Best movie ever made.
Best movie ever made.

Pure delight from start to finish.

Couldn't make one picosecond of it in modern totalitarian America. Every picosecond would be halted by self-censorship and gunpoint censorship.

The closest you could get is a full hour of this:




  ¶ 5:30 AM

  You still doubt?
Many of the global warming skeptics have their own problem with believing a false theory. They continue to believe that the Carbon Cult is a Marxist Socialist 1960s hippie plastic banana rock'n'roll redistributionist socialist radical Marxist redistributionist socialist conspiracy, with the sole aim of giving Satan Obama total control over our brainwaves.

Nope.

That was more or less true in the first decade of the conspiracy, from 1975 to 1988 or so. Margaret Mead wanted totalitarian rule and hated every aspect of America with a lavender passion.

Since then, specifically since Bush The Father took over, the Carbon Cult has involved both government control and Wall Street greed. Gramsci.

Most people understand this, but to assist those who still can't see it, I'd suggest listening to this morning's Bloomberg interview with Jeffrey Sachs. (Podcast here.)

Bloomberg is, of course, the heart of Wall Street thinking, the heart of Gramscian darkness. Sachs is famous for spreading Wall Street 'capitalism' and 'democracy' in post-Soviet Russia, leading directly to their current Mafiocracy. Nowhere in this half-hour interview will you hear the slightest doubt about Evil Carbon; none of the capitalists find any problem at all with the Carbon-Irene connection. Everyone is on board with Gaia.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 4:22 AM

  Cop or codger?
WUWT points to a frustrating interview of Bill Nye The Idiot Guy by Charles Payne on Fox Business.

Idiot Guy is claiming, counter to 100% of all evidence and facts, that evil Carbon caused Hurricane Irene. Payne manages to make the correct counter-argument for a moment, but doesn't have the facts and graphs. Idiot Nye manages to roll over him with insane apocalyptic passion and bloody force.

This is ALWAYS the case with well-intentioned people who try to argue against Carbon Cultists. They ALWAYS fail to use graphs, ALWAYS give up too easily against genocidal Gramscian barbarians.

In the discussion at WUWT, too many of the commenters missed the point in another way, trying to say that Idiot Bill didn't have a climatology degree. Nope, that won't help. In the first place, credentialism is always a tool of the Left, because the Left OWNS the agencies and universities that grant the credentials. As soon as you allow credentials to enter the argument, you've LOST. In the second place, the specific credential of climatology is totally corrupt. Nye's lack of a climatology degree, if that's the only thing you knew about him, would tend to make him slightly more believable.

All valid arguments must be purely based on facts and logic, and must use every available visual aid.

The best way to use facts and logic is to compare patterns and look for visual correlations. (I don't mean an r-squared number, I mean a close agreement and phase lock between two or more waveforms.) It's true that visual correlation doesn't tell you how the causation happens, but a good solid phase lock tells you there is some kind of causative relationship. Complete lack of correlation tells you there is no meaningful connection. Even if you think there's some reason to connect the two phenomena, the lack of similarity tells you the connection must be minor and overwhelmed by other factors, thus not worth worrying about. You should be working on the big factors, not worrying about the invisible ones!

That's where the theoreticians take us all into Loonyville. They never admit that their pet connection is non-existent or minor. They refuse to see that the Apocalypse didn't happen when their prophet said it would. They continue spending infinite amounts of OUR money to create epicycles and exceptions, trying to make an excuse for each mismatch.

In the immortal words of the great philosopher Homey D. Clown, "Science don't play dat."

Science works with actual relationships and discards non-related patterns.

= = = = =

Let's take a down-home example. You're cruising down the interstate and you suddenly realize a blue Crown Vic has been in your mirror for an awful long time. A Crown Vic is either a cop or a codger. Which? Is he trailing you? How do you verify your suspicion?

Just continuing to roll along the interstate won't tell you anything. The Crown Vic could just happen to be going the same way, like thousands of others, in no special hurry to pass.

To find out, you have to break linearity. Take an exit, then make a series of turns that aren't popular or obvious. If the Crown Vic is still behind you after 5 or 6 turns, he's a cop.

Similarly with natural curves. Two lines that move up steadily don't tell you much. Lots of things tend to increase steadily or decrease steadily for a long time. You need to see both lines make the same series of turns together. If the alleged 'leader' makes a bunch of turns while the supposed 'follower' goes straight up ... or vice versa ... you know they aren't connected. And if the alleged 'follower' is making the turns first, you know for sure that it's really the leader.

With hurricanes, we have hurricane intensity, the supposed 'follower', going through a series of ups and downs with a definite down toward the end, while CO2, the supposed 'leader', goes straight up.

Here's a good visual aid, which Charles Payne should have used.



From the incomparable Ryan Maue's Tropical Cyclone chart, with a NOAA CO2 line superimposed. (I used 1970 to 2010 to make the horiz axis as precise as possible.)

The red CO2 line is the alleged 'leader', and the blue hurricane intensity is the alleged 'follower'. Nope, not a cop. Not tracking at all.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 4:57 PM

  READ THIS.
Amazing. There is one person in this fucked land who still has a functioning brain, still observes facts and analyzes them with valid logic.

READ THIS very short interview with Cathy Davidson on what's wrong with education. More truth in these 250 words than in any quadrillion words you find elsewhere.
  ¶ 5:15 AM

  Hell wants you too, Heidi
On Point today discussed the hype over Irene. Began with a thoroughly reasonable comment from CBS reporter Jim Axelrod, who understands that the public is absolutely fed up with cable sensationalism, and clearly wants to position CBS to pick up the slack. More power to you, Axelrod! Maybe I'll even plug in the TV again to see if CBS is doing things differently.

Then proceeded to Satan's fave babe, Comrade Heidi Cullen. After two minutes of Comrade Cullen, I literally had to scream, pouring out several megatons of anger and frustration. I've never made a louder noise in my entire life. I quickly turned off the radio before I felt the need to do something more serious. Lucky for you, Comrade Cullen. Hell wants you desperately, but it won't be me who takes you there.

Comrade Cullen was saying that the drought searing the entire country is Gaia's punishment for our sins. Also, the drought searing the entire world is Gaia's punishment for our sins.

No, Comrade Heidi. Drought is NOT affecting the whole country. Drought is affecting Texas in an epic way, and Oklahoma to a lesser extent. Two states are NOT the country. Any climatic situation that damages two states is NOT global.

What we have this year is an unusually stable jet stream. All meteorologists recognize this, and even a few of the Carbon Cultists have acknowledged the fact. A stiff jet stream gives long cool and wet spells on one side and long hot and dry spells on the other side.

To see the actual effects of this, look at wheat harvests. Texas crops are lost this year. But on the other side of the jet, crops are better than usual.

From Seattle Times:

Wheat farmers might be the only people in Washington not complaining about the state's recent run of cool, wet weather.

It's giving them a late but bountiful harvest, and helping balance the paltry crops coming out of the country's drought-ravaged Plains states.

Washington is expected to leapfrog over Texas and Oklahoma in winter-wheat production this year, making it second only to Kansas, where production is down 24 percent.

Kansas is more or less on the dividing line, drier than usual this year but still getting some soaking rains.

And North Dakota's wheat crop is expected to be poor because it's too wet and cold!

Finally, Comrade Heidi, drought is not affecting the whole world either. This summer is warmer than usual in a majority of the world, but it's only the 7th warmest since good records began in 1880. If you're going to claim a steady trend of Gaian punishment, you need a steady upward trend of temperature, not a somewhat warmer than usual year in some places.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 5:09 PM

  Hope for Main Street?
Northwest Blvd has a dozen old strip malls and buildings. I always look at them when I pass on foot or by bus, but don't pay close attention unless forced.

Today I noticed something unique. All of the strip malls and buildings are fully occupied with running businesses. This culminates a gradual positive trend. Four years ago, when the national "economy" as measured by the Mafia Dick Erection Index (Dow) was pumping at max height, these malls were nearly empty.

You can be sure many of the new businesses will fail, but that's always true of strip malls. That's why we have strip malls.

The important thing is, those malls were 80% empty through most of the 20 years I've lived here. Now they're full of hopeful activity.

Something good is happening here.

= = = = =

Later: Looks like someone else is also noticing this neighborhood renaissance!

I'm also noticing some new construction closer to home. This didn't happen during the boom years; lots of speculative remodeling, but no built-from-scratch houses.

Thinking about this, probably overthinking:

During boom times people think like adolescents. Seek new frontiers, try for the moon, evaluate things on the basis of fantasy numbers instead of actual usability.

In bust times people think like adults. Seek comfort, evaluate things on the basis of real enjoyment and utility.

Booms create new subdivisions, home equity loans, and grandiose malls on vacant land with no certain value. Booms suck the life out of older areas.

Busts rediscover strip malls and fill in safe and comfy old neighborhoods.

It's a theory, anyway!

[A sequel here.]

  ¶ 8:49 AM

  OPT 2
Several months ago I detailed, complete with graphs, how my internal clock had reset to Old Peoples Time over the last few years.

Couple more observations.

1. OPT is especially fine in a Spokane summer. When you get up at 3, you're starting at the coolest point of the day, and you've got a good eight hours with open windows and doors, letting Nature cool the house. Typically turn off the air conditioner at wakeup, turn it on at noon. When I was on YPT, I slept through the cool hours and had to run the AC constantly.

