Diverthity ith tho thweet
Except when it's in my billion-dollar back yard, and then diversity is thimply horrible!

Elton John loves diversity and tolerance. His career depends on diversity and tolerance. But now he finds a community of Gypsy criminals near his mansion, and that's intolerable!

Maurice "Fred" Sines, a racehorse owner who claims Romany heritage, [plans a Gypsy development which] threatens the tranquillity of Old Windsor and Sir Elton's palatial estate, which backs on to the land where the permanent gipsy camp would be built.

The multi-millionaire singer flew into Britain in the middle of last week and is believed to have travelled to his Windsor home with civil partner David Furnish and their son Zachary.

A close friend of the star reacted in horror when alerted to the proposal by the Telegraph.

...

Last week angry residents, among them retired bankers, doctors, university professors, senior airline managers and even the secretary of the local "shift and punt" club, who take to the River Thames every week, staged a mass protest.

My, my! Professors, bankers, and rowing clubs! All the usual suspects who call ordinary folks Neanderthal Fascist Nazis when ordinary folks protest the presence of Gypsy criminals.

The background to this: Last year those same professors, bankers and rowing clubs went beyond cussing at normal people. They actually got Parliament to pass a law that gave special unique aristocratic privileges ("human rights") to Gypsy criminals.

Local residents concerned that gipsies could bring an increase in crime should be given “little weight” in deciding whether or not they can stay.

Fear of crime is not “a legitimate ground on which to withhold planning permission,” the guidance said.

Well, of course. Don't you understand? Fear of crime and fear of crime are not the same thing.

When poor Christians fear Gypsy crime, their fear is Unfear. It does not exist. The poor Christians shall be overruled, and the Gypsy criminals shall be forced into the midst of the unenlightened Christian folks. But when fairies, intellectuals, Jewish bankers and rich dickheads fear Gypsy crime, that's a real fear, an enlightened fear.
  ¶ 7:42 AM

  Metrology notes
Polistra is a fan of metrology, so when WUWT carried an article about a major standard of measure losing its standardness, her imagination was engaged.

In a vault beneath a 17th-century pavilion on the outskirts of Paris sits a platinum cylinder known as Le Grand K. Since 1889 it has been the international prototype for the kilogram, the standard against which all other kilos are measured.

"It's a scandal that we've got this kilogram hanging around changing its mass and therefore changing the mass of everything else in the universe!" Bill Phillips, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, exclaimed at a scientific summit in London this week. No one knows for sure what went wrong with Le Grand K, but some theorize it lost weight from being cleaned.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 10:56 AM

  Happy 150, Kansas!


It's Kansas Day!

Polistra celebrates the sesquicentennial of her home state!

The Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, an icon of the original purposes and goals of Kansas, has joined this scene for the party. It normally lives about 30 miles east of the Mill.

Kansas is now governed by Sam Brownback, one of Polistra's favorite leaders.

Under the previous governor, Big Sis Sebelius, Kansas slipped away from its original purposes and goals; now that Sebelius has moved to DC where the Big Sis type dominates, Brownback should be able to refocus that old Kansan abolitionist energy toward eliminating abortion.

= = = = =

A point Polistra has made before, but needs to be repeated: At some time in the near future a mass secession of non-insane areas will be necessary. Thus we desperately need strong and independent governors in the states that have some chance of survival. Otherwise the genocidal monsters in DC, NY, California, et al will be able to drag the whole continent down to raw Haitian hell.


  ¶ 6:12 AM

  Tech note
Damn. Wish I'd found this many years ago.

In Windows XP, I've been annoyed for a long time by molasses-like sslloowww file opening. Almost every change of directory in the file-open dialog takes several seconds, and the interval is variable. Slows down everything, and breaks the rhythm of "assembly-line" operations on graphics or text. Especially annoying when building something for Poser, because Poser's folder structure requires an ungodly number of up-the-tree and down-the-tree moves.

Several times through the years I've looked for answers, but for some reason didn't find a useful tip until this morning. The tip is here, dated 2003.

The solution is simple.

Use Regedit to edit the registry.

Locate this place in the hierarchy:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

See if a key named NoRecentDocsHistory already exists under this heading.

If it does exist, set its value to 1.

If it doesn't exist, create a new key named NoRecentDocsHistory and set its DWORD value to 1.

Magic! After closing Regedit, all file-opens are now immediate.
  ¶ 8:30 AM

  Unprecedented?
The Islamic/Gaian Occupation Government on Britain is claiming as always that the current winter is Unprecedented, Shocking, etc, so that they can attribute it to Gaia's Holy Wrath Upon Our Carbonic Sins.

Nonsense. Here's some BBC footage from a similar winter in the '60s.
  ¶ 4:11 AM

  Your move, Sheikh
I'm curious to see how Sheikh Osama responds to the current wave of popular revolts in Arab countries. Nominally, this is exactly what he's been working for!

He claims to be a paladin for the long-suffering Arab people, who have been betrayed by foreign-serving client governments for most of the 20th century. He attacks Russia, Britain and America because those three nations have been using Arab governments as chess pieces in the Great Game.

The present wave of uprisings doesn't seem to be inspired by the Sheikh directly. Instead, it appears to be triggered by Wikileaks revelations of the collaborations between those governments and America ... and worst of all, their quiet collaborations with Israel.

[ Later: the London Telegraph reveals that some part of the US govt has been training and funding the protesters in Egypt. This started under Sultan Bush and continues under Pasha Obama. Playing both sides seems strange; we've been heavily funding Our SOB in Egypt for decades, and now we're helping to undermine Our SOB. Is this a strategy with a definite goal, or just Goldman Sachs thinking? Hedge both sides? ]

Egypt is Dr Zawahiri's home and Yemen is the Sheikh's home. Both are bubbling at the moment, which should be pleasing to the Doc and the Sheikh by this hypothesis. Will the revolt finally reach Arabia itself? That should be the keystone, if Sheikh really means what he says.

The big question: If most Arab countries end up with strongly Islamic regimes that serve the cultures and needs of their own people instead of puppeting for the two big Empires, will Sheikh Osama declare victory and stop his war? Or will he act like an American bureaucrat and find new reasons to keep working after his mission is fully accomplished?

= = = = =

Update: The question gets even stronger now that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the ideological father of al-Qaeda, has claimed control of the Egyptian uprising. If the uprising succeeds, it will mean not just a victory for loose allies of Sheikh Osama but a victory for his own organization. This will probably be good for the Egyptian people in general, who have been yanked around by foreign empires for too long ... but will it satisfy the Sheikh?


  ¶ 3:36 AM

  No, that's not what it is at all.
Sort of a minor point, but Polistra always feels the need to defend FDR's policies from modern misunderstanding.

Radio talker Lars Larson was discussing farm subsidies tonight. Larson is a good independent and a pretty good thinker, no party hack ... but he missed this one badly. He assumed farm subsidies were put in place solely for competitive matching, because other countries subsidized their farmers.

Dead wrong.

Farm subsidies were created in 1933 by the Ag Adjustment Act, which was found to be both unconstitutional and badly designed, and was replaced by a better system in 1938.

The purpose is simple. Farming is critically important. You can't have a country without food.

Farmers operating in a totally free market will grow crops based on current prices, leading to wild swings in price and then leading to bankruptcy for some farmers. They will also misuse the land, failing to rotate or fallow when needed, because they can't afford to skip a year. Both of these situations had run wild in the 1920's, assisted of course by speculators, leading to the Dust Bowl. Land that might have remained useful became desert, and the acquired skills of farmers also went to waste.

The Ag Adjustment Act paid farmers of important crops at a baseline level, freeing them from the desperate need to have maximum yield every year until the soil blows away. In return it required the farmers to practice better methods, and other New Deal programs helped to train them.

None of this was related to foreign trade, but it did strengthen American agriculture so we could become a mighty and reliable exporter.
  ¶ 8:44 PM

  Poodle that didn't bark
Noticed something possibly interesting in NBC evening news coverage of the latest monster snow in NYC. Absolutely no mention of global warming.

Is this just an oversight, or a direct result of NBC's new owner? Under Comrade Immelt of GE, all programming, not just weather, was required to carry the Gaian message in one form or another. It was as constant and all-pervasive as the Christian message on Pat Robertson's network.

