Deluxe Schadenfreude
Got some kind of flu or cold again. Third time in 12 months; clearly triggered by lack of sleep plus stress each time.

So won't be writing much. However, this news item is so fully packed with sweet Schadenfreude that it has curative powers!


Even sweeter and vastly more important: America finally joins the list of sane countries that are abandoning hippieshit wind "power".

The wind power industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit failed Thursday in Washington.

The move is expected to have major ramifications in states such as Illinois, where 13,892 megawatts of planned wind projects — enough to power 3.3 million homes per year —

Ooops: Correction needed here. Wind turbines do not power anything. They consume natural gas or coal power, and very efficiently kill birds and bats.

Continuing:

...are seeking to be connected to the electric grid. Many of those projects will be abandoned or significantly delayed without federal subsidies.

There is still a possibility the wind power tax credits could come through as a stand-alone bill or tied to other legislation. But Washington insiders say that is unlikely to happen before the election in November.

By then, the wind industry says, it will be too late to avoid massive layoffs and project delays, because wind projects slated for 2013 should already be far along.

The tax credit, which debuted in 1992,

That last line deserves to be left standing on its own.

ALWAYS REMEMBER WHO BROUGHT US ALL THIS SHIT. ALWAYS REMEMBER WHO PUNCHED THE OVERDRIVE BUTTON ON THE MARAUDING ENEMY ARMY EPA. IT WAS YOUR DEAR "CONSERVATIVE" BUSH SENIOR.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 3:46 AM

  What is Switzerland for?
News:

Swiss scientists plan to launch a "janitor satellite" specially designed to get rid of space junk, the orbiting debris that can do serious and costly damage to valuable satellites or even manned space ships.

The $11-million US satellite called CleanSpace One — the prototype for a family of such satellites — is being built by the Swiss Space Center at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne, or EPFL.

Couldn't resist.
  ¶ 8:52 AM

  Obama starting to campaign against Santorum?
Obama has always made the right noises about manufacturing and outsourcing. But until now he's never made any specific proposals to solve the problem, and has happily gone along with the usual Free Trade shit.

Now he's finally getting exact:

Appearing at a Milwaukee padlock plant, Obama said the U.S. must do everything it can to make it more attractive for American businesses to stay put and grow here home, and "one place to start is with our tax code."

The president visited Master Lock, a manufacturer that has brought jobs back to the United States. Reprising ideas from his State of the Union address, Obama asked Congress to approve tax system changes right away, including a minimum tax on multinational companies so that American firms can't skirt taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. He also pushed for tax breaks for businesses that move into communities that have been hurt by factories leaving town.

Wonder if he's starting to feel heat from Santorum?

The Leninist media, both "right" and "left", have been dismissing Santorum as "just a Catholic social-issues suckup", but his audiences are picking up the whole picture. He's been advocating American production for a long time, as an integral part of the moral message. The media can't understand this.

Plain fact: If you want to return marriage and stability to the working class (both black and white), you must first return decent jobs to working-class MEN (both black and white). Decent jobs must include industrial jobs of all types, not just super-refined high-tech jobs.

Mildly optimistic sidenote: This is how party politics is supposed to work. When both parties trade meaningless slogans while agreeing on everything important, the country is fucked. But when an opposition candidate makes a real argument that resonates with a large segment of the public, a smart incumbent will adjust real policy to damp down the opponent.

FDR succeeded partly because he had two deadly serious opponents in Father Coughlin and Huey Long, who were resonating deeply and violently with large parts of America. And they were resonating for damn good reasons.

FDR had to head them off at the pass or lose the whole country. If the useless Repooflicans had been his only opposition, he wouldn't have been forced to do anything. He could have coasted along, copying Hoover while spouting anti-Repooflican slogans.
  ¶ 1:00 PM

  More false flag
Several "failed and unprofessional" Persian attacks supposedly attempted to harm Israeli targets in India, Gruzya, and Siam. Western experts are "puzzled" by the unprofessional and ineffective nature of these supposed attacks, and the one in India seems "counterproductive" because India is more or less friendly to Persia.

IPR can't figure it out.

I can.

False flag by Mossad.

Remember the earlier false-flag attempt in October. Supposedly Persia was trying to hire a Mexican gangster to assassinate a Saudi ambassador. That one was so obvious and absurd that most commentators, even at IPR, couldn't bring themselves to support the official Isramerican story.

But when you're trying to stir up a war, facts never matter. Ask William R. Hearst. Ask Lyndon Johnson. Ask Rupert Murdoch. Ask Gary Knell.
  ¶ 8:02 AM

  Salute to Canada
Polistra thinks a salute to Canada is timely. Today is their Flag Day, and Canada has been showing considerable sanity.

First, Canada didn't have a financial crash in 2008 because Canada never repealed its 'Glass-Steagall' type laws. Unlike US and UK, Canada never surrendered to Goldman.

Second, after many years of following Gaia even more zealously than we did, Canada is seriously cutting loose from Green Suicide. Canceling subsidies for hippieshit wind "power", officially pulling out of the Kyoto tyranny, and opening wide to oil and gas exploration.

Why does Canada hold firm against Goldman and recover more quickly from insanity? Because it retains a natural parliamentary system. When we switched to our purely abstract republic in 1776, based on lunatic Philosophical Theories about "rights" and "equality", we created the conditions for total paralysis and total corruption. It took a long time, but we arrived at the destination in 1989, and now we're just about dead.




Radio Canada ran its own brief salute to Flag Day this morning, including a soul-stirring rendition of the old Maple Leaf anthem in Sacred Harp harmony. Makes me wonder why they stick with the drab and vague 'Oooooooo Cannnnadaaaaaaaaaaaa' anthem when this perfect and snappy little song is available!


= = = = =

2/20/12:

Canada is getting even better:

Canada has threatened a trade war with European Union over the bloc's plan to label oil from Alberta's vast tar sands as highly polluting...

"Canada will not hesitate to defend its interests, including at the World Trade Organisation," state letters sent to European commissioners by Canada's ambassador to the EU and its oil minister.

ABOUT FUCKING TIME! The elderly lunatic mass-murdering wacked-out hypercriminals of EU are finally getting some serious punchback from countries with real influence. (It wouldn't matter if, say, Belize or Mali threatened a trade war.)
  ¶ 1:59 AM

  Non-barking dogs
The usual neocons aren't barking very loudly at Obama's proposal to cut our A-bomb arsenal by 80%. Nothing on NRO, nothing on Daily Caller, minor mentions on Drudge and Newsmax. Only Weiner alias "Savage", the pure neocon transparently pretending to be an "independent", hit it hard today.

Wonder if most of the usual suspects are coming to terms with post-Cold War reality? Or are they remembering that their boy Bush eliminated ALL of our neutron bombs in 2003 under an agreement with Putin?

In either case, the cut is sensible at this point.

Bush failed to use the bombs on 9/12 when he should have thrown a few at Arabia. Now the world knows that we're not going to use them in ANY circumstance. Zero deterrent value.

Also, the weapons wonks at CFR and other think-tanks have been quietly warning that the bombs may not even be functional because of poor maintenance. Those are complex devices with lots of old electronics and several stages of chemical explosive. The nuke material has been irradiating the electronics and chemicals for 40 years, which is known to cause damage. Details are classified, but the wonks say maintenance has been badly neglected. And if the CFR boys have reached that conclusion, you can be damn sure the Chinese have also figured it out. They have spies everywhere.

So our A-bombs don't deter and probably won't work. Definitely time to recycle the material into reactor fuel, as we've already been doing with old Russian bombs.
  ¶ 5:05 PM

  It's that awful ColdWarming again!
Classic set of headlines on today's Anti-Scientific Anti-American website.



I've highlighted the two Andes items just in case it's not obvious....

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 5:50 PM

  AUDIN rebuild
Putting this up front in the unlikely event that someone was waiting for the fix to AUDIN, my old public-domain audiology courseware.

This week, after seeing indications that people were actually downloading the program, I decided to check out the setup file to be sure everything is OK. It wasn't OK! The setup file had acquired a virus. I located the original CD and set up AUDIN on my computer, in order to build a new installer.

While playing around, realized the existing version (built in 2004, tested on 98 and XP) was crashing in Win 7.

For what it's worth: the problem was memory 'access violation', and it came from using HeapAlloc/HeapFree for class constructors/destructors, instead of GlobalAlloc/GlobalFree. It appears that I wrote it first using Global, then switched to Heap for some unrecorded reason. Perhaps the Heap pair ran better in Win 3.1 or some other very old system.

I switched back to GlobalAlloc/GlobalFree, recompiled with newer Visual C++, and built a new installer in dull but standard MSI form.

