Why so much French?
In the last few years I've been focusing a lot on old French technology and the French history that goes with it. Especially heavy this week.

Why? Not from familiarity. I don't have any French ancestry, have never been to any French places, and have only vaguely known one Frenchman. I did own and love a Renault for a while, but I owned a lot more VWs.

Mostly it's just drunk streetlight. The old French books on technology have MUCH better pictures! The diagrams are clear, and the books often have lively and dramatic illustrations of the history and use of the tech. British and American and German books are vastly inferior in this area.

But there's something outside the visual field of the streetlight. French technology, including the Renault I owned, has a humanistic flavor that's hard to define. The controls are designed to use human skills and express human language and emotions.

= = = = =

Semirelevant sidenote: Old French tech books generally have the table of contents at the back, along with the plates and figures. So I'm accustomed to starting at the back in those PDFs. The first thing you see is the checkout slip.

Old books found in the Old Stacks of college libraries weren't checked out often. Back when I was exploring those Old Stacks physically, I was often the first checkout for a book that had been there several decades.

Here's an extreme case:



This book was checked out just once, in May 1880.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, skill-estate

  ¶ 3:34 PM

  Did this happen before?
Random convective thought.

I'm trying to parse out the historical purposes and goals of Deepstate.

After Harding and FDR had constrained Deepstate for a while, Deepstate resurged in 1946. This happened in both US and UK. Deepstate resumed its old tricks, creating "two" "opposing" sides on every fake issue to distract all emotions and discussion from the real issues.

BUT: From 1946 to 1973, Deepstate allowed the real economy to continue growing. Some offshoring was underway in electronics, but nowhere else. The stock market was reasonably stable, with an emphasis on profit instead of SHARE VALUE.

The first time Deepstate decided to CRASH the whole economy was Nixon's oil shock of 1973.

1973 is the only past event that resembles the current CRASH in terms of purpose, except of course that the current CRASH is universal and worldwide and all-consuming.

Intentional ruination is NOT the same thing as stock crashes. Stock crashes are created by one banker, or one faction of bankers, to cover their own shorts and ruin other bankers. Most stock crashes have only a minor and brief effect on the real economy. 1929 was an exception to this general rule.

1973 and 2020 are intentional POLICY DECISIONS BY GOVERNMENT to halt the whole machine in its tracks.

Several other giant switches also happened around 1973. Nixon broke the gold standard, which opened the way for bankers to create money without needing employees or products or factories. Nixon created the EPA, which immediately started to SHUT DOWN big parts of real industry. CIA created the "global warming" panic in 1975, which turned science into witchcraft.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Carbon Cult, defensible times, Shared Lie

  ¶ 11:13 PM

  A post-hoc that would explain two things
Here's a post-hoc based on a few definite facts. Post-hocs are always dubious, but this one would explain two big changes that are otherwise totally mysterious.

Fact 1. All human traits, talents and tendencies are innate and permanent.

Fact 2. Psychopaths are a permanent part of the population, most likely a stable proportion.

Fact 3. In the 1990s we deleted FDR's laws that formerly constrained Share Value demons.

Fact 4. ALSO in the 1990s, ordinary crime dropped, first in NYC and then most other places.

We've never found a satisfactory explanation for Fact 4. Giuliani took credit for it, but the connection didn't really make sense. Increased enforcement of 'broken window' offenses didn't seem to account for the big change everywhere.

Post-hoc 1: See where this leads? The psychopaths who had formerly been managing "ordinary" crime behind the scenes moved into bigger Share Value crime now that it was permitted and celebrated. Psychopaths are INSATIABLE and always aim for the ABSOLUTE TOP where they can OBLITERATE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.

NORMAL PEOPLE WANT SECURITY. PSYCHOPATHS WANT FREEDOM.

Post-hoc 2: And then many psychopaths moved into government, sometimes directly from the Share Value world (eg Trump and Macron and Pritzker), sometimes as chosen puppets of the Share Value Demons. I'm thinking here of Thrill Killer Inslee, a puppet of Thrill Killer Bezos; and Genocidist Newsom, a tool of Genocidist Tim Cook.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Jackboot stomping forever, Jail mode

  ¶ 5:14 AM

  Interesting exception
Exceptions are worth examining.

The "election" this year started normally. DNC blatantly and obviously rigged the Iowa primary. Reassuringly normal.

