Why was 3d printing so late?
I'm sure somebody has noticed this before, but I haven't read it or heard it, so here goes...

Some big inventions couldn't have happened before they did. Radio unquestionably required a sequence of understandings and devices in both electricity and sound. The first voice broadcast happened exactly when it could. Not sooner or later.

Some big inventions happen when they should, then disappear and happen again. Sewage systems were well-developed in Roman times, then disappeared and came back in the 1800s.

Some big inventions could easily have come earlier. The phonograph could have been invented in Roman times. All the ingredients were there. Instead it waited until the 1800s.

How about the latest big invention, 3d printing? Had to be now, or way late? Way late.

The Jacquard loom was a 3d printer operated by pre-programmed instructions. It laid down soft material in a specified sequence. It wasn't quite fully 3d, but it could have been expanded with 1800 technology. To turn its products into hard things, just pour glue or ceramic over the pattern of threads. This technique was already well-established with decorative items like Chinese lacquerware.

Or use the ancient technique of laying down a ceramic object with a 'snake' of soft clay. (I'm sure there's a better word for it!) Attach a jug full of semi-liquid clay, a cloth hose and a valved nozzle to the program-controlled shuttle, and let it lay down the product directly. Fire it and you're done.

Apr 2015 update: Now it's been done. Back to Jacquard!
  ¶ 11:55 AM

  Let Tim drive
Just after mentioning the need for a rebirth of LORAN, BBC broadcast a TED-like symposium on self-driving cars. One of Satan's major battlefronts. Remove human autonomy, place everything in the oh-so-exquisitely manicured hands of Tim Cook.

All the TEDers make a point of mentioning that WHO has declared automobiles to be a "public health epidemic". None of the TEDers ask why WHO is wasting its time and energy on Satan's pet shit, instead of NOTICING ACTUAL FUCKING VIRUS EPIDEMICS. I guess that's intrinsically obvious to them. Saving actual lives of actual people in actual African countries is uncooooooooooooooooooooool. Dark lives don't jack up the share value of GOOG and APPL, so they don't exist. Dark lives are less real than "dark matter" to a techfag.

All the TEDers make the implicit automatic assumption that GPS and radar and other sensors are unhackable. This is crazy.

GPS is being jammed right now in Korea, as mentioned in previous piece. Radar has been hacked and spoofed and jammed for 70 years. Radar in an automotive context is easy to spoof. Fooling the HiPo's speed radar has been a profitable little industry for 40 years. Acoustic sensors? Navy research has been working for 70 years on jamming and counterjamming and fooling sonar.

And how about the problem of recognizing a pedestrian? I'm rather sensitive to that one, after getting whomped by an SUV in 2008 because the driver was phoning his girlfriend. Could this improve my chances?

Here's how they plan to do it:

"For instance, a pedestrian carrying a device that says I am a pedestrian..."

Confirmed pedestrians are old or poor or anti-tech or drunk. We are exactly the people who don't habitually carry "devices". Therefore you'll need to forcibly implant "devices" in pedestrians. Microchip us like dogs.



Another formerly stupid and weird conspiracy theory, now hardass reality. The 666ers and the schizies were right all along.

Labels: Danbo, infill

  ¶ 4:10 AM

  Shortwave's revenge!
Polistra has been hoping for a return of the shortwave bands, which have been effectively abandoned in the rush to Appleize everything.

Now it appears that one useful shortwave service may be about to return, at least in sane countries. BBC briefly notes that GPS systems, like everything else in the digital world, are fragile and hackable. This has reached a dangerous level in Korea, where North is jamming South's reception of GPS and thus ruining the navigation of South ships.

The obvious solution is to bring back LORAN, an analog system that worked for many years. Strictly speaking LORAN's frequencies are medium-wave, not SW. Just above the usual AM broadcast band, sharing the 160 meter ham band. Very little skip in this range; high-power transmitters and mainly groundwave propagation, which means it's harder to jam or spoof.



This article describes the attempt to bring it back under the "new" title of eLORAN. Silly name because LORAN is already electronic, but I guess you need to have a new label for marketing.

It's a classic Parkinson case study. The agencies that should be working on the return are afraid to grab onto a proposal that might distract from their urgent need to expand bureaucracies without expanding operations. The Coast Guard is now part of DHS aka The Deep State, so it's immune from earthly concerns like navigation. Instead, it is continuing to tear down the old LORAN sites.

National suicide rolls on.

Labels: infill

  ¶ 3:15 AM

  Fantastic ignorance
The media and Experts still haven't adjusted their procedures to vote-by-mail, which has been standard for about 8 years here in Wash.

JacksonSharpton Riot Partners LLC hasn't adjusted either.

Acting United States Attorney Annette L. Hayes announced today that Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) Arlen Storm will lead efforts in the Western District of Washington in connection with the Justice Department’s nationwide Election Day Program with respect to the upcoming November 4, 2014, general elections. AUSA Storm has been appointed to serve as the District Election Officer (DEO) for the Western District of Washington, and in that capacity is responsible for overseeing the District’s handling of complaints of election fraud and voting rights abuses in consultation with Justice Department Headquarters in Washington DC.

In order to respond to complaints of election fraud or voting rights abuses and to ensure that such complaints are directed to the appropriate authorities, Acting United States Attorney Hayes stated that AUSA/DEO Storm will be on duty in this District until voting is complete. He can be reached by members of the public at the following telephone numbers: 206-553-7970 or 253-428-3800.

First: Voting by mail makes "abuses" physically impossible. Closing polls early? Nope. Preventing people from voting? Nope. Making people feel unwelcome? Nope. Can't happen because THERE IS NO FUCKING POLLING PLACE. There is no way for JacksonSharpton to stand at every single house's mailbox with their standard-equipment baseball bats.

This is THE BEST PART of voting by mail. It removes all power from JacksonSharpton.

Second, corrupt counting is still possible and still happens with mail voting, but there's no way that AUSA Arlen Storm can detect or do anything about corrupt counting on the final day. All he can see is a bunch of workers feeding a bunch of papers into a machine. Corruption would happen either BEFORE the final day, with intentional misprogramming of the machine, or AFTER the day with intentional miscalculation of totals.

Third, voting is absolutely totally irrelevant. All candidates are identical. In theory a referendum can make a real difference, but JacksonSharpton's "Federal Court" division will instantly SMASH any referendum that tries to change things.

So AUSA Arlen Storm's presence is purely nonsensical and wasteful. There's no abuse for him to prevent, there's no way he can see bad counting, and the whole exercise of "voting" is a bizarre piece of antique decoration. "Voting" exists solely to provide talking points for the "two" "parties".

  ¶ 6:00 PM

  Blood for
Both political "sides" have a set of truly weird beliefs about the other "side". Especially weird because the "sides" are identical in most ways.

One of the weirdest and most persistent is the left-wing "Blood For Oil" crap. Heard a rather extreme example of it today from some leftist caller on some radio show. He was saying that Ebola was created by CIA to get rid of Africans "so we could get the land."

We've been running this neocon routine for 70 years now, beginning with Korea. At first we were jumping into existing conflicts and wasting huge amounts of money and lives for nothing. More recently we've been creating new conflicts and wasting huge amounts of money and lives for nothing.

WE HAVE NEVER "TAKEN THE FUCKING LAND". We've never taken the fucking oil or the fucking diamonds or the fucking water power or the fucking gold or the fucking titanium or the fucking opium. We've never gotten ANY advantage from our imperial ventures. It's not Blood For Oil, it's just Blood For

Even now, when the neocon ventures are temporarily owned by D-label Obama, the leftists can't give up the idea. This myth is so persistent that it doesn't even switch sides for partisan purposes!

You don't need to add mythical nonsense to your conspiracy theories. Plain old hardass reality is already evil beyond imagining.

Later thought: No, it's not Blood For
Actually it's Blood For Pure Numbers. The Chosen have figured out how to gain riches without exploiting huge new resources. By counterfeiting "money" and pouring it directly into the pockets of the Chosen, they've established a form of riches that the Non-Chosen can't access at all. It's no coincidence that the values of real resources like labor and oil are dropping. The top levels of the economy are no longer demanding real resources. Under this layout, Pure Wars (with no motive but plenty of blood) are needed to keep ordinary people scared and submissive and dead, so the Chosen can justify their exclusive ownership of The Source Of Pure Numbers.
  ¶ 3:31 PM

  Watch out, Samsung.
Now that Apple's CEO has openly declared him/her/it/self to be infallible, we can expect governmental action in two stages.

(1) It is immediately forbidden to criticize Apple products.

(2) It will soon be forbidden to compete with Apple products.

By 'soon' I mean next week, or however long it takes to set up the enforcement mechanism. Slippery slopes and incrementalism are extinct. It's all precipice now.

Google will be able to adjust quickly by self-outing its executive suite, which is already fully Satanized if not yet publicly Satanized.

Samsung will suffer because Koreans are smarter and high-tech-ier than Americans but Koreans have not yet chopped and poisoned their own culture, not yet smashed their own civilization.

  ¶ 8:58 AM

  Verrrry interesting ... and SMART.
Spokane police have installed body cams, which is plenty smart. In these times when SharptonJackson Riot Partners LLC is always hairtrigger-ready to burn a city down when the city dares to arrest an actual criminal, you need VIDEO.

The cops have taken an extra-smart step by publicizing a sample of the bodycam video. This is a test run, but it will give the criminals an unmistakable picture of what they can expect.