2. Getting everything done. The South Park episode on the AARP invasion makes this point clearly: "They've tried to stop them, son, but the seniors get up so early in the morning they get everything done before everyone else is even awake!" When I first watched that episode I was still on YPT and thought it was a parodic exaggeration. Nope. It's wonderfully easy to get all the necessary stuff out of the way by 9. Wash, laundry, yard work, eat twice, dump, go to store. On YPT, most of those chores had to wait till evening when I was tired and hot, and too often the dump didn't happen at all. Ironically, I could probably do an 8-5 job much better now than before! Luckily, don't need to.

2a. Those pre-dawn hours always seem long no matter how you're approaching them. But the length has different implications in YPT and OPT. When you're still trying to achieve sleep at 4 AM, those loooooong seconds are famously nightmarish. When you're in the middle of chores and play, those loooooong seconds are wonderful. More subjective time for chores and play!



3. OPT gives you a broader view of neighborhood activity. This neighborhood is never fully asleep. Half the neighbors within my visual range are OP, with lights coming on before 4 AM. Half are YP, with lights still on at 2 AM. There may be a brief interval when everything's dark, but it's not long or reliable. I suspect a contingent of snoopy OP, peering out of lighted windows at all hours, is a major ingredient of a safe neighborhood.
  ¶ 5:27 PM

  Smart El Paso
Well-written article showing how El Paso has eliminated lawns to bring its water usage under total control.

Over the past 20 years El Paso has paid residents a combined $11 million — $1 per square foot — to remove their grass and replace it with gravel, cement or desert plants. The city has permanent restrictions on watering days and reduced water consumption by offering special showerheads and rebates for water-efficient toilets.

Austin offers a $20 to $30 rebate for each 100 square feet of turf removed as part of a pilot program. So far 70 residents have replaced their grass...

San Antonio offers rebates and gift certificates of up to $400 to residents who choose certain grasses, reduce their turf and cut their water consumption. Only about 360 residents have taken part since the program began in 2008...

The Hueco Bolson aquifer, El Paso's main water source, has stabilized since the city plan was implemented in 1991, and a recent study shows El Paso will have a steady supply for at least the next century, said Ed Archuleta, president of El Paso Water Utilities.

The city's annual water consumption in 2010 had dropped by 1.6 percent since 1990, while its population increased about 36 percent. The utility says the city saved more than $460 million that would have been needed for more pumping and treatment plants to accommodate higher water use.

Spend $11 million to save $460 million and avoid a disaster. Sounds good to me.

Note the comparison to the half-hearted efforts by Austin and San Antone. El Paso paid $1 per square foot, which would be around $10,000 for a typical suburban lot. Ten thousand makes it worth your while to do some work and sacrifice some esthetics. The $400 offered by San Antonio obviously didn't persuade anyone.

Moral: Pay attention to real human nature. Don't make piddly-ass little symbolic gestures then complain that people ought to do the right thing. People will do the right thing when you give them the right combination of rewards and respect.

= = = = =

Sidenote: Spokane has made a weak effort in this direction with weak results... but it's really unnecessary here. Our water supply has plenty of spare capacity, especially since the world is getting colder and wetter. We take water from an aquifer that runs through deep gravel under most of the city. It's not a finite 'locked' aquifer like those in the Plains; it's just an underground branch of the Spokane River, constantly flowing from snowmelt upstream. Bonus: because the aquifer runs under the city, part of the water used on lawns percolates back into it.
  ¶ 11:05 AM

  Cat 2 hurricane meets Stage 4 dementia.
News of the totally wacked-out former America:

Dozens of volunteers have been pitching in all week to protect the 23 patients at a sea turtle hospital on Topsail Island in North Carolina. WHQR's Michelle Bliss reports that four small turtles have been evacuated, but the remaining, larger turtles will weather the storm on-site.

Well, isn't that sweet. Humans are left to take care of their own evacuation, but the TRULY VALUABLE critters must be carefully protected from the WATER which is their own natural habitat. Can't let any fucking sea get on a fucking sea turtle, can we?

Shit.

= = = = =

This, however, is the exact opposite of demented. It's a deeply clever bit of 'narrowcasting' that may save some actual human lives:

When asked if there would be repercussions for those who did not leave, he suggested they write their name, Social Security number, next of kin and contact information on a 3-by-5 card and place it in their left shoe, a tied shoe rather than a flip-flop, so that responders after the storm would know whom to contact.

This is not really meant to identify you. It's meant to put the fear of the Lord into a specific group without openly naming the group.

Who refuses to evacuate? Older women.

And who are the only Americans who still own 3 x 5 index cards? Older women with recipe files. Everyone else has computerized the sort of records that used to be kept on index cards.

Why specifically the left shoe? Think of the old sinister connotations of the left hand.
  ¶ 4:02 PM

  High is right.....
Headline:

McGinn: Seattle to take 'high road' to economic development


Idiot superGaian mayor of Seattle is doing the Bolivian thing. He claims Seattle will gain lots of jobs by expanding and exporting Green shit.

Again, triumph of theory over fact. In this case there is an IMMEDIATELY APPLICABLE fact. Idiot superGaian McGinn has already spent the last year expanding Green shit. He spent 20 million of Bugsy Bernanke's fake Monopoly money, with a goal of creating 2000 jobs and refitting 2000 homes in poor neighborhoods.

Actual fact: He spent 20 million to create 14 JOBS and refit 3 HOUSES.

The Seattle paper, to its credit, exposed this utter failure.

Now superGaian McGinn continues to apply the theory, with absolutely no perception of the fact.

McGinn said Seattle has to take the "high road."

"Compete on the basis of quality, compete on the basis of innovation, the intelligence, savvy and hard work of the people that are here. It means that look to address the income inequality that we see," McGinn said. "he cities that figure out first how to exist in a high-energy cost future are the ones that are going to thrive. Everybody's trying to figure out, 'how do we get off of carbon?' The cities that figure that out are not just going to have lower costs locally and a healthier lifestyle, but they're also going to be the places that export this knowledge to other places. Just like we export airplanes and software, we're going to export our knowledge and vision of how you create a high-road economy."

High road. Green. Get off on carbon.

Got it. Lemme have a toke too, McGinn. Must be strong stuff.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 10:38 AM

  Scary moment
Poked my head out the back, noticed the air was deliciously cool. Decided to give the air conditioning a head start, since today will reach 92. Opened internal doors and turned on a fan in the bedroom to suck air through the house and pre-cool the bedroom.

After a few minutes, caught an unmistakable electrical-burning smell. Seemed at first to be all over the house. Poked outside again; not coming from outside.

ACK! Is the attic wiring burning?

Turned off the fan as a first step. Immediately the smell was less dominant, confined mainly to the bedroom. Leaned down and sniffed the fan motor directly.

GAARRGGGHH! There it is.

Took fan outside, ran hose on it until cold, then threw it in the trash. By the time I got back inside, the smell was gone.

Sort of sad to lose an old American-made possession: the Tesco fan has been serving every summer since 1974. But I guess that's a good long life for a gadget.

Later: to pin down the constants and variables, plugged a heavier fan in the same outlet and ran it for a while. No smell, so it was definitely the old fan, not the wiring.
  ¶ 6:50 AM

  More bad theories
Listening to Bloomberg radio, the Heart of Darkness. They're discussing politics with reporter Margaret Carlson. A good question: "Do Americans really care about what Bernanke does?" Carlson answered: "Yes. Partly because Republicans have made the debt ceiling a big issue, but mostly because they've seen in the last few years that the Federal Reserve has a big influence on their lives. They want to see Bernanke provide enough stimulus to get the economy running again."

A perfect example of the bizarre delusions that happen when you follow theory instead of observation.

The claim that pumping trillions of dollars into Goldman Sachs must create jobs in America is a THEORY. It's a theory that everyone in NY and DC believes as an absolute religious axiom, but it's still just a THEORY.

What do we see upon actual OBSERVATION? We see that Bugsy has poured about 3 trillion into the Swiss accounts of his gang affiliates, with EXACTLY ZERO effect on the economy of America. Plenty of effect on the Mafia Dick Erection Index (usually called the Dow for some arcane reason) but no effect at all on actual American business. And why should it have any effect? NONE OF THAT MONEY REACHES AMERICAN BUSINESS, THUS IT CAN'T HAVE AN EFFECT ON AMERICAN BUSINESS.

I'd guess that many Americans have made this observation, thus they DON'T want to see Bugsy devalue the dollar even more. Otherwise, why so much resonance from Rick Perry's precise description of Bugsy's actions as treason?
  ¶ 5:03 AM

  Yes, Turkey again
It's trite but true: the older I get, the more I realize that I'm simply carrying out my father's legacy.

We didn't talk much. Didn't need to. Both were laconic, observant and experiential.

Nevertheless, I did pick up some large themes from him, and most of what I write here is a continuation of his themes.

Biggest theme: Theory is never the foundation of thinking, teaching or learning. Theory is a tacked-on frill to impress the yokels. When you can discover or teach a fact by observation or experiment; when you've pinned down the constants and variables; you don't need a theory.

Along this line, I'm impressed by Turkey's foreign policy.

