Least surprising genocidal mass-murdering Hitlerian ratshit of the year
The all-consuming all-destroying all-obliterating scorched-earth hyperterrorist army EPA has produced a recruitment video to recruit LGBTQQ2ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ youth to its SS-Totenkopfverbünde death squad. The video is, of course, introduced by Chief Bullbitch Genocidal Terrorist Richard Windsor, alias "Lisa Jackson".

Least surprising genocide of the year. Satan loves Satan. No news here.
  ¶ 6:46 AM

  Moats, decades
Random thought while listening to 1942 radio programs. For a long time it was believed that the Atlantic and Pacific protected America from attacks coming from Europe and Asia. In '42 many commentators "had to admit" that the moat theory was invalid. In 2001 when we were attacked again, commentators again "had to admit" that the moats no longer worked.

Nonsense. Look at actual events.

1941: Pearl Harbor is way out in the middle of the Pacific. Hawaii was not part of America at the time; it was a colony that we had acquired during McKinley and TR's period of imperial aggression. The Japs never did attack the mainland.

2001: We were not attacked from Afghanistan as the neocons like to believe. We were attacked from Florida and Oklahoma. Those Saudi boys had entered the country earlier and had overstayed their visas. We knew who they were and what they were doing. If we had been defending our own boundaries instead of fucking around everywhere else, we could have kicked those Saudi boys out, and could have ferociously stopped all Arab and Muslim immigrants.

Conclusion: We still have moats. It's still comparatively hard to get across an ocean. We still have plenty of time and plenty of methods to detect and repel an attack, whether it's by boat or plane or missile or internet. If we wanted to protect our country, we could.

The problem is not the "small world" or Tom Friedman's "flat world". The problem is vicious blood-soaked treason by Satanic governments and corporations, who intentionally make the nation vulnerable to attacks in order to maximize their power and profits.

Oceans also protect South and Central America, which were completely untouched by the Jap and Kraut imperial aggressions. After we decided to enter WW2, we tried to get South America involved in the fight, but they politely declined.

= = = = =

Another random thought: I wonder if the nameless decade from 2000 to 2009 has broken the long-standing habit of naming decades. We never did settle on a name for the Aughties or Naughties or Pre-Teens or Zeroties. Now we're three years into a new decade that has a known and definite name, but I haven't heard anyone describe the current period as the Teens.
  ¶ 4:35 AM

  Confusion to our enemies
Polistra absolutely loves it when Commies fight Commies. In this case it's not quite accurate; China is actually an authoritarian super-capitalist country using the Commie name, while the NYTimes is hard-line Stalinist.

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees, the newspaper said on Thursday. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times's network.

Regardless of labels, it's still pure golden joyful goodness. When two enemies of civilization fight each other, civilization gets a brief rest.
  ¶ 3:34 AM

  Why Ohm met resistance
Polistra is always cheering for traditional and human-scale measurements. She wanted to find out: Was there ever a set of natural measurements for electricity? Was there ever an English unit of potential or an American unit of resistance? Or did the original experimenters jam everything into the metric prison from the start?

The answer: Well, sort of. Briefly. In the early days of telegraphy, resistance was often measured in terms of length and width of a standard wire, and different nations had different standards. But this didn't last long, and the volt, ampere and ohm were quickly adopted as universal.

Polistra admits reluctantly that this situation makes sense. Food, farmland and fabric were used and measured systematically for thousands of years before theoreticians came along. Electricity was first used and measured by theoreticians and later passed into common use.

While looking for the nonexistent tradition, an interesting forgotten story popped out. Back in 1827, Georg Ohm developed the math of circuits correctly by using an incorrect analogy. Other 'electricians' had already reached a correct understanding of positive and negative charges; Ohm ignored this understanding and used the transmission of heat instead. Because of his incorrect analogy, his correct math was not accepted by the other scientists for many years. Alfred Mayer, writing in 1890, said:

Ohm was led to the conception of this law by assuming that the flow of electricity in a voltaic circuit is similar to the flow of heat by conduction in a rod. Also, his assumptions that the actions of two electrified particles are directly as their distance, and that the electricity is uniformly dense over each cross section of a conducting wire, were directly opposed to the laws and facts well established by Coulomb for statical electricity.