The cop who did the test run said: "I think the average, normal citizen or person out there, if they know they are being videoed, it's going to change their behavior or potentially, the behavior they were thinking about doing, because when anyone's on camera they know there's the potential for other people to see it."

Of course it's not the "average normal citizen" who needs to think about these things. The professional criminal and the vibrant cop-puncher need to think. But I understand that cops have to talk that way.   ¶ 6:56 AM

  Verrrry uninteresting .... but wrong.
Verrrry uninteresting:

Speaking of theory falling behind facts, this article is roughly 10,000 years behind systematically observed facts.

Scientists say they now understand what makes a voice sound charismatic. Some people have an innate ability to manipulate their vocal frequency to give their voice a richer quality, the US-based researchers said. Such people can then apply additional vocal techniques to take advantage of this. The researchers also found that political leaders with lower voices were perceived as more dominant and attractive.

No duh. Ever hear of Demosthenes? Political leaders have understood these techniques in an explicit way, and have been carefully learning and applying these techniques, ever since leadership arose. Actually the number 10,000 should be more like 100,000,000 since birds and mammals and sound-signaling insects have always understood the same point. Some birds and insects even know how to fake their signals to give an impression of importance.


But wrong:

Jan Schnupp, co-director of Oxford University's auditory neuroscience group said the work was interesting and fun. "Intuitively the research makes a lot of sense to me. Normally, larger people have larger, heavier vocal folds which vibrate more slowly, and therefore produce a lower fundamental frequency.

"So we associate deep voices with an impressively large physique. However, how fast your vocal folds vibrate also depends on how much muscle tension you apply in your larynx. Often muscle tone increases, and hence voice pitch rises simply when people get excited."

Sort of partly true at the level of inanimate physics, but fundamental pitch is NOT the most important factor in our informational and emotional processing of speech, and it's not really the main correlate of physical size. Anyone can produce any fundamental from 80 to 300 cps with practice. But a low fundamental won't help if your RESONANCE indicates a narrow and small body. Speech is almost entirely about manipulating and perceiving resonances. We pay very little attention to the fundamental.

Speech researchers figured this out 80 years ago. Bell Labs was in the forefront of this understanding because Bell phones needed to carry a narrow range of frequencies. Until the digital age, telephones "heard" only between 300 and 3000 cps. In other words, the fundamental of everyone except a screaming baby or a Hindoo was NOT PRESENT on the phone. But this didn't bother us. We understood both the informational and EMOTIONAL content of voices without ever NOTICING that anything was missing.

The acoustical "researchers" who wrote this article apparently haven't heard this news yet. This is like writing about transportation without knowing about horseless carriages.
  ¶ 5:10 AM

  Tried
In one area of medicine, theory belatedly starts to catch up with obvious facts.

The study, published in the online journal Plos Computational Biology, found that four of the 13 patients with persistent vegetative state had a “robust” network of brain activity that would allow conscious thoughts, which was confirmed when they were asked to imagine playing tennis when their brains were scanned using a magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) machine.

Previous work had shown that the “tennis test” could be used to show that some seemingly unconscious and uncommunicative patients with brain damage were in fact capable of understanding the request to imagine playing a game of tennis, which caused certain networks of brain cells to become active.

“We measured brain activity at rest and didn’t ask the patients to do anything. It showed that some unconscious patients with persistent vegetative state had robust brain networks that should support conscious awareness,” Dr Chennu said.

For the first six months of this blog in 2005, I was exclusively focused on the Terry Schiavo case and what it told us about THEORY AND ETHICS.

THEORETICIANS insisted that Terry couldn't be conscious because their THEORIES told them so. They didn't need no steenkin facts. Meanwhile, Terry's parents and friends knew that she was conscious because her ACTUAL OBSERVED responses indicated awareness. (Of course consciousness itself is a mysterious internal thing, but we know from long experience that certain types of behavior are normally connected with awareness.)

ETHICISTS insisted that Terry must die because ETHICISTS are vultures who love to drink blood.



I suppose there's some vindication in the belated awakening of a few "scientists", but it's too late to help Terry and a lot of other people.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 4:36 AM

  More Kraki
"Nurse" Kraki Krackho, after suing NJ until it happily got rid of her, is now threatening to sue Maine and stating explicitly that she will not obey state law.

"I don't plan on sticking to the guidelines," Hickox tells TODAY's Matt Lauer. "I am not going to sit around and be bullied by politicians and forced to stay in my home when I am not a risk to the American public."

She insists that she wants to go back to Africa. Maine will certainly be happy to get rid of her, but will Africa take her? Africa is not nearly as fucking stupid as USA STRONG.

What would Kraki say to African patients? "You need to be restricted for three weeks. Of course I didn't need to be restricted. You dare to ask why? Easy. Because you're black and poor and Christian, and I'm white and rich and Communist. I don't need to obey laws because I can afford to hire a Jew lawyer. You don't have any Jew lawyers here, and you couldn't afford to hire one if you did."

I'm sure the patients will understand.

Ellen Sirleaf, the solidly GOOD president of Liberia, is desperately trying to restore order and civilization to a country that was already destroyed by decades of US-supported coups and revolutions. Is Sirleaf going to welcome a self-proclaimed disease vector, a wild monster who is openly fighting FOR the disease instead of AGAINST the disease?

If Africa won't take Kraki, will any hospital take her? I sure as hell wouldn't hire anyone who openly declares that her mission in life is to disobey normal medical procedures.

Meanwhile, idiot Obama is openly associating the word "science" with Kraki's genocidal pro-virus stance, and trying to make a clumsy post-hoc distinction between "science" as it applies to people like Kraki versus "non-science" as it applies to the Army. "Non-science" means standard public health rules that will actually protect the soldiers. Obama is trying to say that both are OK because ____________. (You fill in the blank. He can't.)

Love it. Even some in the Satanic media are beginning to understand that "science" now means mass murder.
  ¶ 8:37 AM

  Fucking country can't do any fucking thing
NPR describes a village in Hawaii that is just waiting and watching as a very slow river of lava approaches. Can't do anything.

If you weren't Americans, you could do something. From PBS:

Other memorable volcanic disasters aren’t so old. In 1973, the eruption of the Eldfell volcano threatened to entomb the nearby fishing village of Heimaey in magma. Boiling rivers of lava engulfed a third of the town before desperate islanders mounted a bold and creative defense against the mountain. Using hastily installed fire hoses and water pumps, the villagers sprayed the encroaching lava with streams of frigid seawater, forcing it to crystallize. The resulting rock dam diverted the lava rivers away from the town and into the sea. Ironically, by the time the eruption was over, the lava had formed a new spit of land that offered improved protection to the town’s harbor.

Note that lava doesn't melt dirt all the way down to the mantle. It pretty much sits on top, presumably after carbonizing and hardening the top few inches. In Hawaii those inches are WET, as witness the fact that none of the grass or trees have burned. Plants are bright green all the way to the exact edge of the lava. In most parts of the world, so much concentrated heat would instantly burn everything for miles around.

So in Hawaii you should be able to do a ditch and dam. Dig a ditch in front of the lava. Gradually curve the ditch away from the town, with the dirt from the ditch piled up between the lava and the town. Dig deeper as you go, pile higher. Path of least resistance.

Nope, none of that is possible. EPA would sue to protect some fucking worm that lives in North Carolina but might someday end up in Hawaii. First Nations Peoples would sue to protect some fucking burial ground. "Nurse" Kraki Krackho would sue because you're unfairly quarantining the lava.

Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah! Can't do. Can't do. Can't do. Loser. Loser. Loser. Loser.
  ¶ 8:41 AM

  Weird ergonomics
Even though ergonomics as a discipline is fairly new, real ergonomics in consumer goods reached a peak around 1980 and has been declining since. Engineers are no longer paying primary attention to usability. Satisfying lawyers and satisfying the EPA Terrorist Army are vastly more important than satisfying the customer.

A truly odd excrescence of this bad trend: The newest buses bought by Spokane Transit have HORIZONTAL STEERING WHEELS, placed up at neck height. I don't mean "more nearly horizontal than car wheels". Bus and truck wheels have always been "more nearly horizontal". I mean EXACTLY FLAT. This is a return to pre-1900 truck practice, and it's completely unnecessary and dangerous. Obviously more difficult for the drivers. There's no way to do a fast one-palm spin, which is a common technique with the usual angled wheel and power steering. The driver has to use the smoker's hold, keeping both hands on the wheel and step-by-step feeding the wheel from one hand to the other. The height of the wheel forces wrists into an uncomfortable and stressful angle.
  ¶ 4:32 AM

  Inadequate aptronym alert
Local news:

Raymond Shawn Gunn, 39, is facing charges of unlawfully possessing a firearm, reckless endangerment and malicious mischief in connection with the Oct. 17 shoot-em-up at Jackson Hole Tavern, 122 S. Bowdish Road, according to the Spokane County Sheriff's Office. The tavern was closed and employees had just left for the night when the front of the building was sprayed with .40-caliber bullets.

The aptronym is obvious, but Ray Gunn actually failed to live up to his name. He should have been using a laser, or perhaps a laser-guided rifle.

Made me think about the irresistible nature of aptronyms. If you're a Gunn, do you feel pressure to become a shooter? Maybe.

My own surname has aptronymic potential, yet I never felt the slightest push toward the occupation it seems to describe. Partly because the occupation is nearly extinct, but mainly because it's not really an occupation-name. The genealogists think it was an Irish place name that got corrupted into English form when it reached America, without any thought for the occupational meaning. Thus I don't have genes from an original worker in the supposedly described craft.

