Diverthity ith tho thweet
Except when it's in my billion-dollar back yard, and then diversity is thimply horrible!

Elton John loves diversity and tolerance. His career depends on diversity and tolerance. But now he finds a community of Gypsy criminals near his mansion, and that's intolerable!

Maurice "Fred" Sines, a racehorse owner who claims Romany heritage, [plans a Gypsy development which] threatens the tranquillity of Old Windsor and Sir Elton's palatial estate, which backs on to the land where the permanent gipsy camp would be built.

The multi-millionaire singer flew into Britain in the middle of last week and is believed to have travelled to his Windsor home with civil partner David Furnish and their son Zachary.

A close friend of the star reacted in horror when alerted to the proposal by the Telegraph.

...

Last week angry residents, among them retired bankers, doctors, university professors, senior airline managers and even the secretary of the local "shift and punt" club, who take to the River Thames every week, staged a mass protest.

My, my! Professors, bankers, and rowing clubs! All the usual suspects who call ordinary folks Neanderthal Fascist Nazis when ordinary folks protest the presence of Gypsy criminals.

The background to this: Last year those same professors, bankers and rowing clubs went beyond cussing at normal people. They actually got Parliament to pass a law that gave special unique aristocratic privileges ("human rights") to Gypsy criminals.

Local residents concerned that gipsies could bring an increase in crime should be given “little weight” in deciding whether or not they can stay.

Fear of crime is not “a legitimate ground on which to withhold planning permission,” the guidance said.

Well, of course. Don't you understand? Fear of crime and fear of crime are not the same thing.

When poor Christians fear Gypsy crime, their fear is Unfear. It does not exist. The poor Christians shall be overruled, and the Gypsy criminals shall be forced into the midst of the unenlightened Christian folks. But when fairies, intellectuals, Jewish bankers and rich dickheads fear Gypsy crime, that's a real fear, an enlightened fear.
  ¶ 7:42 AM

  Metrology notes
Polistra is a fan of metrology, so when WUWT carried an article about a major standard of measure losing its standardness, her imagination was engaged.

In a vault beneath a 17th-century pavilion on the outskirts of Paris sits a platinum cylinder known as Le Grand K. Since 1889 it has been the international prototype for the kilogram, the standard against which all other kilos are measured.

"It's a scandal that we've got this kilogram hanging around changing its mass and therefore changing the mass of everything else in the universe!" Bill Phillips, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, exclaimed at a scientific summit in London this week. No one knows for sure what went wrong with Le Grand K, but some theorize it lost weight from being cleaned.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 10:56 AM

  Happy 150, Kansas!


It's Kansas Day!

Polistra celebrates the sesquicentennial of her home state!

The Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, an icon of the original purposes and goals of Kansas, has joined this scene for the party. It normally lives about 30 miles east of the Mill.

Kansas is now governed by Sam Brownback, one of Polistra's favorite leaders.

Under the previous governor, Big Sis Sebelius, Kansas slipped away from its original purposes and goals; now that Sebelius has moved to DC where the Big Sis type dominates, Brownback should be able to refocus that old Kansan abolitionist energy toward eliminating abortion.

= = = = =

A point Polistra has made before, but needs to be repeated: At some time in the near future a mass secession of non-insane areas will be necessary. Thus we desperately need strong and independent governors in the states that have some chance of survival. Otherwise the genocidal monsters in DC, NY, California, et al will be able to drag the whole continent down to raw Haitian hell.


  ¶ 6:12 AM

  Tech note
Damn. Wish I'd found this many years ago.

In Windows XP, I've been annoyed for a long time by molasses-like sslloowww file opening. Almost every change of directory in the file-open dialog takes several seconds, and the interval is variable. Slows down everything, and breaks the rhythm of "assembly-line" operations on graphics or text. Especially annoying when building something for Poser, because Poser's folder structure requires an ungodly number of up-the-tree and down-the-tree moves.

Several times through the years I've looked for answers, but for some reason didn't find a useful tip until this morning. The tip is here, dated 2003.

The solution is simple.

Use Regedit to edit the registry.

Locate this place in the hierarchy:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

See if a key named NoRecentDocsHistory already exists under this heading.