Might just be an oversight, but I'm going to keep watching.

One theme that did come through on all the networks is the utter incompetence of the regular "meteorologists". They had all predicted 4 or 5 inches, but the storms just sat there and gave 4 or 5 feet. Most likely this isn't because of a Gore-style assumption of tropical warmth; the frontline folks at the Weather Service are more practical than that. Still, their models seem unable to track and predict the movements of the jet stream. I've been seeing similar failures here, though our winter this year is not especially bad. (Knock on ice.)
  ¶ 6:37 PM

  What in the motherfucking hell is wrong with these people?
Washington state, like most states, is way past broke. Yet its tyrannical "legislators" continue to impose more rules, requiring more paid regulators, and making it more likely that tax-paying businesses will continue to leave the state.

Idiocy 1:

Health advocates believe that it should be illegal to smoke in a car with kids in it and SB 5016 aims to do just that. No one signed up in opposition to the measure at the Senate Transportation committee today where it received its first public hearing.

Idiocy 2: State Senator Comrade Debbie Begala, Hero of Pol Pot Labor, proposes a ban on all wood stoves in the state. The proposal is full of exemptions for various privileged classes, so the net result would be very little reduction in pollution. It would only add jobs for regulatory tyrants (who love enforcing exemptions even more than they love enforcing rules) and would make life difficult for businesses that sell stoves and fuel.
  ¶ 7:08 AM

  Dream note
Mainly for my own records, since nobody but Googlebot "reads" this ... In the past two months, several of my remembered dreams have been firmly located in the West Central Community Center here in Spokane.

Can't think of any good reason for this. Never been inside the building. In the first 10 years here, I was working downtown daily and rode a bus that passed by WCCC. So its exterior and location are thoroughly familiar. But I don't go downtown regularly now, and the bus route also changed. Haven't seen it at all since 2001.

Most of my complex dreams are still located vaguely in Okla where I lived in the 1970s, and the characters are still based on the people I knew in the '70s. Until this recent pattern, the only Spokane-located dreams were in an improved version** of this house, and most of those seem to have been triggered by actual sounds that the dream-machine interpreted as intruders or visitors.

You'd think that 20 years in one place would make more of an impression on a brain, but apparently not!

**Oddly, the improved version of this house is constant in those dreams, with a definite floor plan. Even though I've never seriously considered remodeling, I must have an unconscious Platonic template for what this house "should have been".
  ¶ 5:48 AM

  Sputnik
Rand Simberg at NRO said most of what I wanted to say.

Fact is, Sputnik didn't really wake us up, and we didn't need to be awakened.

Russia got there first because Russia was less careful, that's all. The same lack of caution gave them Chernobyl. Nuff said.

It wasn't a lack of American education that held back our rocket efforts. Most of the top scientists were Germans, educated under Hitler. And the American-educated boys were already working hard on all sorts of advanced projects. One of my engineer uncles was working on cesium-ion rocket engines at Los Alamos when Sputnik happened.

The money pumped into math and science education after Sputnik only made things worse, as money always does in education. The educrats implemented the bizarre and idiotic Stanford Math Study Group project (commonly called New Math). SMSG was based on Set Theory, which was "elementary" by the convoluted Gödelian definitions of weird-ass academic dickheads, but had precisely zero connection with the way humans actually learn and use math. SMSG New Math caused pure confusion for both teachers and kids, and actually set back American math ed for many years.



Would have been vastly better if education had returned to the one-room schoolhouse with its abacus and counting boards. No need to tear down the buildings, just emulate great teachers like Mrs Hunholz who taught the one-room way.

Learn concretely and you can handle abstraction later. Learn abstractly and you're lost forever.

= = = = =

Footnote: SMSG seems to be called School Math Study Group, but it was definitely Stanford on the textbooks we used, and it was called Stanford in local discussions at the time. And it was discussed in our house with considerable passion. My father was a prof in Education at KSU, and part of his job was supervising practice teachers in math. Thus he could see this mess from a broad perspective. He saw the older teachers getting totally frustrated because they didn't understand the Stanford shit; he saw the administrators stupidly pushing it because it was New And Improved And Progressive And Really Really Smart; he saw the kids failing to learn because it was shit. But he wasn't in a position to stop any of it. He could only sympathize quietly with the older teachers, try to assure them that they weren't moronic or out-of-date; it was the curriculum that was moronic.

= = = = =

Footnote 2: Nice irony: at about the same time, Russian math education was switching to the one-room schoolhouse approach. Learn by concrete interaction and discovery, with lots of discussion and teamwork toward solving real problems. Their math and science education remains superior and liberating, while ours remains stultified and stupefied. Makes me wonder quite seriously: Was SMSG a Soviet plot? If it wasn't, the effect was the same.

= = = = =

Conclusion: Our ruling class used Sputnik to convince us that we were 20 years behind the Russians in math. We weren't, and it didn't matter anyway.

Our ruling class then proceeded to destroy our math curriculum, which actually put us 20 years behind the Russians.

Since then, our ruling class has perfected the art of national sabotage, and practices it in all aspects of government, religion, science, education and culture.

Labels: Experiential education, switchover

  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Sotuuuuuuuu


Polistra heard one good thing in Pasha Obama's speech: "Faster than planes in some places ... without the patdown."

He seems serious about high-speed rail.

May be serious about cutting regulations; but the last president who proposed this was Clinton, who let Algore "handle" the idea, ie discard it.

On the other well-known rail of politics, Pasha Obama said something vague about reforming Social Security, then immediately ruled out all the actual ways to reform it. Cute.

On education, he has consistently pushed vo-tech and soft-pedalled the "traditional" abstract college education. Excellent message, and the first president in recent decades who has pushed in this direction rhetorically. But action belies words. Right now his Dept of Ed is making life difficult for the very same private tech schools that he verbally praises.
  ¶ 6:53 PM

  Zero tolerance, infinite appetite
Polistra has discussed this before in the context of impurity and pollution, but it applies equally well to the more positive parts of life.

From an editorial in New Superstitionist:

Good news from Africa. We may be in a position to eradicate the guinea worm (see "Southern Sudan's votes could kill an ancient disease"). If we succeed, this will only be the second human disease to be wiped out, after smallpox in 1980.

The optimism comes because the people of Southern Sudan have peacefully voted for independence. Thanks to international pressure on their current governors to accept the vote, the independence plan may just work.

Southern Sudan has already helped bring the cattle disease rinderpest close to eradication, despite civil war. But guinea worm is harder. There is no vaccine. You have to be there when the worm emerges from every victim, and stop it infecting anyone else. To finish off the worm, the Southern Sudanese need peace and they need money for development.

We know poverty breeds war, anger and disease that can threaten us all. This time, the poor have voted for a new future - one without the guinea worm. That's a remarkable peace dividend.

One of three correct.

Poverty breeds disease, yes. Anger and war? Nope.

Look at any war in recent memory. You'll find the war was started by a rich tribe who wanted even more riches (or more macho) ... or by a rich tribe who wanted to bring down a competing rich tribe.

= = = = =

Impoverished people are concrete. They understand how life works. Above all they instinctively understand Diminishing Returns, or in mathy terms the sigmoid curve or tanh function. Life is all about the tanh. (Just ask Snookih!)



Poor people understand the limits at both ends. Static friction and drag. You have to push the cart for a while before it starts to move; then you can move it faster by pushing harder; but beyond a certain speed extra effort doesn't gain more speed. Diminishing returns.


= = =

More broadly, a certain amount of effort is needed to start anything. You have to build a fence around your livestock or plow the fields or set up the fruit stand by the roadside.


= = =

After that, you're in the small linear region, where increasing effort will bring increasing return. Water the crops more, or feed the hogs more, you get more food. Spend more hours selling fruit, you get more money.


= = =

And poor people also understand that beyond a certain point your results will hit a ceiling, a saturation point where the friction negates your effort. So they don't try to quadruple their returns, and they don't try to steal their neighbor's livestock.


= = =

Most importantly, the poor understand the emotional aspects of Diminishing Returns. They know that having more cattle than you can handle is not better than having enough cattle to feed your kids. They sense that enjoyment does not continue to increase after you reach sufficiency.