Several different origins of Gunn appear on the web, but the most likely one comes from old Gaelic gunni meaning war or battle. So a Gunn does have warrior genes but not specifically gun-using genes. Gun as a device to explosively propel lead balls appears to have developed later from the same word for battle.

= = = = =

Couple days later: Here's a dead-perfect aptronym that couldn't have resulted from early pressure by the name, because the referent substance didn't exist until she was an adult....

Murder suspect Chrystal L. Huff was booked into Spokane County Jail just after 4 a.m. Wednesday. ... Huff has previous convictions for assault, violating a protection order, obstructing a law enforcement officer and conspiracy to possess a controlled substance.

The article doesn't specify the controlled substance, but the mugshot tells us it's meth. Chrystal Huff is 40 and looks 80. Meth years.

Labels: Aptronym Alert

  ¶ 3:41 AM

  Hard question
We need to stop and ask one hard question. Medicins Sans Frontiers is unquestionably saving SOME lives in West Africa. But the countries that have stopped Ebola have done it by STRICTLY ENFORCING STANDARD PUBLIC HEALTH RULES, not by heroic medical efforts. Heroic medicine is a desperate post-hoc effort that can't remotely compensate for a failed government.

Public health is NOT about saving a few lives. Real public health officials often have to sacrifice a few lives to save millions.

Are the few saved lives in Africa balanced out by the harm MSF has done in Europe and America? When you bring a virus back to your home country and heedlessly spread it by taking ocean cruises and shopping, you are doing BIG HARM.

This is Neocon Medicine. "We are EXCEPTIONAL. We have a Unique Moral Purpose, so ordinary rules and laws do not apply to us."

Nature doesn't think you're EXCEPTIONAL. The virus sees you as infectable tissue just like any other infectable tissue. In medicine as in economics or war, infantile ego and infinite stupidity are killers.
  ¶ 6:27 AM

  Yup.
Yup, sure enough. No prize for predicting this one, though I didn't think it would be this ferocious.

The White House is urging the NY and NJ governors to repeal the mandatory Ebola quarantine order for all medical staff returning from W. Africa, after the quarantined nurse threatened to sue authorities for treating her “like a criminal.”

Quoting an unnamed administration official, the New York Times reported that “top administration officials have been speaking with Mr. Cuomo daily and have also been in touch with Mr. Christie, trying to get them to rescind the order."

New York, New Jersey and Illinois are the three US States that have introduced mandatory 3-week quarantines on everyone who could have had contact with the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea where the epidemic has killed nearly 5,000 people.

The local authorities’ actions after the New York Ebola case were “uncoordinated, very hurried, an immediate reaction to the New York City case that doesn't comport with science,” said a senior administration official who spoke with the NY Times on the condition of anonymity.

If you needed any more proof that the word "science" refers solely to pure national suicide, pure genocide, pure mass murder, absolute raw bloody evil multiplied by infinity, you've got it. Final final final final proof.

Satan's media have grabbed onto the lawsuit by the alleged "nurse" Kraki Krakho**, using him/her as the standard Victim Hammer to break down the walls of common sense. He/she is being depicted as the Noble Virtuous Innocent Carrier of the Virus Of Colour, Unfairly Imprisoned by Evil White Fundy Halliburton Bushitler KKK Klansmen Koch Koch Koch.


The only non-standard piece in this brutally predictable Passion Play is that Cuomo, normally a docile Satanite, is continuing to defend real science and real life against the genocidists. I figured he would jump out of the way after shoving Christie onto the subway tracks.


= = = = =

** Apologies to real crackhos for the comparison. Real crackhos may sometimes infect their johns, but they don't ARROGANTLY SUE TO PROTECT THEIR "RIGHTS" TO INFECT OTHERS. In fact they often feel guilty about their drug-controlled behavior. I'd rather deal with a real whore than a ligitious leftist any old day.
  ¶ 3:30 AM

  Testable theory //// EDIT: Tested.
A dog's hatred of vacuum cleaners is usually explained on the basis of noise. Not the only possible connection. Different vacuums make very different sounds, but all have one thing in common.

Trying to fit myself into a dog's perspective ... I hate the vacuum because it creates confusion and chaos. It snatches up the millions of unique and interesting smells that properly reside in millions of places on the floor, and mixes them all into one big fast-moving everything-smell. Sort of like putting kaleidoscope glasses on a human.

The hypothesis should be easy to test.

Do deaf dogs hate vacuum cleaners?


Update: I should have checked Youtube before asking! Most questions about behavior and culture are answered decisively on Youtube. The clear (and cute) answer is:



Deaf dogs love vacuums, or at least think vacuums are interesting. So the conventional assumption is right. It's the noise, not the smell!

Later: After watching a wider variety of dog vs vacuum clips, the correlation disappears. Some normal-hearing dogs like vacuums, and many of them fight the vacuum even when it's turned off. Maybe it's the snake-like shape, not the noise or the smell. Mammals certainly have an inborn fear and hatred of snakes.
  ¶ 7:28 PM

  Random Percy thought
I was thinking (yet again) of Walker Percy's perfect 1971 prediction of modern America. He pinned Al Sharpton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Toyota Priuseseses, along with nearly all of the idiocies and evil that brought those people and things into prominence. He pinned down the misuse of science to justify political insanity. Near the end he has iPhones creating chaos through fiendishly dirty autocorrects.

One character that I hadn't been able to match was the Satan type, a pharmaceutical salesman named Art Immelmann. The name is rife with metaphors, the ethnicity is obviously accurate, but who is his modern equivalent? Big Pharma is a fairly dirty business, but it does some actual good along with the dirt. Not Satanic. Immelmann isn't a lawyer or banker, which would seem like better choices.

Got it. The iPhone connection leads to the proper correlation. He's a tech magnate like Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or ... Jeffrey Immelt. He stole the protagonist's invention, which was a portable diagnostic tool for physical and character ailments, and turned it into an iPhone.

He's Apple.

Immediate update: Just after writing the above, I went to find some local news about last night's storm, and bumped into this piece on Elon Musk. He's warning about the danger of letting software control our lives. Though he's not quoting Percy, he's envisioning exactly the same final scene I just mentioned, and he's TAKING PERCY'S SIDE! Amazing. Even a techie can see the light sometimes.

So I need to remove Musk from the above list!
  ¶ 5:10 PM

  Sewage/wine etc
It's always interesting in a grim clinical way to watch the Hierarchy Rules of modern Satanists.

Until yesterday, Ebola was officially a Virus Of Colour, entitled to all the rights and privileges appurtenant thereto. Ebola was free to do any fucking thing it wanted, with no interference by vaccines or public health rules. Ebola Vectors were also free to do anything they wanted without any interference by police or authorities. Take an ocean cruise, ride public transport, anything you feel like doing is fine because you are carrying a Virus Of Colour. Any cop or doctor who dared to interfere with the Virus Of Colour was


Yesterday the picture changed entirely. For unknown reasons, Gov Cuomo decided to treat Ebola the same as any other virus, subject to all historically proven public health rules. Other NY Satans are OUTRAGED SHOCKED STUNNED by this UNPRECEDENTED UNACCEPTABLE INTOLERABLE imposition of actual science and actual common sense upon an Unarmed African-American Teenvirus.

What's more, Cuomo was joined in the statement by Christie of NJ. Very smart move by Christie. He knows that even though his beliefs and policies are identical to any other Commie, he is an Unperson because he wears the Scarlet R on his shirt. But by speaking in unison with Correct Leader Cuomo, his common sense becomes quasi-acceptable.

So far this policy change hasn't been countermanded. Will be fun to measure its short half-life.

= = = = =

Another hierarchy in a totally different context:

AUBURN, Wash. -- Like all religions, the Sikh faith is steeped in tradition. One of the most revered is the carrying of a Kirpan, a sword or dagger, at all times. "People will even wear it in the shower. It's kind of hard for others to understand," said Jaswinder Singh, spokesman for the Gurudwara Sikh Center of Seattle. The concept of the Kirpan is taught to children at an early age. The dagger is considered an instrument of social justice.

A few weeks ago at Auburn's Gildo Rey Elementary, a Sikh family approached the school telling them their little boy would be carrying a Kirpan every day.

District administrators are citing state and federal guidelines that allow certain exceptions to Washington's "zero tolerance" for weapons policy. They say there are plenty of Sikhs, both students and staff, who have carried Kirpans to school for years without incident.

"The knife can't come out. It can't be shown around. It needs to be underneath their clothing," said Auburn Assistant Superintendent of Schools Ryan Foster. "That allows them to express their religion without jeopardizing anyone's feeling of safety. If there are any problems, we will take it to the family, but we don't expect any."

Here in Sharptonia, those magic words SOCIAL JUSTICE opened the idiot brain-like organs of the Epsilon Educrats. "Social Justice! Oh! Social Justice! That means Communism! Good!"

In countries where real Sikhs live in large numbers, the real meaning of those words is known. Sikhs are excellent and fierce warriors. British colonial armies were full of Sikhs because Sikhs like to fight. Social justice means vengeance.

Meanwhile, Unkids who belong to Unreligions will still end up in actual non-symbolic jail for drawing a picture of a knife in art class, even if the knife looks just like a kirpan. Especially if the knife looks like a kirpan. That would be Taking The Symbols Of A Correct Religion In Vain.
  ¶ 5:13 AM

  Fall back, fall back 3
While UK considers moving toward permanent DST for insane reasons, Russia makes a small but meaningful return toward sanity:

"Russia has turned back its clocks to winter time and has reverted to the full 11 zones from Kamchatka in the Pacific to Kaliningrad that were reduced to nine by the previous president, Dmitry Medvedev. In July, Russia's President Vladimir Putin signed a law bringing back winter time but canceled the summer time shift."