Goal: Zero problems.

Completely original and ELEGANT.

In longer form: Turkey will do whatever is necessary and feasible to have zero problems with its neighbors, and doesn't much care about countries that aren't neighbors.

No theory. Perfectly pragmatic. Measurable and quantifiable closed-loop goal. You'll know when you reach zero problems. If some problems still remain, you can generally see what must be done to eliminate them, or you can decide to live with them.

Contrast this with America's foreign policy, which doesn't even have a formulation. By Polistra's Law of Inferred Intent, America's post-1989 foreign policy appears to be something like this:

"USA! USA! USA! We're Number 1! We're Exceptional! We are God! We are the sole wellspring and source of morality in the world. Therefore, any country that threatens Israel or competes economically with Saudi Arabia is suspect. Therefore, any country that violates Betty Friedan's feminist doctrine, or allows normal men and women to marry and have children, is suspect. At any time we may decide for no particular reason to invade any one of these suspect countries, in order to accomplish something or other. We have no idea what we want to accomplish, but we know it absolutely must be done. Achieving something or other fully justifies any expenditure of money and soldiers, any amount of permanent disorder and chaos in the suspect country."

This is based on a wild farrago of incoherent theories, and has no measurable goal anywhere. There is no way to find out when we're done, or when we're getting close to done. We just have to keep spending money and soldiers.

Labels: Turkey

  ¶ 11:12 AM

  Die-versity at its finest!
News item:

Police reports filed in Latah County reveal a former Associate Professor at the University of Idaho, who police say shot and killed a graduate student then himself, was a self-admitted "psychopathic killer" who threatened the student several times with a gun before he shot and killed her on Monday.

According to the roommates of 22-year-old Katy Benoit, the student was sexually involved with Ernesto Bustamante, but broke things off in March. Friends say Benoit claimed the former professor threatened her several times with a gun and even put the gun in her mouth at one point.

A friend of Bustamante told police that he owned several handguns and had multiple personality disorders, one which he called "psychopathic killer" and another he called "the beast."

According to the documents Benoit filed a complaint with the University of Idaho against Bustamante in June. Bustamante was either fired or allowed to resign on Friday as a result of the complaint.

Then on Monday he killed Benoit and later killed himself.


All you need to know is the name. Ernesto Bustamante. The Right Kind Of Name. He filled a quota, so his frank psychopathic insanity Did Not Exist. He worked for four years, got promoted from Assistant to Associate, while impressing his students as being a raving wacko.

He had The Right Kind Of Name, so nothing else mattered. All else was Unfact.

Die-versity trumps all. Die-versity kills all.
  ¶ 3:19 AM

  AAAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Yes, that's an orgasm.

The Svensmark experiment at CERN has finally reported its results, and they're completely unsurprising. It's all the sun.

I'm especially glad that Nigel Calder got in the first write-up. He's been writing about the Svensmark theory for years, and this is his vindication. He was also the last human editor of New Scientist magazine before it was penetrated by the genocidal Gaian aliens and flipped to New Stalinist Mag. Needless to say, New Stalinist is completely ignoring the triumph of their Trotsky.

= = = = =

For black-box thinkers like me, this experiment with high-energy particles was simply unnecessary. The phase lock between sunspot waveforms and earth temperature and precipitation patterns over the last few thousand years was all I needed. I don't care about the mechanism.

But some of the math-minded skeptics, and conceivably a tiny handful (approximately 0.00000) of the less highly-paid Carbon Cult mass murderers, will finally be convinced by this.

There's simply no doubt now.

It's a fairly complex mechanism, and each step is now firmly established.

More solar activity -> Stronger magnetic field -> Repels cosmic rays -> Less cloud nucleation -> Warmer earth.

Less solar activity -> Weaker magnetic field -> More cosmic rays reach earth -> More cloud nucleation -> Cooler earth.

The CERN experiment pins down the cloud nucleation step. The other steps are already well known and undoubted.


In honor of this civilization-restoring event:

Happystar, Polistra, and ESPECIALLY old Sol are singing the Conquest Chorus.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 5:23 PM

  Aw come on, don't make everything linear!
In the curse on Coburn, I linked to a Wiki page on Parkinson's Law of Triviality, sometimes called the bicycle-shed law. It's the basis of the pork-buster trick.

The wiki describes the Law of Triviality as a straight-line inverse relationship between cost and attention. Councils or legislatures will pass huge expenditures (like a nuclear reactor) instantly because they don't know anything about the subject, and aren't embarrassed to admit their ignorance. They will take plenty of time debating in detail on a small item like a new bicycle shed for the park, because they know something about such structures and feel the need to show their knowledge.

This isn't how Parkinson described the law in his first edition, which formed the foundation for most of my thinking about politics. He gave it as a curve. Low attention for small items like pencils because nobody wants to look like he's wasting time on tiny matters. High attention for middle-size projects like the bicycle shed where everyone wants to sound informed; instant approval for the nuclear reactor where ignorance is okay.

Don't know if Parkinson linearized the law himself in a later edition; more likely it's been simplified by moderns.

Linearizing is one of Polistra's pet peeves. In every field of endeavor, modern scientists and Experts seem incapable of understanding cycles or curves. Everything must be turned into a pure straight line, which can be extrapolated down to zero and up to infinity.

Nature doesn't work that way. Nature runs on negative feedback, which forms cycles or sigmoid curves.

Upward extrapolation obviously serves the interests of the Men of Infinite Greed, who must believe that their capacity to acquire power or money has no limits.

Downward extrapolation wipes out a whole area of biological activity relating to immunity and hormesis. In nature, small doses of harmful things train organisms to counteract large insults. If you ignore hormesis and treat all effects as linear, you're in a position to sue or imprison anyone who emits even one atom of the supposedly bad thing. Downward extrapolation thus serves the interests of predatory lawyers and the marauding enemy army EPA.
  ¶ 10:17 AM

  Prayers answered
On 6/11/11, I prayed:

Clearly the only cure for most of science, business and government is the Kuhnian cure, death of an entire generation. I pray constantly for a monstrous disaster to speed this salvation. Now that Sheikh Osama is gone, there's no hope that he will try again and get it right this time, so we can only pray for something like a Richter 20.0 earthquake that reduces the East Coast to unsurvivable rubble from Boston to Palm Beach.

Today was a pretty good start!



Thank you, Allah. More, please!
  ¶ 11:30 AM

  Hell wants Coburn


The infernal Coburn is at it again. He's putting tremendous energy into ridiculing and mocking a tiny bit of REAL SCIENCE involving the metabolism of shrimps. This REAL SCIENCE costs the NSF about half a million dollars, comparable to the piglet that Polistra is feeding here.

Meanwhile, Coburn pays ABSOLUTELY NO ATTENTION to the 18 Billion Dollars in the current budget to support Satanic Gaian primitive ooga-booga superstition. Proportional to the cloven-hoofed monster looming over Polistra.

This, of course, is the ENTIRE REASON for "pork-busting".

Pork-busters get the dumb Repooflican cheerleaders all weewee'd up about tiny and useful projects that sound silly. Then the politicians are perfectly free to spend infinite trillions on raw bleeding genocidal evil. Invading countries that didn't attack us, supporting anti-science research explicitly designed to kill all humans, pouring quadrillions directly into the obscenely fat pockets of Goldman Sachs.

Damn you, Coburn. Damn you a trillion times. Hell wants you, Coburn. If there's any justice, you'll spend an eternity with your filthy little slot-shaped mouth iron-strapped inside the anus of a giant pig, and everything you breathe and digest for eternity will come through the giant pig's digestive system first.
  ¶ 10:42 AM

  And yet again....
Another daily installment in the running story of Turkey, the one and only sane country in this totally fucked world.

From Public Radio Marketplace:

Germany, Switzerland, and Italy are all phasing out nuclear power. But, just days after the Fukushima disaster, the Turkish government promised it's going ahead with plans for nuclear energy. And since then, it's been pushing to speed up the construction of the three proposed plants.

Labels: Turkey

  ¶ 5:55 PM

  Rut forever
Well, the chimpanzee is now free to rut wherever he wants, to rape any woman in the world. He is officially unpunishable.

Basic law of the modern universe:

JEWS NEVER LOSE.
  ¶ 4:35 PM

  Daggers
The dude in front of me at Safeway this morning was a tall 25-year-old. Looked healthy but somehow out of phase. He bought a gallon of milk and a big box of donuts, and started talking to the cashier lady in a slowed-down Valium voice. Like a 45 record played at 33.

33 RPM Dude: "Times are tough."

Cashier Lady: "Yup."

33 RPM Dude: "Lost a thousand dollars yesterday."

Cashier Lady: "Betting?"

33 RPM Dude: "Yup. Kids need food. Times are tough."

Cashier Lady said nothing at all, but her face shouted at 120 dB:

"YOU FUCKING IDIOT. YOU'RE BARELY MAKING IT, YOUR KIDS NEED FOOD, AND YOU HAD THE GALL TO BET $1000?????? GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!"

Needless to say, 33 RPM Dude didn't notice the non-verbal shout.

33 RPM Dude said: "Hey, who's this Jerry on the sign there? Is that Jerry Lewis?"

Enough.
  ¶ 12:39 PM

  Sometimes an unexpected is just an unexpected


By contrast to previous item, here's a tiny little event that's truly unexpected. Nobody could have seen it coming.