Sucker Filter. If you're dumb enough to believe that the rigging was incompetence, you're the kind of "voter" both parties want and cherish and cultivate.

But at least initially, New Hampshire seems to have been unrigged. Bernie was allowed to win.

It's always hard to gather a pattern from only two instances, but Iowa and NH are traditionally the most important buildup for our "election" racket.

Two choices.

1. New Hampshire somehow resisted DNC's normal blackmail operations, kept its own functional system for counting votes, and didn't alter the results.

2. This is the rigged and planned result, for reasons that aren't yet evident.

Given the way our "elections" work, (1) is just barely conceivable, (2) is vastly more likely.

A quick hypothesis without any supporting data: William Henry Harrison. Bernie is 78 and had a heart attack or a "heart attack" during the campaign. He won't last much longer, and he knows it. VP Pete will be able to take over almost immediately, and Bernie's fans will fade away without resentment or resistance.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Sucker Filter

  ¶ 12:14 AM

  Me-first, You-first
Yesterday I was bored enough to read quora.com for a while. Quora is a good place for cross-cultural comparisons, often asked as "What habits of nation X are shocking to Americans?" I happened to read some items about Spain that did actually surprise me. Spain is definitely a Me-first culture, where everyone minds everyone else's business and nobody ever yields or thanks.

Quora writers from India are disgusted at the You-first habits of England and non-NYC America. They can't understand why we waste time on gratitude or waste money on paying people for service.

Reminded me that I'd written a pretty decent defense of You-first recently, at a time when my prose generator was working well.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Tulsi's campaign is emphasizing RESPECT:

I really want you to hear this, David: It doesn’t need to be this way. In our movement, we not only respect, but deeply appreciate, that our great nation is made up of a rich diversity of views and attitudes. That progress cannot be made when we fear differences of opinion, resort to cancel culture, or when we allow our leaders and the media to fan the flames of division. On the campaign trail, Tulsi has the opportunity to meet people from across the political spectrum, from all walks of life and with all different (and often very strongly held) points of view. We do our best to ensure that at our gatherings, we create an environment of aloha and respect that is so lacking from our political discourse. We may respectfully disagree, yet we are still able to look each other in the eyes and have a conversation.

It's nice that your bot calls me by name, Tulsi, but frankly I don't see any of that shit in daily life. In this neighborhood, Tulsi, most people mind their own business and treat others with respect and kindness. We are the exact opposite of NYC, which never gives, never pays, never makes, never thanks. We try to yield and tolerate, and we try to be thankful when others yield and tolerate.

Are we really unusual or unique, Tulsi? Maybe, but I doubt it. This area is thoroughbred Deplorable. Lower middle to poor, struggling single parents and comparatively comfortable oldsters. Quite a few homeowners are taking in boarders or hooking up RVs in their yards. Mixed race, about one black family on each block, a lot of NW tribes. No NYC types, no Randians. [The city is dysgoverned by a Randian NYC carpetbagger who has done incalculable damage to the place and the people, but fortunately he doesn't condescend to enter Deplorable neighborhoods.]

So I say yet again that RESPECT is nice, but we're already there. We're doing our job, Tulsi. Talk is cheap, and the old uniter not divider shit is the cheapest of all.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Tulsi, of course, hasn't improved. She's still all talk and no action. I gave up on her a long time ago.

A more important question: How do cultures become Me-first or You-first? It's not simply or clearly genetic.

China and Japan are genetically and culturally close, but China is extreme Me-first and Japan is extreme You-first. China's Me-first isn't new. Earlier writers observed it, and my father observed it when he served in Shanghai in WW2. So it's not just a product of Mao.

The Spanish writers at Quora believed that Spain's Me-first started from the 1936 revolution. Seems possible. Earlier accounts of Spain showed an extreme You-first.

Latitude may be more important than genes. The Me countries tend to be warmer, and the You countries tend to be colder.

One particular set of genes seems to carry You-first. The old tribes of Siberia and America are vectors of You-first. The You-first parts of USA were strongly influenced by the old tribes, and the Me-first parts are more purely Euro. This would also hold true for Japan, where Han Chinese mixed with Siberian genes. Since these genes tend to stay in northern latitudes, this may be the real cause of the latitude connection.

Again, these correlations are weak and breakable, subject to change by major cultural shifts.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 12:30 AM

  We don't want easy
Random thought, probably wrong but I want to pull it out for further examination.