Damned theoreticians. Always the same. Always ignoring truth if it doesn't fit the latest theory.

Ohm assumed that charge was handed off step by step between the 'particles' in the wire, just as the molecular agitation of heat is handed off from one molecule to another. This led him to view resistance as a sort of velocity measurement:

That is to say, both elements reciprocally change their electric state as long as a difference continues to exist between their electroscopic forces; but this change ceases as soon as they have both attained the same electroscopic force. ... The motion is effected in most bodies so rapidly that we are seldom able to determine its changes at the various places, and on that account we are not in a condition to discover by observation the law according to which they act.

If he was observing any delay using the instruments then available, he was probably seeing the result of inductive reactance in a long coil or wire, rather than simple resistance. A low-pass RL filter can easily take a perceptible amount of time to reach full flow.

Why did Ohm's bad assumption work? Probably because it wasn't all that bad! I spent much of my life playing and working with electrical stuff: repairing, designing, building, teaching. I used Ohm and his variants and corollaries daily. I always started with the analogy of airflow or waterflow**, in which the electrons pass between the atoms of the metal at a finite speed, while the charge field acts instantly across space. In the end it doesn't matter which of these concepts is treated as a finite velocity.

Polistra and Happystar try to see Ohm's original view, using a couple of experiments.


First Polistra shows heat conduction in a rod. She puts the rod onto a 'potential difference' between cold and hot, and watches the different molecular agitations transfer at a finite speed, until the rod is at a uniform temperature.


Now Happystar applies the same concept to a (non-factual!) electric circuit, perhaps as Ohm imagined it. Using an Edison iron-nickel battery to create a potential difference, he drops a wire onto the negative end to complete the circuit. The charges transfer at a finite speed toward the center of the resistive load, until the load is at a uniform current.



= = = = =

Footnote 1: **Airflow and waterflow: See my AUDIN courseware, lesson 201, for an example. Also, the battery, pulsing wires and 'resistive block' are available in my ShareCG page.


= = = = =

Footnote 2: The preface to Ohm's little book nabbed my sympathy instantly:

I herewith present to the public a theory of galvanic electricity ... and shall arrange more such portions together into a whole, if this first essay shall in some degree repay the sacrifices it has cost me. The circumstances in which I have been placed have not been adapted ... to encourage me in the pursuit of novelties. I have therefore chosen for my first attempt a portion in which I have the least to [fear from] competition.

Ah, I understand only too well. I've been there too many times. My 'donate finger' got itchy, and I looked around for Georg's Paypal button ... until I realized that old Georg was probably not online right now.

= = = = =

Footnote 3: Watching the movement of the red and blue in Happystar's resistive load block, my eyes catch an odd illusion. The block seems to be sagging on top and bulging on the side, but only near the right end. (Roughly under Happystar's left leg.) I guarantee there's no bulging in the digital graphics. The shape of the block is not touched by anything in the animation. No mesh adjustments, no displacement maps. Only the color gradients change, and they change symmetrically. So where does this off-center bulge come from?


= = = = =

Much later update: It turns out that Georg's analogy was right.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 4:08 AM

  No analogies
For a long time it's been easy to compare the American Empire with the Roman Empire. More valid and immediate comparison, of course, is Orlov's analogy to the Soviet Empire.

But we've gone waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond those two.

The late Romans weren't TRYING to destroy civilization. They weren't taking ACTIVE STEPS to blow up everything their ancestors had built; they just forgot their history and let things decay.

Lenin had tried briefly to destroy the structure of families, but gave up and focused on building a strong totalitarian country.

No, that's not enough for us. We're taking active steps to RIP UP everything our ancestors did, and we're working amazingly hard to destroy the structure of culture and families.