Been connected to Comcast since 2000. The cable ran through the branches of an apricot tree to the nearest pole.

Every time a serious wind came along, I expected the tree to snap the cable. Nope, never broke.

Last winter most of that tree crashed to the ground under heavy snow. I expected the cable to be brought down with it. Nope, the cable was just above the part that crashed.

In April of this year, I finally had that tree cut down, along with the other Wood Weapons, and since then I haven't expected anything to happen to the cable. It's perfectly open and untouched from the house to the pole.

Today, for no reason at all, the roof-level attachment of the cable came loose, letting the cable dangle low from the next anchor point.

No real wind since June, no rain since June. Only beautiful and ever-so-welcome warmth. Not even especially hot for Spokane. We've bumped 90 a few times but never got near 100, so it can't be an expansion thing. Why did the wire finally decide to come down today with exactly zero visible cause?

Genuinely unexpected.

It's still connected and working, so no big deal. Provided I don't get stupid and walk into it, all will be fine until Comcast gets around to fixing it. I scheduled a repair call online, for Monday between 8 and 10 AM.

= = = = = Update Monday:

The repair guy got here at exactly 8 AM! That's also unprecedented for Cable Guys. Normally, 8 to 10 AM means 4:59 PM in Cable Standard Time. So we have two unprecedenteds in one little incident.

... Today's cable guy took longer than the basic task should have needed, but it turns out he wasn't working slowly. After looking closely at his work, I see he did something interesting and worthy of appreciation.

The original 2000 installation was grounded to a deep old spike that had been around for a long time, probably dating from a TV antenna lightning arrestor in the '50s. Sometime around 2003, Comcast put a lot of publicity and money into a strange unexplained 're-grounding' project on all houses in town. At that time they actually de-grounded the cable, hooking it to nothing more than the steel siding. Very bad idea. Basically turned the siding into an antenna for 60 cycle buzz. A year later, without any publicity, they re-re-grounded the line to the electrical entrance box, which was a little better.

Today's technician (I think his name was Randolph) rearranged the whole setup from scratch, finding a better physical anchor point and clamping the ground back to the solid spike after carefully cleaning off the tarnished old copper. That's where it should have been, and that's where he put it.

Randolph also paid close attention to esthetics, arranging the pattern so the cable was nearly invisible against the house. Kept the horizontal part under the lap of the steel siding, and ran the vertical part behind a downspout. That's not just craft, it's ART!
  ¶ 5:44 PM

  How to Kill Common Sense. One Easy Lesson.
Headline on AOL news:

"Dad, you're kind of freaking me out.

Moments before the deadly disaster at Indiana State Fair, a father spooked his 12-year-old daughter with a prediction.... Words that proved chillingly prophetic.


Not prophetic at all, let alone chillingly prophetic. Turns out the father made a perfectly commonsensical observation: the platform looked fragile and a big storm was coming. If you grow up in the Midwest, this is a common set of skills. You know something about structures and you can gauge a storm. You may not be able to predict the exact wind speed, but you know if this is a "bring an umbrella" storm or a "get the fuck inside and pray" storm. By all accounts this one was closer to the latter category.

But no. This was UNPRECEDENTED UNEXPECTED UNPRECEDENTED UNEXPECTED NOBODY COULD HAVE FORESEEN ON PENALTY OF DEATH!!!!!!

If anyone shows any signs of non-abstract knowledge, shows that he can use his own experience to predict a situation without relying abjectly on the Official Experts, he must be Mystical and maybe Just A Little Crazy.


  ¶ 4:37 PM

  Turks get it waaaay more than right!
Been focusing lately on Turkey as a model. In the last ten years they've been able to mix very healthy economic growth (manufacturing, not banking!) with a healthy traditional culture. That's unique.

Now they're taking a step above success, into the true high ground of morality.

Nobody else has been able to help Somalia. Western countries, even when we could afford it, couldn't break through the cultural barrier. Stupidly as usual, we tried to interfere militarily and got slapped down. Now we couldn't afford it even if we could figure out how to do it right.

So Turkey steps into the cockpit and grabs the controls. Because their current government is explicitly Muslim, they can be heard by the Somali people, and they share a common view of humanity and governance.

This is a giant positive change in the political shape of the world. For the first time in living memory, a competent and good country is intervening in a trouble spot. Up till now, all the intervention has been either by wacked-out demented senile babbling lunatics like America and Britain, or by highly competent and totally evil China.

Labels: Turkey

  ¶ 3:13 PM

  BRAVO PERRY!



Polistra and Happystar give Perry an incandescent salute!

ABOUT GODDAMN TIME.

Straightforward proclamation of the fucking truth, straightforward rejection of evil Gaian pseudoscience, straightforward embrace of real science.

First fucking time ever from a major fucking candidate. No bobbing and weaving, no equivocation.

Also, Perry has accurately and precisely described Gang Leader Bugsy Bernanke as treasonous. All the other Repoofs have meekly submitted to Gang Leader Bugsy, meekly or even joyously participated in his treason.

The best part about his actual governing record is tort reform, which this unfortunate country needs more than any other political change. Again none of the other Repoofs have ever touched the subject, because they suicidally want to seek the votes of lawyers. Perry understood that lawyers are physically incapable of voting Republican, and went ahead with real reform to benefit the people of Texas.

I may have to break all my promises and vote for a Republican this time, now that there's finally a Republican candidate who is at least partly sane.

However, he won't be nominated.

Comrade Romney is the real Gramscian deal. Comrade Romney is all in for Gaia, Die-Versity, and Free Trade. The Three Horsepersons of the Modern Apocalypse. Comrade Romney loves them all. Famine, chaos, war, death: the old Four Horsemen. Comrade Romney loves them all, old and new... provided they stay here in his hated enemy America and don't slop over into his dear beloved Motherland China.

Therefore Comrade Romney will be nominated by Goldman as a safe counter-bet, but Comrade Obama will continue as president because his loyalty to Goldman is 100.0% proven.

Goldman never loses.
  ¶ 5:01 AM

  Stop this Innovation crap.
Listening to On Point, probably the most thoughtful and least idiotically partisan of the news-analysis shows. Today's topic is the 'Jobs Crisis'. All the Experts agree that we need "more innovation to keep up with globalization."

INCORRECT.

New innovations = new Chinese products, with no gain of jobs HERE.

Back to this point again. We have already lost entire NON-INNOVATIVE industries to China. Steel and concrete and wallboard and TVs and incandescent lightbulbs are perfectly good products with no fresh innovations. Americans who had spent their lives learning how to make these things are now useless.

It wasn't a shortage of innovation that lost those industries.

It was an oversupply of raw genocidal greed, Satanic evil and murderous treason in the American corporate and political spheres.

Therefore the solution has nothing to do with innovation or education.


Ready for the secret solution?

1. BLOCKADE CHINA. Nothing goes from here to there, nothing comes from there to here. No people, no badly-made crap, no money. Sink any ship or plane that tries to break the blockade.

And at the same time:

2. Locate all corporations that have sent jobs to China in the last 30 years.

3. Without warning, jail all their top executives, slam them in the hole at Supermax, and freeze all their corporate assets.

4. When the lower levels of the criminal corporations inquire what's going on, inform them: "Hey mutant alien fuckheads. You can have your fucking stolen loot and your fucking evil asshole executives back AFTER you give us our jobs back. Keep the jobs here for 5 years, then you can have your shit. If we even suspect one of you is cheating during those 5 years, you're all dead."


I'm using China here for shorthand, but this should also include Mexico, India, and any other country where production was transferred purely to avoid hiring Americans.

(There may be some foreign production that makes sense because of nearby resources or special talents, but this would have been underway before 1980. Any outsourcing that started after 1980 can be assumed treasonous unless strongly proven otherwise.)
  ¶ 9:37 AM

  OW again, dammit


Why I'm in 'brief fucking comment' mode this week: Back pain is back. I made the mistake of digging in the yard again, and got duly punished. (Not exactly a mistake; I'd been raking and digging fairly often for 6 weeks without any further problems. For unknown reasons it caused a problem this time.)

Random observations:

(1) Seems like the pain and spasms depend mainly on the gamma feedback system, responding primarily to accelerations instead of steady stretch. Wonder if a drug or technique that mainly suppresses the gamma receptors would be especially helpful?

(2) A tiny house with lots of furniture is good. Not exactly 'Universal Design', but there's always a table or desk nearby to pull on, to boost your way past the acceleration point.

(3) The trunk muscles seem to know what they can get away with. They allow moves and positions that won't hurt, and they simply prevent some moves and positions that will hurt. This causes one icky and hard-to-discuss inconvenience: Properly wiping after a dump apparently includes a slight automatic twist of the pelvis, on the totally reflexive level. The stiff trunk won't allow this twist, which makes it hard to reach all of the requisite area. I developed a workaround, but it's still unhandy.

(4) Couple days later: This set of exercises on Youtube definitely helps. Recovering faster than before by using these tricks. The exercises don't look nearly as good when I do them, but still work.
  ¶ 4:46 AM

  Oh, stop.
As long as I'm in 'brief fucking comment' mode today:

All the brand-R fuckheads, even the allegedly independent and non-partyhack Doyle and Savage, constantly refer to Obama as 'redistributionist'. They use the term several fucking times per minute.