Clocks are unnatural, of course. But we know from 100 years of experience that the twice-annual DST flipflop is doubly unnatural. Disrupts our sleeping and pooping routines, with bad results; and uses MORE electricity than constant clocks. Returning to 'finer' zones is another move toward improved health and sanity. Clocks never match sun time, but broader zones pull people even farther from sun time.
  ¶ 4:37 PM

  That was weird.
Computer did something weird and virus-y. I noticed that the net wasn't running. Not unusual in itself. Comcast often turns off at some point on Saturday morning. System maintenance or something. I rebooted to see if the modem was somehow unsync'd from the system. After the reboot, the system date was April 3, 2014, and all the stuff in the systray was gone. Comcast was on, but all the usual American websites were showing as "uncertified". UK websites were okay.

4/3 was before I bought this computer, and before its software was installed. When I bought it in August, the date of the system files was 5/14/2014. So 4/3 shouldn't be a 'default date' for the machine.

Ran a System Restore to the last probably-good restore point, which seemed to straighten things out, but the date was still 4/3. Manually changed the date to 10/25, and it seems to be sticking there so far.

Ran AVG to see if any viruses showed. Nothing. But AVG had lost its paid registration and thought it was the Free edition. I don't know how long that had been happening; if it had been running as Free for a while, it could have missed something. I know from earlier experience that the Free edition isn't strong enough.

I wasn't doing anything unusual this morning; the usual web locations, the usual graphics stuff. Amapi, UVmapper, Poser.

Google shows April 3, 2014 as the date when the SSL Heartbleed thing was discovered, which is probably significant in Hackerland. But Google doesn't find any specific viruses that actually reset your date to 4/3.
  ¶ 1:07 PM

  Hibernation over, mofo. Hibernation OVER.
The bear has awakened. After a few years of patient tolerance as USA STRONG mindlessly rips the world to bloody shreds, Putin has finally filled out his side of the chessboard.

“By the way, I am constantly surprised that our Western partners make the same mistake over and over again. They once sponsored Islamist extremists that had fought in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Taliban and al-Qaeda originated from these [extremist] movements."

"No one wanted to listen to us and no one wanted to talk to us. Instead of a difficult but, I underline, civilised dialogue they brought about a state coup. They pushed [Ukraine] into chaos, economic and social collapse, and civil war with huge losses."

"Russia is self-sufficient."

I'm tempted to say "About fucking time", but I'm not the one to say it. I trust Nature's laws. Putin is acting in alignment with the natural (and civilized) rules of fighting, which require a considerable amount of growling and posturing before the first bite.

“Unfortunately, there are neither guarantees nor assurances that the existing system of global and regional security will be capable of safeguarding us from upheavals.”

USA STRONG, you been growled at. You will not listen. You will continue to be an unspeakably violent bully. You will continue turning the world into a bloody mush. You will continue shooting your own cops and deifying your own thugs. You will continue printing infinite amounts of nominal money and handing it to the super-rich while moving all productive activity to China. (I do not write in conditionals and subjunctives and 'shoulds'. Those verb forms are extinct in USA STRONG land.)

"The bear is considered the owner of the Taiga, but he, I know for a fact, does not want to go to a different climatic zone, as it is uncomfortable for him there. However, he will not give it to anyone else; I think that this should be clear.”

Alligator wasn't ready when Bear awakened. Will USA STRONG be ready? No. Bullies are never ready for resistance. Bullies have an infinite ego which contains ... or so they think ... the entire universe.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, STRONG!, Гром победы

  ¶ 5:21 PM

  Misses the point entirely
RCS notes an interesting Swedish article on the rise of the city-state. It's an important trend. Cities like Lagos and Sao Paulo and Shanghai have become larger and more powerful than typical nations. Unfortunately the article ... or at least the available synopsis ... seems to be solely about New York.

This type of ‘local global policy’ concerns issues such as for example climate change and terrorism. While the world’s nations were still debating the Kyoto Protocol, Toronto in Canada was the first in the world to ever adopt an emission target. Other cities and local governments all over the world have followed its example. In the US, for example, hundreds of city councils and many states have defied the Federal Government by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. And alongside the global fight against terrorism since ‘9/11’, many cities have started developing their own security strategies. Today, the New York police have a metropolitan security service that is larger than that of many countries and includes, for example, a separate local intelligence organisation with staff stationed permanently in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

This is not about the city-state as a modern phenomenon. This is solely and strictly about the psychotic mass-murdering genocidal all-consuming wackitude of Lord of Lords and King of Kings Michael Bloomberg. The author apparently doesn't know that "hundreds of city councils" (with a few equally psychotic exceptions like SF) are not representing their own unfortunate inhabitants. They are representing bribes paid by Lord of Lords and King of Kings Michael Bloomberg. Emperor Bloomberg decided to use his money to take over the country from the bottom up. And he has succeeded magnificently.
  ¶ 3:50 AM

  Outraged by common sense as always
Alaska politician Don Young made a speech at a school and said something about suicide that SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED OFFENDED OFFENDED OFFENDED OUTRAGED OUTRAGED OUTRAGED all decent Experts and Journalists and Teachers. Apologies are required! Investigations are pending! The Iron Maiden is being sharpened!

When you see MAXIMUM SHOCK AND OUTRAGE by media and inquisitors, you can be 90% sure that the object of the SHOCK is a plain ordinary obvious tautological truth.

Not quite 100% sure in this specific situation because Young is a successful politician.

Successful politicians usually start as high-status kids. [Not max-status jocks. Jocks don't have to compete at all. They avoid all problems and punishments, so the concept of campaigning and competing is foreign to them.] The upper-middle status layer learns that competing is worthwhile, learns that status depends on your presentation. That's how you win elections and jobs if you are starting from an above-median status.

So politicians often fail to understand the feelings of lower-status people. They think we're just not trying.

Is that the case here? No. Young shows that he DOES understand low-status problems.

He said that suicide comes from a lack of support from friends and family.

Simple truth. Not the whole truth, but close enough for a sound-bite, and much closer than we usually hear from Experts of all stripes. Friends and family may think they're supporting the bottom-dweller, but the bottom-dweller feels (rightly or wrongly) that the support is superficial and fake. Usually rightly. And the discovery of such fakery is often the final straw.

Solving the problem does not mean improving support, because the improved support is going to seem fake by definition. The best solution is to bypass the need for support from family and friends. Find a job or project or mission where status is irrelevant, where your efforts can lead to real success. This may involve inanimate objects (arts and crafts, building and fixing stuff) or it may involve animals (horses or dogs) instead of humans. After you make it through adolescence on the Bypass Route, your skills and results may well give you real status (or at least money!) in a more adult setting where natural attractiveness is not the ONLY thing that counts.

What we truly need to investigate is the hyperwacked thought-diseases and satan-theories that these Experts are feeding these kids. I don't know what alien dyslogic is passing through these cranial cavities, but it must be wildly alien and counterproductive if Young's common sense is SHOCKING to them.


= = = = =

Quick check of Young's biography: Sure enough he's not the standard politician. Grew up poor, moved to Alaska after serving in the Army, worked in construction and shipping in summers while teaching in a BIA school in winters. Didn't get pulled into politics until age 40. So he does understand low-status kids from internal and external perspectives.
  ¶ 6:58 AM

  You'd think....
After all these decades of absurdity, it's amazing that anyone still thinks you can accomplish anything by moving clock hands.

Children’s health would benefit if Britain switched to continental time by moving the clocks forward an hour, say researchers.

Lighter evenings would increase the amount of time children engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity each day by an average of two minutes, a study showed.

Two minutes! Yes! Huzzah! Calloo callay! Instant salvation!

There's a serious problem with kids lacking sunlight, as Polistra noted plaintively here. Rickets has returned to London. But you aren't going to touch the problem by fiddling with clocks. Bad culture and misused science cause the problem. The bad culture needs no description; the misused science is an overemphasis on melanoma. In fact melanoma from typical outside play is almost nonexistent. Recent increases in melanoma come specifically and solely from artificial tanning. (This should be obvious from simple logic. Kids no longer play outside, and melanoma among young people is increasing. Therefore sunlight is not the cause of the increase.)

If you really want a clock-based solution, change school hours. You can do this far more flexibly than the crude DST crap. In high-latitude cool places like England or Wash, you could expand and contract both ends of the school day. Run school 7AM to 1PM in summer, and 9:30AM to 2PM in winter. Improve traffic safety and give more illuminated outside play.
  ¶ 1:54 AM

  Constants and Variables 21
More disproof of the idiot Rand/Romney/Rush 47% largesse shit. SS benefits are getting a very small COLA again this year. For many years now, SS benefits have not been keeping up with inflation. In the '90s Congress even started taxing SS benefits.

If the 47% largesse shit had any truth at all, Congress wouldn't be able to restrict COLA and wouldn't be able to add tax. Us wrinklies are the most reliable and watchful voters, so by this theory we should be the most powerful part of the 47. Merely by throwing our larg-esses around, we should be able to stop any politician who dares to monkey with our benefits.

In fact Congress finds it easy to enact these sensible restrictions and taxes, and nobody even complains.