In my long and emotional piece on the Chappe telegraph I wrote:

This system required considerable skill and brute strength. The stationnaires were expected to work 12/7/365 for 38 francs a month, roughly $150 now. They had to watch up and down the line for messages from other telegraphs, and then twist their wrists and bodies to resend the message. No wonder they were easy to bribe.

By contrast, the early dial telegraphs required no skill and no strength, and Morse requires considerable skill and no strength.

Raises an interesting question: Successful systems required either physical strength or mental skill. Telegraphs that anyone could operate didn't succeed.

Is this a general rule? We presume that every improvement in convenience, every decrease in strength or skill, should be immediately popular. In fact it doesn't work that way.

I can think of several examples in the history of automobiles. Synchromesh made shifting much easier, but it wasn't a major selling point. The first full automatic by Sturtevant in 1905 didn't even get noticed; Reo's Self-Shifter in 1933 didn't sell; Hydramatic took 10 years to become popular. Power brakes, relieving effort and improving safety, appeared on most big cars in the '30s then disappeared, and didn't return until the mid '50s.

In household appliances: Automatic ironers were introduced after WW2. A few people bought them, but most preferred the manual way. Kitchens of the '20s were designed so the housewife could sit down while washing dishes or cooking. Later kitchens returned to full standup, and nobody complained.

The same presumption is behind the current push toward "autonomous" cars. Again it's pretty clear from sales and polling that most people would rather do their own driving, and most people are exactly right. In this case the "innovation" is NOT innocent and misguided. The "innovation" is genocide.

LIFE IS PURPOSE.

Within limits, most creatures would rather accomplish their purpose by using and improving their own skills. An invention that eliminates dangerous or extreme exertion will succeed, but an invention that goes beyond the optimum will fail.

= = = = =

This is intimately related to the idiotic Repooflican Tocqueville cultists, who constantly tell us that politicians win because they give free LARGESSE to the "47% Takers". I decisively and definitively debunked Tocqueville. In fact people vote AGAINST largesse, and vote FOR real jobs.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, skill-estate

  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Walls vs psychopaths
Thinking about Gilded Ages 1 and 2, and then thinking about Bernie Scabders. Those thoughts smooshed together to form a new and dubious correlation.

Not new:

Between the two Gilded Ages we had the Union Age, 1933 to 1979. Predatory corporations existed, but they were CONSTRAINED by hardass Fed regulators AND by hardass unions. They knew exactly how far they could grow, and they didn't try to go beyond the limits. They were forced to operate on PROFIT and DIVIDENDS instead of share value, which means they were forced to have EMPLOYEES and PRODUCTS.

I've covered that territory too often.

New thought:

During a Gilded Age, robber barons have names. Everyone can list several robber barons. During the Union Age, there weren't any named or famed robber barons. In fact the most famous leaders were union leaders.

GA1 = Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Mellon, Stanford.

Union Age = Jimmy Hoffa, James Petrillo, Walter Reuther.

GA2 = Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Musk.

In the Union Age the constrained corporations were no longer led by founding families. The founders were still around in some cases, but they kept a careful distance from the companies. In most cases the founders had either died out or pulled out because constrained capitalism was NO FUN for criminals and psychopaths.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 8:38 AM

  Feeling the rotation?
In a discussion about the not-so-mysterious 'hum', one of the participants said that she could feel the earth rotating.

Sounds flaky and mystical? Not necessarily.

Polistra tries to demonstrate how it COULD happen.

The earth has its own magnetic field, which rotates inside the Sun's relatively stable field.

We'll let Polistra stand on the equator for simplicity, with the lines of the Sun's field passing through.



When the earth rotates, it carries Polistra through the sun's field at varying angles.



If Polistra has a good magnetic sense, she would be feeling those lines. (Unsurprisingly, those lines look like the aurora.)



Most humans have a poorly developed magnetic sense, but some could be more talented. Birds and bacteria might be more aware of this motion.

= = = = =

Graphic serendipity: Of course those lines are the aurora, but I didn't try to make them look that way. I just made some parallel cylinders and turned them partly transparent. Poser's buggy handling of multi-layered partial transparencies provided the aurora look, which is rather impressive.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:37 PM

  Possible answer to missing chart point
Yesterday I mentioned that some specific frequencies resonate with specific atoms, potentially disrupting certain proteins or chemicals. AFAIK this isn't a real problem with our all-pervasive electromagnetic radiation, but it got me to thinking along similar lines.