Now it works for sure in Win 7 and Win 2000-Server. I no longer have an XP computer for testing, but if it works in 2000-Server, it should also work in XP.

For more background, see here.

Download the new setup file here.

NOTE: Because the stupid website refuses to download an MSI file for stupid "security" reasons, I had to change the file to "AUDIN-SETUP.msi.txt" for permissible download. Just rename it without the .TXT part and run it to install AUDIN.

There is also a ZIPPED container including the same MSI. For some reason the stupid website handles a ZIP but won't handle an MSI by name.

Update 5/19/2015: Modified and rebuilt the program again to make it look right on newer displays. It was 'hard-wired' for 800 x 600 and looked too wide on bigger displays. Now it's not resizable, but holds its correct aspect ratio. Same names for files as above.
  ¶ 5:06 PM

  Best article of the year
Last week I noted (and transcribed) a wonderful BBC interview with Mahathir Mohamed, former prime minister of Malaysia. He advised Europe and America to get realistic, to start producing instead of manipulating, to stop living rich when there's no real money.

He observed that Asians are more realistic:

"When we are poor we live as poor people."

Now it appears that one part of Europe may finally be absorbing facts, coming to terms with reality.

In a beautifully written article on Greece by Maria Margaronis:

When you ask people on the street if they would rather Greece went bankrupt than submit to further measures, many now point out that it is already bankrupt, that public sector workers have gone unpaid for months, that hospitals have no supplies, that the poor are being wrung dry in order to pay the banks. "Let's get it over with," a woman who works for the education ministry said to me. "Then we'd know we only had €250 a month and we could start again.

Mahathir Mohamed would approve!

I have to quote the final paragraph, simply to bask in the reflected glory of perfect logic and lyrical prose:

The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what's really at stake here is not Greece's identity but Europe's. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.

How can anyone dare to support the EU after reading that?

The dismal answer: Because Goldman maximizes its profit when EU eats its children. That's all we need to know.

=======================================

Meanwhile, one of EU's most valuable children is screaming in pain, but EU continues to rip out its guts:

Global planemaker Airbus joined a chorus of concern that a European scheme to charge airlines for carbon emissions risks triggering a full-blown trade war, with implications for plane deals and even Europe's crippling sovereign debt crisis.

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), introduced on January 1, has drawn howls of protest from airlines around the world, with China banning its carriers from taking part.

Airbus Chief Executive Tom Enders said he was increasingly concerned at the potential fall-out if tensions are not defused. "I am very worried about the consequences of that. What started out as a solution for the environment has become a source of potential trade conflict and that should be a worry for all of us," he told an aviation conference on Monday ahead of the Singapore Airshow.

EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas acknowledged the growing opposition to the scheme, and said he was willing to be flexible in finding a solution, but the 27-nation bloc would not bow to pressure to suspend the scheme, which it says is part of a global fight against climate change.

"Trading Scheme" = Profit for Goldman.
"Fight Against Climate Change" = Profit for Goldman.
All you need to know.
  ¶ 3:03 AM

  Perfect summation
Perfectly phrased description of Modern Times in an NPR interview with Anne Rice.

"If there's a modern temper, it's that we are alone now. A lot of the institutions in the past that gave us guidance are now suspect or moribund."

Needless to say, this was the ultimate goal of Stalin and his agents in America. Didn't work in Russia, but worked perfectly here.

Stalin and Betty Friedan, who are spending eternity raping each other, looked up from their mutually condign punishment and smiled for a moment.
  ¶ 8:47 AM

  Confusion comes to a head, maybe
Hardly surprising news:

Zawahiri gives support to rebels in Syria, and part of the violence there is believed to be run by al-Qaeda.

As I noted a year ago, this shouldn't have surprised anyone. Nevertheless, both "sides" of American politics are completely confused and convoluted by the whole Arab Spring.

I'm cheering for these uprisings from a nationalist perspective.

Stalinist multi-culturalism doesn't work. 60 years of misery and chaos in US and EU have proved that beyond a doubt.

Muslim countries should have Muslim rulers, Christian countries should have Christian rulers, and people who violate the standards of each culture should expect to have trouble. That's called civilization, and it does work.

But cheering is not the same as material support. On the governmental level we should be standing back. Way back. No sanctions, no military aid, no diplomatic pressure, no air support, no troops. Just let it happen. Don't jump in on either side. We're too fucking stupid to predict the consequences of an intervention, as the last 60 years have also proved beyond a doubt.
  ¶ 4:05 AM

  Real capitalism
The textbook form of the Free Market still works in niches where Wall Street and its cute little pet governments haven't ruined things!

A group of traveling prostitutes suspected of settling in Spokane told police they were making good money here because the local competition is so ugly.

One woman is in custody and other arrests are possible as part of an ongoing investigation into a 36-year-old California man who investigators believe has been brokering sex deals while living out of motels in Portland, Seattle and Spokane. Two motel rooms in Spokane were searched this week.

Shaquisha L. Jenkins, 22, was arrested on a misdemeanor prostitution charge Tuesday when the Spokane Regional Gang Task Force searched rooms at the Stratford Suites, 11808 W. Centre Lane in Airway Heights, and the Bel Air Motel, 1303 E. Sprague Ave. in Spokane.

A Spokane police officer contacted Jenkins and an 18-year-old woman on East Sprague Avenue Jan. 31 and was told “that because there is a lack of attractive prostitutes in the area, they are able to make fairly good money,” according to court documents.

No chance of a discrimination lawsuit, no complaints from NOW/NARAL. Just facts and realism!

Sidenote: Though I haven't window-shopped in the East Sprague big-box stores in many years, I'll admit that the merchandise I see on the bus lately tends to verify the esthetic judgments stated in the article.
  ¶ 5:22 PM

  Not a universal curse
Polistra recently discussed the 'Curse of Natural Resources', the idea that a country is generally better off without a valuable resource like oil or diamonds.

Taki has a vivid account of Nigeria's cursedness, with constant civil wars between various tribal and religious factions driven by oil. We've seen the same thing across Africa and Central Asia for a LONG time.

It's easy to see why this happens.

A resource-poor country like Japan needs oil and has none of its own, so Japan has two choices: (1) Take over the world; (2) Make enough money to buy oil. Japan tried the first choice from 1905 to 1945. Fun while it lasted, but rather unpleasant at the end. Since 1945 they've taken the second choice, which turned out a lot better for Japan's own people. They work productively, they receive money for work, and they don't get bombed.

The exact same thing happened to Germany.

Resource-rich countries like Nigeria or Iraq or Congo have plenty of oil or diamonds or copper, so they don't need to learn how to work. In such places the reciprocity is not Work for Money, but Ownership for Money. The tribe or government or rebel group that owns the resource-bearing land gets the money. Net result: endless war.

But the curse is not universal. North America has plenty of natural resources but doesn't fight tribal wars about them. Oddly enough, our biggest dispute is not about who gets to own the resources, but whether we get to use them at all. Normal businesses are trying to extract the oil and copper and gas in a civilized way; the marauding enemy army EPA is trying to prevent us from extracting any of it.

Why no curse? Maybe because our culture came from England, a resource-poor island. Admittedly the colonization of North America happened because England was trying to take over the world at that time, but England's reason for colonizing here was agriculture, not minerals. Thus the emphasis was still on working, not extracting.

It's one hypothesis, anyway.
  ¶ 5:59 AM

  Untwisting an axis
Today's mini-furore over the contraception provisions of Obamacare shows a very slight return toward the natural alignment of parties and ideologies.

Popes in the 20th Century have consistently favored more 'socialistic' economic views, with the state protecting the poor against the rampaging rich. Popes have also consistently favored protecting life in all conditions. They've gone beyond proper Christian moral logic in recent years as they reject the death penalty, but before that change their position on all aspects of human existence was fully consistent with Christ. He founded a church of the oppressed, not a church of the elite. Anyone who is endangered by the wealthy and the powerful should be protected by his church; and that includes helpless unborn infants who are endangered by their more powerful mothers.

In Europe, Catholic political parties (usually called Christian Democrats) have run along the same lines, and still do.

American politics also followed the same lines until 1973. FDR held most of the Catholic voters because he was truly on the side of the poor, firmly restraining the vultures of Wall Street. Republicans held Protestant voters by supporting the vultures. In those years most of the big vultures were Presbyterian, and other Protestants felt their interests aligned with the vultures. (Evangelicals weren't a significant faction at that time.)

In 1968 the two parties switched part of their message, for reasons that didn't make much sense. Democrats picked up the value set of the old rich, which is also the value set of the criminal class at the bottom and the hippie children of the bourgeoisie.

Republicans then picked up the value set of the bourgeoisie, which included most Catholics.