What was the first step in forming civilizations? Keeping out predatory animals. Finding ways to exclude lions and tigers and bears from human settlements. So naturally we have to bring them back. We have to re-implant bears and wolves, and viciously PUNISH anyone who dares to oppose them.

What's another big step? Draining miasmal swamps to get rid of mosquitoes, and building dams and irrigation systems to move water where it will help to produce food and energy. So naturally we blow up dams, "restore" canals into useless streams, refill miasmal swamps that our ancestors had drained, and even build new malarial swamps where swamps didn't naturally occur.

Smashing family structure? Watch any TV show to see how it's done. Or listen to the politicians who have "completed their fucking personal journey" and "evolved" into raw gibbering psychopathic genocidal mass murderers.

No, you can't make those Roman or Soviet analogies any more. We're fucking PIONEERS. We're truly fucking UNPRECEDENTED. Nobody in the history of the world, not humans nor any other animal or plant, has INTENTIONALLY RIPPED THEIR OWN CIVILIZATION INTO BLOODY SHREDS.
  ¶ 4:04 AM

  If I can ace the test........
UK Telegraph has a short feature on the new British citizenship test, which "critics say" has been dumbed down too much. They included some sample questions, and I scored 100%.


Maybe the "critics" are right if a Yank who has never been to England can ace the test.

To be sure, I'm an unusually Anglocentric Yank, listening to BBC constantly for 50 years and reading UK online papers instead of US online papers ... but still my knowledge is solely verbal as opposed to experiential. They should reinsert the "mundane information about water meters" that only an actual resident would know about. It's the mundane stuff that really counts!
  ¶ 8:56 AM

  Quis custodiet ipsos custodis?
After a long period of highly stable 20-degree weather with freezing fog, we finally broke into the 30s with some nice street-clearing and roof-clearing rain. Looking at the Weather Bureau this morning to check rain amounts, I found this. (I squashed the chart horizontally to fit the important parts into a readable image)



Note the cheery "Quality Control: OK!" on the line with an obvious instrumental error. I'm fairly sure we didn't have a 136 mph wind during the night. If we did, the Weather Bureau would no longer exist, and I wouldn't either.

= = = = =

Later: they did catch the error when compiling their monthly record. It shows 22 as max wind for that date.
  ¶ 3:29 AM

  Finding sanity
The R team is predictably joyous, and the D team is downcast, over a federal "court" "decision" that says one of Obama's interim appointments was wrong for some mysterious reason, which the "court" calls "the constitution". I have a vague memory of this document. Both of our idiot teams still misuse the words of this obsolete document for their own purposes; both teams idiotically claim that OUR WONDERFUL TEAM always follows the document and THE OTHER NASTY team always violates it. In fact all presidents and all Congresses and all federal agencies operate in total and blatant violation of the document. Every appointment and every decision is transparently and prima-facie illegal.

Polistra likes to go back in time to find relative sanity. In this case she goes back to 1943 and listens to an Information Please episode featuring Senator Fulbright. The specific sanity is found at 18:00 in the clip, if you want to hear it.



Info Please liked to ask specific questions to political guests, so they asked Fulbright how a treaty can be approved by the Senate. He proceeded to outline three different ways it was actually done, making it clear that only one was really legal and proper. No party-based nonsense, no finger-pointing or blame. Just the facts.
  ¶ 5:56 PM

  Destabilize
Yesterday NPR interviewed some fucking genocidal mass-murderer representing the fucking genocidal mass-murdering Sierra Club. [Can't seem to find transcript online yet.]

Sierra Wack was discussing his civil disobedience effort (undoubtedly funded by the terrorist army EPA) nominally aimed at "encouraging" the terrorist army EPA to stop the Keystone Pipeline.

Sierra Wack seems to have found a new phrase to replace "global warming" and "climate change".

The threat of a destabilizing climate.

We need to re-stabilize the climate.