There's only one sensible move connected to SS that Congress is ACTUALLY AFRAID of making. Removing the 100k cap on the payroll tax would make the SS system solvent and 'profitable' for many years to come. Extremely sensible and NECESSARY move.

Congress won't touch it.

Conclusion: Congress isn't bothered by the big blob of reliably voting geezers. Congress is DEATHLY afraid of a handful of super-rich fuckheads who are NOT on SS.

Votes are less than zero. Raw power is more than 100%.

Bullets count. Ballots do not count.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 6:42 AM

  Mid-size poop


An evil creature has departed for Hades today. Party time in Roy Cohn's corporate HQ!

Ben Bradlee wasn't among the maximum evildoers, but his mid-sized evil had a broader effect than most.

Before Bradlee, newspapers competed on various sides of politics with clear labels. In most cities you could choose between left and right papers, or choose opposite sides of the local corrupt mayor. You knew what you were getting. After Bradlee, more than 100% of newspapers were more than 100% leftist, and more than 100% of them firmly claimed to be "non-partisan". Choice disappeared.

Part of the blame for this belongs to the non-leftist politicians who still fail to understand the situation. Nixon was the first to fail in this way. Despite his naturally suspicious temperament, he went ahead and used dirty tricks that LBJ and JFK had perfected. He assumed that he would get away with it because LBJ and JFK had gotten away with it.

Even now Repooflican politicians haven't figured it out. They continue to use the terminology of competing brands while doing exactly the same things as the other "side". This means that Repooflicans are nothing more than a convenient blame-carrier. When the D politicians do the same things and it leads to national collapse, the D pols and their captive newspapers can blame Rs for the failure.

You're doing the same thing. Just go ahead and wear the same label. Be "Democrats". This will eliminate the scapegoating. Journalists will not start telling the truth, of course, but they won't be able to play Bradlee's evil game any longer.
  ¶ 2:15 AM

  Ma Nature's aphid bakery?
This fall we've had a full month of aphids instead of the usual week of aphids.

This summer we had a full month of 90s instead of the usual week of 90s.


Silly but tempting hypothesis: Each time a day hits 90, Ma Nature slips a new set of aphids in the "oven", and they "cook" until fall turns off the heat. Each daily batch then pops out of the "oven" and swarms in sequence.



I have no idea what the real "oven" might be; supposedly these aphids develop by asexual cloning inside their unfertilized mothers, but aphid reproduction seems to be largely unexplored and mysterious. Every species of aphid has its own unique and often variable life cycle.

Not quite a rule but pretty general: Simple creatures adapt by altering patterns of reproduction. Complex creatures adapt by altering individual and group behavior.

= = = = =

Later: an even sillier analogy. A retirement account for a generation of aphids. Every time the temp goes over 90, Ma deposits a certain number of degree-days in the account. When fall comes, the account starts paying out those deposits steadily, one per day, as swarmers who lay eggs for the next generation. Aphid-nuity.
  ¶ 7:02 PM

  Which is it?
Wix.com has been running a radio ad featuring a pet shop where the owner is trying to get things done while several parrots raucously echo everything he says. The point, I guess, is that Wix makes things easier than having several parrots raucously echoing everything you say.

At the end a parrot says "Rrraawwwk. Fuck off!"

I suppose the parrot is meant to say "Wiiiix! Dotcom!" but I can't hear it that way.
  ¶ 9:09 AM

  BIG GOOD news


BBC reports on the BIGGEST GOOD NEWS of the decade. It's a little hard to spot the BIGness because this is part of a gradual chain of research with some partial successes and many failures. But this is finally THE BIG ONE.

In short:

Self-provided stem cells have regenerated a broken spinal cord, and a fully paralyzed man can walk again.

In long:

Darek Fidyka, 40, was paralysed after being stabbed repeatedly in the back in the 2010 attack. He said walking again - with the support of a frame - was "an incredible feeling", adding: "When you can't feel almost half your body, you are helpless, but when it starts coming back it's like you were born again."

Prof Geoff Raisman, chair of neural regeneration at University College London's Institute of Neurology, led the UK research team.

The treatment used olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) - specialist cells that form part of the sense of smell. OECs act as pathway cells that enable nerve fibres in the olfactory system to be continually renewed. In the first of two operations, surgeons removed one of the patient's olfactory bulbs and grew the cells in culture.

Note especially that this patient was paralyzed for a few years, which means his muscles and innards had already atrophied to some extent.

Okay, you murderous bloodthirsty embryonic stem cell wackos. Give up now. Come out with your hands up. You're surrounded. The non-murderers have finished the job that you never even started.

Note also that the success was PRIVATELY FUNDED, because the evil fucking governments were all focused solely on the evil murderous useless ESC project. Killing babies is their SOLE PURPOSE.

The groundbreaking research was supported by the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation (NSIF) and the UK Stem Cell Foundation (UKSCF) UKSCF was set up in 2007 to speed up progress of promising stem cell research - the charity has to date contributed ￡2.5m. NSIF was set up by chef David Nicholls after his son Daniel was paralysed from the arms down in a swimming accident in 2003. To date the charity has given £1m to fund the research in London and a further £240,000 for the work in Poland.

A few private millions have accomplished what government billions couldn't. No fucking surprise.

UKSCF has a donation site here. I tried to send an appropriately BIG donation, but it didn't work. Might be Firefox problem, might be the UK-specific website, which didn't understand my US street address and zipcode. NSIF has a donation site here, and my donation worked (clumsily) through that channel. Hint to both organizations: If you want more donations, use Paypal! Donors want to donate. Donors don't want to spend 15 minutes struggling with a process that fails in the end.
  ¶ 3:10 AM

  Deer
Saw an actual deer in the front yard this morning. I was vacuuming and focusing on the floor; caught something in peripheral vision that seemed too large for a dog; looked up just in time to see Bambi trotting past the porch. I've never seen a regular deer before in the flesh. Seen various off-brand ruminants in zoos, but not a plain old Bambi.

Nov 6 update: Saw him again, or maybe another deer. This time it was on my morning walk. He was casually strolling down the street ahead of me. We made eye contact then both continued on our respective business. He didn't seem to be spooked or surprised.
  ¶ 6:03 PM

  Good idiot
Ron Paul is frustrating. His goals and dreams are good. The America he wants is a good America, and some of his plans and methods would deliver a better America.

But he always relies on economic theory instead of human nature at crucial points. Nice example in today's column on the draft....

The very worst form of national service is, of course, the military draft, which forces young people to kill or be killed on government orders. The draft lowers the cost of an interventionist foreign policy because government need not compete with private employers for recruits. Anyone who refuses a draft notice runs the risk of being jailed, so government can provide lower pay and benefits to draftees than to volunteers.

Three sentences. The first and last are perfectly true. The middle sentence disagrees with human nature and blows up the whole argument.

In fact a draft makes neocon foreign policy HARDER, not EASIER.

When a broad cross-section of men are in the Army unwillingly, they don't take a lot of crap. We pulled out of Vietnam because most Americans had a stake in the war and most Americans could see it was shit.

The all-volunteer Army includes ONLY men who are naturally inclined toward military service by genes and/or culture. These men have formed a priestly caste, highly capable and efficient at military tasks and unsuited for civilian life. They will obey all orders because obeying orders is their life and passion. Very few Americans have close connections with the priestly class, so even if the soldiers were mutinous their attitude wouldn't affect the country.
  ¶ 5:15 AM

  More ethics
In today's National Suicide News:

Olympic National Park is planning to build public observation areas at the site of the former Glines Canyon Dam so the public can learn about ongoing efforts to restore the Elwha River. ... work on the observation areas would start this fall.

On the egregiously rare occasions when we kill a murderer, we invite "observers" to be somewhere near the execution, but we draw the curtains at the moment of death. Nobody gets to see justice being done.

Observing the execution of a country is different. We pay $300 million to kill a clean energy-producing dam so we can get more of our power from dirty coal. Then we proudly spend extra millions to insure that everyone can see the Death of a Nation in glorious Technicolor.

Ethics.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 4:44 AM

  Happy Birthday Sputnik part 2
While I was shopping on Ebay for 'Soviet radios', this thing came up. It's not a radio, but it's closely related to radio. It was expensive ($150) but it tickles so many of my passions that I just had to buy it. Life's short and all that.



Электронный конструктор was a school electronics learning 'toy', aimed apparently at junior high level. It was made in 1983. Excellent illustration of the Soviet approach to education. Hands on, muscle memory, little theory. All the right things. At the same time, of course, American education was nothing but rote memorization of insane theories. We still haven't broken out of the idiot rote model, though a few scattered bright spots are popping up.

This difference arises from different levels of CONFIDENCE by government. Learning by discovery puts kids in direct contact with REALITY. If you're confident that your system will survive a brush with reality, you allow learning by discovery. If you're afraid that your kids might question your system after encountering reality, you keep them in a rote bubble.

I'd imagine Экон was used in school sort of like this:



The base part was designed to look like a radio.



Экон has four 'rooms'.

Just under the handle is a compartment for 6 AA batteries.

The right side room holds a speaker and volume control, with an audio amplifier behind it:



On left in this picture (lower right on the case) is a tuning capacitor. This is a heavy-duty ceramic cap, suitable for high-voltage use. It doesn't match the other battery-duty components; must have been military surplus or something.

A little booklet included 30 different circuits to build, ranging from a signal generator to a siren to several simple AM radios.