If it does exist, set its value to 1.

If it doesn't exist, create a new key named NoRecentDocsHistory and set its DWORD value to 1.

Magic! After closing Regedit, all file-opens are now immediate.
  ¶ 8:30 AM

  Unprecedented?
The Islamic/Gaian Occupation Government on Britain is claiming as always that the current winter is Unprecedented, Shocking, etc, so that they can attribute it to Gaia's Holy Wrath Upon Our Carbonic Sins.

Nonsense. Here's some BBC footage from a similar winter in the '60s.
  ¶ 4:11 AM

  Your move, Sheikh
I'm curious to see how Sheikh Osama responds to the current wave of popular revolts in Arab countries. Nominally, this is exactly what he's been working for!

He claims to be a paladin for the long-suffering Arab people, who have been betrayed by foreign-serving client governments for most of the 20th century. He attacks Russia, Britain and America because those three nations have been using Arab governments as chess pieces in the Great Game.

The present wave of uprisings doesn't seem to be inspired by the Sheikh directly. Instead, it appears to be triggered by Wikileaks revelations of the collaborations between those governments and America ... and worst of all, their quiet collaborations with Israel.

[ Later: the London Telegraph reveals that some part of the US govt has been training and funding the protesters in Egypt. This started under Sultan Bush and continues under Pasha Obama. Playing both sides seems strange; we've been heavily funding Our SOB in Egypt for decades, and now we're helping to undermine Our SOB. Is this a strategy with a definite goal, or just Goldman Sachs thinking? Hedge both sides? ]

Egypt is Dr Zawahiri's home and Yemen is the Sheikh's home. Both are bubbling at the moment, which should be pleasing to the Doc and the Sheikh by this hypothesis. Will the revolt finally reach Arabia itself? That should be the keystone, if Sheikh really means what he says.

The big question: If most Arab countries end up with strongly Islamic regimes that serve the cultures and needs of their own people instead of puppeting for the two big Empires, will Sheikh Osama declare victory and stop his war? Or will he act like an American bureaucrat and find new reasons to keep working after his mission is fully accomplished?

= = = = =

Update: The question gets even stronger now that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the ideological father of al-Qaeda, has claimed control of the Egyptian uprising. If the uprising succeeds, it will mean not just a victory for loose allies of Sheikh Osama but a victory for his own organization. This will probably be good for the Egyptian people in general, who have been yanked around by foreign empires for too long ... but will it satisfy the Sheikh?


  ¶ 3:36 AM

  No, that's not what it is at all.
Sort of a minor point, but Polistra always feels the need to defend FDR's policies from modern misunderstanding.

Radio talker Lars Larson was discussing farm subsidies tonight. Larson is a good independent and a pretty good thinker, no party hack ... but he missed this one badly. He assumed farm subsidies were put in place solely for competitive matching, because other countries subsidized their farmers.

Dead wrong.

Farm subsidies were created in 1933 by the Ag Adjustment Act, which was found to be both unconstitutional and badly designed, and was replaced by a better system in 1938.

The purpose is simple. Farming is critically important. You can't have a country without food.

Farmers operating in a totally free market will grow crops based on current prices, leading to wild swings in price and then leading to bankruptcy for some farmers. They will also misuse the land, failing to rotate or fallow when needed, because they can't afford to skip a year. Both of these situations had run wild in the 1920's, assisted of course by speculators, leading to the Dust Bowl. Land that might have remained useful became desert, and the acquired skills of farmers also went to waste.

The Ag Adjustment Act paid farmers of important crops at a baseline level, freeing them from the desperate need to have maximum yield every year until the soil blows away. In return it required the farmers to practice better methods, and other New Deal programs helped to train them.

None of this was related to foreign trade, but it did strengthen American agriculture so we could become a mighty and reliable exporter.
  ¶ 8:44 PM

  Poodle that didn't bark
Noticed something possibly interesting in NBC evening news coverage of the latest monster snow in NYC. Absolutely no mention of global warming.

Is this just an oversight, or a direct result of NBC's new owner? Under Comrade Immelt of GE, all programming, not just weather, was required to carry the Gaian message in one form or another. It was as constant and all-pervasive as the Christian message on Pat Robertson's network.