Especially annoying from Doyle, because when he's not reciting the mantra he's giving the straight truth about where the money really goes! Either he's required to recite the mantra with a certain frequency, or his mind is overly compartmentalized.

Listen. If Obama had done any redistribution at all, the rich wouldn't be getting richer and the poor wouldn't be getting poorer. Some degree of balance would start to show up.

Obama continues to massively redistribute UPWARD, just like Bush 1 and Bush 2. No difference.

Steal jobs and money from Americans. Donate the jobs to China and the money to Goldman Sachs.

A second mantra that everyone shares, including the alleged independents: "Obama is an Alinsky follower. He wants to transform this country into something you won't recognize, wants to collapse The Free Market entirely, wants to establish a Soviet system here." This has some historical truth; Obama did train in the Alinsky mode. But again it doesn't distinguish Obama from Bush The Father and Bush The Son. All of them are transformers, and their desired transformation is NOT the Marxian utopia implied by the mantra. Their explicit destination is 1890 America, a country with a handful of super-rich robber barons and a rabble of lower-class desperate borrowers who will do anything to keep a few vestigial middle-class trappings. Their marching song is not The Internationale, it's Sixteen Tons.


  ¶ 1:44 PM

  Why do they WANT to commit suicide?
It's a total mystery.

Some official Brit fucking idiot, criticizing his govt's attempt to hire William Bratton:

"America polices by force. We don't want to do that in our country."

Well, then, you fucking idiot, you fully deserve to get a whole fucking lot more of what you already got. Fucking idiot. I hope the next wave of niggers and wiggers takes you out first, with lots of TV coverage, you fucking idiot. The tiny handful of honest residents in England, namely Turks, will cheer your demise, you fucking idiot.

Irrelevant sidenote: Wonder why all the Brit media are referring to "Bill Bratton"? I don't know what his friends call him, but the American media always called him William Bratton. Is this some Brit stereotype that Americans must have snappy nicknames?

Labels: Turkey

  ¶ 5:48 AM

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody expected....
I'm terminally annoyed by the constant patter of Unprecedented, Unthinkable, Nobody Expected, Couldn't Anticipate .... after every disaster, riot or attack.

A small but especially annoying example after the State Fair disaster in Indiana.

The stage toppled at 8:49 p.m. A timeline released by Indiana State Police shows that fair staff contacted the weather service four times between 5:30 and 8 p.m. At 8 p.m., the weather service said a storm with hail and 40 mph winds was expected to hit the fairgrounds at 9:15 p.m.

The NWS did its job, trying to warn the officials. The officials clearly didn't do their job.

And here comes the Unprecedented:

Gov. Mitch Daniels called the accident an "unthinkable tragedy" and said the wind burst was a "fluke" that no one could have foreseen.

Didn't need to be a fluke. The predicted 40 mph can easily bring down a weak structure like that one.

It's perfectly thinkable. Your officials just didn't think of it. Assholes.

  ¶ 5:44 PM

  Two Eternities' Hate
Gem-like example of how today's Gramscian communists have expanded Orwell's old wimpy little Two Minutes' Hate into an all-encompassing Eternal Hate.

Headline: Starkey raving bonkers! Historian accused of racism on riots.

Needless to say, Starkey is telling the precise truth, with zero exaggeration, about niggers and wiggers. White rich kids observe that black gangsters have all the status and get all the welfare goodies, so they emulate the black gangsters. No mystery to anyone who lives in the actual world. It's all around you if your eyes are open.

And the Hate starts:

Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a prominent presenter on Channel 4 News, questioned whether the historian had "lost it".

Mr Jones said Starkey's comments were "utterly outrageous" and that viewers would find his comments "offensive generalisations". "We cannot dismiss him as a buffoon. I think there should be no platform to espouse these sorts of outrageous views based on prejudice, not fact, and incitement of racial hatred. His career has come to an end and it has ended in disgrace."

Mr Lammy, whose constituency saw the outbreak of rioting a week ago, said: "His views are irrelevant – he's a Tudor historian talking about contemporary urban unrest."

We don't have Gulags in the West, but we do punish truth-tellers by absolute banishment. Starkey has told the truth, so his public life is finished.

See James Watson and Rick Sanchez for previous examples of banishment for truth.
  ¶ 6:21 PM

  BEST APTRONYM OF ALL TIME.
Radio Australia ran a cute feature this morning on a book about the near-infinite variety of sexual equipment in various animals. The author and interviewer had lots of not-quite-clean fun with the topic, along with some serious discussion of evolutionary motives and such.

The book is 'Hung like an Argentine Duck'. Title refers to an astonishing duck with a 16-inch penis. More dick than duck. According to the author, there's no good biomechanical reason for the extension; apparently it's just a way to impress the female duck.

Author's name: Dr John Long.

Labels: Aptronym Alert

  ¶ 4:21 AM

  Stark difference between Marx and Gramsci
News item:

A woman who was forced to leap out of her burning home after it was set alight during the London riots has described English society as "sick".

Polish national Monika Konczyk, 32, said she came to the UK five months ago seeking a better life - but nearly lost it during the disorder that devastated London.

"I thought London was a civilised society full of gentlemen and ladies - but it is not like that. England has become a sick society."

The Poundland shop assistant added: "I found myself jumping for my life after being attacked by thugs and thieves. They set fire to my building without any thought for anyone's safety.

"They were happy for me to die. They were like animals - greedy, selfish animals who thought only of themselves."

"I have never seen anything like this in Poland. Polish people are hard-working and respectable. They believe in working for a living, not stealing from others.

"If you want nice clothes or a new TV, you don't smash shop windows and loot them - you work and pay for them."

For decades, American commentators have been pushing the false thesis that Marx destroys family structure while Gramsci (aka "The Free Market" aka "Individual Liberty") is good for families and culture.

Nope. Dead wrong by explicit definition and intent.

Soviet communism briefly tried to ruin family structure in 1920, but gave up. Since then the Soviets have concentrated on controlling the economy and suppressing political dissent. In Poland they let the Catholic church retain its power. Polish classrooms always had a cross hanging in front, while American teachers are fired for hinting at the existence of Christianity.

Gramscian communism intends above all to destroy culture, science, religion and family, to remove income and useful work from ordinary people, to channel all money AND all power to the top dogs. Scorched earth.
  ¶ 3:34 AM

  Unprecedented hair
On the bus this morning, sat behind a petite older lady of indefinite South Asian ancestry. Her choice of colors was classical Hindoo saffron and violet, but she didn't really look Hindoo, didn't have the big head that Hindoos normally require to house their wastly superiorrrr intellectnesses and arrrrrogancy. Maybe she's Thai or Burmese; I'm not familiar enough with those types to say for sure.

She had the most unprecedented hairstyle I've ever seen.

The hair was sectioned around the crown; center area was pulled up into a short tail well off-center. Upper part of one side was gathered into a second tail, which was drawn over in a triangle shape and fastened to the top tail with a jeweled ring and velvet bow. Lower part of the back was gathered into a third tail, more like a conventional 'queue', gathered first with a bright red scrunchy and farther down with a black scrunchy. Around all this, she wore a bright brown visor thingie. Flanking the bottom pigtail, two pink bow-shaped plastic barrettes serving no obvious purpose. She was also wearing delicate rimless glasses surrounded by plastic sunglasses.

Despite all that, she seemed thoroughly sane, competent and composed. She radiated so much quietude and orderliness that I ended up thinking her weird disorganized hair was just the way hair should be done!
  ¶ 9:19 AM

  Too bad they wouldn't fit
Another good line by Max Keiser, in his latest piece on Russia Today.

Interviewer asked something about the London riots, and Keiser said "Listen, those rioters would make excellent speculators. Goldman and JP Morgan should be down on the streets hiring them! They have all the right characteristics!"

Well, not quite. The pattern in this particular riot is interesting. Most of the rioters and looters are niggers and wiggers. A mix of black gangsters and rich white kids who think they're black gangsters. Both are descended (a loooooong way down) from previous generations of African and Anglo Christians. Though they share Goldman's rapacious greed, they wouldn't fit in.

Somewhat like Breivik, these rioters have bought the ruling class propaganda completely, but misinterpreted the desired actions.

Ruling class says: Muslims are bad, Jews are good. Honest business is bad, infinite greed is good. Producing is bad, stealing is good. Family-centered communities are bad, Diversity is good.

And that's why the ruling class gets all tanglefooted when it tries to discuss Breivik or the rioters. The aristocracy doesn't like to have its principles implemented by non-professionals.

  ¶ 7:32 AM

  Close, but sometimes a cigar is a cigar
Drew Westen, apparently some kind of shrink, has come down on Obama from the Left.

Frustrating! Westen hits one very good point, but doesn't realize that he's mainly playing for the same Goldman team as Obama.

Westen properly but belatedly notes, as Polistra realized soon after the election, that Obama talks a good FDR game and then acts pure Bush. Obama's rhetoric correctly diagnosed the bubbles and speculators that got us into this mess, and then he DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to stop the bubbles, and DID ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING to continue and SUBSIDIZE the speculators.