At the same time, the parties retained their original economic positions. On economics, D was still nominally aligned with the working class and R with the old rich.

Roe v Wade in 1973 hardened up this strange twist. Catholics and Evangelicals, whose economic interests should have been D, moved to R. Presbyterians and similar anti-Christian Protestants, whose economic interests should have been R, moved to D. The richest of the rich are now Jews, who learned to be Democrats when they were mainly poor; they stayed with D but switched from economic loyalty to values loyalty.

And there we've stood ever since. Neither party has a consistent set of values, so American politics has degenerated into pure team-cheering and meaningless random slogans, attempting to swing those few hundred Floridians whose votes actually count. Nobody else exists.

There have always been a few members of Congress who stayed with the old consistent lines, making them 'incomprehensible mavericks' as seen from the conventional twisted view. Ron Paul is a pre-1968 Republican, favoring the economic interests AND the hippieshit values of the super-rich. Marcy Kaptur (and several other Rust Belt types) are close to pre-1968 Dems, favoring the economic interests AND the strict values of working class Romans.

= = = = =

If NPR's analysis of Obama's backdown is valid, he's acting out of respect for the more socialistic Dorothy Day-style impulses of Catholics. If so, this little halfway compromise could start to untwist the large contradiction.
  ¶ 5:23 PM

  Tin ears
Lots of 'tin ears' in the news.

Misteromney gives us a fresh example every day. Not concerned with the poor, loves to fire people, and so on.

Jerry Sandusky wants to get out of house arrest so he can visit his grandkids.

Bernie Marcus and other rich bastards think they're doing smart PR when they say things like "Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?"

Pseudoscientist charlatans think they're doing smart PR when they say things like "The social controversy over climate change is in part due to climate change denial. In order to defend and support the teaching of climate change, it is important to understand — and be able to rebut — arguments about climate science, and to understand why people choose to attack such well-tested science."

= = = = =

A generation ago these 'tin ears' weren't nearly as common.

Wrong-doers weren't innately different then. They didn't have any more conscience about their wrong-doing than now. They slept easily, just as modern wrong-doers sleep easily.

But old-fashioned malefactors had a clear intellectual understanding that their deeds were abnormal and disapproved by the rest of society, and knew how to avoid saying such brazenly dumb things!

I'm inclined to blame our tight caste system.

A couple generations ago, most people shopped in the same stores, rode the same streetcars, and attended the same movies and organizations.

Most of us smoked the same cigarettes, which gave us a natural ice-breaker. Most didn't brush our teeth regularly, most didn't shower daily. We were much less fussy about smell.

Rich folks had to ask a poor stranger for information at times, teaching them that poor strangers were capable of knowing things; poor folks had to answer a rich stranger's question at times, teaching them that rich strangers didn't know everything. Now Siri has taken over this job, allowing us to keep our pet illusions about strangers.

Rich people had black American domestic servants who schooled them in working-class ethics. (Redundant: should just say ethics.) Vice-versa, the blacks serving in rich homes understood with perfect and cynical clarity how rich bastards behave. Now the rich have disposable Mexican servants who barely speak English and go home to Mexico when they're fired.

The bad/good distinction also works both ways. Modern wrong-doers can't picture how a normal mind works, how a normal mind perceives their words. Vice-versa, modern innocents fail to understand how the criminal or con-man mind works, and can't conceive that the criminal sleeps well at night. They say fantastically stupid things like "Well, I'd rather see him get life than the gas chamber, because life will give him time to regret his mistakes." No it won't, you hopeless idiot. Life will just give him time to train lots of young criminals.

= = = = =

Bet you're expecting me to issue a disclaimer. Expecting me to say "Well ha ha, we may look back fondly on olden times, but we wouldn't really want all of that to return, would we? We can't go back to racism, classism, ageism, fatism, somethingelseism, homophobia, somethingelseophobia, etc, etc, etc. We're past all that now. This is, after all, 2012, ha ha."

Nope. Not gonna say that.

All of those idiotic -ism words are fancy Orwellian ways of saying just one -ism.

REALISM.

We could go back to realism if we wanted to. We don't want to, because we've been hopelessly stupefied by 57 years of Die-Versity in "laws" and "courts", 57 years of Leninist propaganda on TV.

And even if some of us wanted to recover realism, we know perfectly well that the Gulag awaits, the Delta Force is ready to rumble. Not worth it.

Labels: Ethics

  ¶ 9:05 AM

  Language update for Feb


Professor Polistra has gathered a pretty good load of verbal ratshit for this season's Language Update.

= = = = =

Curating:

Formerly just museums, now suddenly applies to any type of organizing or collecting activity.

"One big benefit of curating your Facebook feed..."

"Absolut Soni explores the past 20 years with curating space with mixed media installations from audio-visual to sculptures and couture..."

"Although we'd like to think that nothing genuine can come from curating a bevy of social media platforms..."

= = = = =

BCE / CE:

Secular tyrants have taken this up with a vengeance lately.

"The earthquake happened in 529 BCE. That means Before The Common Era."

They always specify what BCE means, so that we unwashed unenlightened unprogressive religious yahoos can perhaps gain a slight vague glimmering of the Enlightened Progressive Secular Scientific Gift that has been bestowed upon our lowly undeserving ears.

YOU AGGRESSIVE CONDESCENDING MOTHERFUCKING SCHOOLYARD BULLIES, WE ALREADY KNOW PERFECTLY FUCKING WELL WHAT BCE MEANS. BCE MEANS "I'M A HIGH PRIEST WITH MANY GRADUATE DEGREES, AND YOU'RE A DUMB FUCKING IGNORANT LOSER." LISTEN, ASSHOLES, IF YOU ACTUALLY WANTED TO COMMUNICATE FACTS TO US, YOU WOULD SPEAK NORMAL FUCKING ENGLISH. IN NORMAL FUCKING ENGLISH, THE TWO ERAS ARE CALLED BC AND AD, NOT BCE AND CE.

These monsters smash civilization with every single fucking toxic nasty filthy word they utter, and then they wonder why HUMANS fail to respect them.

Tumbril time, citoyens.

= = = = =

Contextualize:

100% Pure buzzword. Zero calories, zero semantics.


"But those fires were in the forests of south-east Australia – nowhere near the savannahs of northern Australia where you propose introducing elephants. We had to contextualise."

"The post has been expanded to better contextualize Sen. Jeff Sessions’ remarks."

"As for Mr. Payne, he responded curtly when asked about Searchlight’s shifting strategy this week. 'Ask the studio,' he said. 'I just make them. I don’t contextualize them.'"

"In that way, we can all reap the privilege of being able to contextualize ourselves through life’s toughest hurdles."

= = = = =

Personal Journey / Evolve:

Another name for re-education, another name for Room 101. The end of every Personal Journey is I Love Die-Versity, I Love Fag Marriage, I Love Free Trade, I Love Open Borders. Not one iota of thought remains in my vacuum-packed brain after my Personal Journey. My vacuum-packed brain functions only to receive and implement today's Official Diktat from every single program on my Official Cable TV Telescreen.

The endpoint of Evolving is the same. Humans are rapidly Evolving in the direction of total chaos and destruction of our species. Darwinists should be protesting loudly at the abuse of Evolving to mean Eliminating reproduction, but they won't protest because they are not really Darwinists at all. They're just bloodsucking Death Fetishists like the rest of the mass-slaughtering ruling class.

One question to you Commie fuckheads: If you're really Darwinists, how come you believe that your own personal belief set as of this millisecond is the ultimate absolute final conclusive goal of all conceivable evolution? And if you look back to, say, last year, you also felt that your own personal belief set as of that millisecond was the ultimate absolute final conclusive goal of all conceivable evolution. No further progress was possible. What happens if your personal belief set, rigidly obeying the commands of your 500-foot plasma telescreen, adopts a different belief next week? Since this week's belief is the ultimate, does that mean next week's belief is impossible?

Classic example of both from Gov Gregoire:

Governor Chris Gregoire of Washington wishes she'd supported marriage equality for gays and lesbians years ago -- and she hopes President Obama evolves in his thinking soon. But she respects the president’s “personal journey” and asked people to “give him the time” to see it through.

= = = = =

Tri-Yoka:

Probably unique, but worth recording and watching because pronunciations spread through the elite. The latest futile effort to keep Greece enslaved by the monstrous EU conspiracy is run by EU itself, IMF and Euro Central Bank. This Gang Of Three calls itself the Troika for some reason. One commentator on Bloomberg this morning pronounced it "Tri-Yoka", which is accidentally appropriate. Troika literally means a sled or vehicle pulled by a yoke of three horses.

