Mostly human
Spokane News opened a poll to count aliens. Are you an alien Mascoid or are you human?



The result has been constant from the start. Total at this point is 23k votes, which is about 20% of the adult population of Spokane. That's a big N for a survey, larger than turnout in primary "elections". Result: 59% humans, 41% vile filthy nasty genocidal alien grotesque Mascoid holocausters.

Labels: Asked and properly answered

  ¶ 11:49 PM

  Active or passive?
Random thought, mainly for my own memory...

I've been using science and anti-science loosely.

Science is both a passive and an active verb. As a passive verb, it was defined best by Carver.

Look about you.
Take hold of the things that are here.
Talk to them.
Let them talk to you.

Or in more conventional terms, observe patterns and check them.

= = = = =

As an active verb, science really means engineering. Find a problem and solve it. Do what works.

BUT: All real problems have already been solved. So real engineers are cautious slow improvers, not innovators. They use methods and equipment and materials that have been tested for thousands of years, and occasionally adopt a new method or material AFTER it has been intensely and thoroughly proved superior to the old.

Elon isn't anti-science, he's the ultimate anti-engineer. He takes problems that have been OPTIMALLY solved, problems that don't even need improvement, and tries to do what never worked.

Lockdowns fit into that category. We have already OPTIMALLY solved the question of immunity. KILLING THE ENTIRE COUNTRY was never IMAGINED until this year, and anyone who proposed it would have been instantly disdained, mocked, and tinfoiled. (Well, it was imagined and accomplished in several places like Ukraine and Germany in the '30s, and Cambodia in the '70s, and Uganda in the '90s, but until now we pretended to disapprove of those older Social Distancing projects.)(Hmm. Come to think of it, there was one Social Distancing project that was equally effective, and we heartily approve it. Dixie in 1861. Not a coincidence.)

= = = = =

Where does public health belong in these definitions of active and passive?

Public health is MUCH more engineering than science.

Public health is primarily sanitation. Indoor plumbing, refrigeration, vacuuming and mopping. Exterminate insects and rodents.

Public health also involves border control, which means fences and gates and buildings to house the inspectors.

Public health also involves vaccinations, which are derived from medicine but mostly need equipment to manufacture the vaccines efficiently and safely, and equipment to inject the vaccines.

Engineering, not science. Only marginally intersecting medicine.

Labels: Asked and properly answered, Carver

  ¶ 1:21 PM

  A better alt-universe question.
In previous item I cited an interesting alt-universe question, then mentioned an unrelated alt-universe question that had been on my mind.

Let's try again with a more appropriate response to the original.

The original alt-universe question from a tech venture capitalist type:

HONEST (not sarcastic): I would LOVE to see the counterfactual world—in a parallel universe (from 1971 to today)—where the price of money, “free markets” and all capital allocation was not distorted by handful of academic decision makers.

Excellent question, gathering the whole problem into one sentence.

Did we have a realistic chance of avoiding Nixon's massive sabotage? As I mentioned in previous item, our offshoring was well under way before Nixon broke real value.

Who recognized the problem in 1958 and could have offered a solution? George Romney.

He was the only sober man in a position of power at that time. Everyone else was passed out, incapable of good judgment. Being the only sober man at a party where everyone else is unconscious has advantages.

He was also firmly committed to SAVING instead of DEBT. Mormon training helped, plus Nash tradition. Nash had made it through the '30s without failing because it avoided debt.

He also had the advantage of Mormon eldership training, which gave him an unusual ability to bring conflicting parties together. He used both his soberness and his negotiating skills to pull Nash up from 'struggling independent' to nearly part of the Big Three, almost knocking Chrysler out of the ring.

At that point someone persuaded him to go into politics. He ran for Mich governor and did the same thing there, fixing problems that nobody had fixed before.

After three terms of success, someone persuaded him to run for president. At that point his sober and accurate judgment bumped into a bigger enemy than GM. When he proposed pulling out of Vietnam, Deepstate destroyed him.

Alt-universe: What if Romney had been a little more sneaky, or had resisted Deepstate's blackmail more effectively? He would have pulled out of Vietnam, turned the country from debt to saving, and countered the threat posed by resurgent Japan and China.

Labels: Alternate universe, Asked and properly answered

  ¶ 11:49 PM

  Missing the melting point
Via ZH, the company that was working on the roof of Notre Dame is denying the possibility that a worker's cigarette could have started the fire.

"We condemn it. But the fire started inside the building... so for company Le Bras this is not a hypothesis, it was not a cigarette butt that set Notre-Dame de Paris on fire," said Le Bras Frères spokesman Marc Eskenazi, who insisted that it would be impossible to set a log on fire with a cigarette butte. He also questioned how cigarette butts could have been found on the site.

Logs aren't the problem because logs weren't the upper surface of the roof. The surface that would have been touched off first was lead. Lead melts at 600F. The tobacco in a cigarette is typically 900F.