= = = = =


Rich educated people don't know tanh. They have never planted a crop or turned a wrench or rocked a cradle. They have dealt with life at a clean distance, through lawyers and spreadsheets and Disposable Mexican Servants. They assume that life runs on a straight line.


They believe added effort will always yield added income. Most importantly they assume that increased income will continue to yield more enjoyment. Rich educated man thinks: "I have lots of Money and Power and Lebensraum, and I enjoy them. If I have twice as much Money and Power and Lebensraum, I will enjoy them twice as much. If I have 584358934859389508390589 times as much Money and Power and Lebensraum, I will enjoy them 584358934859389508390589 times as much. MORE! MORE! MORE! MINE! MINE! MINE! ALL MINE! ALL MINE! ALL MINE! YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY! ALL MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE! ALL MEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

That's why rich educated people make war. They don't know where to stop. They don't know that pleasure needs a foundation and has a roof. They are too fucking stupid to understand tanh.
  ¶ 12:19 PM

  Jane Jacobs needed
Sociologist Jane Jacobs (and many others) have used a sort of A/B experiment to distinguish innate characteristics of an ethnic group from the characteristics forced by their usual rulers.

Find two cohesive communities of the same group, living under very different kinds of government. Ask: do these people fail at home and flourish in diaspora? If so, their usual native government is the limiting factor.

Or do they perform roughly the same in both places? If so, their own characteristics are the limiting factor.

Korea is the purest laboratory-quality experiment. Not even a diaspora, so geography and weather aren't variables. Same people on the same land, divided in half by an arbitrary boundary; horrible government imposed on one half, decent government on the other. Under horrible government they simply starved. Under decent government, they became the most competent country in the world.

Chinese are the classic example of better performance outside the native land. Their native government has been oppressive most of the time, stifling progress. When they gather in other countries, they quickly show all kinds of superior talents for business and science. Thus the problem (until very recently) has been the government.

Africans are the opposite. Native governments in Africa are oppressive, but Africans in other countries are still corrupt, unintelligent and violent. Crime rates in black communities of the West are identical to crime rates in natively-ruled African countries. Thus the problem is innate characteristics.

= = = = =

After anguishing over the "Fighting Hamster" clip, I started thinking about Slavs in this context. Clearly the native Russian gov't has been consistently oppressive for many centuries, with a peak of nastiness during the Soviet era. The alcohol-fueled demographic suicide of Russia is an obvious result. But what happens when they gather elsewhere?

Spokane should be a good experiment for some Jane Jacobs type. Since 1989, Spokane went from zero Slavic to 15% "fresh" Slavic. The local Russians (and Bosnians, Ukranians, etc) don't stand out. They haven't taken over the drunk tank; they work very hard, start small businesses, and keep their houses neat. Aside from language and sometimes costume, the only way you can spot them is by the smoke!

This webpage caught my attention as a sort of icon ... or should that be икон? ... of Slavic flowering in this area. Look at the top picture. Now compare with Fighting Hamster.
  ¶ 4:52 AM

  Atheist joke
Ran across this joke when searching for a different joke. This one is much better than the one I was trying to find!


An Atheist accosted a preacher. "Do you believe in eternal life?" The preacher has no time to reply. "Well it's a load of rubbish!" shouted the Atheist. "I believe in science, evolution, survival of the fittest, and when we die, that's it! No eternal life, no great judgment, and no God!" The Atheist continues his assault against the preacher repetitiously and tirelessly. "Eternal life! Eternal life! Ha! It's all pie in the sky! When I die that's it, the end, no eternal life, no nothing." He continues, until he reaches his climax, "I will be buried six feet under when I die and that's it! Nothing! Caput! When I die I am utterly convinced that that will be the end of me!"

"Well, thank God for that" replies the preacher.


Comes from this webpage. Poor spelling and punctuation, but lots of truly funny jokes.


  ¶ 7:35 AM

  Vermont tries to get it right
Vermont's new governor is pushing for a single-payer health plan within the state. This doesn't seem to have entered the national discussion, but it's definitely worth watching.

You can't honestly argue the basic point now. Countries with single-payer plans have better health, better competitiveness, better business, and more opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Obama's plan is a huge step backwards from single-payer; it maintains all the current redundant and conflicting segments of American health care, and adds yet another redundant and conflicting segment with vastly more rules than the other redundant and conflicting segments, and no co-ordination between any of the segments. The only advantage of Obama's plan is that it guarantees even more profit to insurance companies, at tremendously increased cost to business and workers.

The Vermont plan, if the Feds will allow it to be set up properly, should blaze the trail for the rest of the country. Above all, it must find a way to fold both Medicare and Medicaid into the plan, so there are NO redundant/conflicting rules and NO redundant/conflicting bureaucracies. Single means single, dammit.
  ¶ 5:49 AM

  Language update: blank


Professor Polistra has noticed something... typically she would have a new Language Update about now, a blackboard full of annoying misuses and trendy buzzwords.

The last Update was in September, and it usually takes 3 or 4 months to accumulate enough wordcrap to fill the blackboard. But since September, I haven't noted anything new and annoying. What's going on? Am I getting less fussy with age? Highly unlikely.

Aha! Since September I've watched almost zero television.

Therefore, the non-barking blackboard implies that television, especially cable "news", is the prime culprit in linguistic distortion. Radio and the web must be somewhat less prone to mindlessly copied mispronunciations and stupid insider jargon.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 6:38 PM

  Russians don't change much
Caution, this clip is not for the faint of heart.

The title means "[The] fighting evil-hamster attacks!"

Russian hooligans tease a giant black-bellied hamster, and it bites their fingers. In drunken glee, they proudly show off the pouring blood and keep teasing. I don't know why the hamster is giant and black-bellied; maybe heavy metal pollution, maybe it was bred for fighting.

The whole situation is qualitatively different from modern western pranks. American hooligans, even when drunk, would have enough sense to avoid a rabid-looking hamster. You'd have to go back a century or two to find this level of suicidal drunken oblivion.

= = = = =

Later thoughts here.
  ¶ 5:25 PM

  The pre-17th senate returns briefly
Oklahoma has now joined the set of lawsuits against the Infinite Profit For Insurance Companies Act of 2010 (aka Obamacare).

At this point, delegates of 28 state governments are taking official action against this law. 28 of 50 would be a nice majority in any functional legislature.

Before it was ruined by the 17th Amendment, the Senate performed this function. Each senator was appointed by the state legislature and thus served as a delegate from the state government. These delegates were mainly meant to analyze, revise, or stop the laws passed by the lower house.

After the 17th, the Senate turned into a second lower house, except with zero accountability. Senators no longer represented anything in particular, so they ended up representing only their own personal power-hunger.

To some extent the Supremes picked up the job of checking laws, but after the Supremes were taken over by Soviet Agent Earl Warren, they have mostly been writing laws to replace and wreck the Constitution.

It's sort of interesting to see an original legislative function popping to the surface again, even though it has to work outside the rotten structure of the legislature.

In modern America, valid and legal actions can only occur as temporary ad hoc workarounds.
  ¶ 5:13 PM

  Boortz's fine idea
Usually I find Neal Boortz annoyingly Randian. Today he offered a strong and original idea that could be a real nation-saver.

Repealing Obamacare is meaningless unless you simultaneously replace it with something better. Boortz says we should replace it with Charter Health Care, analogous to Charter Schools.

Charter School is a retronym, a fancy phrase for a special school that operates the way all schools used to operate in the days when schools were somewhat effective. Without the idiocy of mandates forced by various special interest groups, and with wide latitude for the principal to set locally appropriate policies.

Charter insurance would be the same. The feds would license or charter several private insurance companies to operate without state and federal mandates.

If you're a sane older heterosexual male, you can be sure that you aren't going to get pregnant, or get AIDS, or get an abortion, or get [voluntary] psychiatric care, or have a sex-change operation. Thus you should be able to buy a simple insurance plan purely for catastrophic stuff, from a company that doesn't waste any money on those physically impossible risks.