Here's the clever part. You build the circuit by inserting the correct pattern of modules in the middle room, like a jigsaw puzzle or a chess problem. Each module is hollow and contains what it says on the top. Straight wires, T-junctions, caps, resistors, transistors, one push-button switch. Each module can be inserted 4 different ways.



The lower room contains the antenna/inductor, which was designed to serve either as the input tuned circuit and antenna for a receiver, or as the inductive side of a Hartley oscillator. This big antenna module is removable but in practice it always stayed right there, with custom connections along the middle partition. Under the antenna is a 'dead' row with no actual connections, to hold leftover modules.

Экон gives you a nice initial introduction to circuitry. You learn to compare the schematic with reality, and you get an INTRINSIC REWARD when it works. Hear the siren, tune the stations. After Экон you're more ready for serious breadboarding, where you need to select components and solder everything.



Even the box lid has been MAINTAINED.

= = = = =

What's the moral of the story?

Self-sufficiency.

(1) When kids are educated through HANDS and MUSCLE MEMORY, they gain a deep and unremovable knowledge. Soviet math and science education did this. American math and science education relied on rote memory, which is shallow and removable. (Our response to Sputnik led to even more rote memory of even crazier theories.)

When you've learned through direct sensory and muscle experience, you know how things work. You can thus develop new strategies when you encounter new situations. You are SELF-SUFFICIENT.

(2) Making things. Before WW2 Americans made everything we used, and paid Americans to make things. After WW2 America started outsourcing. Solid-state electronics was the pioneer of outsourcing. At the same moment as Sputnik, Japan became very good at making transistor radios, and we unconditionally surrendered to them. We allowed our own radio industry to collapse, because the Sacred Theory Of Open Borders must be obeyed AT ALL COSTS, especially including national suicide. Russia didn't make the same mistake. A close examination of the internal parts of this gadget, and the internal parts of the VEF shortwave radio, shows that all the components are Russian-made. They look different from American (Chinese) parts.

= = = = =

When you make things internally and repair things internally and educate for self-sufficiency, you maximize your survival.

And we can see the difference RIGHT NOW. BBC reports that Russian farmers and manufacturers are quickly picking up the slack now that imported food has been stopped by our sanctions. (By the way, isn't it just wonderfully ethical that we attack Russia and then slap Russia with sanctions for DARING to answer our attack? Fucking chutzpah as fucking always.)

From BBC:

But there has been no broader backlash. In fact one poll published this week revealed that most Russians believe sanctions can actually boost the economy; two in five told the Levada Centre they would accept an even bigger ban on foreign imports if necessary. That is partly because supermarket shelves have not emptied here - it is their content that has changed. At one central Moscow store this week the dairy counter was full of packages labelled Edam, Gouda and Ricotta - but on closer inspection much of it was made here in Russia.

Incidentally, Toldja so.

Summing up:

Protectionism protects more than your industries and jobs and economy. Above all it protects your CIVILIZATION and your HUMAN CAPITAL. If you're accustomed to making things and fixing things internally, you KNOW HOW to make things and fix things, and you KNOW HOW to adapt to new situations. Those skills don't disappear quickly.

= = = = =

Poser model is here.

Labels: Experiential education, new toy, Гром победы

  ¶ 2:57 AM

  Wind or not?
I'm wondering if there was a moderate windstorm last night. I didn't notice anything, didn't get awakened by noise. Nothing shows on the Weather Bureau's records, but they're at airports and rarely reflect what happens in Spokane, so that doesn't mean much.

This morning my back yard was covered with pine needles. Since I had my own trees removed 3 years ago, needles can only hit my yard with a pretty decent wind. Also, the Spokane-News facebook page is carrying lots of mentions of power outages in North Central and far east Valley locations, plus one tree down in Deer Park. Puzzling.
  ¶ 5:08 PM

  The other end
At the other end of the scale from Rome's Satanization, we have the deeply and solidly Christian president of Liberia.

Ellen Sirleaf is humbly pleading with the Western principalities and powers for more assistance. She also apologized to the mayor of Dallas for sending Ebola to Dallas.

Think about that. She didn't need to apologize. It wasn't her fault that Duncan came to Dallas. It was partly Duncan's own fault for lying about his condition, partly the fault of the airlines and Western authorities for maintaining evil Free Trade and Open Borders against all rules of Nature and common sense.

Yet she humbly apologized.

Christ in action.

One part of her 'Dear World' letter:

There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars. In Liberia, our civil war ended only eleven years ago. It destroyed our public infrastructure, crushed our economy and led to an exodus of educated professionals. A country that had some 3,000 qualified doctors at the start of the war was dependent by its end on barely three dozen. In the last few years, Liberia was bouncing back. We realized there was a long way to go, but the future was looking bright.

Now Ebola threatens to erase that hard work. Our economy was set to be larger and stronger this year, offering more jobs to Liberians and raising living standards. Ebola is not just a health crisis – across West Africa, a generation of young people risk being lost to an economic catastrophe as harvests are missed, markets are shut and borders are closed.

As US/UK/EU continue to stir up new revolutions and new chaos in all parts of the world, this tells us what we are doing. The disasters we create are coming back to infect us. Nature always instructs monsters, and Nature eventually destroys monsters.
  ¶ 5:13 AM

  So furiously rage together
Satan's toxic hordes are RAGING RAGING RAGING at the HERETICAL bishops who DARED to question Satan's unquenchable and unstoppable PROGRESSIVE ENLIGHTENMENT for even one picosecond.

I predict that the handful of weakly and vaguely nonSatanic bishops will bend over and take Satan's red-hot poisoned dick in a few days. Satan does NOT allow delay or dissent.

Update: BBC is interviewing some insiders. One is an "archbishop" who was part of the synod. He/she/it just now stated that he/she/it voted against the "welcome", NOT because it was Satanic, but because it was NOT SATANIC ENOUGH.

As fucking always. Satan always gets MORE THAN 100%. MORE THAN ALL. MORE THAN INFINITY.
  ¶ 3:14 AM

  Whose dream?
Sometimes on the way into sleep I'll pop into a mini-dream that is so weird or nonsensical that it wakes me up immediately and I have to start over. Most of those pop-ins are visual and not easily described or written. This one was nicely verbal and linear and writable, with a bonus that the subject of thought was itself parallel to the process of phase shift!

It went like this... using italics to represent the exact moment when dream mode switched in.....

= = = = =

Grr. The FM radio is drifting. Stuck between stations. That's annoying. Should I get up and try to tune it? No. In the first years of FM, most radios had separate AM and FM and FM/AFC settings on the bandswitch. There wasn't any meaningful difference between the latter two; you didn't need to turn off the phase-locking to tune the radio. Back around 1961 I had an odd FM-only radio that had only two controls, the tuning and the FM to AFC switch. The radio was made by Blonder-Tongue. Now there's a name you couldn't use nowadays. Censors would pick it off immediately. Blonder-Tongue is a lot like the Spanish movie "Seven Celias and a Charlatan", but I doubt that the readers would WHAT? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? THAT DIDN'T MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE! There's no such movie, Spanish or otherwise, it wouldn't be "a lot like Blonder-Tongue" if it did exist, and I wouldn't know about it anyway!

= = = = =

After fully waking, I googled a bit. (1) Blonder-Tongue did make an FM-only radio that was similar to the one I owned, but the one I owned was a Sarkes-Tarzian like this. I don't know why it was 'rebranded' in dream mode. (2) B-T didn't get picked off by the censors. It's still active 50 years later, still making the same main product line of VHF amplifiers and antenna splitting systems. (3) There never was a movie called "Seven Celias and a Charlatan". Sounds interesting, though. I'd watch it! [As always, I wish to hell I could channel some of that dream-time creativity into wake-time. If you paid me a thousand bucks to come up with an interesting title for a Spanish movie, I'd just draw a complete blank.]


= = = = =

Here is a fascinating article on the history of Sarkes Tarzian. Like Atwater Kent and McMurdo Silver, it wasn't two guys named Mr Sarkes and Mr Tarzian, it was one man. First name Sarkes, last name Tarzian. His company was most famous for components; nearly all TVs and radios of the 50s had some S-T parts in their chassis. After the brief venture into complete radios, they stopped manufacturing in 1970. The company, still run by the Tarzian family, is now a holding company for several radio and TV stations.

Labels: Alternate universe, TMI

  ¶ 3:57 PM

  Terachutzpah 2
Couple weeks ago I noted the most perfect and infinite example of chutzpah, coming naturally from the Tribe that invented chutzpah. In that case Chair Yellen was bemoaning the vulnerability of Americans without savings or other resources. It's a perfectly valid bemoan, but Chair Yellen has the UNIQUE AND TOTAL POWER to solve the problem. All by itself, Chair can issue a simple four-word order: "Stop controlling interest rates." This would solve the problem of low savings. Nobody else in the world can do it. Chair can do it instantly any time Chair wants.

Did Chair solve the problem? Did Chair issue the four-word command? No. Chair simply complained about the problem in the same way as powerless little nobodies like me.

Terachutzpah.

Now Chair is at it again. This time Chair has outputted a longer and broader speech about income inequality. Again a perfectly valid complaint. I've skimmed through the speech, and it's the same stuff I've been saying for 8 years, the same stuff that smarter people have been saying for much longer.