Perfectly Orwellian. This decade's weather-related problems are EXACTLY caused by an UNUSUALLY STABLE phase in the world's cycles. Just like the decade of the '30s. We get floods, droughts, persistent hot spells, persistent cold spells. Note the common theme? STABILITY. Blocking highs. Systems don't move. Heat stays in one place, cold stays in one place, wet stays in one place, dry stays in one place.

Get it? Get it? Get it? This is called



We don't need to stabilize a system that is abnormally stable. And our Evil KKKarbon Sins And Iniquities have not destabilized the system, because it is abnormally stable. And there's nothing we can do to re-stabilize Nature even if it were actually unstable. We just have to wait for the wheel to turn, and try to get out of the way. The wheel will turn. Count on it. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. 66 years. Round and round and round and round and round and round and round.

Get it? Get it? Get it? This is called



The current stable phase is doing more damage to our material possessions than the '30s stable phase for several obvious reasons. We've built millions of houses in KNOWN floodplains and beaches, so more houses are subject to flooding. We've built millions of houses in forests, so more houses are subject to wildfires. We've turned lots of farmland into streets and urban areas, so ground has less ability to absorb rain. We've FAILED to maintain existing dams and levees to control flooding, and worst of all the psychopathic terrorist army EPA has actually TORN DOWN dams that were controlling floods. That is an ACT OF WAR, and nobody has yet answered the ACT OF WAR.

Labels: Carbon Cult

  ¶ 3:47 AM

  Why steep roofs are better
Looking at snow on various roofs, I decided to settle a question that had puzzled me for a long time.

It's clear that steep roofs are better in snowy places.

One reason is obvious but not very important. When snow is 'shed-able', steep roofs will shed it faster. Powdery snow is inclined to fall or blow off, and it falls faster from a steep roof. However, most snow doesn't blow or slide easily. It sticks equally on all roofs. (This year's Spokane snow is especially glue-like, presumably because the temperature has been especially steady at 20 degrees.)

The other reason is more general, but I couldn't wrap my mind around it properly: Steep roofs can hold the load better. This is usually described in terms of pounds per square foot, but that doesn't hit the mark. The important variable for breaking or weakening a roof is the bending force applied at the middle of the rafters. I could sense that the bending force was different for a steep roof, but I needed a diagram to pin it down.

Here's the diagram. The animation varies the roof from steep to nearly flat. Three vector arrows represent the relevant forces felt by the middle of a rafter. The black arrow, always pointing straight down and always the same strength, is the pull of gravity on the snow. The green arrow represents the component of gravity along the rafter. This force tends to pull the house apart, and it is actually worse** for the steep roof. Most important is the red arrow, the component that tries to bend the rafters. This force is weak on a steep roof, strong on a flat roof.




= = = = =

**Footnote: If you take the green along-rafter force and vectorize its effects on the top of the wall, you see that it comes out roughly the same for all roofs. The force along the rafter is strongest for a steep roof, but most of it goes into downward compression, which is the safest kind of force. For a low roof the along-rafter force goes mainly into sideways pull-apart, but it's a weak force.


= = = = =

March 2017: a more precise observation of actual roofs. Steep is definitely better. Steep with occupied (warm) attic is best of all. No doubt about it. The Cape Cod was deaigned by experience in snowy New England, and it's still the winner.
  ¶ 7:39 PM

  We never negotiate
I've always been annoyed by the nonsense that governments emit when faced with pirates or terrorists.

"We strongly condemn in the strongest terms this cowardly act. We will never negotiate with cowardly terrorists."

Well, in reality we do pay terrorists often, though not every time. It's well known that the first few months of the Afghanistan war succeeded because we simply paid the Taliban to leave for a while. We didn't defeat them militarily or diplomatically or anything else.

The terrorists KNOW they're going to get paid. They know it because they've BEEN paid. They know it because they HAVE THE FUCKING MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS. We're not fooling them with our fine brave-sounding words.

So what's the fucking point of emitting the "Never negotiate" signal? Solely to fool Americans? But we know the truth now, so we aren't fooled either.