Currently, each state requires some of those things to be covered by every insurance plan, which jacks up the cost for people who will never need those services, and for people who have enough goddamn sense to pay for extra crap on their own. And even in these parlous times, with federal mandates indefinite and potentially infinite, states keep piling on more and more mandates. Fucking egregious treasonous monstrosities.

Sidenote: Would governments behave differently if they knew how many Americans pray fervently and daily for Sheikh Osama to try again and get it right this time? On his first try he missed most of Wall Street and he missed the Capitol, thus leaving us in the same totally fucked condition.
  ¶ 2:44 PM

  They did it!
I wasn't initially sure that the Lower Nuthouse's repeal of Obamacare was worth noticing. Decided it's worth a brief comment.

I really didn't think those fuckheads would actually do something. I was sure they'd just continue business as usual, debating the rules for debating the vote on the rules for debating the rules for debating the vote on the rules for debating the rules for debate on a resolution to rename the North Mooselookmeguntic Heights Post Office in honor of Victorious High School Coach Augustus "Bud" Squires Junior.

The simple fact that legislators are doing their own job for one day is unprecedented.

Their own job is to represent the wishes and needs of the voters. Before this, they were doing everything except their own job. They were weeping in public, naming post offices, weeping in public, honoring Lesbian Kumquat Awareness Week, weeping in public, and above all representing the wishes and needs of China.
  ¶ 7:07 AM

  Here's where Diversity leads.
Britain's Tories, acting either for Diversity or for pure old-fashioned treason, appointed a Muslim female as their chairman several years ago. Now, unsurprisingly to anyone except the Tories, the Muslim female is telling the English to stop hating Muslims.

Islamophobia has “passed the dinner-table test” and is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial, Baroness Warsi will say in a speech on Thursday.

The minister without portfolio will also warn that describing Muslims as either “moderate” or “extremist” fosters growing prejudice.

Lady Warsi, the first Muslim woman to attend Cabinet, has pledged to use her position to wage an “ongoing battle against bigotry”.

The notion that all followers of Islam can be described either as “moderate” or “extremist” can fuel misunderstanding and intolerance, she will say.

“It’s not a big leap of imagination to predict where the talk of 'moderate’ Muslims leads; in the factory, where they’ve just hired a Muslim worker, the boss says to his employees: 'Not to worry, he’s only fairly Muslim’.

Indeed, this is the best way to win a war.

For instance, during WW2 Churchill often pleaded for tolerance of Germans and Nazis. He was famous for saying "We shall never, never, never, utter a harsh word against our dear German friends. We shall defend them against bigotry on the beaches, we shall defend them against bigotry on the landing grounds, we shall stop all Naziphobia in the fields and in the streets; we shall kill any Englishman who harbors ill will against Germans in the hills; we shall never, never, never surrender to the English!"

What's that? You say that's a complete distortion of Churchill's words? Piffle. Don't worry, this will be the only available version very soon. I'm sure Minitrue is at work right now.

Putting aside the crappy satire and telling the plain hard truth: The real Churchill, saying the things he actually said, would be banished from Britain today.
  ¶ 4:30 AM

  Until I read this...
Until today I believed that China was an economic adversary that had already defeated us economically, but I didn't think China was a military threat.

Now I've changed my mind.

The Chinese Army is believed to have built an underground "Great Wall" that stretches for more than 5,000 km in the Hebei region of northern China. Citing the People's Liberation Army's official newsletter, [a Hong Kong newspaper] said China's strategic missile squadron, the Second Artillery Division, built a massive underground tunnel to conceal nuclear weapons, including the Dongfeng 5 intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 13,000 km.

Since 1995, the Second Artillery Division has mobilized tens of thousands of soldiers to build a network of tunnels stretching for more than 5,000 km below the mountain regions of Hebei. "A missile base has been built hundreds of meters underground and can withstand several nuclear attacks. People refer to the network of tunnels connecting to the missile base as the 'Underground Great Wall.'"

The purpose of the secretly constructed underground Great Wall is to give China a second chance after a nuclear attack, military experts said. [It is] unprecedented for the PLA's newsletter to reveal classified information about the tunnels; this demonstrates Beijing's confidence in its military power.

They're ready. We're not.
  ¶ 3:36 PM

  Cold is hot, hot is cold
South Korea joins the set of countries suffering from the fast-approaching Little Ice Age, with inadequate preparation because all the world's "scientists" agreed on the criminal lie of warming.

The government is implementing emergency energy-saving measures as demand for electricity skyrockets amid the record-breaking cold weather.

Following a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the government announced a series of measures which include limiting the interior temperature of energy-hungry big buildings and operating fewer subway trains.

From Jan. 24 to Feb. 18, the government will designate 441 buildings with high energy consumption ... and limit these buildings to interior temperatures of no more than 68 F.

These include 174 department stores or large discount stores, 113 corporate buildings and 68 educational facilities. On-site inspections will be carried out, with violators to face warnings followed by fines.

Intervals between subway trains in the Seoul metropolitan area will increase by one to three minutes between 10 a.m. and noon, the peak hours for electricity demand.

Korea is doing things in its usual organized and strict way, which should help to fix the existing problem.

Ah, those benighted foreigners. We Americans know the right way to fix a problem! Shout incoherently at each other, run around like headless chickens on meth, let everything collapse, blame each other for the collapse, shout even more incoherently, run around like headless chickens on meth and crack, rinse and repeat.

But it remains to be seen whether Korea will learn from the problem. If any country is smart enough to learn and adapt, it would have to be Korea, but the Carbon Cult is so all-encompassing that I'm not hopeful.
  ¶ 12:40 PM

  What mistrust?
Headline: Obama, Hu aim to 'overcome sense of mistrust'.

Nonsense. There's no mistrust at all.

The Chinese government will always act in the best interests of China.

By contrast, the US government will always act in the best interests of China.

Both perfectly trustworthy and reliable.
  ¶ 6:17 AM

  Most SHOCKING news of the decade!
An amazing research study has found that sports fans drink! Even more shocking, sports fans who engage in tailgating drink more!

No, no, no! I can't believe it!
  ¶ 5:06 AM

  Common sense for once.
A long-running dispute between Conoco and a few hippie-ass envirotyrants in Idaho is finally and decisively resolved.

Amazingly, law and common sense prevailed, and the hippie-ass envirotyrants lost. A federal highway, which was built and funded by the taxpayers for the sole purpose of aiding communication and commerce, finally gets to be used for its intended purposes, and the rest of America and Canada will now have a better chance to develop more oil and natural gas resources.

Roads are not "holy sanctuaries" for prissy esthetic appreciation. You want esthetics, there are millions of ways to get esthetics without halting commerce and transportation to please your own goddamn Delicate Royal Aristocratic Ocular Apparatus.

= = = = =

Admittedly, there's a deeper problem at the source. This hugely complicated transport route wouldn't have been needed if Conoco had built its refinery the old way, with American workers forging and fabricating everything on site from American steel panels. Those pieces could have been shipped routinely by normal rail or truck freight from Wheeling or Pittsburgh, and this mess wouldn't have been possible. But since Conoco chose the modular approach to minimize American labor, maximize Chinese profit, and maximize shipping, the hippies had a chance to break the system.
  ¶ 6:17 PM

  Ed Chlapowski RIP
News item:

Ed Chlapowski, the man who notified the world that Pearl Harbor was being bombed by the Japanese, has died at 88.

Last year Chlapowski recounted the Dec. 7, 1941 attack that propelled the United States into World War II. He had worked an early watch at the submarine base, had breakfast and had just sat down on his bunk in the barracks when he looked out the window and saw a hangar roof blown away. Then he saw the Japanese planes. Chlapowski ran to the radio room, where he knew the crew was short on Sundays. A supervisor handed him a message, and in Morse code, he sent out word that Pearl Harbor was under attack.

Polistra is conducting an old-fashioned telegrapher's funeral ceremony.

Morse '30' signifies end of transmission; the cut wire signifies a circuit no longer grounded.
  ¶ 2:06 PM

  Dumb and dangerous
A legalistic argument within Britain's political class has the potential to rip out the basic concepts of government.

Tony Blair was placed under further pressure ahead of his second appearance before the Iraq Inquiry after his most senior legal adviser said last night that the former prime minister's public statements about the invasion contradicted the legal advice he had been given.