Dammit, Chair, stop rubbing it in! We know you are Of Royal Blood and Totally Privileged to do any fucking thing you want without punishment. This means that you COULD solve these problems without punishment. NO FUCKING BODY FUCKING ELSE IN THE FUCKING WORLD CAN FUCKING DO IT. Instead, you grotesquely pretend to be some ordinary Non-Royal Redneck who is suffering under the yoke of Royal Oppression. "Boy howdy, I really hate what those Fed Reserve assholes are doing to us. Don't you just hate it too? I wish there was something we could do about Fed policies, but there isn't. We just have to take what they dish out."

This is way beyond chutzpah. No word for it.
  ¶ 8:56 AM

  Works both ways
Old-fashioned tyrants displaced their evil decisions into bureaucracies so the decision could be treated as an "unavoidable" fact of nature. Just good old Due Process. Modern tyrants do the same thing with computers. "I wash my hands of this decision. The computer did it."

Refreshingly, displacement can work both ways. Google's ad-popping algorithm is capable of doing and saying things that a human would get in deep trouble for..........



You can hear the algorithm thinking: "Banned Book Week + acronym = BBW. What's that an acronym for? Ah! FAT! What do we have in our ad stock for FAT? Zulily!"

Sidenote: Yum. Pretty. For too many years 'plus-size' models looked like Janet Reno. Clearly the selectors just couldn't stand to let them be pretty. Sort of like the way Detroit treated compact cars at first. After Toyota bonked Detroit upside the head, Detroit finally learned the lesson that Nash had figured out much earlier: Pretty is pretty regardless of size. Quality is quality regardless of size.
  ¶ 4:00 PM

  Why did Stalin turn against us 2
I just put something together. I don't know if this result is the truth, but it certainly makes more sense than any other interpretation of the full set of events.

In 2010 I wrote this:

= = = = = START REPRINT:


Polistra has been wondering why Stalin put so much effort into subverting the US after WW2.



From our side it didn't make sense; we had been working in partnership with Russia in the war, and our people had tremendous sympathy for the Russian people who had borne the brunt of defeating Hitler. (One of five Russians died, one of five Russian towns was destroyed.) The Marshall Plan could have helped Russia recover, but Stalin chose instead to make us an enemy.

Surely old Joe didn't expect to fully Sovietize America in his lifetime. He also remembered from 1920's experience that a big socialist economy can't stay alive unless some big capitalist economies remain in other countries, to provide surplus food in emergencies and fancy goodies for the nomenklatura. Unlike today's idiotic American commie rulers, Joe didn't believe his own propaganda. Given all those certainties, what the hell was he trying to do?

A newly available radio series offers a possible answer. War Telescope, now available at OtrCat.com, was a series of 15-minute programs on NBC, aired weekly through the war years, hosted by Elmer Peterson and Morgan Beatty. All of the segments provide a mix of insight into wartime life and speculation about the coming peace. Many of these insights have been lost in current thinking.

"A European View of the War", aired 2/26/44, may contain the answer to the Stalin puzzle. It focuses on the diplomatic community in Europe, who considered America to be an unstable and unreliable ally. [Robert Parker's 1944 book echoes these concerns.] Our military had saved Europe's ass in WW1 and WW2, but before and between the wars our government had failed to form an intelligent and coherent foreign policy. Would we hold steady after this war, helping the other Allies to conclusively and decisively punish Germany? Or would our financiers and industrialists fall back to their natural preference for Germany, carrying Congress with them as they had done in the 1930s?

From this angle it's easy to see why Stalin wanted to have a firm hand on American policy, wanted to insure that the United Nations Organization served Russia more than America. From this angle, letting America return to normal meant letting Germany return to power. It wasn't mainly about Communism; it was mainly about Russian and European national interest.


= = = = = END REPRINT.

Now, after comparing the 1944 cartoon Краденое солнце and the current cartoon series Маша и Медведь, I suddenly see a larger picture. [Note: The alligator in Краденое солнце was unquestionably Germany. I don't know if Masha is consciously intended to represent America, but her destructive behavior and the bear's sane response form a perfect metaphor in any case.]

Larger picture: Preventing America from linking with a resurgent Germany may have been part of the bear's purpose, but the MAIN purpose of the Cold War was to prevent America from BECOMING the next resurgent Germany.

What actually happened during the Cold War? America didn't start any wars. We got involved in Korea and Vietnam, where we were fighting against China while fooling ourselves into thinking we were fighting Russia. Thus we were serving Russia's purposes. Keeping China occupied and keeping ourselves weak. Both sides were fomenting coups to develop proxy dictators in various third-world countries, but those coups were quick and led to increased stability, not to permanent chaos.

What actually happened after the Cold War? Exactly what the bear had feared, and exactly what the bear had been preventing. We are now Imperial Germany and Imperial Japan, starting wars around the world (but especially around Russia!) for no rational or national purpose. Some of these wars serve Israel's purposes, some are just pure blood-fetish. We are pure violence, pure crime.

The bear was right.

= = = = =

Update one week later: The bear has awakened from hibernation.

Labels: Гром победы

  ¶ 2:45 AM

  Basic marketing question

Still watching the accelerating Satanic roar of Antipopess Francine and the hopelessly delusional misinterpretation by wishful and loyal Romans. Stop defending her, dummies. She's NOT ON YOUR TEAM in any sense of the word. Get OUT now before you lose every scrap of your integrity.

Completely aside from natural law and the specific unmistakable teachings of Jesus, there's a super-basic question of simple numbers and marketing.

Why in hell are ALL supposedly "Christian" churches fighting and competing so desperately for the favors of THREE PERCENT of the population? Why are they so desperately and contemptuously REJECTING the 60% who WANT to belong to actual Christian churches?

It makes no sense COMMERCIALLY. It's like Budweiser focusing all its marketing on Muslims while turning away Germans and sports fans. It's like Cadillac focusing solely on Amish and turning away blacks.

You can't excuse it as an untried theory. We have 30 years of experimental data from two churches that pioneered the Three Percent Appeal, and another that focused on Christ-hungry folks.

What's happened to Anglicans and UCC? Membership down by half. What's happened to Southern Baptists? Doubled.
  ¶ 4:28 PM

  Non-hissing cats
It's always illuminating to notice when an Official Story stops. Satan's media never start being right, they only stop being wrong.

In this case: The Savage Beheadings of Innocent Hikers and Innocent Motorists and Innocent Volunteer Humanitarians (i.e. spies) by Savage ISIL Savage ISIS Savage IS Savage Islamic State.

Savage ISIL Savage ISIS Savage IS Savage Islamic State is the created myth that's so Savage we had to name it four times! It's four [clap] four [clap] four [clap] four [clap] Four Myths in One!

These Savage Beheadings were THE ONLY STORY for two months, especially in the British Satans. Now the story has abruptly halted.

Are we getting ready for another Eurasia Eastasia? Will Savage ISIS Savage ISIL Savage IS Savage Islamic State return to being Our Noble Savior, as it was when we created and trained and armed it in the first place?
  ¶ 1:56 AM

  Corner of SE 14 and Cinderella
After mentioning emptied-out neighborhoods in previous entry, I googlestreeted a couple of areas that I remembered from OKC. Have they been emptied yet?

I'd previously googlestreeted them about a year ago. At that time they looked perfectly familiar, unchanged from 1972. Ready to be emptied. No other destiny.

When I "drove" through them this morning, I thought: Whoa there! Did I type the wrong address?

No. It's the same address, but sometime between 2007 and 2014 it was magnificently gentrified.



Above is 2007, below is Aug 2014. This is typical (though not universal) of the whole neighborhood around Byers and SE14. The houses aren't any bigger, but they're smartly renovated. Presumably some of the occupants are new, but I doubt that everyone was forced to evacuate. So the old occupants are pulling up to fit the new standard.

OKC has broken the boom-bust ratchet! Instead of ripping out the smallest shacks, transform the shacks into cottages ... Then the cottage people will come ... Note the little hipster car! ... And the shack people will either leave or rediscover how to be cottage people ... Which most of them were at one time.

THIS IS THE CORRECT ALTERNATIVE TO EMPTIED-OUT NEIGHBORHOODS.

Double Bravo to OKC for doing it RIGHT!


= = = = =

Later: Presumably most of the work was done by individual contractors and flippers, but the results have a coordinated 'look'. This implies city planning or urging. Those brick mailboxes were starting to appear in the 2007 googleview, and they're all over the neighborhood in the newer picture. They must have been a city effort to give the neighborhood an instinctive and distinctive identity. OKC has been running a clever and productive neighborhood-identity program for quite a while, but I don't see any references to this well-defined little area in online discussions of the program.

When I lived there, the 'perceived boundaries' were the river on the north, SE17 on the south, High on the east, and Central on the west. I did most of my shopping along Central and only occasionally went over to Capitol Hill.

Aha. Here's the only specific description online. The document is a 1994 survey for historic landmarks, which looks down its haughty nose and sniffs:

Shidler-Wheeler #1 district is primarily residential, consisting of bungalows, Folk Victorian, and shotgun houses. Included is a row of brick-veneer shotgun houses on SE15. The area is approximately from SE10 to SE15 and S Byers to S Laird, comprising most of the Central Addition platted in 1908. Many of the houses were built prior to the 1920's; however, many have been drastically altered, some demolished, and a number of inappropriate infill buildings constructed. The survey determined that the area no longer meets the criteria for National Register listing.

Drastically altered? Inappropriate infill? Hmph to you too, assholes.

Infill is a city's salvation.

= = = = =

**Footnote for non-Okies: Shidler rhymes with Idler, not with Midler or something else.

Labels: infill, Shack people - Cottage people

  ¶ 8:09 AM

  ZIRP = Sharpton
This is a wild thought but it makes sense from a Goldman perspective.