Unfortunately, Westen goes off track after that. He knocks Obama for failing to keep the Global Warming bubble going! This is probably the one place where Obama has NOT run fully in line with the speculators. Obama is allowing a very slight opening for more oil drilling and more coal production, which is marginally good for REAL business. And Obama hasn't tried very hard to keep the Cap-n-trade crime running. McCain would have done much better for Gore and Goldman in this department.

Westen complains, again backwards, that Obama didn't pay ENOUGH blackmail to Goldman Sachs in the form of "stimulus". Westen apparently believes, for some inscrutable reason, that trillions of dollars paid directly to treasonous bankers will benefit American people and American businesses. No, trillions of dollars paid directly to treasonous bankers serves only to reward the treasonous bankers for their other trillion-dollar heists.

Westen also tried to psychoanalyze Obama, and I halfway stopped listening after that. Something about an unwillingness to face down bullies, which is yet again totally backwards. The plain fact is: Obama is not supposed to face down the bullies. He's WORKING FOR THE BULLIES, and his job is to INFINITELY EMPOWER and INFINITELY ENRICH the bullies. (Or should we say the bullies and bearies?) So far he's doing it even better than Bush did. Every action of Bush and Obama is designed to create domestic and international chaos, to make life difficult or impossible for honest business in this unfortunate country. Every action is designed to channel more trillions into the hands of speculators, and he's done it magnificently. That's why he will be re-appointed in 2012. Romney has pretty good Wall Street credentials, but he hasn't proven his obedience, so he will not be appointed. (I will not insult my reader's intelligence by using quaint obsolete vestigial words like 're-elected' or 'candidate'.)
  ¶ 6:44 PM

  A prayer
Polistra and Happystar are saying a prayer in the form of a cheer. Since nobody in the Gaian Occupation Government understands the truth, maybe Allah or Jehovah will have mercy on this unfortunate land and force the truth to be visible in the only way that the idiots will understand.

Preferably Allah, since his economic system is exactly the right medicine for our terminal illness.




Closed caption for cartoon-impaired:

Gimme a Z! Z!
Gimme a E! E!
Gimme a R! R!
Gimme a O! O!

Whatsat spell? Zero!

Where do we wannit? DOW!

When do we wannit? NOW!

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:30 PM

  Final proof
I've been saying over and over since 9/11 that the DC response to 9/11 was completely misplaced, that any damn fool could see which country attacked us. Saudi Arabia attacked us, and the only sane response was to remove Saudi from the map.

Until now, the Saud Dynasty and the Bushobama Dynasty have worked together to conceal this obvious fact, to make it seem that the attack came from Iraq and Afghanistan, while Sheikh Osama was an "enemy" of Saud.

Bushobama has kept low-level war activity going in those countries, and now adds Libya. All three are economic or religious adversaries of the Saud Dynasty, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the entire war effort is simply a way to eliminate or weaken enemies of Saud.

Now we have a firm connection at last.

Raelynn Hillhouse, an American security analyst, claims [Osama's] whereabouts were finally revealed when a Pakistani intelligence officer came forward to claim the $25m bounty on Osama's head.

Her version ... contradicts the official account that bin Laden was tracked down through his trusted courier.

"The ISI officer came forward to claim the substantial reward and to broker US citizenship for his family," she writes on her intelligence blog, The Spy Who Billed Me.

... The informant claimed that the Saudis were paying off the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) to essentially shelter and keep bin Laden under house arrest in Abbottabad...

This account leaves one question, though. Clearly Obama decided to do the deed that both Bush and Clinton had explicitly refused. Obama broke through the 'protective shield' and killed Osama, while Bush and Clinton had meekly obeyed the Saudis. Does this amount to a declaration of independence, a clean break between the Bushobama Dynasty and the Saud Dynasty? Or did Saud decide for its own reasons that Sheikh Osama was no longer worth the trouble?
  ¶ 10:32 AM

  Local currencies growing
Several cities in North Carolina are developing local 'scrip' for use solely among local businesses.

Scrip has been tried many times for purely localistic motivations, with little success. The present effort, called the Greensboro Currency Project, is gaining momentum. Local scrip was common in the '30s depression as well, when banks were untrustworthy. In this century the mistrust belongs to the whole Federal monstrosity, not to banks per se.

Good report from WXII TV in Charlotte. Fifty businesses in Greensboro have signed on, with an explicit understanding that the local currency will be more likely to survive when the dollar dissolves.
  ¶ 1:59 AM

  Turks get it right ... again
One encouraging bit of news from the British riots:

Shop owners across London vowed tonight to do whatever it takes to protect their businesses as anger over the police's inability to stop widespread looting pushes them towards setting up their own neighbourhood vigilante groups.

Inspired by reports of the Turkish and Bangladeshi communities chasing would-be looters out of their neighbourhoods in east London, many shop keepers today said they too would come out and defend their livelihoods if rioting erupts across the capital for a fourth night.

"There were no police so we came out to defend ourselves," said a shopkeeper who only gave his first name Mehmet. "I don't know if it's breaking the law but what can we do?"

"What the Turkish community did was brilliant, they made the area a safer place," said Tonya Cavanagh, a 39-year-old shopkeeper who runs a neighbourhood watch system in the area. "Everybody is really thankful. I think more people will go and help out the Turkish people too now. It makes you want to stick together."

Westerners have lost touch with the basic idea of justice and punishment, replacing it by suicidal egalitarian nonsense that encourages crime and enriches agitators.

Muslims clearly haven't lost touch with justice, and they're teaching the more trainable Westerners.

= = = = =

Sidenote: There's an odd non-barking dog in this story. In recent years the British court system has treated self-defense much more harshly than crime. Anyone who dared to defend his home or business against a criminal was in serious trouble, and wide open to lawsuits by the criminal as well. This crowd of publicly organized vigilantes should have taken the FULL ATTENTION of the coppers. No hesitation about using live ammo, bombs, and tanks against self-defenders.

Several months ago, Cameron claimed that he wanted to restore sanity on that front. Maybe he has, or maybe the coppers are just so completely uninterested in the whole affair that they can't even stir up their usual hatred for non-professionals.

Labels: Turkey

  ¶ 4:10 PM

  Who made a payroll?
I'm tired of brand-R commentators constantly saying that some brand-D politician or candidate "never made a payroll."

Decided to look up previous presidents to see who actually ran a business at some point in his life.

Most presidents have worked in private business, at least when young. Reagan is the only one who spent most of his life working in the private sector, though he never owned or operated a business. The vast majority went straight into politics after Army or college.

Within the last 100 years, here are the four presidents who actually ran a real business:

Harding owned a newspaper for a few years.

Truman owned a haberdashery (hat store) for many years.

Carter ran a peanut farm.

Bush Junior owned an oil company and a baseball team, at least in name. By most accounts he was mainly drunk at the time.

Among those, only Truman seems to have been a serious businessman, not just 'doing the business thing' for political showmanship.

Is that really a sterling list? Does that lead to the conclusion that "making a payroll" should be the prime brand-R qualification for the next president?
  ¶ 12:37 PM

  Should be fun
While a fiery revolt spreads through England, the British politicians are still busy writing Stiff Resolutions Of Strong Condemnation against the Syrian government's crackdown on its local rebels, which is none of their fucking business in the first place.

What will happen if the Gaian Occupation Government in London decides to use adequate force to quell their own revolt? Will the Gaians then Strongly Condemn their own actions?

Should be fun to watch.

However, I'm not holding my breath. British cops have learned the same Prime Directive as American cops: Blacks are physically incapable of committing crimes. If a crime appears to be committed by a black man, you need to cure your hidden racism and raze your consciousness so you can see the correct criminal, the nearest white guy. These riots are primarily by black criminals, so the crimes simply do not exist in the razed consciousness of the enlightened police.
  ¶ 3:33 AM

  Triple vs double
Headline:

Obama calls US AAA nation despite AA+ Rating


And the Repooflicans are saying similar things in their usual bizarre dialect. USA! USA! USA! WE'RE NUMBER 1! WE'RE NUMBER AAA! NO, WE'RE NUMBER AAAAAAAAA! NO, I CAN SAY MORE A'S THAN YOU! WE'RE NUMBER AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!


Well, Standard and Poor had it right. We're an AA country. Friends of Bill. Helpless addicts of idiocy, hopeless demented victims of Korsakoff's syndrome. Beyond rehabilitation.

Kill it and get it over with. No other solution.
  ¶ 1:00 PM

  Sharp shadows, contrail dictaphone
This morning the sunlight had a special quality. All vertical shadows were exceedingly sharp, bringing out some details of brickwork and windows that I hadn't seen before. If I had to put a name on the effect, I'd call it vertical polarization, though I don't know if that's possible.

Thinking about that, I started looking closely at the clouds to see if there was something Polaroidish about them. Hard to tell.

But in the process of examining the clouds closely, I noticed something else.

All the clouds were clearly formed from jet contrails, in a pattern of fairly regular stripes. This didn't make sense, because I know there's only one jet path in that direction, not several widely spaced parallel paths. (Widely spaced parallel paths couldn't all lead to the same airport anyway!) In fact, a jet was running along that one path as I watched, so I could spot it definitely.

The first part of the contrail was clear, then it blurred out; and each line of clouds to the left was unquestionably formed by an even more blurred remainder of an earlier contrail.