As I detailed here, Nature only transmits electrostatic waves, not magnetic waves. When humans started to develop radio, we mainly used inductive or electromagnetic transmitters and receivers. Dolbear's capacitive system was an exception, but he didn't pursue it.

Why does Nature prefer to communicate with static fields instead of magnetic fields? Most animals have magnetic sensors for navigation, so it would seem efficient to re-use those sensors for communication. But nobody does.**

Two answers pop up immediately.

(1) Blood cells contain iron. If an internal antenna is creating a strong magnetic field, it could 'permatize' the blood cells, leading them to clump or repel each other.

(2) Navigation is too important and subtle to tolerate interference. The earth's field is much weaker than the radiation needed to communicate, so the communication would overwhelm the geosensors, and again possibly 'permatize' them.

** Partial exception: the bee's waggle dance, which is a sort of vector compass pointer based on the earth's field. "Go 30 degrees left of North for five units, then go 80 degrees right of North for three units."

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, bee

  ¶ 3:32 AM

  One adult politician?
I've been whining about the lack of adult leaders in Sorosian lands. Here's at least a potential adult: Richard Ojeda, running for Congress in WVa. He's running as a genuine Populist, anti-crime and anti-corporations. Remains to be seen what he'll do, but he's talking about actual problems and actual solutions instead of mechanical partisan quotes.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Sorosia

  ¶ 3:31 PM

  Garage vestibules?
On my morning walk I was noticing the common practice of building a carport in front of a garage. The extra stage is needed because the garage is permanently filled with stuff instead of cars, so the cars need a new shelter. A few houses have two-stage carports because the first carport is permanently occupied by a non-movable RV.

These carports could be called vestibules for cars.

Back in the 1920s most decent houses had vestibules or screened porches on every entrance, so you could leave wet coats or tools semi-outside and keep the true inside clean and warm.

Did anyone ever build a purposeful vestibule to keep the garage itself dry and warm and unpolluted? A sort of airlock to hold the car while it's warming up, or a place to do repairs and cleaning before storing the car in the clean garage?

Yes! Or at least it was suggested in this 1918 steamfitter's trade journal:

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 10:26 AM

  Was this Agnes?
Among the new arrivals at American Radio History is a typical local 'radio guide' from Los Angeles in 1944. Not especially interesting except for the cartoon on one of its regular features.



Why is this interesting?

The style looks a LOT like Alphia Hart's wife Agnes, who did the page art for the Aberree.




Agnes met Alphia in the Hubbard organization in Phoenix around 1950, and the rest is history.

Was this Agnes? Sure looks like it. Identical style and flavor, similar purpose for art. Locations and dates are "not inconsistent" as they say.

Labels: Aberree, Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 10:13 AM

  Vestigially wrong
BBC's Future section has a mildly interesting article on vestigial features in common objects. Most of the alleged origins make sense, but two of them strike me as wrong. I'm sure of the first one, not sure of the second.

= = = = =

First, BBC claims that the Diner's card has rounded edges because....

In 1949, Frank McNamara was dining with clients at Majors Cabin Grill Steak House, New York. When the bill arrived, he realised that he had left his wallet at home in another suit. There are a lot of rumours about what happened next. ... Regardless of the truth, a year later McNamara returned to the restaurant and paid with a small cardboard card known as the Diners Club Card. This was a landmark step in the development of the credit card – the first multipurpose charge card.

“I had a look in the archive to the first 2,000 that they made. They’re not the same shape that they are now,” says O’Hara. Instead the cards were rounded at the top two corners. “It’s a really unusual shape. The only other example is a rolodex card.”

A Rolodex card was larger than a credit card, rounded on all corners, and had two T-shaped slots in the bottom. No reason to assume it was the origin.

Clipped or rounded corners have always been a desirable feature on cards that need to slip in and out of wallets or pockets. A square corner splits or folds over quickly, making the card unusable and unstackable.

Here's a 1938 example from Billboard:



When Social Security was new, people wanted a more permanent card than the square-cornered card issued by SSA. Vending machine operators obliged with a round-cornered card containing an engraved plate. Library cards and store charge plates were similar, well before the Diner's Card.

Maybe Mr Diner wanted to be unusual. Maybe he printed up the first batch (fairly expensive with engraved serial numbers), realized at the last minute that a sentence on the bottom was improper, then cut the bottom off to meet a deadline.

= = = = =

Second: The article quotes a Wikipedia explanation for America's right-hand driving habit. The explanation seems to have appeared first in Popular Science in 1925.