Finally figured it out. It's not incorrect, it's incomplete. The complete statement is:

We never negotiate with terrorists because we don't know how to haggle. We always pay sticker price up front.

Now it makes sense.
  ¶ 5:15 PM

  Never thought about that before......
An excellent essay by Satoshi Kanazawa on the role of Satanist-Stalinist fashion in rejecting scientific results. His main point is hardly a new discovery; it's been dramatically clear for 40 years inside academia. Self-censorship is still absolute in "social" ""sciences"" like economics and psychology, but it's starting to fade in real biological and medical fields. A medical result that shows a difference between races or sexes can occasionally be published without ruining careers.

Along the way, Kanazawa makes one little sidepoint that snagged my attention ferociously.

In my experience, the only time the cries of bad science from the self-appointed science police were not motivated by political correctness was the controversy surrounding Daryl Bem’s study on precognition, which I have previously defended, because, contrary to Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence. All the other times when people complained about “bad science,” they were politically motivated. They found the conclusions to be “dangerous” and “offensive,” and therefore it must be bad science.

I had always taken the 'extraordinary claims' rule as pretty good advice, but hadn't stopped to examine it. What does 'extraordinary' mean in Sagan's mind? It means UNFASHIONABLE. If a finding disagrees with Oprah Winfrey and Khloé Kardashian and Michael Mann and Al Gore and Bill Nye and 'New Scientist', it's extraordinary and needs extra evidence.

The proper rule is obvious after you peel the onion. Every claim requires valid evidence, and valid means the same regardless of fashion or consensus.
  ¶ 6:27 AM

  Human temp scale?
Listening to local radio announcer this morning: "Hey, Deer Park is getting balmy now! Their temperature is five times as warm as the last reading. They've gone from 1 degree to 5 degrees!"

The announcer was joking, but not entirely. There are two ways of 'correcting' his idea.

(1) If you want to get technical and thermodynamic about it, "five times as hot" as 1 degree F would actually be hot enough to melt iron. Absolute zero on Fahrenheit is -459, so 1 degree is actually 460 degrees above the point where molecules don't wiggle. To get the molecules wiggling 5 times as fast as they were in Deer Park's air, you'd have to reach 2360 F, which is melting range for a number of common metals.

(2) Professor Polistra doesn't want to get technical. She wants to get human, wants to find a measurement system that agrees with human experience and senses. So she wants to set up a human-based scale of temperature, something like decibels or the Beaufort wind scale. Unfortunately, temperature is much more subjective and individual than sound or wind, so a general scale is probably impossible. Consider the 'annotated thermometer' joke, which is about as close as we can get to a human scale. All of its points are specific to nationalities or localities, like:

40 F: Californians shiver uncontrollably. Minnesotans go swimming.

Still, Prof P wants to try fitting a dB-style temperature curve. It would obviously be a tanh shape, like almost all human sensory responses. Using the Fooplot online grapher, she formed up a graph for her own rather cold-loving response. The horizontal axis is degrees F, and the vertical might be called "How hot is it?" on the positive side, and "How cold is it?" on the negative side. Positive 10 is Too Fucking Hot, Negative 10 is Too Fucking Cold, and zero is Just Right.



Incidentally, the function isn't clearly visible on the blackboard. It should be:
deciGoldies = 10 * tanh((Fahrenheit - 55) / 40).

By this scale, the distinction between 1 and 5 degrees is about half a dG, which seems about right.

Labels: Heimatkunde

  ¶ 8:11 AM

  Dumb linguists as usual
Benny Boy has written his first Tweet in modernized Latin. "Scholars" are saying the same old nonsense:

The Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano threw its weight behind the initiative last week, with Manlio Simonetti, a professor of Christian history, telling the paper that Latin was well-suited to Twitter. "Latin adapts very well to the brevity demanded by new social networks, even better than English," he said.

Bad generalization from a good fact. Latin, as a synthetic language, packs more grammar into each word than English does. But this makes an 'average' sentence longer in terms of syllables or characters.