The brand-new concept that war must be justified on legal grounds is intentionally dangerous.

It's infecting America as well. Tune into any leftist commentator, and within 5 seconds you'll hear that Bush and Cheney are "war criminals" and should be arrested by some "international tribunal".

Wars have never been legal. Wars have never been moral. Any attempt to apply legal or moral criteria to wars is an attempt to wreck civilization.

The only moral criterion for war is simple. If Tribe A attacks Tribe B in a serious way, Tribe B must totally and utterly defeat Tribe A. Remove A from the face of the earth, if at all possible. The details don't matter. Torturing prisoners, slaughtering civilians, whatever it takes to reach absolute victory.

If all the Tribe B's followed this precept, the surviving Tribe A's of the world would learn a thing or two. Those who failed to learn would cease to exist.

These questions about "international law" are completely improper, and their sole purpose is to serve the long-standing Leninist impulse to ruin the world.

The proper question about the behavior of Blair, Bush, Cheney and Obama is practical and factual. Did Iraq and Afghanistan attack us? Or did Iraq and Afghanistan have imminent plans to attack us?

The answer is No. Who did attack us? Saudi Arabia, not Iraq and Afghanistan. How should we punish Blair, Cheney, Bush and Obama for making and continuing this false decision? I don't know, but I know this court procedure is simply national sabotage.
  ¶ 5:36 AM

  Not new at all
Jerry Doyle is ranting on the "new" outrage of requiring licenses for bicycles, proposed by New Jersey. "What's next? Walking licenses? Airbags on bikes?" etc.

It's not new at all, and it's neither outrageous nor threatening. Many states and cities used to license bicycles. I remember having a cute little platelet on my bike in Kansas. It was a matter of pride, a step toward adulthood. You'd fasten it under the rear reflector, or wire it to the little slots on the back of the saddle.



If I'm recalling correctly after all these years, Ohio's bike license was a decal that you wrapped around a frame tube. Not as cute as a platelet, but still a point of pride.

Twenty seconds of Google found this Ebay page of old bike plates for sale, just to verify that I wasn't completely dreaming!

= = = = =

It's clear that Doyle didn't ride a bike when he was young.

Lately I've been noticing such blind spots in people who clearly don't know what outdoors is. Another example: today's weather was miserable. Windy, humid, showery, 50 degrees. Anyone who walked in it would reach the same judgment. The KREM weathergirl called today "beautiful", apparently because 50 is greater than 32.

I'm coming to realize: Despite my lifelong hatred of sports and calisthenics (caused by the raw hell of junior high gym class) I've always done a fair amount of outdoors exercise. Perhaps more than the average sports-loving American. Out of 40 years of adulthood, there were only 6 years when I exclusively drove to work. The rest of the time I mostly walked or biked, reserving the car for seriously bad weather or hauling; and even during the 6 car-commuting years, I typically spent a half hour biking or walking after work. But it was never for the exercise, because I hate exercise! Just for grocery shopping or girl-watching.

[Incidentally, credit to old friend Larry for a random comment several years ago that led to this realization!]
  ¶ 2:15 PM

  Dead[ly] wrong
Despite decades of harsh reality, I'm still sometimes surprised by the convoluted multiple wrongness of our rulers and Leninist Poison Vendors.

News item this morning:

Nation Ponders King in Wake of Arizona Shootings

The federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. has taken on added meaning for most Americans this year, as they try to make sense of the violence in Arizona that left six people dead and a member of Congress fighting for her life.

"Dr. King's message was about inclusion and the recognition of human dignity, of human rights and making sure that all of our voices are heard," said Imani Perry, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University. "I hope people in Arizona, in particular, embrace that part of his message. The politics in Arizona recently have often seemed to revolve around excluding people."

Uncountable lies, uncountable inversions of logic.

Plain fact: Loughner was able to be out of an institution, and able to purchase a weapon, precisely because of the "Rights Movements" inspired by Comrade King.

Before these movements, the ample warning signs provided by Loughner would have led to an involuntary commitment, and he would have been rationally and sanely excluded from the general public. His voice would have been confined to his own head, and would not have been heard via his Glock.

If we're going to associate Comrade King with this event at all, the sole factual conclusion is that six people died because of the evil work of Comrade King's followers.

Labels: Loughnerian Logic

  ¶ 5:48 AM

  CentrifuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE!
The Stuxnet thing is the first time I've felt good about an official activity of this country in many years.

Just imagine those Islamic centrifuges cranking up and up and up, finally breaking open and splattering uranium all over the building, while the operators sit in the control room watching perfectly normal readouts.

Ultimate nerd fun.

This is just like the way Reagan brought down the Soviet Empire: playing undetectable tricks on their oil pipelines. It's wonderful to know that we still have a few people on the 'dark side' who are willing and able to do good work.
  ¶ 5:38 PM

  State of the shipwreck
The members of the Lower and Upper Nuthouses have decided to integrate their seating arrangement for the SOTU speech.

Usually the phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" is a loosely applied trite cliché. In this case it's a concrete and literal trite cliché. These egregious monsters think they're accomplishing something by moving their chairs around.
  ¶ 11:16 AM

  I tried to tell my mom this, part 2
Earlier I noted an interesting bit of science news. The microbe Mycobacterium Vaccae, commonly found in soil, seems to aid both happiness and intelligence.

A new item reflects the same fact from another angle. A cancer researcher was using Mycobacterium vaccae to stir up an immune response against some form of cancer. He found that the trial was impossible to run in proper double-blind form, because the researchers could immediately and reliably distinguish the real-bacteria patients from the placebo patients. The real-bacteria patients were dramatically happier.



Got me to thinking. Before the tyrannical "patients rights" movement forced institutions to stop the practice, all kinds of institutions ran their own farms. Prisons, insane asylums, homes for the retarded. The patients liked the farming, food self-sufficiency saved money, and the institutions needed much less medication and restraint.

Exercise, sunlight and usefulness were undoubtedly the main factors, but I'm wondering now if working directly in the soil was also important.

Now, of course, prisoners and patients are "liberated" from the therapy of Dr. Mike Vaccae.

Here's an experiment: Survey people who spend a lot of time gardening. See if those who wear plastic gloves can be distinguished from those who get their hands dirty.

= = = = =

Incidentally and anecdotally, two of the local radio and TV personalities are noticeably happy all the time. Yup, they're the gardening specialists.
  ¶ 5:19 PM

  Loughnerian syllogisms
One of the indications of Loughner's schizy condition is a series of weird "syllogisms" in his writings. These syllogisms are nonsensical by normal logic and science.

= = = = =

By contrast, our ruling class functions by clear and valid logic.

= = =

Ruling class syllogism 1:

Premise 1: Weather is changeable. Temperature goes up and down.

Premise 2: Recently temperature went up in some places and down in some places.

Conclusion: Therefore we must shut down all industry and eliminate the human race, because industry and humans emit carbon dioxide. [Except for Chinese industry and Chinese humans. Chinese industry and Chinese humans emit a special Sanctified Anointed Carbon Dioxide Molecule, which Miraculously Propitiates The Planet Goddess[pbuh].]

= = =

Ruling class syllogism 2:

Premise 1: All children have different talents and abilities.

Premise 2: A functional society requires many different talents and abilities.

Conclusion: Therefore we must spend trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars on education to make all children identical.

= = =

Ruling class syllogism 3:

Premise 1: A group of Saudi and Yemeni men attacked us in 2001, killing 3000 Americans.

Premise 2: These Saudi and Yemeni men were following a Saudi ideology, were funded by the Saudi royal family, and were trained in Germany, Florida, and Oklahoma.

Conclusion: Therefore we must run endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to bring the great benefits of elections and feminism to these countries.

= = =

Ruling class syllogism 4:

Premise 1: Evolution happens when one species dies out in a certain location or niche, and other more adaptable species move in to take over the niche.

Premise 2: We are strictly secular and strictly Darwinian.

Conclusion: Therefore we must prevent every species or local population from dying out, AND we must prevent other more adaptable species from "invading" the niche. We must stop evolution in its tracks. We must make life as maladaptive as possible, to fulfill our Darwinian mission.