A solid wood beam starts to burn around 800F, so it could have been ignited, but that's not the point. Wood wasn't exposed. Lead was.

You could see the order of burning in the videos. The lead sheets melted first, leaving the oak rafters in place for a while. Finally the oak burned.

Even so, it would take more than one cigarette to get the whole thing started. Perhaps there was a pileup of leaves in a crevice or angle of the roof, and the cigarette started the leaves. I still doubt it. I'm still betting that flammable GREEN insulation like polyisocyanurate (aka ROCKET FUEL) was the major igniter or spreader.

Labels: Asked and properly answered, Carbon Cult

  ¶ 1:44 AM

  Good question, useless answer
An article in Aeon starts with an excellent and evocative question:

Should life in jail be worse than outside, on principle?

Author Chris Barker is a prof at a small POST-Christian college (Methodist) in Winfield. You don't see articles by Kansans in fancy websites very often, so I decided to read it.

Unfortunately the author fails to hit the main question. Instead he runs the usual post-Christian crap. He misdefines Populism as usual, and focuses on an odd concept of 'Eligibility' which is never fully defined.



= = = = =

Barker cites two old principles that have supposedly shaped prisons.

1. In 1832, the economist Nassau William Senior described how the ‘first and most essential of all conditions’ in administering relief to the poor is that ... the conditions in the workhouse should be awful: worse even than the poorest of the poor.

2. Jeremy Bentham argued ... a more commonsense equality principle – offenders should have access to no more resources than they had while free.

Principle 1 is understandable but unevenly and inconsistently applied. Principle 2 is crazy. A Mafia boss should be allowed to continue running his empire, but not allowed to increase it. Shkreli should be allowed to continue killing sick people, but only at the current rate. Crazy.

= = = = =

I'll answer the question my way, based on actual experience in prison plus some REAL KANSAN and REAL POPULIST thinking from JM Graybill. (ie the usual Polistran crap.)

Instead of CONDITIONS AND RESOURCES, I'll focus on PURPOSES AND SKILLS.

The basic PURPOSE of life, the GOD-ASSIGNED DUTY of life, is to make more life, more order, more value. Criminals, whether common thieves or bankers or government officials, are in the opposite business. Criminals destroy life, decrease order, ruin value.

In any discussion of handling criminals you have to start with the three sources of criminality, traditionally summarized as "the Sad, the Bad, and the Mad."

How do we turn each of these categories from value-destroyers to value-creators, without adding more danger to the society of non-criminals?

= = = = =

1. The Sad aren't really criminals. They are young Deplorables who hope to gain status and COOLness by associating with the Bad. They start helping gangsters by stealing cars or small amounts of money, and the gangsters use them mercilessly because juvies typically don't get jail time. [When you can hire employees who frequently take 90-day vacations at state expense, or employees who don't take vacations, you're bound to choose the latter.]

We can help them best by training them in a genuinely useful and marketable skill. We should force them to serve as an apprentice creator instead of an apprentice destroyer. In earlier times, before post-Christian idiots used the crazy concept of "rights" to ruin civilization, we actually did use forced apprenticeships, and they worked well.

The crucial point is that the GENUINELY USEFUL WORK must yield a VISIBLE COMPLETED RESULT AT THE END OF EACH DAY. [More often is better but daily is sufficient.] After a year or so, the intrinsic satisfaction of DOING YOUR GOD-ASSIGNED DUTY becomes ingrained, and the daily requirement can be loosened. When you have the taste of doing your DUTY and getting paid, the illicit thrill of criminality fades. Long-term pursuit of goals replaces short-term impulsiveness.

= = = = =

2. The Bad are innately criminal. They are born with a tendency to accomplish goals by destruction instead of creation. This is often described as something for nothing which misses the point. The pro criminal is willing to work hard for a goal, provided the work involves more harm than good.

Ordinary apprenticeships outside the walls won't help, because the pro criminal will find a way to use the work for criminal purposes. So we need to develop and use their creative purpose in a more restrictive environment.

Even now, actual prisons often manage to provide this setup. Again the Sorosian "rights" monsters are constantly trying to get rid of useful work in prison, because "rights" monsters want criminals to be maximally destructive when they transfer to the Sorosian army. The only permissible skill is a skill that enriches Soros.

= = = = =

3. The Mad are outright psychopaths who have no redeeming value, no reformable remnant. In the current situation we use their evil skills beautifully as hedge fund managers, journalists and government officials. A few psychopaths are unfashionably delusional, ie paranoid about something other than Russia. These misguided madmen end up in prison or insane asylums. There's no point in trying to retrain the Mad, whether fashionable or not. Just lock them up.

Labels: Asked and badly answered, Asked and properly answered, Jail mode, Make or break, skill-estate

  ¶ 1:52 AM