Because most noun inflections are repeated on article, adjective and noun, and verb inflections are often multisyllabic, you generally end up with more characters for the same meaning in Latin. English is mainly an isolating language, which means our grammatical functions are chiefly performed by separate words, and each word does its job exactly once.

Oriental languages get the most mileage from Twitter because they're allowed to cheat. Each character in Japanese or Chinese represents a syllable. Twitter still allows 140 characters, even though the characters carry far more weight than Roman letters. (Strictly speaking, Unicode is the cheater. Unicode uses 32 bits for each visible character no matter how much meaning it carries.)

Arabic and Hebrew have a more 'honest' advantage because they don't write vowels. Even if we were still using 8-bit ASCII, Arabic and Hebrew could pack about twice as much meaning into a tweet.
  ¶ 5:40 PM

  Before Morse 3
This is the third and last in a series of old telegraphs. The title isn't really accurate, because the Gray Telautograph came well after Morse; but I want to make the series consistent. (See the Wheatstone five-needle telegraph and the Breguet dial telegraph.)

Elisha Gray just missed being the famous inventor of the telephone and the founder of a giant corporate empire. Gray and Bell were working against each other, and Bell had better access to money and lawyers. Gray got his revenge to some extent with the Telautograph, which is the spiritual ancestor of the mouse and tablet, AND the ancestor of the modern computer printer. It even looks a lot like a printer.

The Telautograph was commercially successful from 1890 to 1920; it went out of use when photoelectric tubes made the optical fax machine possible. Sending and receiving machines are similar in appearance but opposite in mechanism.



On the sender, you pick up the pencil and write on the paper [almost] normally. The shelf under the paper is sensitive to pressure and detects when the pencil is making a mark; the pencil is attached via two strings to pulleys that rotate, creating pulses on the wire as you pull or push.



You could draw or write anything within the limits of the sender, and it would be reproduced faithfully at the receiver.



Polistra anxiously awaits the first communication from her faithful silent companion Happystar. What are his innermost thoughts? What has he been pondering?



Oh. I guess we should have expected that.



For more technical detail, here's a closeup of the sending action with the top covers removed. Imagine your hand grasping the pencil.

Each wire passes through a 'threader', then across the polarity switcher, then reels up onto the commutator on its own side. As you move the pencil around, each commutator turns quickly, breaking a circuit to create pulses on the wire from its own side. When the direction of each wire reverses, the polarity switcher puts the negative or positive side of the battery into the circuit for that side.




On the receiving side, these two streams of negative and positive pulses are sent to something like a linear stepping motor or stepping solenoid on each side. (I haven't been able to figure out this mechanism from the patent drawings!)

= = = = =

Artistic note for Poser types: I've released all three of these telegraphs on my ShareCG page. See also the Wheatstone and Breguet sets.


= = = = =

Later note: This 1961 British Pathe newsreel about the insure-everything Lloyds agency shows a Telautograph in action, starting at 1:30. Looks very much the same as the 1880 version.

Labels: Morsenet of Things

  ¶ 6:17 AM

  Schlecht und Böse
Another pair of news items leading to another random thought.

I learned German (sort of) by reading Luthers Bibel, and by singing along with Schütz and Bach. In Luther's time German made a distinction between schlecht and böse. Both words mean bad or evil, but they belong to different classes and connote different mindsets.

A peasant who snatches a piece of bacon to feed his kids is schlecht. Ein König oder Graf who snatches a peasant's land to feed his pet peacocks is böse. The peasant's schlecht actions will probably hurt someone, but he's not consciously trying to do harm, and may have no honest choice available. The König's böse behavior is fully conscious and completely gratuitous. Most of all, the König is above prosecution and knows it.

= = = = =

Schlecht news:

Spokane Valley Fire had responded to a transformer fire at the substation and saw the fence surrounding the station had been cut open. Deputies arriving on scene found a large opening in the fence and saw footprints leading to the substation.

An Avista employee told deputies a ground wire had been cut and removed from the transformer, causing it to ignite. The employee said the cutting of the ground likely burned the suspect(s). 2,165 Avista customers in the area were without power for a short time because of the incident.