= = = = =

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 4:52 AM

  Fraser Nelson gets it
Nelson in the Telegraph:

But the Bank of England cannot create wealth. All it can do is transfer it, from savers to debtors. Every extra penny enjoyed by those whose mortgage rate is now lower than inflation is a penny not going into a savings account – and the full effects are only now becoming apparent.

As those in the pensions industry know, what is happening is nothing short of a crisis. Pension Corporation, an insurance firm, estimates that the hole blown in British company pension schemes by the first round of QE was £74 billion. Firms are legally obliged to make up this shortfall – so they will need to find £20 million a day of real cash to repair the damage.

Same in US. Substitute Arch-Criminal Bugsy Bernanke, Greatest Thief In History, for Sir Mervyn King, and substitute Federal Reserve for Bank of England.

It's not just pension schemes that suffer, it's also insurance companies and the people who buy insurance. Many pension funds and insurance companies have legal or contractual restrictions on the types of investments they can make. With safe bonds yielding negative interest, those companies are earning less. This forces insurance premiums to go up.

I'm puzzled by this. Surely pension funds and insurance co's are big enough and financial enough to have influence in Congress. Why haven't they complained? Or if they have complained, why hasn't their influence moved Congress? I suppose the answer is obvious: Goldman Sachs wants it this way, and nothing else exists.

= = = = =

Update 2/14/2012: Pension plans in Britain are finally starting to complain publicly. I guess Goldman holds only 99.9999999% of the cards there.
  ¶ 3:11 AM

  BRAVO OBAMA!
Obama the Texas Cowboy Oilman is leaving Bush the Gandhian Green Hippie in the dust.

Two new nuclear plants APPROVED FOR CONSTRUCTION, for the first time since Three Mile Island!

Time for Polistra to do the Energy Dance, not seen in a few years:



  ¶ 2:00 PM

  Lake Vostok
News:

Valery Lukin, the head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, said reaching the lake was akin to the Americans winning the space race in 1969.

"I think it's fair to compare this project to flying to the moon," said Lukin, who oversaw the mission and announced its success.

My first response to Lukin's moon-landing comparison was "Yeah, okay, you Russkis were late to the moon so you have to say that."

Then I thought about it for a moment. He's perfectly right. Maybe more than right.

We've been examining the moon forever. In fact, plants and animals have been shaping their lives around the moon's influence for as long as life has existed. And humans have been looking closely at the moon with telescopes for 400 years. Our moon landings didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

This under-ice Great Lake is much less familiar, much less explored, than the moon. We didn't even know it existed until 30 years ago, and we haven't been able to 'see' it at all until now.

When your entire culture is based on sadistically aggressive imperial expansion, you're blind to most aspects of reality. When your only question is "What's out there?" you never ask "What's in here?" After the end of the Space Race a few Americans are starting to ask the latter question, which turns out to be far more interesting and USEFUL.
  ¶ 9:34 AM

  Burble
Since I've been paying more attention to the outdoors I've been noticing California Quail on and around my tiny property.

A couple years ago I began to hear their distinctive call occasionally, and enjoyed the tone which reminds me of Martha Mears. Last summer a family of quail settled in a little micro-forest, about 30 by 8 feet, along the west side of my yard. This copse is bounded on the back by a fence and on the front by tall yellow roses. In between are a dozen narrow trees or shrubs. In summer the ground under this micro-forest is nicely shaded and cool; in winter it stays fairly dry; and the thorny roses block humans and dogs. Good shelter for a quail-sized animal.

Most likely the quail decided to stay when I was planting and reseeding the back yard to replace the trees and pine crap that had made the yard unusable. They consumed about half the seeds that I put down. Seemed like a fair bargain in exchange for the entertainment they provide. Plump critters marching around in formation with their cartoonish head-antennae bobbing up and down: just plain fun to watch.



= = = = =

Related bit of science: Univ of Surrey is looking into the human impact of bird sounds.

Listening to five minutes of birdsong every day can be said to help beat the winter blues, but what other benefits can it bring? A new three year research project that will look into the impact of birdsong on human wellbeing and behaviour is being launched today by the University of Surrey in partnership with the National Trust and Surrey Wildlife Trust.

These quail produce one sound that soothes my soul. When foraging they burble together, sounding like 'wurp? wurp? wurp?' Unmistakable meaning even to my dull mammalian brain: We're all here. We're all here. We're all here. We're all here.

Humans don't make that sound, though I suppose small talk or humming while working may serve the same purpose.

Clearly there are common acoustic elements in the sounds emitted by most vertebrates, and there are common mechanisms in the cochlea and auditory system to detect these common factors. Hissing and growling are understood to signify danger. Infant sounds are universal, and most birds and mammals respond to them protectively.

And now we're back to the Grand Blueprint, aren't we?

= = = = =

Artistic note: this is the first real animation I've done in a while. Mostly I've been recycling old ones with a few variations. Feels good, and serendipity added some interest. Due to Poser's interpolation, the quail make some cute moves that weren't part of my explicit keyframing.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Heimatkunde

  ¶ 6:28 PM

  Not fair
Honest and scientific people have noticed for a long time that the Gaian form of pseudoscience fills all the slots of a religion. By now this observation is trite. Gaia has an apocalypse, a messiah, and typical forms of sin and redemption. It makes predictions that are 100% wrong, and continues to maintain faith that someday all of its predictions will come true. The Hidden Warmth will get ya if ya don't watch out! Just you wait, unbelievers!

Suddenly realized.... this comparison is unfair to religion.

Traditional religions, at least in their more solid forms, make very few bad predictions.

They say lots of presently untestable things about presently untestable areas of life: souls, heaven, the thoughts of God, etc.

But when they make testable predictions about the consequences of actual human behavior, they're generally right. And they're closer to the mark than secular "sciences" like psychology and economics.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 5:41 PM

  Probably wise


Perfect typo ... or is it more like an auto-correct? ... in latest UK Telegraph Anglopanic over an inch of snow. Probably a good idea, since clearly Brits have no idea how to drive in winter.
  ¶ 6:33 AM

  Good sign
Via UK Telegraph:

Teenagers now list using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as their number one pastime, overtaking watching television, according to a new report.

Sixty-five per cent of the 16-24 year-olds who were polled for the survey, listed talking to their friends via Facebook and Twitter, as their top leisure activity.

Bodes well for the future. TV enforces ONE ABSOLUTELY UNIFORM RIGID ORTHODOX VIEWPOINT. As young folks break loose from The Big Phase-lock, they will still follow a bunch of stupid trends as teens always do. And given the way Facebook works, most of those stupid trends will be created by big corporations.

But they won't be helplessly locked into ONE set of deadly falsehoods and lethally wrong assumptions. They will be able to explore lots of different viewpoints, some of which may even be true and good for civilization.
  ¶ 4:56 AM

  Another line in the Grand Blueprint
Biologists are realizing that the most common types of fish did most of their early development in rivers and lakes, not in the sea.

Needless to say, this goes along with the earlier realization that fish genes already contain the code for land-walking legs.

At some point a real scientist following good old Ockham will have to conclude:

You can't assume that all life branched out from one location.

That's an arbitrary axiom that needs to be independently proved before you can use it. Otherwise you're running in circles, missing most of the story.

If life randomly started in water, why do the genes of swimming fish contain the code for walking?

If life randomly started on land, why do many land critters have an instinctive 'gait' for water?

The only tenable hypothesis is that life was prepared to live in all sorts of locations, from deep salt water to soil to deep rocks to land surface to fresh water to the clouds.

Where did it begin? Possibly in all of those locales.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:52 AM

  Learn from Pat
Old Buchanan lays out the facts on Persia in a remarkably clear and rigorous way.

Basically: If Persia wants war with the West, it knows goddamn well how to start such a war. Since Persia has not started such a war, we can conclude that Persia does not want war with the West.

Strongly echoes Robert Taft's rigorous logic on the Soviet "threat", as heard in this 1952 CBS segment contrasting Truman with Taft.

(Buchanan doesn't say this, but I have to add: Persia hasn't started a war with ANYONE in 1300 FUCKING YEARS. That's a pretty good indication of a non-aggressive tendency, wouldn't you say?)

Well, who wants war? Israel and its US slaves want war.

Why? Because Israel and its US slaves are hopelessly addicted to bullying and aggression. Since 1990, America has been repeatedly attacking countries that didn't attack us, countries that had no intention of attacking us. That's the mark of a deranged psychopathic bully.
  ¶ 11:29 AM

  Learn from Dr. M
Excellent BBC interview with Mahathir Mohamed, former PM of Malaysia. He's trying to tell Euro and US how to recover from our economic death spiral. He speaks from a more or less Islamic worldview, but basically he's just telling us to return to the pre-1980 way of doing things.

Partial transcription, with some editing of unclear phrases:


Host: Why do you think Asia has managed to weather the financial storm so much better than its Western rivals?