= = =

Ruling class syllogism 5:

Premise: A crazy guy gets obsessed with one particular politician and ends up shooting her.

Conclusion: Therefore all dissent must be silenced.

= = = = =

Hmm. Wonder where Loughner got the idea for weird syllogisms?

It's beyond me.

Labels: Loughnerian Logic

  ¶ 5:23 PM

  Thank god for new media!
This has already been said in various ways, but I still have to say it.

Before Facebook and Youtube, the Soviet media and Soviet parts of our government were able to build their own vicious toxic version of a story with no hindrance at all.

When Oswald killed Kennedy, our Soviet media told us Oswald was a "right-winger", and we had no choice but to swallow the poison for many years.

The truth was simple and obvious: Oswald was trained in Russia and his wife Marina was a KGB agent. Before 2000, these simple and obvious truths could only be spread through obscure magazines and newsletters with subscriptions in the hundreds.

With this month's assassination, the Soviet media and Soviet parts of our government are still trying to feed us the same old poison. They are still persistently connecting Loughner to their current "right-wing" bête noire Palin. This time it doesn't work, because Loughner was able to self-publish.

Again the truth is simple and obvious. Loughner's Facebook and Youtube postings tell us instantly that he's a plain schizophrenic with no political influence. His version of the world is completely outside anyone's reality, even a leftist's reality.

Even if the Soviets try to take down his "publications", the web insures that they will continue to circulate easily. You don't need to be part of a small inner circle that could be easily penetrated and switched by FBI, as was the case with 1963 truth-seekers.
  ¶ 12:23 PM

  Sane Rousseff
Brazil is suffering from floods and mudslides. I've been curious to see how Dilma Rousseff, new president and former Marxist guerrilla, would respond. Sort of hoping to see an old-fashioned Marxist response, not a new Gramscian response.

Ms Rousseff described the destruction as an act of God but she also expressed anger at illegal construction.

"We saw areas in which mountains untouched by men dissolved. But we also saw areas in which illegal occupation caused damage to the health and lives of people."

Saying that building houses in risky areas was "the rule rather than the exception" in Brazil, she added: "When there are no housing policies in place, where will a person with an income of up to two minimum wages live? He will live where he is not allowed to."

Ms Rousseff said the state would care for the victims but said stopping future tragedies would be a priority.

Yup, Marxist. In other words, sane and practical. The flood is simply an act of God, and the job of government is to make it easier for people to live decently and legally.

Gramscian leaders like Bushobama and Cameron would respond first by blaming Western civilization for bringing down the wrath of Gaia[pbuh] on our sinful exhalations. Gramscians would then throw money at the displaced people without changing any of the laws that forced them to build illegally. The money would be insufficient to start a new life but just enough to accustom the people to welfare.
  ¶ 4:09 AM

  Blasphemy
I didn't listen to the actual Tucson ceremony. Even with the pills, I don't have enough spare blood pressure to handle that sort of thing any more. This afternoon, Savage played a brief segment and I nearly choked on blasphemy.

In the segment, Comrade Bullbitch Napolitano was reading from the same part of Isaiah that Händel had used for his main text in Messiah.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. ... And the glory of the Lord is revealed...

This passage has been sanctified by both Händel and Schütz. Hearing it in Mr Napolitano's flat dry lesbian tones was exactly like expecting to see Chartres and realizing it's been replaced by a gray cement Stalinist apartment building.

Savage caught what he believed to be an error, but he was wrong: he assumed that the female gender of Jerusalem was a feminist revision. In this case it's not. It's just one of those vestigial leftovers of grammatical gender in English. In other Euro languages every noun has a grammatical gender with no connection to its real sex; in English only a tiny handful of inanimate nouns (cities, nations, ships) still retain a female grammatical form, and none retain a masculine form.

But Mr Napolitano made a real and revealing change in the same passage. Instead of "her iniquity is pardoned", he said "her inEquity is pardoned." The religious concept of sin was utterly alien and unimaginable to the leaden mind of Comrade Napolitano, so he replaced it by a Marxist concept of sin. Anything that has not been flattened and deadened into precise indistinguishable Equity is sinful.
  ¶ 3:23 PM

  Speaking in a "way that heals"
Pasha Obama recommends that we should speak in a way that heals, not a way that hurts.

I have no earthly idea what he means, and he doesn't either....

But just for fun, let's take the words literally.

How do you heal a disease?

Two basic things:

(1) If possible, remove the pathogens or the cancerous tissue.

(2) Whether (1) is possible or not, mobilize the immune system. The immune system can take care of nearly anything if it's strong enough. This usually means improving mood, nutrition and exercise.

= = = = =

Now let's apply these to a couple of important metaphorical diseases.

Global warming: The pathogens are a few evil leaders like James Hansen, John Holdren, Michael Mann, Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore. The cancerous tissue has spread through all of the world's governments, churches, schools and media. There's no legal way to remove the pathogens, and the governments, churches, schools and media are already rotting and decomposing on their own. Healing must rely on the non-malignant area of the culture, which is luckily forming its own new organs. Most important task: keep the network of non-malignant people running, and expand the new structures.

The Islamic war: Pathogens are Arabians. Western governments have the tools to excise this cancer (oddly enough, the same radiation methods that we use every day to eliminate literal cancer!) and Western governments had a good chance to do it on 9/11/01 when the patient arrived in the ER. Because the governments were already infected by Arabians, they were unable or unwilling to do the job. Now the cancer has spread, and the necessary surgery is beyond the means of non-governmental entities. Again, the best we can do is to maintain the morale and network of non-malignant people. In several non-English-speaking countries (eg France, Switzerland and amazingly Syria) we're already seeing a great immune response by governments, so we know it can work; the question is whether the Anglosphere is too far gone.

= = = = =

Even though Pasha Obama was speaking empty platitudes, I'll guarantee these were NOT the solutions he would imagine.
  ¶ 2:31 AM

  DC flooding


The weepy wino who "leads" the Goldman Sachs Red Label brand in the Lower Nuthouse is at it again. Boo-hooing his way through a broken-hearted speech about something or other. He's weeping instead of doing his goddamn job.

John Boo-hoo-ner belongs in the Union Gospel Mission halfway house, not the Lower House. He should be reading "Jesus wept" in exchange for a bowl of soup, not reading the Constitution.
  ¶ 9:05 AM

  Aussie flooding
Something missing in the overall discussion of the Australian floods. Before 1975, before the murderous Iron Fist of the ecoterrorists SMASHED SMASHED SMASHED the people of Western countries into huddled miserable abject terrified submission, the people and the media would have responded to a flood with one unified call:

We want dams!

Or if the flood resulted from a defective or broken dam,

Fix the dam!

None of that is heard today.

Instead, we hear only the whimper of a whipped slave:

Please, Master, I know it's all my fault! Please, Master, let me breathe just a little longer! I'll try not to exhale much, Master! Please, O Most Omnipotent Goddess of the Planet[pbuh], allow a few of us to live, if this can be called living!

Aussie blogger Andrew Bolt tells us that this flood is (as always) part of a pattern, that the pattern is (as always) about a third of a century long, and that the 1974 version of this flood did cause a sane response from politicians. For a while. But shortly thereafter, the murderous Iron Fist of the ecoterrorists SMASHED down on Australia, and the plans were abandoned. Some fucking little fish might have been embarrassed by the dam, so the Aussie gov't decided it was better to kill all the people than to embarrass one Holy Sainted Royal Goddamn Motherfucking Fish.

Time to reprint this passage from the 1938 WPA Guide to Kansas, showing that our experts and governments and scientists were not always murderous, that our scientists actually perceived facts and used logic at one time in the long-distant dimly remembered past.

Recent years of almost unprecedented drought have led to the often expressed belief that the climate of Kansas is changing. Geologists and meteorologists, however, point out that weather runs in cycles, the most pronounced being about a third of a century in length. Conditions during a cycle are easily mistaken by laymen for permanent changes. Despite year by year fluctuations in temperature and precipitation, recorded evidence shows that general climatic conditions remain unchanged.