Finally I got the picture. Jets run along the same path toward the airport at regular intervals. After each jet passes, the contrail blurs out, and simultaneously the prevailing upper-level wind carries all the earlier and fuzzier contrails steadily toward the left. It's like recording an old dictaphone cylinder. More accurate but more strained metaphor: It's like plowing a field by running the tractor north and south in one line, with long pauses between runs, while slowly and steadily towing the whole field to the west... in a strong wind that smears each furrow after it's plowed. (Told you it was strained!)





[Artistic note: The animation is speeded up, which is necessary and good. It also has too much vertical movement, which isn't so good. The streaks should be vertically stationary, moving only toward the left. I couldn't think of a nice way to make that happen within the Poser mechanism.]
  ¶ 11:45 AM

  Jewish Spring?
Looks like Israel is experiencing the same sort of protests that brought reform to Tunisia and Egypt. 300k middle-class people are camping out in Tel Aviv, protesting the same general situation that we have in America. Middle-class wages are stagnant, prices go up, the rich get richer.

It's an interesting difference.

Here in US, the banking class and the Jews are pretty much the same set, which leads to a mostly-true stereotype. It's obvious that the criminal Treasury officials and the beneficiaries of their vast trillion-dollar gifts are nearly all Jewish, so the collusion is simply there. Doesn't matter if it's deliberate or natural, it's still there. No Jewish bankers have ended up in jail except Bernie Madoff, whose victims were Jews.

In Israel everyone is Jewish, so the true class distinction is visible in pure form, and the people have no problem with mounting a serious protest against the banking class.

Makes you wonder: If our bankers were mainly Presbyterian (as they were in the '30s) would we be more willing to protest against them? Is it only our deathly fear of appearing discriminatory that keeps us off the streets? If so, it's a well-cultivated and highly convenient fear.


[Later: Looks like Sailer has reached the same conclusion from a slightly different angle.]
  ¶ 5:27 AM

  Gold vs speculation
One of the Money Talk shows featured a good long interview with economist Ken Rogoff, who has a timely book "This Time is Different", showing how bubbles keep happening over and over and over, and how governments never learn.

The show took some calls, and predictably most were from gold bugs claiming that the gold standard would prevent bubbles. Rogoff didn't bother to slap these callers down, so the argument still needs a slap!

I don't know all the bubbles, but I know a few.

Tulip bubble 1630s: Europe solidly on gold and silver.

South Sea bubble 1720s: England on gold, with some pound notes in use. Walpole ended the bubble with hard-ass laws, then jailed the speculators and the MPs who had deregulated to enable the bubble. Thereafter, England had no more bubbles for a long time.

Railroad bubble 1880s: America on gold and silver, with bank notes in use but not yet popular.

Agriculture and stock bubble 1920s: America mostly using paper, but still tied to gold.

1934: FDR did two things at once: took gold out of circulation and clamped down hard on speculators. IF the gold bug argument had any validity, this should have been the START of bubbles. Instead, it was the END of bubbles for a long time.

1971: Nixon officially cut all ties to gold. IF the gold bug argument had any validity, this would have roused up even more bubbles, along with the bubbles we would already have as a result of FDR's gold confiscation. In fact we still had no bubbles, and no new bubbles began, because FDR's regulations were still in effect.

Late 1980's: Under Wendy Gramm, SEC stopped enforcing FDR's rules. No change in gold. 1990's: Dot-com bubble.

1999: Under Phil Gramm, Congress eliminated ALL laws on speculation. No change in gold. Bingo! 2000-present: Housing bubble, stock bubble, agricultural bubble, derivatives bubble. All the world's a bubble.

= = = = =

In short, changes in gold vs paper had no effect either way on the tendency to bubble. During these 400 years currency evolved from all-gold to mostly-gold to mostly-paper to gold-in-name-only to pure 'fiat'. Bubbles occurred during each mode of money.

Changes in laws on speculators had TOTAL effect on the tendency to bubble. With strict laws, no bubbles. With loose laws, bubbles. With no laws, all bubble.

= = = = =

Nov 2011 update: Here's a graph that proves the same point. Wonder why financial crimes are common under Bush The Son and Obama? Because Bush The Son and Obama have stopped prosecuting financial crimes.
  ¶ 4:20 PM

  Will this be on the test?
Interesting response to the Standard & Poor report card by both Obama and the neocons. Both are protesting the grade instead of using the grade as a wakeup call for their own abysmal performance.

I ran into the same thing when I was a teacher.

"You can't give me a C! I'm special."

No, Heather. You're not special. You performed poorly.

No, America. You're not exceptional in the way you mean the word. You're exceptional in the shortbus sense of the word, and you really deserve a ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ----------------- grade for performance, intelligence, and behavior.

The A- you got from S&P is a politely charitable bit of niceness.

= = = = =

As usual, I apologize to real retards for the comparison. Real retards are mainly good commonsensical people who think in a less complex way than most of us. Shortbus America is a hugely intelligent mutant alien, capable of thinking thousands of bizarrely false thoughts at the same time, capable of doing thousands of grotesquely Satanic and self-destructive acts at the same time.


  ¶ 6:08 AM

  See city burn
Yesterday's Tottenham riot provides a perfect example of the Death of Journalism. I know very little about London, so have no preconceived sense of who's more likely to do the rioting there. Tried to get an idea from reading the major online newspapers, but they are violating the basic rules of journalism. They're giving us a condescending set of pre-kindergarten multi-culti pablum:

Oh! See city burn! Big house burn! Burn, house, burn! Burn, burn, burn! Who burn house? Who beat up man? Who do bad thing? We not know! Not, not, not! We see no bad man! No bad, no bad, no bad! No see! All your fault! Your fault, your fault, your fault! You bad!

So I tried Youtube, and immediately got a perfect picture of who's doing the rioting.

As in all other areas of life, the professionals have totally abandoned their duties while still getting paid. The duty of every profession is now performed by random unpaid citizens.
  ¶ 4:41 AM

  The rich are different
Listening to Clark Howard for lack of anything else tolerable at 3AM Saturday. Clark is more or less lefty in culture, but generally realistic.

A lady called with a mortgage problem, mentioning that she's in a one-bedroom house with husband and baby, then describing the usual adjustable rate Sucker's Mortgage. Clark interrupted her with incredulity: "Did you say a one-bedroom house? I've never heard of a one-bedroom house. Sure you don't mean a purchased apartment?"

The rich are different.

= = = = =

In fairness, this may be an East vs West thing. Very few 1-bed houses have been built anywhere since 1950. Before that, East and West were different in important ways. In the East, where real estate was valuable and crowding was accepted, most houses were large. Apartments, upper-class mansions, or big enough to hold an extended Irish family. In the West, land was cheaper and the ideal of having your own yard has always been important. So a tiny cottage was worth building and buying.


Hooray for tiny cottages!


  ¶ 3:43 AM

  Canary bites
Ecoloons constantly say that the wildly abundant and fast-expanding "endangered" polar bear is the canary in the coal mine.

Whaddaya know! They're right for once! A polar bear has warned British ecoloons in the only possible way that their beyond-all-comprehension primitive voodoo idiocy is FUCKING DANGEROUS.

Admittedly the trite analogy doesn't quite work; the real canary died to warn humans of danger, while the polar bear killed an ecoloon and seriously injured other ecoloons to warn sane humans of the danger posed by the ecoloons.

Still, it's a positively delightful scene. Darwin at his best. Intelligence beats raw force, but when you turn your intelligence backwards and do absolutely everything wrong, when you replace the facts of Nature with the unspeakably bizarre Gospel of an apocalyptic brain-mincing cult, raw force will win again.

Gotcha! Beautiful!
  ¶ 3:21 AM

  Dead serious 2
Reprinting an earlier entry, and adding more.

= = = = = START REPRINT = = = = =


Allah, I don't know if you exist, since I don't particularly believe in any gods.

But if you do exist, I owe you a great big old apology.

For several years I believed the vicious lies our rulers spread about your people.

I disbelieved everything else our rulers said, so I should have known better, should have disbelieved this line of crap along with all the other crap!

Last year I began to see pieces of the truth, but didn't fully abandon the crap until now.

= = = = = = = = =

This is undoubtedly improper form, but it's the best I can do.

Sorry, Allah.



= = = = = = END REPRINT = = = = = =


After that series of painful realizations I decided to take a look at economics. The 'Islamic System' webpage gives a good condensed version of the ideal Islamic economics. Its author, and other explainers, admit up front that none of the existing Muslim countries come anywhere near the ideal; but the full system was applied from 800 to 1100 or so, leading to the Islamic Golden Age.

Over the past three years or so, I've been trying to think about alternate ways of running an economy, focusing especially on Maury Maverick's Agrarian ideas.

No need to re-invent. The correct system is already there, and it fits most of my recent thinking.

Unlike capitalism and communism, the Islamic setup is based scientifically on an accurate and sympathetic assessment of human nature. No idealistic assumptions.

The only part that's hard for me to digest is the prohibition of interest. As a miserly curmudgeon, it could be that I have a vested [ahem] interest in the subject. But the underlying motivation makes sense anyway:

In capitalism the one who gives the loan, shares the profit but not the loss, this is very unfair and unjust. In Islam if you want to share the profit then you must share the loss also – this is the model of Partnerships or company structures in Islam.