MM: In Asia we are still doing real business. In the West you are not doing real business, in the sense of providing goods and services. You are dealing mostly in the financial market which is not doing anything productive. It is just a kind of gambling.

Host: So can the West learn anything from how Asia built up its economy?

MM: Asia was a poor part of the world in the past and we used to live as poor people. Slowly we are building up our wealth and now we are much better off. In Europe now, as a result of these bursting bubbles, you have lost a lot of wealth, and now you must be poorer relative to the past. In Asia we live within our means. When we are poor we live as poor people. I think that is a lesson you can learn from Asia.

Host: So what should Europe do?

MM: You should go back to doing real business. Producing goods, providing services, trading, not just moving figures in bankbooks.

Host: Well, people who work in the financial sector would argue that they are providing a valuable service to business.

MM: I don't think so. They are just abusing the system in order to make money for themselves. They do not generate jobs or businesses. For instance, currency trading moves 4 trillion dollars a day. This is about the same as Germany's GDP for a year. Currency trading does not generate any jobs, so it is not productive.

Host: Currency trading has been a big issue for you. You famously pegged the Malaysian currency to stop the speculators.

MM: Currency is not a commodity. When you deal in coffee, coffee is something you can drink. You can grind it up and turn it into a useful drink. Currency, you cannot grind it and make it into anything. It is just figures in the books, and you can't trade with figures. There must be something solid [bangs his fist on the table for solidity!] to trade. Then you can legitimately make money.

Host: Should we stop having floating exchange rates?

MM: Well, floating is fine but it is not just floating by itself. Some people are manipulating it, by shortselling for example. If you keep on selling a currency that will depress the price, and if you keep on buying that will raise the price. So you can take a profit at any time just by moving up or down.

Host: So how do we stop this speculation?

MM: The idea that the market can regulate itself is quite wrong, because the market is about making profits for themselves. They don't care what happens to other people. They impoverish whole countries [as Soros did to Malaysia] and lots of people suffer.

Host: You think there should be regulation?

MM: Yes. I believe currency trading has no function at all. Of course you have to exchange currency to have trade, but pure speculation should be stopped.

Host: Coming back to Europe's predicament. How difficult a situation is Europe in now?

MM: In the first place you are in a state of denial. You refuse to acknowledge that you have lost money and therefore you are poor. You can't remedy that by printing money. Money isn't something that you just print. Money must be backed up by something, and gold is probably the best backup.

Host: How long will it take for Europe to get out of this?

MM: It will take a long time. To recover your wealth, first you have to work for many years to rebuild your capacity to produce goods and services to sell to the world. You cannot expect to live at this level of wealth when you are not producing anything.


= = = = =

Yup. Nuff said.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 5:38 AM

  Learn from Our Onslow
Watching the idiotic green dominos fall one after another. Solyndra, Fisker electric cars, wind "power" in Britain and Germany, and so on. They never had a valid business; they always depended solely on gov't subsidies and they knew it. But they didn't allow for the wonderful ways of Nature. These welfare queens were not simply taking tax money; they were using it to displace and destroy real business. Now there isn't enough surplus value to support the subsidies, so the subsidies are drying up.

These green welfare queens could have learned something from Our Onslow, head of a permanent welfare family. Our Onslow made a point of reading serious newspapers, keeping up with news of the economy and the strength of the Pound.

Our Rose asks: "Why is Onslow reading the Financial Times?"

Our Onslow replies: "I like to keep an eye on the economy. A bloke in my position has to wonder how long the country can afford him. If we don't get the economy right, people like me are gonna be in trouble!"

On Youtube here.
  ¶ 4:48 AM

  It ain't what you say, it's what you know
Modern activist types, from hippies all the way to the Arab Spring folks, tend to miss one important point. They believe social media give the people more power against the gov't because social media can spread a message fast.

That's not the real source of power. Smart governments keep their power by allowing lots of expression in channels that the government can monitor. Email and Twitter are closely monitored by the gov't. Always have been. Bear in mind that NSA was one of the first nodes of the Net.

Every time you spread the message, you're giving the gov't one more data point to map the extent of the heresy; every time you forward an email, you're giving the gov't a new name to watch or arrest. And of course most of those smart-phone devices will obligingly tell the gov't exactly where you are at the moment you wrote or talked.

The real transfer of power happens the other way around. Gov't power is weakened when the gov't monopoly on acquired knowledge is broken. Thus Wikileaks, Climategate, and similar revelations are more dangerous to the gov't.

Admittedly there are a few dumb dictators like Dear Leader Kim who try to stifle everything instead of learning everything, but they aren't very successful. Holding power that way is tremendously expensive and also stifles the normal activities that keep any country running.
  ¶ 3:33 AM

  Encouraging
NPR reports on a small but heartening exception to the overall death of storage in the modern world. The exception arises from a dubious assumption, and may prove to be ephemeral.

Farmers in the Corn Belt are quickly putting up more grain bins on their own property, in order to act as their own sales agent. This trend seems to have started from the artificial Goldman Boom in 2008, which happened only because Goldman needed a new market to vampirize after it had sucked all the blood from the housing market.

The farmers are trying to play the Day Trader game on their own. Some of them may win, but overall the odds are stacked against the individual operator.

Sounds awfully familiar. In the stock market, the 1990s dot-com bubble inspired lots of folks to try trading stocks on their own. A few made good money; most went bankrupt.

NPR interviewed a co-op manager who brought things down to non-bubble reality: With a natural commodity like grain, commoditized mass production works nicely. The co-op can manage the stored grain of many farmers at once, dividing the costs of buildings, aeration, pest control, fire protection, grading, security and marketing. It's a system that has worked for a hundred years.



Well, what's the encouraging part? Co-ops are also building more storage these days. That's the encouraging part!
  ¶ 6:08 AM

  The fine points of aristocracy
Another of those delightful Commieshit vs Commieshit stories.

A subsidy-developer in the Philadelphia area is trying to get permission to build a huge solar-collector project on a wooded hillside. He's running into opposition from local residents AND from the local Biodiversity commieshits, both of whom disapprove of clear-cutting a steep hill and leaving it barren. In fact their concern is entirely valid. When you clearcut a hill and then you get rain, the hill falls mainly on the plain, burying any houses that happen to be there.

I found myself noticing the even-handed tone of the article. Because commieshits are on both sides of the dispute, the reporter had to be fair.

If the Biodiversity commieshits hadn't joined in ... if it had been purely the solar subsidy-thief against local residents ... the reporter would have known instantly that the solar subsidy-thief was Pure and Holy and Sacred, and the local residents who didn't want to be crushed were Nazi Fascist Halliburton Homophobes.

Or the opposite hypothetical: If a subsidy-thief had been seeking to clearcut the same hillside for a tax-advantaged steel mill instead of a tax-advantaged solar boondoggle, the reporter would have known instantly that the locals who didn't want to be buried were good folks, whose cause is worth defending. In that case the hillside steel mill project would have been described accurately as a subsidy-seeking tax dodge.

Of course it's still a tax dodge, but making it solar gives it aristocratic privilege.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 6:25 PM

  Shouldn't have tried it
NPR runs a feature this morning attempting to explain Roman Numerals to young folks watching the World Series, or whatever it is. Apparently each annual Super-Hockey-Golf Festival, or whatever it is, has a roman numeral on it for some reason.

In the first place, somebody should have seen immediately that this wasn't going to work on radio. You need a blackboard or an animation.

In the second place, learning mnemonics for the basic letters of the roman system doesn't get you anywhere near understanding the system. You can remember forever that I is one, V is five, X is ten, and so on; but until you know the complicated rules for combining the letters, you don't know anything worth keeping.

In the third place, the mnemonics were based on an assumed knowledge of rap-rop, or whatever it is. The rhyme for L = 50 involved a connection between "Fifty Cents" and "L Magazine", which are apparently rip-rap groups; when the announcer suggested that not everyone will know what a "Fifty Cents" is, they tried an alternate rhyme featuring Samuel L. Jackson, who is apparently another ripper or hopster or racketeer or whatever you call it.

Seriously, where's the editor? NPR is generally biased to the left, but it's also a cut above other left or right media in terms of common sense and depth of message.

Common sense and depth failed on this one!
  ¶ 8:33 AM

  Still no Niña


We're thanking the weather gods for continued relief from La Niña. Most of the northern US, in fact, is getting off easy this winter. Around here we had one good solid snowstorm a couple weeks ago. Otherwise it's been cold and dry.

This winter shares a distinction with the previous summer. Both have been typical but narrow in temperatures; both have been unusually dry in precip.