Epitome of schlecht crime. Methheads work hard to acquire a few feet of copper; the crime creates its own punishment.

Fun to imagine, though. "Lessee. I'm gonna tromp through the snow; then I'm gonna cut this wire; then pull it out and take it to the recycler. Sounds like a good plaBBBBBZZZZZZFFFFFZZZZZZZFFFFZZZZZ"

= = = = =

Böse news: Lance Armstrong. Michael Mann. Lloyd Blankfein. Jamie Dimon. Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard, Julia Gillard. Nuff said.

= = = = =

  ¶ 2:27 AM

  Edison's revenge on Tesla 2


As Boeing tries to fix an unbelievably idiotic problem caused by using laptop batteries to power an aircraft, Polistra hums sedately past in her Detroit Electric.

Just another reminder that rechargeable batteries were already perfected in 1910. The nickel-iron battery doesn't burn up, lasts at least 100 years, and doesn't require Chinese materials.
  ¶ 5:34 AM

  Proposal
Various economists are tossing around dumb ideas (i.e. the trillion-dollar coin, second mortgage on Alaska) for "solving" the national debt. All of those ideas are invalid. All are mere accounting tricks with no real transfer of value. There are only two honest ways of eliminating a debt: through an actual payment, or through inflation.

So let's transfer some actual property, not just fiddle with ledger entries.

I propose giving California to China as a permanent colony in exchange for all debts. But the transfer comes with very long strings. The Chinese occupiers must be fully and enthusiastically Chinese.

Specifically, the new settlers must:

(1) Shout racist abuse at everyone who is not pure Han.

(2) Smoke constantly and aggressively.

(3) Build huge dams and coal-burning power plants, with no regard for "endangered" species.

(4) Level the Sierras and strip-mine all the gold and other minerals.

(5) Use the slag from (4) to build a new continent west of San Francisco, covered with 200-story solid gold Han-only casinos.

(6) Maintain huge slave labor camps.

(7) Execute faggots and bulldykes.

(8) Eat everything that moves. Dogs, cats, condors, brains of live monkeys.

(9) Burn down "old growth" redwood forests and sell the ash as a dick enhancer.

(10) Imprison pornographers and hippieshits.

(11) Abort female babies and treat male children as little emperors.

= = = = =

One more condition: These essentially Chinese actions must be constantly televised in the remaining US, so that normal Americans can watch hypersensitive Californians screaming and dying of unbearable mental anguish. This will provide a huge source of revenue for the colony, and may even have the side benefit of crowding out all existing media. Revenge Channel 1, Revenge Channel 2, Revenge Channel 3.... pretty soon there's no audience for NBC, CBS, Fox, etc.
  ¶ 3:54 AM

  Two items, one error
A couple of totally separate news items today illustrate the same basic error in thinking. This error is fairly new and nearly universal. I'm pretty sure nobody with any sort of sophistication fell into this fallacy 100 years ago.

Item 1: A murderer was actually executed, which is rare enough; he was killed in the electric chair, which is unique. First time in several years. He had to volunteer repeatedly and aggressively to make this happen, and had to overrule a dozen satanic lawyers over and over and over.**

Satan dba ACLU has brought us to this point by manipulating the error I'm discussing. Every possible method of execution is illegally declared to be "cruel and unusual" because it may cause some extra pain in the last minute of life.

= = = = =

Item 2: Some idiot "professor" has done a Skinner-box experiment on crabs, showing that they can learn to avoid an electric shock.

First of all, this is fantastically redundant. Many millenia of informal experience and two centuries of formal experiments have taught us that ALL LIVING THINGS from bacteria to begonias to bumblebees to bonobos have some way of sensing pain or unpleasant situations; and ALL LIVING THINGS have some way of escaping from the pain or unpleasantness. Our understanding of sensory systems in plants and protozoa is new and still developing, but we've known about animals forever. This is as certain and unarguable as gravity.