The Islamic economy is based upon wealth generation where participants partake in investment, employment and trade in the real economy. Islam does not have a dual economy where the real economy operates alongside a financial sector. The Islamic economy focuses all participants on the real economy, through employment, company profits, utilisation of land (agriculture) and manufacturing, wealth is generated in only one sector. This brings the huge benefit of wealth only circulating in one sector - the real economy, where all can participate.

This agrees solidly with my observations on the need to switch from stock markets to private equity holdings. Expanding the same concept to all investments makes sense, but I haven't wrapped my cranky-miser head around it yet. Especially since the official work-arounds seem rather sneaky. (Basically charging interest while calling it something else.)

Anyway, once more: Sorry, Allah.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 4:31 PM

  Can't you see?
Isn't it wonderful?

Our Dear Leaders are adding yet another set of foreign rebels to their Friend List:

Foreign Secretary William Hague urged the "discredited" Syrian regime to end its violent repression as the United Nations Security Council adopted a statement condemning attacks on civilians and widespread human rights abuses.

Prompted by an intensification of the three-month-old bloody crackdown against anti-government protests...

Meanwhile, the very same Dear Leaders here are diligently preparing new measures to crackdown on all anti-government dissenters in their own countries.


Look. In the first place we have no goddamn business interfering with anything that happens in Syria or Libya or Egypt.

But even if you think we do have some business there, you have to see that our elites are specifically befriending pro-religious, isolationist, nativist protesters in those Arab countries, while ramping up a new crackdown against pro-religious, isolationist, nativist protesters in Western countries.

I suppose it's a normal tyrannical hypocrisy. Still, it's a fairly new one. Before the Bush/Obama dynasty, we routinely cracked down on Christians and populists here, but made no pretense of supporting anti-secular nativists in Egypt and Syria. Before 1989 we were consistently pro-secular and pro-internationalist.

= = = = =

Sidenote: It occurs to me that the above, read out of context, might leave an ambiguous or incorrect impression of my own position.

To be clear: I'm in favor of ALL nationalist and separatist movements that aim to re-establish native cultures and religions. I'm against ALL arbitrary nation-states, against ALL multi-culti secular regimes. In some places those nationalist movements will be Christian, in other places Islamic, in others Buddhist, etc.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 6:28 AM

  Meaningful dream?
Recording this morning's dream before it goes away. Seems to be one of those dreams that has an asterisk on it, telling me that I'm supposed to listen ... but damned if I can see why.

Dream was set at Penn State where I was a research tech in acoustics. Some visiting professor was touring our lab. He recognized me and pompously boomed, "Well, I see we have a pioneer in our midst."

In real life I was a very minor pioneer in a couple of areas: graphical waveform editing software, and cheap AAC. A few people recognized my role in the former, while the latter disappeared into the mists of history. I'm more proud of the latter.

But no, this visiting prof seemed to think I was a pioneer in Chi-Squared statistical methods. Obviously mistaken identity, since I hate statistics, rarely use anything beyond mean and median, and couldn't write a Chi-Squared formula if you held a gun to my head. (Using stats is a good way to create false connections and miss real connections, which is of course the exact job of every Scientist and Expert.)

I suppose the dream evolved from some comments I've made lately at WUWT regarding the need to analyze temperature patterns with wave methods like LPC rather than the more typical stat methods. Those comments are fully in character: pro-wave, anti-stats. But why the backwards character in the dream? Why does Chi-Squared appear at all, since I haven't even read the phrase in many years?

Labels: Blinded by Stats

  ¶ 3:42 AM

  Gem-like perfection of lethal reverse logic
I couldn't have invented this if I tried.

From New Superstitionist:

Stigma and homophobia against gay men is hampering efforts to manage a growing epidemic of HIV in Islamic countries, warn epidemiologists this week.

The spread of HIV is at a relatively early stage in Islamic countries, so there is an opportunity to stop it growing.

"The stigma is a barrier to HIV prevention services," says Laith Abu-Raddad....

Historically, HIV epidemics have often begun in minority, high-risk groups such as men who have sex with men or intravenous drug users, then spread to the general population. A problem in much of the Islamic world is that men having sex with men is illegal. That, coupled with homophobia, hampers efforts to contain the virus by making gay men too scared to seek treatment, a pattern that has been seen in eastern European countries, India and sub-Saharan Africa.

A sane rational person, including even sane rational scientists, would reach a simple and blazingly obvious conclusion:

Islamic law makes it hard for HIV to spread; therefore, Islamic law is good for public health.

You might also observe secondarily, as I've been seeing in other contexts, that Islamic law agrees with science, while Western liberal law violates science.

No, not these idiots. The only thing they can see is that Islamic law makes it harder to run their usual Western liberal approach to HIV, in which gay behavior is celebrated to the fabulous heavens while normal human behavior is SMASHED TO BITS.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 6:20 PM

  More reason to like this state
If FDR came back to Earth today, he'd be proud of exactly one thing happening in this unfortunate country.

For years farmers in the Odessa area near Moses Lake have been battling diminishing water supplies for their crops, cutting back on planting and losing money. Those farmers say a new water project is critical to their livelihood.

Around 100,000 acres depend on water wells but the aquifers are running out fast, receding up to ten feet a year.

It's this concern that makes the Weber Siphon Project so important. A canal is being built to bring in water from Lake Roosevelt behind Grand Coulee Dam. The project is part of an effort to provide water to communities along the Columbia River and protect wildlife in a joint effort between several agencies.

FDR's ghost has mostly been spinning at gyroscopic speeds in the last 20 years, as he hears about dams being breached, canals and levees failing from poor maintenance, power plants being shut down to satisfy primitive ooga-booga superstitions.

Finally one thing he could enjoy: a WPA project being expanded and improved to serve the interests of HUMAN AGRICULTURE.

Bravo Gregoire!
  ¶ 5:15 PM

  When you only know theory...
I've been growling lately about people who live entirely in the realm of theory, people who utterly ignore all the lessons of history and science. I should be praying that they stay in the abstract realm, not wishing they'd get in closer touch with reality!

Here's why:

A Swedish man has been arrested after attempting to split atoms in his kitchen, claiming that he was only doing it as a “hobby”.

Richard Handl said that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorised possession of nuclear material.

Handl, 31, said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.

Only later did he realise it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.

Although he says police didn’t detect dangerous levels of radiation in his apartment, he now acknowledges the project wasn’t such a good idea.

“From now on, I will stick to the theory,” he said.

The utter innocence is the remarkable part. Sent a question to the Radiation Authority. Just being Germanically punctilious, in case there's some fussy little zoning code that frowns on kitchen-stove reactors for some unknown reason.

= = = = =

Sidenote: When discussing the need to profile Arabs at airports, it's always been a convenient snide rhetorical riposte to say "Yeah, right, we really need to be profiling Scandinavians. They're the real terrorists." I've said it myself more than once. Now I'm not so sure! Maybe the Magnetic Pole of berserkness in the world has truly shifted from the Persian Gulf to the Baltic Sea.


  ¶ 2:18 PM

  Glimmer of understanding
Good point by Paul Carr in TechCrunch.com this morning.

And yet increasingly I wonder whether, for the sake of humanity, it might not be a bad thing if the earthquake comes and tips all of web 2.0 into the sea. ...

The Internet — particularly “web 2.0″, with its communities and tagging and reuniting and friending and liking — was supposed to civilize us all. The idea was that by connecting the whole world through a variety of social networks and crowd-sourced standards of behavior (from reputation scores on eBay to Yelp reviews for dog walkers) – people would be driven to greater empathy for, and responsibility towards their fellow man. When Randi Zuckerberg sat on stage at DLD ’08 and told us the story of the Palestinian and Israeli children brought together through their joint membership of a Facebook group about soccer, we all shed a tear. Web 2.0 is working — it’s really working!

Carr goes on to cite a couple examples of how it doesn't work. The examples don't strike me as especially compelling, but the main point is still important.

It's good old Diversity, public enemy #1. Supposedly all hatred is caused by ignorance, by lack of education, by lack of contact with The Other.

Nope. There are isolated cases where purely false stereotypes, or government-induced stereotypes, can disappear with familiarity; but most hatreds are based on observed facts.

"Familiarity breeds love" is dangerous and deceptive because it superficially resembles a tautological truth.

Tautology: Contact with a variety of people gives you a realistic picture of human nature, including both differences and similarities.

False extrapolation: Contact with a variety of people teaches you that all people are identical, that everyone wants the same things in life.

I figured out this fallacy rather early. In 1969 I was about to head for Mansfield as a result of my really stupid decision to evade the draft. The local Communist mentoress, an Earth Mother type with long and solid Party connections, advised me: "I think you're awfully judgmental. This experience will be good for you. By encountering all those men of different colors and classes, you will acquire more sympathy for their plight."

Being a fucking stupid hippie, I responded with appropriate humility and guilt. But after six months in Mansfield, I knew with harsh certainty that Earth Mother had been lethally wrong. My before-jail 'judgments' were wildly insufficient and hopelessly naive. I hadn't realized that incurable evil was real, hadn't understood the innate difference in violence and dominance between blacks and whites, hadn't understood the innate differences between criminals and non-criminals. Now I do.
  ¶ 1:15 AM