Daily highs and lows have been strictly average: 85/60 in summer, 30/20 in winter. What's missing is range. Previous summer lacked the usual triple-digit hot spells, and this winter lacks the usual single-digit cold snaps. It's just relentlessly normal.

Meanwhile, winter is banging the Eastern Hemisphere hard. Some of the Europanic is silly, with Britain getting all weeweed up about temperatures near freezing!!!!! and one horrible inch of snow!!!!!!! but the problems in the Balkan area are genuinely serious, with -5F and six feet in places that aren't prepared for it.

Has the Arctic Oscillation changed its pattern again, as it did in 1976?

= = = = =

Irritation: The local media continually describe this winter as "warmer than normal". It's not, dammit. It's drier than normal. The 2009-10 El Niño winter showed what happens with warm temperatures and normal precip: Lots of rain instead of snow. I can halfway understand the confusion ... we unconsciously associate snow with cold winter, and associate non-snow with warm summer. Still, if you're posing as a meteorologist you should make a point of distinguishing temp from precip.
  ¶ 5:24 AM

  Wanna see a real hockey stick?
Pseudoscientists in many fields love to predict that a measurement like temperature or sea level is rising linearly forever. The pseudos have been running this scam for a LONG time, as Swift showed us 300 years ago.

Nature don't play dat. Nature doesn't have "tipping points." Nature always runs in cycles or sigmoids because Nature consists of an infinite number of negative feedback loops.

But human activities certainly can form a linear jump with no visible end, because human activities (especially bureaucracies) are often designed with no feedback or positive feedback. The Economic Populist blog exhibits such a graph of long-term unemployment. It's impressive. From 1950 until Shotgun Paulson's Theft Of A Nation in 2008, the line runs in cycles superimposed on a very slow upward trend as we gradually lose our industries to China. After Shotgun, the line goes almost vertically upward, with no end in sight.
  ¶ 3:56 AM

  Hiss and growl
Just pondering....

When you have a real vocation, your personality switches into a different mode when you're inside the vocation.

From my own experience:

When I'm discussing economics or politics I'm hot, passionate, and wildly one-sided. Those are not my vocations. Those are areas where lethal mass-murdering psychopaths are in charge, constantly attacking me and my tribe, constantly stealing my money and cultural heritage. Hissing and growling are my only defensive weapons; I don't have the aristocratic privilege or the nuclear weapons or the trillions needed to fight on an even keel.

(Must admit, the hissing is extra-loud because it's partly directed at myself for being a molasses-brained retard. I rode along with the lethal psychopaths for too many years even while seeing all of their murderous activities separately; I didn't put it all together until Shotgun Paulson stole the whole country in broad daylight in Sept 2008.)

By contrast, when I'm discussing programming or phonetics, I'm calm, open to various ideas, and impartial. Those areas are vocational. I can marshal facts and logic as weapons, so I don't need to hiss and growl.

Connecting this to an earlier ponder on the new power of vigilantes:

What was the Big Theme of the previous decade? Toto.

This was the decade when little dogs pulled back the curtains on all sorts of crooked Wizards, the decade when vigilantes punctured the balloons and bubbles of the pompous Professionals, showing the latter as complete miserable frauds, charlatans and criminals.

What really happened is that the people who are paid for their vocation have ceased to be professionals. They no longer contain the mental structure of their vocation; they no longer recognize or remember the Shoulders Of Giants in their own field.

In Huxleyan terms they're Epsilons. Every day is a new day, every moment is a new moment, every theory is a new theory. Their empty brains await the command from the Speaker Of Authority: "Carbon!" And they shout gladly, "Carbon! Carbon! Oh Carbon!"

When attacked they no longer own the facts and logic to form a calm coherent defense, because all their facts are false and their logical circuits are shorted out. So they hiss and growl and slash. Unlike my hissing and growling, theirs is dangerous because they are not powerless. Their hissing controls the media channels for everyone; their growling determines the interest rate; their slashing directs the Delta Force to bomb the nearest Whitey.

When they come after us, politeness is suicidal. They do not comprehend politeness. An Inquisitor who encounters a polite Heretic doesn't think "Oh! I am so impressed by this man's Gandhian non-resistance! He makes me so ashamed of my un-Christ-like nastiness, that henceforward I shall Repent Of My Erroneous Ways! I shall ever after be a modest Scholar, glad to teach and glad to learn!" Nope. The Inquisitor only thinks "Soft one. I can finish him by lunch, still have time for golf."

We powerless critters have to stand our ground, hiss and growl just as loudly as the tyrants, and try to undermine them or fool them whenever possible.

At the same time we should use a little discernment, and avoid wasting energy against people who aren't real threats.
  ¶ 7:56 PM

  Theory of treason
Listening to a local stock-picking radio show. The host is interviewing an executive of Keytronics, which used to build keyboards but now does 'contract manufacturing', designing various things here and building them in China and Mexico.

I suspect the host was hoping to get callers asking about share value, but instead the callers grilled the Keytronics man on outsourcing. Good.

In response, Mr Keytronics complained about US regulations and said he simply couldn't compete with Chinese wages.

He then cited a theory that goes roughly like this: If we build things in China, we will help to develop a middle class in China. After about 50 years of killing our own working class to enrich the Chinese working class, we may be able to resume making things here and selling them to China.

Okay, asshole.

(1) You've just openly admitted to disloyalty. You stated explicitly that your business is devoted to destroying the American economy in order to build up the Chinese economy. That's how you make your profit.

(2) Your basic complaints are valid, but you've intentionally failed to state the cure for the complaints.

Regulations and foreign competition are not unchangeable laws of nature. They are artifacts of American federal law. In previous decades, US employment regulations were much less onerous and US trade policy was designed to favor American workers. Congress changed those laws because US businessmen, like you, wanted them changed.

If no company could import from China, nobody would have to compete against Chinese prices. If no company could outsource jobs to China, nobody would have to compete against Chinese wages. See how simple it is?

If a significant number of US business executives were loyal to America, they could tell Congress to roll back the regulations and reimpose tariffs and limits on outsourcing.

This has not happened because US business executives are traitors. They hate America and want China to succeed; and they have told Congress to shape the laws toward that 'theory'.
  ¶ 11:39 AM

  One size, old and new
Various socialistic forms of governance are famous for applying "one size fits all" ... but the old Marxian forms of socialism and the new Gramscian forms make very different shoes.

Marx shoved everyone into a dull brown oxford, sized for an average foot. Most people were close to a fit, and the shoe was durable enough that you could get used to it.

Gramsci shoves everyone into a Chinese knockoff of a Manolo Blahnik spike-heeled pump. Only a few anorexic aristocrats can fit into the shoe, and it lasts a few days.

Let's look at three American examples.

1. Housing


FDR introduced Marx to America. His WPA built lots of housing projects for farmers and city people who were living in tumbledown shacks or rat-infested tenements. Many of these projects still exist, like Cherokee Village in Enid on the left. It has been maintained over the years, and is now an assisted-living facility for older folks.

Bush The Father introduced Gramsci to America. His version of accommodation was the ADA, which requires everyone to shape their buildings, public works, and daily habits to suit the needs of wheelchairs and schizophrenics.

= = = = =

2. Electricity


FDR built lots of dams. These brought electricity to farmers and city people who had been burning kerosene or rags. Many of these projects still exist, like Grand Coulee here in Wash. It has been maintained and expanded over the years, and still provides reliable cheap power and jobs to Americans.

Bush The Father enacted the Clean Air Act; Bush The Son expanded it into Cap-n-Trade and subsidies for wind turbines. This provides profit for speculators and General Electric, jobs to Chinamen, and unreliable expensive power to everyone else.

= = = = =

3. Money


FDR closed down the banks and re-opened only the solvent ones. He then outlawed abstract speculation. Ordinary people were able to trust the money system; super-rich people were forced to do something productive if they wanted to stay super-rich.

Bush The Son and Obama gifted infinite rewards to the insolvent banks and the abstract speculators who had just finished destroying the economy. Ordinary people are able to starve; super-rich people don't even need to run their usual murderous criminal frauds. They can simply sit back and watch the trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions roll in.

= = = = =

In short:

The Marx shoe fits ordinary folks, leaving the elite to buy their own.

The Gramsci shoe fits the elite, leaving ordinary folks to buy their own.


  ¶ 3:38 AM

  Tourette bunny cured by acupuncture?
A story that's worth following a bit more....

A rabbit kept at a museum in Durham, NC was exhibiting some Tourettish symptoms such as head-twitching and walking in circles. (No, he wasn't saying things like "Eeeehhhh, what's up, DICKWADBITCH?") Vets checked him for infections, found nothing. A vet who had been using acupuncture on domestic animals tried a few sessions, and the twitching and circling disappeared.