The facts, of course, are still the same. Nature doesn't give a flying fuck about our weird apocalyptic suicidal religious cults. Nature just keeps doing the same thing over and over. For a few brief decades, our rulers and scientists understood this fact. For a few brief glorious decades, our rulers and scientists tried to serve humanity.

Now they just kill us.
  ¶ 4:38 AM

  Why I listen to NPR, part 5
I'm continually puzzled by the labeling of Fox News as "right-wing". It does carry more of the Repooflican commentators, but most of them are party hacks, not wingers of any sort. They loyally supported Manchurian Candidate McCain, whose agenda was 100% identical to Pasha Obama. That's not ideology, it's just a highly paid commercial endorsement. Pepsi over Coke.

Outside the commentators, Fox's "hard news" people are just as solidly Commie as CNN's.

Nice example this morning on a report from Guttmacher, the abortion industry's private think tank:


"For the first time in decades, more women have exercised their right to choose."

- - - Fox, Steve Rappaport


"For the first time in three decades, the number and rate of abortions performed in the United States is no longer declining."

- - - NPR, Julie Rovner


Which of these statements represents an open left-wing viewpoint, and which is neutral?
  ¶ 8:04 AM

  So that's where it went
As usual 'despite' really means 'because'.

News item: "Meth thrives despite tracking"

Electronic systems that track sales of the cold medicine used to make methamphetamine have failed to curb the drug trade and instead created a vast, highly lucrative market for profiteers to buy over-the-counter pills and sell them to meth producers at a huge markup.

An Associated Press review of federal data shows that the lure of such easy money has drawn thousands of new people into the methamphetamine underworld over the last few years.

“It’s almost like a sub-criminal culture,” said Gary Boggs, an agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration. “You’ll see them with a GPS unit set up in a van with a list of every single pharmacy or retail outlet. They’ll spend the entire week going store to store and buy to the limit.”

Now we know what happened to the famous American ingenuity and entrepreneurial culture.

Most of the LEGAL paths to create new enterprises are roadblocked by litigation or the ecoterrorist group EPA. The few paths that aren't blocked have been undercut by Chinese products or Chinese copyright thieves.

Only ILLEGAL enterprises are neither roadblocked nor outsourced, so smart entrepreneurs go illegal.
  ¶ 6:13 AM

  Moment of silence?
This wasn't a minute of silence. It was more like a minute of rush hour traffic. Or a minute in a railroad switching yard. Or a minute in a severe thunderstorm.

Nicely defines our pathology. The Emperor declares a minute of silence. The Emperor appears on his balcony, and we get a minute of blinding flashes and roaring shutters, as each camera operator maximizes his orgasmic exposure to the Most Royal Most Holy Luminosity of His Most Holy And Most Radiant Highness The Emperor.

Incidentally, I've already said what I think about this whole mess.
  ¶ 8:54 AM

  Fluoride turnabout
Polistra has observed before that the strange Substance Superstition or Material Taboo was largely owned by Bircher types back in the '50s but is now owned by the Commies.

= = = = =Reprinting from 2008:

The 'organic' fetish includes a perfectly standard and predictable set of taboos:

Hates fluoride in water
Hates pasteurized milk
Hates vaccines
Hates tobacco and alcohol
Tends toward vegetarian, not always total
Favors 'organic' or 'health' foods
Loves exercise, especially mass calisthenics

These were an intrinsic part of Hitler's program, and they came from an earlier German hippie-like movement (die Wandervogel).

From 1945 to 1970, you could predict with about 75% certainty that an American who held these preferences would be a Bircher.

Consider the right-wing general in Dr Strangelove, constantly afraid that Commies were "preverting his vital bodily fluids." Only slightly parodied: the Birch types really did talk that way.

After 1970, you could predict with about 75% certainty that a body-purity fanatic was a Commie.

The taboo switch corresponds exactly with the official switch of American Leftism from the universalist Marx to various forms of Fascist-derived identity politics in 1968. The taboos came into the Left directly from hippiedom, not from the Birchers. Just as they had come to Hitler from the Wandervogel, not from prissy aristocrats.

= = = = =End reprint

Now we're seeing an official manifestation of the switchover on fluoridated water, as the Establishment "scientists" (i.e. Commies with PhD's) are starting to worry about fluoride.

Contradictorily, this coincides with an official disdain of vaccine worries. The latter doesn't make sense; the Establishment doesn't work against its own cherished superstitions....

Ah, now I see. The problem with vaccines is mercury. Mercury is a serious poison, though the autism connection is highly dubious. We can't have people talking about mercury as a poison, because that will interfere with the forcible implantation of Compact Fluorescent Lamps.

Now it makes sense. Watch for a campaign to portray Tungsten as a horribly deadly poison while soft-pedaling Mercury.
  ¶ 5:29 AM

  Komedy Kingdom
Long past time for an OTR review!



Komedy Kingdom was an obscure syndicated show produced in 1937. A few scattered episodes are available free in various spots on the web, and the whole series seems to be available here at the moment. (I bought it from good old OtrCat, but they've pulled it down since then.)

The sound on these clips is outstanding, not a scratch or a skip anywhere. Somebody must have preserved the original unplayed transcription disks, which is exceedingly rare from that era.

Elvia Allman hosted KK, as the ruler of a realm where sadness was prohibited. The premise was weakly applied, and clearly wore even thinner toward the later episodes.

This was Elvia's first and only top billing, but she became more famous later in various character parts. She played the laconic Mabel Toops on Fibber, played a pair of Jersey Girls named Brenda and Kobina on Bob Hope, and did a lot of early TV including this Dragnet episode.

Along with all the other funny ladies of that era, Elvia has been deleted from history by today's monstrous Femynyst Commie-diennes, who insist that wyyymyyynn were not allowed to be funny until Joan Rivers broke the mold. Well, I suppose they're right in a definitional sense. If you define "funny" as the anti-civilization Stalinist skrawkings of a Whoopi Goldberg or a Margaret Cho, then nobody, male or female, was allowed to be "funny" as radio entertainment in the '30s. By this modern definition, "humor" was only heard in Party Cadre meetings.

= = = = =

Despite Elvia's best efforts to liven it up, the show's komedy kontent is nothing special. Each episode has a subject (sports, afternoon, hobos, etc). Elvia starts off with a monologue which flows into a series of skits. Standard vaudeville material, done in a standard way.

Music is what makes KK stand out. The mainly nameless singers and instrumentalists are perfect, and they perform a mix of well-known standards, blues, and obscure numbers in a unique way. All songs of that era were written with a verse and a chorus, but you rarely hear the verse; KK gives full emphasis to the verses of every song, with some surprising results.

For instance, 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' is generally thought to be a song about baseball. Nope. It's a song about a girl who loves baseball. Entirely different proposition. And the second verse is a song about a song about a girl who loves baseball. All of that complexity is lost when you skip the verses.

Take me out!

As I was thinking about verse and chorus, recitative and aria, I realized each episode of KK has the form of a cantata. Starts with a rousing overture which leads directly to the first 'scripture reading' by Elvia. Several recitatives, arias and interludes are interspersed among the spoken segments. At the end Elvia gives a benediction, followed by a slow and stately hymn. Bach (who wrote several secular cantatas replete with dialect humor) would have appreciated this use of the form!
  ¶ 8:47 PM

  Who killed industry? Phil Gramm.
Art Robinson, after losing his Congressional bid, has returned to publishing his fine newsletter Access to Energy. In the latest issue [not online, subscription only] he featured a chart that astonished me.

I wanted to verify and analyze the info in more detail, so I consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. BLS has all the labor data you'd ever want, available in attractive graphs and Excel form. It's not well organized, but I finally located the graph that Art had used.

Here's the graph, with some "added value" in the form of snazzy color strips representing presidential terms.




This is the total number of Americans employed in real manufacturing, i.e. making things, from 1939 to 2010. [Would have preferred to run a full century, but BLS data starts at '39.]

The left half runs pretty much as I'd expect. Factoring out the initial hump from WW2 total mobilization, manufacturing gradually increased from FDR through Carter. Comrade Jimmy began the process of deregulation that handed our economy to the financial sector. Since then, every president has continued to steal jobs from ordinary black and white Americans to enrich Goldman Sachs.

The astonishing part is the last decade, the total smashup typically described (with a correct sound if not a correct meaning) as the "Bush Boom."