Then the balance of power shifted. In the United States, wagons were increasingly common on the roads. Drawn by up to 20 animals, they were a popular way of transporting goods over long distances – and the men helming these vehicles liked to drive on the right. They’d sit on the rear leftmost horse, so it was easier to make sure oncoming traffic didn’t get too close if it was also on the left.

There wasn’t any arguing with the momentum of 20 1,000-pound (453kg) horses. Other road traffic quickly got used to driving on the right and the rule stuck. Hundreds of years on, right-side driving is irreversibly embedded in US street design.

Supposedly some drivers of Conestoga wagons formed a national habit. I can't prove this one wrong, but a tendency among some long-distance freighters seems unlikely to set a habit for city streets.

More likely:

In France, traditionally foot traffic had kept right, while carriage traffic kept left. Following the French Revolution, all traffic kept right.

The first keep-right law for driving in the United States was passed in 1792 and applied to the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike. New York formalized RHT in 1804, New Jersey in 1813 and Massachusetts in 1821.

Note the dates. We were consciously following French trends and erasing British tendencies after the Revolution.

This 1799 engraving of Philadelphia streets shows carriages on the right.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 12:30 AM

  How does this work?
Common observation: When I'm short on sleep, all sorts of immune mechanisms and damping mechanisms are weak. Negative feedback fails. Lots of people have noticed and described this in lots of ways. Cult leaders and military trainers use this fact intensively.

Looking specifically at the optical system. Normally the brain has a sort of spatial noise-canceling system that hides the flaws in the retina. When sleep is short the AVC doesn't counteract the flaws, and I see all the sunburns and laserburns accumulated through the years.

How does this noise-canceler work? It's clearly operating way up in the cortex, in an area where the retinal image is rebuilt.

Raw retinal image with burns: (The big slash at lower left happened about 4 years ago when I STUPIDLY looked at the bottom of an optical mouse while trying to clean it. Tip: DON'T DO THAT!)



Up in the rebuilding department, the brain forms a mask from the burned spots. It distinguishes them by a lack of change. Perhaps the mask is a sort of 2-dimensional capacitor, building up more neural charge where the signal is not averaged out by changes. (In other words, a semi-permanent template.)



And then fills in the mask with the details that belong there, acquired by moving the eyes around (saccade).



Finally the filled-in mask is superimposed on the raw image:



Undoubtedly the real mechanism is infinitely more complex, but this is at least one stylized model.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 8:33 AM

  Better explanation
Convective thought.

It's likely that the whole RUSSIANHACKING poison was developed by DNC as a weapon against BERNIE, not a weapon against Trump. All of DNC's war effort, all of DNC's ACTUAL hacking, was aimed at destroying Bernie. Trump was not supposed to be a contender. After Bernie was down, Empress Hillary could safely and easily step onto the Throne and rule forever and ever amen.

Obvious connection 1: If you're going to build a narrative based on collusion with Russia, who is the intended colluder? The candidate who has always described himself as a SOCIALIST, or the candidate who was known as a real estate mogul?

Obvious connection 2: In fact Russian media HAD been favoring Bernie for several years. This was perfectly clear to anyone who read RT and Sputnik. Our media are too stupid to read anything, but operatives like Podesta aren't NEARLY that stupid. RT and Sputnik were NOT Trump fans.

When Bernie was knocked out early by the DNC hacking of primaries, the narrative wasn't needed, so it was turned against Trump, where it required a lot more work to develop nonsensical nonconnections. Our media slavishly obeyed because the Clinton mafia kills disobedient slaves.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 2:38 AM

  Short short stories
How the FBI Came to Doubt the Official Story of Dillinger’s Murder

How the CIA Came to Doubt the Official Story of JFK’s Murder

How Charlie Manson Came to Doubt the Official Story of Sharon Tate’s Murder

How OJ Came to Doubt the Official Story of his Wife’s Murder

= = = = =

One of the above headlines was actually written by actual paid writers.

Granted, it's unlikely that CIA was the sole driving force behind Oswald, but we know with 100% certainty that CIA was deeply involved in watching and AP'ing Oswald. His own motives were pro-Soviet, but CIA and FBI are experts in steering internal motives toward their own criminal purposes.

How can PAID WRITERS and their PAID EDITORS be so totally insulated from all facts and reality that they can't even see the problem with their idiot story?