Big question: Why is Al Sharpton allowed to do what he does? Why does he have a comfy perch in TV while he starts riots, burns cities, and kills cops?

Chain of logic:

(1) The people who run MSNBC are the same people who run the financial industry.

(2) 50 years ago those financial leaders were firmly opposed to riots because riots ruined their factories. They did everything to prevent riots, using both metaphorical carrots and literal sticks.

(3) Now they like riots and pay Sharpton to keep the cities burning.

(4) Aha! Factories! 50 years ago financial leaders owned those factories, so they wanted American working-class employees, white and black, to be stable and satisfied. Now the financial leaders HATE the idea of putting factories in America because Our Lord And Savior Share Value [pbuh] is maximized by factories in Bangladesh and China.

(5) So they want to make American factories an aversive and impossible thought. They want to guarantee that no maverick financier breaks the spell by reinventing Social Economics as in NCR or Marland or Mohammed. If a maverick starts the trend, others may decide to try the idea, leading to a loss of power and a slight decrease of infinite wealth acceleration for the financiers.

In other words, Al Sharpton and ZIRP and EPA are three flanks of the same scorched-earth policy. Prohibit money from seeking ANY sort of productive investment. No savings, no industry. Go directly to Goldman. Do not pass Ford.
  ¶ 4:46 AM

  Emptied-out
Earlier I noted my dismay at the difference between nice self-contained compiled programming and the sloppy mess of Web programming.

Now that I'm pretty much done with this project, the dismay is even worse. I just finished combing through all 5200 pages of the project to fix a couple of subtle HTML oddities that my 'batch converter' had produced rather consistently. These oddities don't cause errors because browsers are designed to handle them at the moment, but you can't count on quirksmode to last very long. So they needed to be fixed.

In a properly organized programming setup like C++ or Fortran, these oddities wouldn't have made it past the compiler. And if they weren't exactly syntax errors, they could have been caught by various helper tools. There is no quirksmode in C++.

In the current HTML setup there aren't even any usable tools. There are some things called HTML Tidy and HTML Lint, but when you try to use them you find that they haven't been updated since 2007. They don't handle half of the actions that a 2014 web app is expected to contain. They aren't aware of SVG or RWD or browserhacks, so they halt with a flurry of meaningless error messages.

Even the written standards aren't updated to reflect modernity. SVG pretty much stopped developing and standardizing around 2009, while its use continues to increase.

The whole area of standards and checking is an emptied-out neighborhood. It was abandoned in the mad rush to NEW NEW NEW.

So: I had to run through all 5200 pages by hand. I could have written a Python quickie to detect and change the most common problem, but after trying it I realized that good old Eyeball Mk I was indispensable. The most common problem didn't always appear as the same mechanically detectable stream of characters, and my Eyeball was able to catch other oddities plus a few non-HTML problems that QA had missed. The process didn't take nearly as long as it might seem. I kept close track of time, and it amounted to 8 hours spread over 3 days.

Many coders resort to big heavy packages like Jquery or Twitter-Bootstrap to handle the jobs that standards are supposed to do. I resisted pressure in that direction, partly because I'm cranky and old-fashioned, and partly because I don't trust the Open Source situation of those packages. You're not buying a license to use those helpers, so they aren't responsible to your needs. You're relying on the web to fetch the core of those systems, and the web could cut off your access at any time, or divert to something fake or malicious.

= = = = =

Emptied-out standards, big packages. Reminds me of modern American cities. Emptied-out downtowns, compiled neighborhoods extinct, rich folks living in gated communities with private security. No security for the ungated; you have to keep your Eyeballs open and your private weapons ready.
  ¶ 3:36 AM

  Hey! Journalists aren't supposed to reveal FACTS!
When Ebola came to the US, journalists showed some interesting signs of sanity. They were hammering Slithery Snake Frieden with hard questions despite his Royal Blood, and despite the party of the current president. Normally those two factors would silence journalists.

Now they're doing even better. They are finding facts and publishing facts to serve the actual life-and-death needs of the public!

At one time in the distant geological past, this set of actions was considered to be the job of journalists. Sometime before dinosaurs, journalists found facts and published facts to help ordinary people live their lives. In recent generations, of course, journalists have EVOLVED. Now they tell 100% lies, serving the needs of brand-D politicians and super-rich Jews.

The Texas nurse who contracted Ebola while caring for the first person to die of the virus in the U.S. has been identified as 26-year-old Nina Pham. Health officials have not released the nurse’s name, but Yahoo News identified Pham through public records and a state nursing database. Then on Monday, Pham’s family confirmed her identity to local Dallas ABC News affiliate WFAA.

Yahoo News broke through the Slithery Snake Genocidal Privacy Wall and provided ACTUAL INFORMATION, which will enable people who might have had contact with the nurse to get examined.

It sounds like Slithery Snake himself is considering the possibility of considering the possibility that his genocidal theories and mass-murdering Ethics may be only 99.999999999999% perfect and may require a momentary 0.00000000000000000001% adjustment, of course temporarily and on a trial basis. This too is unheard of. Royal Blood never adjusts theories to match facts. Royal Blood fakes facts to match theories. Royal Blood never abandons mass-murdering Ethics, even by an epsilon-sized increment.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 4:22 PM

  Still not convinced
Nearly all of the riots and revolutions in the last 20 years have been run by the US government directly or indirectly. The fingerprints of groups like NudelmanPyatt Chaos Partners LLC are perfectly clear, and the benefit to Israel or Goldman is perfectly clear.

One currently running revolution doesn't fit the pattern. Hong Kong is too far from Israel to be worth the trouble of chaosing, and Hong Kong is already a finance-based economy. Both Morgan and Goldman have major offices in HK and play a large role in its functions.

In earlier times HK was a strong manufacturing center and thus a threat to Goldman, but that was at least 30 years ago.

ZeroHedge is quoting an article in Peking's main newspaper that tries to accuse USA of fomenting the protests. Not convincing. The neocon Nat'l Endowment for Democracy apparently advocated HK riots, but there's no indication of actual training or funding for the rioters. All the other revolutions involved heavy training and support. NED's effort looks more like routine bureaucratic credit-grabbing.
  ¶ 3:38 AM

  Sportwave
Shortwave is unique among all means of communication. It has a certain sporting aspect. When you send out a signal in the range of 3 to 30 mc, the atmosphere may decide to bounce it around the world, allowing you to reach great distances with fairly low power. With higher power, a serious antenna, and lots of experiment and calculation, you can be reasonably sure of reaching a desired destination most of the time. But you're never entirely sure. Sunspots and thunderstorms and temperature inversions and all sorts of other crap may block you. Ham operators enjoy this sporting aspect. Like fishermen they collect wall trophies (QSLs) and run contests and expeditions for bragging rights. Professional broadcasters may not enjoy it but have learned how to exploit it.

Doing a review of a 1983 Soviet shortwave radio got me thinking (again) about the meaning of SW. This radio, clearly for domestic use, proves that the Soviet system was confident about its success in those years. Not so in Stalin's time, when owning a SW was a criminal act, and radio was basically a closed-circuit intercom system.

Within the US, popularity and availability of SW radios inscribed a different curve. SW broadcasting came of age around 1935, basically enabled by the superhet receiver. Earlier receivers weren't able to maintain a consistent sharpness of tuning across a wide range of freqs.



American radios for home entertainment began to feature SW bands as soon as broadcasters began to provide content. SW reached a peak in WW2, when listening to the propaganda of both sides was considered part of an Informed Citizen's duties. Even some car radios had a SW band. Along the same lines, American newscasters frequently mentioned "our propaganda says .... and their propaganda says ....", trusting the American listener with the fact that both sides were stretching things.

After WW2, home radios dropped SW abruptly and picked up FM instead. This coincided with the government's sharp crackdown on 'disloyalty'. Suddenly the duty of an Informed Citizen was limited to line-of-sight propagation. Then TV finished the job, making the viewing experience line-of-sight as well. Propagandists finally fulfilled their perpetual dream: a closed pipe injecting one stream of messages from source directly to brain, with no leakage or tributary streams allowed. No skip, no bounce, no imagination. Best part: the injectees didn't even realize it was a pipe. They only knew that they couldn't stand to be disconnected from the pipe.

This state of affairs continued, with constantly tightening media monopolies and narrowing of permissible viewpoints, until the Internet came along in the mid-80s and broke the monopolies but didn't stop the censorship. The Web is, after all, a closed-circuit intercom system. Everything we see and hear passes through NSA's ears and eyes before it reaches ours.

SW isn't illegal; you can still buy SW radios designed for ham use, but they aren't meant for home entertainment. They don't look good in the living room. This limits their use to a small number of Oddballs who can be watched easily.

Why did US government and culture encourage SW in the '30s and discourage it from the '50s until the present? I think it was a question of confidence. FDR was confident that his efforts to improve America would stand comparison against the alternatives in Russia and Germany. Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, et al were not nearly so confident.

It's especially noteworthy that Russia was building and selling SW radios domestically in the '80s and we were not. Reagan crashed the Soviet Empire at a moment when our own empire truly would not stand comparison. As Gorby was loosening and reforming, we were eliminating industrial jobs, freezing out all possible reforms, and continually narrowing the range of permissible discourse.

Our trend has continued, with disastrous results. We don't know how the Soviet trend would have developed because it was interrupted.

Labels: Alternate universe, infill, Гром победы

  ¶ 7:24 AM