Now the idiot "professor" is using the completely unremarkable fact to reach a completely nonsensical conclusion via the same error:

The finding could have important implications for the food industry, where many chefs boil crabs, lobsters and prawns alive in the belief that they are impervious to pain.

Lead researcher Professor Bob Elwood said: 'The experiments show it is likely they experience pain, rather than flinching, and therefore we must start to question how these animals are treated."

Well of course they experience pain. There's absolutely no way to draw a line anywhere in the living world between "critters that experience things" and "critters that don't experience things". Maybe awareness exists only in some phyla and not others; or maybe there's a spectrum from dim awareness to bright awareness; but we have NO OBJECTIVE WAY to draw those lines. If we use the word experience for our action when we run away from a skunk, we also have to use the word experience for the action of a bacterium swimming away from a toxin.

This idiot "professor", and his accomplices in the media who are loudly trumpeting his "special new finding", want to use the "special new finding" about crabs to make us stop eating crabs, because the crabs suffer in the last minute of life.

= = = = =

Why is that focus so fallacious? Because anything that happens in the last minute of life will not be remembered.

We DO need to focus on humane treatment DURING THE FULL LIFETIME of the critters we're going to eat. A cow or chicken or crab that is unnecessarily deprived, or unnecessarily confined, is being treated inhumanely. It is suffering, and it endures and remembers the suffering for months or years.

Sophisticated religions have always understood this point, and have tried to encourage decent treatment of livestock and careful use of crops, followed by a respectful but not necessarily painless death. Kosher, halal, saying grace at table. Three ways to demonstrate sacred respect toward the animal we're sacrificing.

= = = = =

** Footnote: The fact that ONLY A THREE-TIME MURDERER can wrestle our official Satans into a sort of temporary semi-sanity, and the fact that it takes TWENTY YEARS for a THREE-TIME MURDERER to achieve this little temporary partial victory, tells us EVERY MOTHERFUCKING THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about the current _____ ______ _____ ______ ______ ______ of what we formerly knew as "Western civilization". [No words exist to fill those blanks, and if they did exist, I wouldn't deflower and contaminate an innocent computer by typing them.]

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 6:00 PM

  Forgotten stuff


Listening to old radio MP3s, Polistra and Happystar have picked up a few facts and words that have been forgotten.

(1) In a 1940 report from Germany, a CBS correspondent mentioned that he had been driving on a "double-track highway" called an Autobahn. Shows that the four-lane road was still completely unfamiliar to Americans. The reporter had to make a railroad analogy which was both familiar and appropriate. At that time Americans understood that a double track made it easier for trains to run in both directions, without risk of collision if the dispatcher failed to give the right signals.

It's odd that Americans didn't apply that analogy to automobiles until much later. We had plenty of divided boulevards inside cities, so the connection should have been possible. There was simply no pressure for highway safety.

(2) Also in 1940 the Senate passed a new Conscription law. Sen Josh Lee of Okla introduced a bill to conscript money as well as men. Seems like a good idea. The rich are always able to keep their sons safe, so why not put their money in harm's way instead? Of course the bill failed. Then as now, Wall Street was pure treason.

(3) In 1952 when Comrade Truman was fucking up the Korean War, Senator Al Gore Senior made a suggestion that shows us the genetic origin of Al Junior's fantastic stupidity. Al Senior proposed dumping nuclear waste across the Korean Peninsula to create a 'moat' that the forces of the North couldn't cross. A spokesman for the Atomic Energy Commission refuted the idea with a degree of clarity and logic that we rarely hear from officials now: It would be possible to create a mile-wide zone with enough radiation to kill a man who stays there for a month. But no matter how strong we made the radiation, a soldier could run through it in 10 minutes with no ill effects. A soldier in a steel truck or tank could drive across it even faster, with even less exposure. [A modern bureaucrat would say with drearily predictable legalism: "We haven't read the statement. We'll let Senator Gore speak for himself." .... thus leaving the ignorance uncorrected.]
  ¶ 3:10 AM