= = = = =

Partial answer maybe: When I tried to look up obvious and famous murders from various decades to generate more fake headlines, the search yielded very few KNOWN murders and lots of UNSOLVED murders. "Journalists" are uninterested in facts because facts don't allow you to spin a six-month-long soap opera.

Plain facts can't even support a short newspaper item.

Let's try it...

Headline: Who Killed Nicole Simpson?

Story: OJ.

When you're paid by the word or the minute of airtime, a two-letter story isn't profitable.

= = = = =

Wildly irrelevant poetic footnote: On the long headline/short story, I wanted to href the famous Ogden Nash poem about fleas. The online references to the poem agree on the actual poem (Adam had em) but disagree with my memory of the title and authorship. All online mentions say that the poem was improperly credited to Nash, but I read it in a book that was an anthology of Nash poems, published when Nash was alive and while the alleged other author was alive. Presumably the other author wouldn't have allowed the poem to be published and copyrighted in a Nash book. Most of the online refs think the title is simply 'Fleas', while others cite variations on 'Lines about Microbes' or 'Lines about Fleas'. The original title was LONG. Something like 'A disquisition on the historical prevalence and origin of Fleas'. That was the WHOLE POINT of the poem. Long title, short poem.


= = = = =

Wildly irrelevant factual footnote to the wildly irrelevant poetic footnote: Actually Adam didn't had em. Fleas don't like humans because we're hairless. We picked up fleas, along with civilization, from dogs. Seems like a small price, but then dogs always charge us a small price for instruction in love and virtue.

= = = = =

Wildly irrelevant Nashian footnote to the wildly irrelevant factual footnote to the wildly irrelevant poetic footnote: Shouldn't a footnote to a footnote be a toenote?

Labels: Age of Stings, Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 1:52 AM

  SW vs SWARM
Been sleeping poorly in hot weather, which means my physical and emotional skins are thinner than usual, requiring more caution to protect both borders.

Got better sleep this morning, so decided to take a look at some known idiocy. Arstechnica has been leading the warmongers in the techie realm. Are they still at it? Yup, even worse.

This is EXACTLY like 1917, when ALL publications on ALL subjects were SOLELY devoted to stirring up war against Germany. (Which turned out in the end to be more against Russia.)

This is NOT like the 1950s, when mass media pushed anti-Russian propaganda but alternate views were openly available and openly discussed.

Especially among techies, Cold War I was distinctly different. Tech types had strong reservations about going to war.

Why? Biggest reason is obvious. Older tech types in the '50s had served in WW2 and knew what war was like. They didn't want another war.

War experience didn't affect the younger tech types, including me. Why were 1967 techies so much less SWARMY than 1917 and 2017 techies?

Best guess: Shortwave. Hams and SWLs had direct contact with foreigners, including Soviet Bloc foreigners. We knew that Russian techies didn't get to "vote", but we also knew that Russian techies got more respect and better treatment than our techies. We also knew that Russians were not ferocious war-seeking monsters, which made us wonder about the standard depiction by our mass media.



BUT: the Web makes foreign views and personalities vastly more available. Youtube lets you see ordinary people in all countries. You can see their rooms, their streets, their social behavior. Why doesn't this have the same effect?

Best guess: Because the Web makes SWARMING possible. Like-minded people gather in ZeroHedge and ArsTechnica, and gang up on the tiniest hint of heresy. Ganging up isn't possible on shortwave, and ganging is more difficult with paper-based newsletters and mailings.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, switchover

  ¶ 3:28 AM

  Banquets and heckling
Possible positive development in Japan. The US news articles are short on details. All of them say that Yuriko Koike's new party scored a big win over Abe's party in the Tokyo regional government. They call the party "Citizens First", but none of the US or EU media say WHAT the party represents. Japan Times gives more info. In fact the party is not Citizens First, it's Tokyoites first. The name is transliterated Tomin Faasuto no Kai, where Faasuto is the Jap pronunciation of the English word First.

A more complete description is here.

A former TV newscaster-turned-politician, Koike served in key Cabinet and ruling party posts, including defense minister, before becoming the first female leader of Japan's capital in July 2016. Stylish and media savvy, she is a populist whose policies can sway depending on public opinion, experts say. Once called a migratory bird for her repeated party-hopping before settling with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in 2002, she launched a new party in May for Sunday's election: "Tomin (Tokyoites) First." She has put her nationalistic and hawkish stances on defense on the back burner.