You might expect September The Eleventh Two Thousand And One to be the edge of the cliff, but it isn't. Looking closely at the data in spreadsheet form, it appears that the death spiral began in late 1999.

Well, what's late 1999? Not a war or a presidential transition, but the Triumph of Phil Gramm, the Repeal of Glass-Steagall. Phil abolished the law that had prevented the Wall Street Mafia from stealing the entire country. After that, the Mafia roared into murderous action and stole the entire country.

Now focus on the 2008 drop, which finally knocked our productive sector back down to its 1946 size in absolute numbers. (Per capita, it's about half of 1946.) The crash of 2008 allegedly removed trillions from the financial sector. If we had an actual free market, you'd expect investment to flow back into manufacturing after such a complete loss of trust in banking. Nope, manufacturing dropped again at that point, indicating that we no longer have anything resembling a free market. The people with money, the People Who Count, are now betting even more strongly on the Mafia because they make all the rules. They design the laws of governments and they design the laws of economics to suit themselves. See Medaille's Plutonomics for more details.

Another observation: the BushObama death spiral for manufacturing happened during the LOWEST TAX RATES in this whole 70-year span. Repooflicans continue to recommend even lower taxes as the "cure" for our economic woes. This graph tells you who they're curing. For a Repooflican, "Economic Disease" means that a few scant dollars are still wasted on those nasty old blue-collar Americans performing useful labor. We must do everything possible to cure this horrible disease! We must achieve "Economic Health", where ALL money goes to Mexico and China (with a nice hefty vig to Goldman Sachs for the transaction)!!!!!


  ¶ 5:51 PM

  Coulda had a V8
Instead of today's utterly pointless time-waster of reading the Constitution, we could have seen a truly useful exercise.

We could have asked Clarence Thomas (the only man in DC who has actually read the Constitution) to write a set of 435 moderately difficult questions with correct answers.

Then we'd print the questions on a set of cards, shuffle them, and place them in a bowl.

Then we'd ask each member of the House to pull out a card and give the answer.

Members who gave correct answers would then be qualified to take the oath of office. Members who gave incorrect answers would obviously be unqualified to uphold a document they've never read. They would then be treated as observers, able to sit and listen but not able to vote.

I'd bet on roughly a dozen legitimate members remaining after this exercise.

= = = = =

More seriously, it's truly bizarre that the Right defends the reading and the Left objects to the reading. Since 1962 the real document hasn't been used at all; everything done by the Feds violates either the explicit letter or the clear spirit of the old document. The ONLY people who use the Bill of Rights are leftists: the Soviet-front ACLU and the black-robed Soviet saboteurs in the Federal court system. These enemy agents use an inverted reading of the document to kill American industry, weaken the military, embolden criminals and terrorists, and destroy the family. Nobody uses either the actual document or any imaginary version of the document to advance American interests.

If 'conservatives' really wanted to restore America, they would be agitating violently to eliminate this document. It only serves as a tool for our enemies.
  ¶ 12:51 PM

  Dead birds ===>> New Madrid 2?
The reports of dead birds continue coming in, and seem to be centering on the Missouri Bootheel.

What happens before a big quake? Magnetic and electric fields change quickly.

How do birds navigate? Magnetic fields, especially at night.

When magnetic fields move suddenly, birds get confused. (This is very well-known from observations near radio transmitters and similar sources.)

And we unfortunately know that the Missouri Bootheel has a history of quakes.

This makes far more sense than the stupid noisy-fireworks theory. If that were true, we'd notice dead flocks every New Year's and every July 4th, and we'd see them everywhere.

My first guess was that the birds were sucked up in a thunderstorm updraft, thrashed around, then slammed to the ground by a downdraft. That does happen occasionally, but Accuweather has eliminated the possibility in this case.
  ¶ 6:07 AM

  As usual
During the pointless "debate" before the predetermined fairy-izing of the military, opponents were saying things like "Just watch. This is only the first step. Later on, heterosexuals will be kicked out for joking about sex."

As usual the Communist side was dismissing such fears as "homophobic paranoia", depicting a nice peaceful situation where the Lion and the Lamb will get along just fine.

As usual the fears expressed by non-Communists turn out to be understated, not unfounded. The expulsion of heterosexuals from the milifairy is starting immediately, not later on.

Honors is under investigation for a series of raunchy videos in which he appeared from 2006 to 2007. The videos included skits that aimed to provide some humor during the long deployment at sea.

As usual.
  ¶ 7:02 AM

  Swap
Interesting developments.

In Egypt, jihadis strike a Christian church. Both the nominally secular government and the Islamic hierarchy come out loudly against jihad, and the government takes steps to protect Christians.

In Syria, without any definite provocation, the nominally secular government bans burqas and takes steps to remove Islam from schools.

In USA, the state of Oklahoma, operating under the delusion that the antique document known as the Constipation? or Consecution? I forget the exact name... Anyway, mistakenly believing that this old dusty scroll gives it the power to make secular legislation, Oklahoma decides to ban Sharia just as Syria is doing. But unlike Syria, Oklahoma's attempt to act against Jihad is mercilessly squashed by a black-robed agent of the Islamic/Gaian Occupation Government in DC.

In Iraq, formerly secular and tolerant of Christians under Saddam, the new government planted by Sultan Bush continues turning more Islamic, forcing Christians to flee.

In Britain, a law enabling Jihadis to be held on suspicion has been scrapped by the British IGOG, allowing Jihadis to run free.


= = = = =

These trends don't add up to a full swap, since the two sides of the world started from very different conditions. Still, the Anglosphere (along with its colonies like Iraq) is surrendering to Islam more abjectly every day, while the Islamic world and other parts of Europe are clawing their way back to secular governance after a few bad decades.
  ¶ 5:27 PM

  Robot teachers
Korea is using robots to teach English to kids.



Makes you wonder ... is this how Orientals see Caucasians? A white egg with a face mounted on a flap, and dinner plates for hands?

Actually the face-on-a-flap is a neat solution to a difficult problem. How do you make a robot switch from man to woman to child without screwing on entirely different heads? How do you give it a wide range of expressions without micro-engineering all the human facial muscles? You put a TV screen where the head should be, and use 3d software to create the faces.

The kids seem to accept it easily, making eye contact with the face on the flap.

Note that the English phrases include "I love my Mommy" and "I love my Dad." A teacher in America, robotic or not, couldn't teach those phrases. Most kids here don't have a Dad, and the school administration would get sued to death for assuming that kids have exactly one female parent and exactly one male parent.

That's why Korea is going to succeed as we collapse.

View (about 1.5 minutes)
  ¶ 2:06 PM

  Isn't that just sweet?
The Islamic/Gaian Occupation Government in England has decided to remove all restraints on terror suspects. They already freed Jihadis from jail; now they are taking away the 'house arrest' requirements so their own valued Jihadis will be totally free to carry out the Will of Allah.

This is an important step toward total destruction of England, and a major move toward total victory for Satan's dearest children Allah and Gaia.

The IGOG is already fulfilling the Divine Will of Gaia to the fullest, but hasn't yet gone all the way for Allah.

America's IGOG needs to look to London for guidance; our rulers are slacking off just a bit by comparison.
  ¶ 7:18 AM

  Curing cabin fever
Just noticed that I hadn't posted since Tuesday... not that it matters, since nobody except NSA reads this blog. Still, the point is to maintain some discipline.

I'm highly prone to cabin fever in wintertime. Finally learned in the last couple years that the best cure for cabin fever is to take control of the situation. In this case, raking the roof immediately after a heavy snow is the controlling factor. Prevents ice dams, thus preventing the real damage that happened in 2008. Also gives a good sense of the real situation as opposed to the panicky imagined situation. (It's just 8 inches of snow, not 800 pazillion megafeet!)

Also good exercise. In the 2008 winter, the exercise nearly finished me off. This time, after getting blood pressure under control, the exercise is sort of fun. Can't complain about that.

Meanwhile, Polistra and Happystar are enjoying a toonish amusement park I'm 'building', based on the rides that used to be in Sunset Zoo in Manhattan.





Wheeee! Happy new year!
  ¶ 3:09 PM