The rabbit is what makes it interesting. With humans, it's just about impossible to tell whether acupuncture is doing anything physical or simply serving as a placebo. You can't do a double-blind or substitute a more placebo-like therapy that would feel the same. Dogs wouldn't prove anything either, since dogs clearly share the human values of helping and being helped. Rabbits are more likely to test the real physical effects, because they lack the tight links of empathy that bind humans and dogs.

There's nothing wrong with using the placebo effect. Modern medicine would cure more people if it paid more attention to the value of trust and the innate "healer mechanism".

But it would be useful for neurology to know if acupuncture belongs in the placebo category, or if it's directly causing physical changes in the various reflex arcs and ganglia. Would open the door to a wider set of related therapies, and might improve the practice of acupuncture and acupressure.... though a therapy based on thousands of years of experience and testing is likely to be optimal by now.
  ¶ 5:20 PM

  The O'Sullivan Mechanism
This week's tempest between the Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood illustrates how O'Sullivan's Law works.

O'Sullivan observed that every national office of every organization ends up at the extreme Satanist-Leninist end of the political spectrum. Even if all of their members and all of their local offices are normal rational religious people, the national office will rigidly follow the latest hard-left fashions.

We generally assume it's just a groupthink phenomenon: all the NGOs attend the same cocktail parties and feel ostracized if they don't follow the official line.

This week we got a rare chance to see how it really works. When Komen decided to stop funding The Satanist Sacrament Of Abortion, all the knives and whips and chains came out and slashed and flayed Komen into meek submission.

Just now Komen swerved back from Deviationist Road onto Straight And Narrow Path Of Orthodox Satanist Doctrine, but it's probably too late.

Komen's Self-Criticism And Recantation Whimper is perfectly Maoist in form:

"...the Komen Foundation is amending the criteria of its new policy to make clear that it will only bar funding for organizations under investigation if that investigation is criminal and conclusive in nature and not political."

Any departure from orthodoxy is Political by definition. Strict Satanist orthodoxy is non-partisan, non-political, default, unmarked, normal, doesn't need any adjectives or descriptors.
  ¶ 8:52 AM

  Our children will never know snow
While we're waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for the HIDDEN 100000000 DEGREE GLOBAL WARMING to pop out of its wormhole and BURN AND ROAST AND BOIL US, we have this mysterious illusion of deep snow and bitter cold in most of Europe. Obviously this is some kind of mass hysteria, because the Meteorology Office officially predicted that snow would be extinct by 2010.

Best part:

Amazingly, the Sahara Desert, which had no snow for 33 years until a brief fall in western Algeria last month, faces an inch of snow by the weekend.

Recognize 33 years?

Before the Soviet takeover of the West, REAL SCIENTISTS understood that 33-year pattern quite well, because they had this peculiar bizarre witchcraft-style practice of GOING OUTSIDE AND OBSERVING GODDAMN NATURE AND LOOKING FOR GODDAMN CYCLES. Fortunately we've abandoned such primitive rituals.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 2:50 PM

  Finally some firmness
The American hierarchy of the Roman church has finally taken a solid stand on a serious moral issue, declaring that it will disobey Obamacare requirements to provide abortions and contraception.

About fucking time.

In recent years the Roman church has been morally absent. I suppose they were ashamed of the choirboy-diddling mess, or just too busy dealing with lawsuits.

Back in the '70s some Soviet-agent priests and Soviet-agent bulldyke nunpersons went to jail for anti-Vietnam and anti-nuclear protests, but they weren't really acting on behalf of Just-War Doctrine or anything else. They were only obeying their Soviet bosses, and when their Soviet bosses collapsed the idiotic movement collapsed.

And in the 2000s the church disobeyed immigration laws semi-officially, but that wasn't about morality either. It was only about keeping those lucrative Mexican customers in the church.

This official disobedience is thus the first serious pro-Christian action by the Church in at least a century.
  ¶ 6:36 AM

  Leave the bottle full for others


Reprinting this nice cheerful scene partly from the usual superstitious compulsion to take Polistra and Happystar out of a predicament, partly because it connects to a nice cheerful news story.

The real Milk Bottle Cafe here in Spokane burned several months ago. The outer structure was saved, and it's being redone.

The cafe had been used as a Hollywood movie location back in '85. Last week Matthew Modine, the star of 'Vision Quest', visited town as part of his Vision Quest to help rebuild the cafe.

Nice bit of reciprocity! Not often seen from Hollywood types.
  ¶ 8:02 PM

  In Misteromney's Neighborhood 2
Sequel to this.








  ¶ 11:35 AM

  On the 'mind-reading' advance
UK Guardian has a fairly good report on this.

Lots of misunderstanding in the media.

First, this particular experiment is not reading thoughts or speech; it's just reading a later stage of the brain's response to heard sound. Going a couple stages beyond what a cochlear implant does; looking at a higher level of coding, then reverse-engineering the code to recover the sounds.

Second, there's no guarantee that the production process uses the same coding. It most likely doesn't. Speech production involves controlling the muscles of the larynx, jaw, tongue, lips, velum, pharynx, diaphragm, ribs, and abdomen to achieve a magnificently complex result. These patterns, when measured by an EMG or EEG, have absolutely no correlation with sound waves except in the rhythm of syllables.

However: Speech is regulated and refined by feedback through the ears, which is why deaf people sound strange. It's possible that the structures monitored in this experiment are also involved in the feedback part of speech.

Basically a thought goes through four main stages: (1) The internal structure of what you mean. This is non-phonetic and may be universal regardless of language, though I doubt it. (2) An internally 'heard' representation of what you want to say. This is in your own language, but sort of idealized; doesn't necessarily sound anything like you speak, and can move much faster than real speech. (3) The neural commands mentioned above, serving to control the various muscles. These are formed in your own language and dialect, and move in real time. (4) The sound that arises when those commands move your various muscles, causing air from the lungs to set up shaped vibrations. This is in your own language and dialect, but varies from day to day depending on muscular strength, inflammation of tissues, mucus in nose, etc.

Best hope for a speech prosthesis is to find where (2) happens in the brain. This is the idealized version of the utterance, and it may be the template you compare against when using auditory feedback to keep the speech under refined control. If so, it may be found in the structure monitored by the current experiment, and may be outputtable in some understandable form.

Picking up the commands in stage (3) would be the most direct; we know where each of those muscles is represented on the motor strip, and the outputs are analog voltages that could be fed directly into a synthesizer. But this wouldn't help many of the people who really need such a device. If the lesion is outside the brain, as in bulbar polio or spinal injury or ALS, (3) could help. But with stroke or CP the motor commands themselves are distorted, so you'd have to go inward to (2).
  ¶ 5:20 AM

  Good tech, bad tech
While napping, halfway listened to a BBC tech feature with two dramatically contrasting news items. I doubt they intended the contrast, but it banged into my mind.

First item: Young tech types in Afghanistan have set up an open-source clearing house for practical ideas to improve life in their country. Their basic notion is that the cell-phone system must become the backbone of not only tech but government and civilization. There's very little infrastructure outside the cell network. Afghanistan has about 18 million mobile phone users* in a population of 30 million. Covers just about every household, so it's a good choice for a backbone! These techies are starting with a 'promo' to show their abilities: an app** to schedule and register for the Hajj. Since every Muslim should make the Hajj at least once, it's a universal need, and the American puppet gov't is apparently doing a poor job of organizing the trips. Beyond this, the techies are working on many ways to streamline commerce and other activities.

Second item: London sidewalks are often tilted heavily toward the street to aid drainage. Wheelchair users have some trouble navigating the tilt. So a "human factors engineering" laboratory has built a small streetscape and a full set of telemetry equipment to "solve" the problem. Human subjects are weighed down with all sorts of stress analyzers, accelerometers, gait-analysis laser points, and cameras; then they do things like pushing wheelchairs around the sidewalks. Cost must be around a million dollars, and the result will be a bunch of numbers. Even if the numbers somehow lead to a proposed engineering solution, the solution would require rebuilding the whole city to compensate for a minor problem experienced by a few people.

= = = = =

Perfect parable of Good Tech and Bad Tech.

Good tech is simple, uses minimal equipment and directly solves the problems of real people.

Bad tech uses lots of money and equipment and serves only to generate more grants for the researcher.


How would you apply Afghan Tech to the London problem? There can't be more than a thousand serious chair-users in a town that size. Offer each of them a mechanism that senses tilt and biases the electronic steering controls accordingly. This isn't fancy; could have been done mechanically 200 years ago or electrically 100 years ago. Now it could probably be done with a hacked Wii or Kinect thingie.

If you get a thousand takers, you've spent maybe half a million and you've directly solved the actual problem without affecting anyone else. No need to measure human factors, analyze gait, or rebuild the city.