Why the English word for First? Japanese has its own words. Maybe the English sounds more powerful?

The party's website is tomin1st.jp again using the English. It's a slow loading site but it's worth the wait. It has a rotator of 'cards' on top, with Jap and English captions. The English is excellent, and the meaning is clear. (TMA = Tokyo Metro Authority, TMG = Tokyo Metro Government)

I've repositioned some of the cards vertically to fit here:



Hmm. Sounds familiar.

= = = = =

I should resist but I won't.

Hey Vince, you know what they call ZZZ in Japan?

No, whadda they call it?

They call it ZZZ, but it's ZZZ-san.

= = = = =

Irrelevant sidenote 2. I can't read it, but the Jap text on those cards looks like Haiku. The pattern is right, and the English version is written as a poem. What would happen if an American populist politician used poetic slogans? Probably the same thing that happens when an American populist politician dares to live and breathe. EXTERMINATION.

Still, it might be fun to go down swinging. Haiku obviously wouldn't be appropriate, since the whole point of nationalism is to use your own culture.

The Kansas populists of the 1890s weren't afraid of verse. Here's a fine example that approaches the flavor of the Tomin First poems:



Strong stuff.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 1:54 AM

  Bryan avenged, sort of, not really.
The Populists of the 1890s were good diagnosers but terrible prescribers. They analyzed the problems of financialism and globalism beautifully, but their proposed solution was always a weakening of the gold standard. Exactly backwards. What happened when Nixon finally killed the gold standard? Final victory for the bankers and globalists.

For some reason the usual Populist Pill was Bimetallism, which mixed 15 parts silver and 1 part gold into a magic token that would destroy all bankers.



Now bimetallism has returned in an equally useless way. In Max Keiser's latest episode he discusses a metal-mix ETF, which supposedly has some properties of a currency. When you buy a unit of this thing, you're supposedly claiming title to a mix of metals stored in bullion warehouses somewhere. The mix is 93.75% silver, 3% gold, and the rest platinum and palladium.

93% sounds familiar. 15 to 1 is 93.33% silver, 6.66% gold.

= = = = =

Is that why they chose 15? Were they consciously beasting gold? I doubt it. 666 wasn't a big deal in 1890. Only a few scholars and offbeat snake-handling churches focused on Revelation themes. Public attention began with TV evangelists in the 70s.



Oddly, Google's Ngram thingamajig doesn't show the pattern. I can't think of a way to distinguish the religious context from incidental occurrences of 666 in technical publications. 666 volts, 666 hours of part-time work, etc. I'd expect the incidental references to be fairly constant over the years; the Ngram is fairly constant, which tells me that the printed publications of evangelists never made it into libraries. There is a mild correlation between the peak frequencies and preparing for war. 1811, 1844, 1917, 1939, 1989. When we are riling ourselves up to attack some foreigners, we talk about the Beast.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, skill-estate

  ¶ 4:58 PM

  Coding well.... not yet
Tech-tyrants and media-demons locked in their bubbles of infinite evil and infinite falsehood SHOULD create a business opportunity for non-demons. This article at Federalist points to several existing alternatives that should be boosted and popularized if we want to slow down Satan's bulldozer.

One caught my attention. Eich, who was Inquisited out of Mozilla for heretical non-satanic beliefs, has gone on to create an alternative company and an alternative browser called Brave.

I immediately gave it a try. Unfortunately it's not ready for prime time, not a proper competitor to Firefox. Eich seems to have missed the main advantage of FF over other browsers: Plugins and extensions. Most important of all is the download helper. Brave doesn't have a built-in downloader and hasn't yet found or developed a plugin for the purpose.

When you're developing a brand-new device or software for a totally new purpose, you have to build the whole system at once. Content, carrier, accessories.

But this is NOT a brand-new device. This is directly competing with an existing device. When you're trying to compete with an existing device or software that has slots for accessories, the FIRST thing you do is rig your new device or software to accept the SAME accessories seamlessly. A new kitchen stove should heat existing pots and pans. A new coffeemaker should use existing filter papers. A lamp should use existing light bulbs.



Eich's team hasn't done this. They're asking users to suggest plugins for adaptation, which means the API slots are not the same. If the slots were the same, you could simply transfer your extensions as easily as you transfer your bookmarks.

I desperately WANT to support this effort. Coding well is the best revenge. Unfortunately Eich hasn't done it yet.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered

  ¶ 12:06 AM