= = = = =

* Footnote 1: 18 million cell phone users in a pop of 30 million. Think about that. Meanwhile, American Repooflican commentators are still repeating the same old tired shit about Afghanistan being a 5th-century country where people don't have watches or calendars. Hmmmmmm. Who's behind the times?

** Footnote 2: The Hajj App. I can't imagine Western techies designing an app to assist ordinary people in the performance of their religious duties. Western techies are civilization-smashing commieshit fuckheads, as evidenced by their unanimous commieshit fuckhead response to the SOPA/MegaUpload situation. You couldn't pay them enough to write a program that would help people register for baptism or arrange a proper two-gender marriage.
  ¶ 5:04 PM

  Duh
Headline:

Longtime Allies, Egypt And U.S. Now Have Differences


Well, yes. That was the whole fucking point of their revolution. The people were tired of a leader who primarily served US and Israel. They wanted new leaders who would serve the FUCKING PEOPLE OF FUCKING EGYPT for the first time in 50 fucking years.

At the moment the new leaders aren't meeting all expectations of the people, but that's normal in a revolution or reform. The people always expect changes that aren't practically possible. Nevertheless, the new gov't is doing pretty well on the most basic goals of national sovereignty and Islamic dominance.

Do you suppose London papers in 1776 had headlines like this?

Longtime Allies, American Colonies Now Have Differences with England

No, because they weren't fucking idiots. Only modern American "journalists" are idiotic, infantile and egocentric enough to believe that every revolution should advance the aims of Feminists, Fags, Amorphodites, Bulldykes and Graduate Queer Culture Studies.
  ¶ 3:41 AM

  Only way to profit?
Supposedly Steve China-Jobs set up the huge Foxconn factory in his beloved motherland of China because Apple couldn't make a profit on its phone devices otherwise.

Let's think about it. Did we always need to have slaves working 35 hours without a break, ruining their bodies, just to supply all Americans with telephones?



Hell no. For 70 years Western Electric supplied phones for every American. WE's Hawthorne Works employed about 50,000 Americans, and was famous for good working conditions. In fact it was a laboratory for improving working conditions.

Are the new devices so complicated that they require a different level of labor? I doubt it. In electronic terms the iPhone is literally a billion times more complicated. But in terms of human labor the old and new are about the same, with roughly two dozen parts needing human assembly. So the comparison is valid.

Was the old Bell System actually able to make a profit, despite using those horrible lazy unskilled American workers and paying them actual money in exchange for labor? Hell yes. Back when stocks were bought for steady dividends instead of picosecond-scale pico-variations in share price, ATT stock was the gold standard.

So what's the difference?

Industrial policy.

Bell insisted on protection against foreign competition because its executives liked America and understood Henry Ford's correlation between contented workers and contented customers.

Apple insists on "free trade" because its executives are sadistic treasonous monsters who hate America, love slavery and enjoy using Chinese slave labor. This system is called "The Free Market" or "Individual Liberty".

That's the difference.
  ¶ 12:31 PM

  Do cats like water?
No.
  ¶ 6:10 AM

  Eating the seed corn
Yet another example of the Death of Storage. USDA is trying to cut a piddling $150 million. This will prevent exactly one hour of Federal borrowing from China. Whoooooieeee! Free at last! Free at last! For one hour!

Well, how do we accomplish this full hour of freedom and frugality? By closing 250 service and research offices. Many of those offices have been running local research with connections to local crops, to develop new seeds and stop plant diseases.

We're starving our own future, making a huge disinvestment in our own economy's growth potential, in order to satiate the hell-bound Tom Coburn. Your time is short, Tom. Satan is impatient.



Garbanzo is mad enough to BUST the nearest pork-buster! Polistra and Happystar stand in solidarity with him.
  ¶ 6:29 PM

  Little bit
Looks like one economist with Establishment credentials has picked up on the evils of the Fed's zero-interest policy.

Warren Mosler:

It would serve public purpose if the Fed made it clear that in today's rate environment, what's called 'quantitative easing' in fact removes interest income from the private sector, thereby functioning much like a tax...

Furthermore, all the evidence so far indicates this source of fiscal drag may be at least offsetting any positive effects of lower interest rates on aggregate demand.

This brings up my second criticism with regards to the interest income channel. Lowering rates in general in the first instance merely shifts interest income from 'savers' to borrowers. And with the federal government a net payer of interest to the economy, lowering rates reduces interest income for the economy.

Since 2006 our economy has been trying to run on the counterfeit Wealth Effect generated by homeowners borrowing against a nonexistent increase in fictional value. At the same time we have completely canceled and deleted the honest Wealth Effect of stability and frugality.

In a civilized economy, storage of value allows people, businesses and governments to feel secure and confident. When you feel secure and confident, you're willing to spend money in sensible ways. You're less likely to gamble.

In a chaotic 'bets and debts' economy, with no storage of anything, you're always on the edge. You're vulnerable to every exigency of nature, to every scam and fraud, to every loss and expense. You're ready to risk it all on one roll of the dice.



The song, of course, expressed the attitude of a working man in Gilded Age Version 1, which we see repeated now in Gilded Age v2. Cynical and utterly realistic. The working man knew damn well that a Little Bit wouldn't help. When you owe your soul to the company store, when every dollar of income has to outgo immediately, only a one-in-a-billion Superball is enough blooming luck.

However: In a civilized economy where jobs are stable, money is constant, storage is secure and saving yields a meaningful return, you only need a Little Bit of luck. When your money goes into savings first, each small bonus, each slight increase in sales, gives you a permanent gain.
  ¶ 5:47 PM

  Boys vs men 2
Sequel to last night's observation about Repooflican debaters. Newt and Mitt were carrying on a junior-high feud; when Paul and Santorum were invited to join the feud they instead showed how to solve the problem that Newt and Mitt were quibbling about. Boys vs men. Nice clear distinction.

Something similar is going on within the climate dispute between the genocidal mass-murdering Carbon Cult and the heretical Real Scientists. The Real Scientist side is descending into petty disputes, focusing on eentsy-weentsy details, trying to find all sorts of minor problems with the Carbon Cult's equations and statistics. Now they're trying to establish a competing Uniform Theory of Climate.

THIS IS A PURE WASTE OF TIME.

The heretical models are not going to work any better than the Carbon Cult models because the earth's climate is BEYOND MODELING. The number of well-known and well-measured variables is way beyond any computer's ability to handle, even if we knew the correct patterns for any of them. Which we don't. And we may be completely unaware of some important variables. Unknown unknowns, in Rumsfeldian jargon. Worst of all, we can't even start with "the earth's climate" as a meaningful concept. Northern and Southern hemispheres are largely independent systems, and there's very little consistency between any two locations.

In terms of Basic Science, the only thing we need to do is disprove the Carbon model. And that was ALREADY DONE decisively and dispositively by graphs like this.

FACT: If CO2 plays any part at all in determining the world's temperature, it doesn't show in the record. No further math needed. The job of Basic Science was finished 20 years ago.

Enough junior-high feuding. Enough Asperger obsession with details piled on details piled on details piled on details piled on details.

Now it's time for Applied Science, time to think about solving our ACTUAL PROBLEM.

In terms of climate and weather, OUR ACTUAL PROBLEM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TEMPERATURE. OUR ACTUAL PROBLEM IS PRECIPITATION. Specifically, in recent years the large-scale systems have been paralyzed too often, leaving jet streams in one place for an entire season, producing droughts on one side and floods on the other.

Can we figure out how to unstick these blocking highs? Can we force the jet stream to start slithering around more freely? Or if this is going to be permanent, how can we compensate? How many thousands of bureaucrats and Black-Robed Saboteurs will we need to kill before we can start building dams and canals again? Those are the APPLIED SCIENCE questions we should be pondering.

Polistra started hammering on this point in 2005, as seen in this animation.
  ¶ 3:41 AM

  Boys vs men
Listened to a few minutes of tonight's CNN debate. Must admit: Unlike the useless "parallel press conferences" of previous elections, this year's debates are genuine and purposeful. They reveal the character, strength, and abilities of the candidates.

During the few minutes I caught, Mitt and Newt were feuding like 7th-graders about who is more offensive, and who wants to invade more countries and planets, and who tattled on who, and whose dick investment account is bigger, and Don't You Dare Talk To Me In That Tone! and I'll Talk To You In That Tone If I Want To, By Golly!

Commiefag Blitzer then asked the other two candidates to pick sides in the feud, and they refused. Instead, Paul and Santorum told us in precise detail how they had tried to prevent the housing bubble at the same time when Newt and Mitt were making millions from it.

That's exactly how a debate should run.
  ¶ 5:38 PM