Might just be an oversight, but I'm going to keep watching.

One theme that did come through on all the networks is the utter incompetence of the regular "meteorologists". They had all predicted 4 or 5 inches, but the storms just sat there and gave 4 or 5 feet. Most likely this isn't because of a Gore-style assumption of tropical warmth; the frontline folks at the Weather Service are more practical than that. Still, their models seem unable to track and predict the movements of the jet stream. I've been seeing similar failures here, though our winter this year is not especially bad. (Knock on ice.)
  ¶ 6:37 PM

  What in the motherfucking hell is wrong with these people?
Washington state, like most states, is way past broke. Yet its tyrannical "legislators" continue to impose more rules, requiring more paid regulators, and making it more likely that tax-paying businesses will continue to leave the state.

Idiocy 1:

Health advocates believe that it should be illegal to smoke in a car with kids in it and SB 5016 aims to do just that. No one signed up in opposition to the measure at the Senate Transportation committee today where it received its first public hearing.

Idiocy 2: State Senator Comrade Debbie Begala, Hero of Pol Pot Labor, proposes a ban on all wood stoves in the state. The proposal is full of exemptions for various privileged classes, so the net result would be very little reduction in pollution. It would only add jobs for regulatory tyrants (who love enforcing exemptions even more than they love enforcing rules) and would make life difficult for businesses that sell stoves and fuel.
  ¶ 7:08 AM

  Dream note
Mainly for my own records, since nobody but Googlebot "reads" this ... In the past two months, several of my remembered dreams have been firmly located in the West Central Community Center here in Spokane.

Can't think of any good reason for this. Never been inside the building. In the first 10 years here, I was working downtown daily and rode a bus that passed by WCCC. So its exterior and location are thoroughly familiar. But I don't go downtown regularly now, and the bus route also changed. Haven't seen it at all since 2001.

Most of my complex dreams are still located vaguely in Okla where I lived in the 1970s, and the characters are still based on the people I knew in the '70s. Until this recent pattern, the only Spokane-located dreams were in an improved version** of this house, and most of those seem to have been triggered by actual sounds that the dream-machine interpreted as intruders or visitors.

You'd think that 20 years in one place would make more of an impression on a brain, but apparently not!

**Oddly, the improved version of this house is constant in those dreams, with a definite floor plan. Even though I've never seriously considered remodeling, I must have an unconscious Platonic template for what this house "should have been".
  ¶ 5:48 AM

  Sputnik
Rand Simberg at NRO said most of what I wanted to say.

Fact is, Sputnik didn't really wake us up, and we didn't need to be awakened.

Russia got there first because Russia was less careful, that's all. The same lack of caution gave them Chernobyl. Nuff said.

It wasn't a lack of American education that held back our rocket efforts. Most of the top scientists were Germans, educated under Hitler. And the American-educated boys were already working hard on all sorts of advanced projects. One of my engineer uncles was working on cesium-ion rocket engines at Los Alamos when Sputnik happened.

The money pumped into math and science education after Sputnik only made things worse, as money always does in education. The educrats implemented the bizarre and idiotic Stanford Math Study Group project (commonly called New Math). SMSG was based on Set Theory, which was "elementary" by the convoluted Gödelian definitions of weird-ass academic dickheads, but had precisely zero connection with the way humans actually learn and use math. SMSG New Math caused pure confusion for both teachers and kids, and actually set back American math ed for many years.



Would have been vastly better if education had returned to the one-room schoolhouse with its abacus and counting boards. No need to tear down the buildings, just emulate great teachers like Mrs Hunholz who taught the one-room way.

Learn concretely and you can handle abstraction later. Learn abstractly and you're lost forever.

= = = = =

Footnote: SMSG seems to be called School Math Study Group, but it was definitely Stanford on the textbooks we used, and it was called Stanford in local discussions at the time. And it was discussed in our house with considerable passion. My father was a prof in Education at KSU, and part of his job was supervising practice teachers in math. Thus he could see this mess from a broad perspective. He saw the older teachers getting totally frustrated because they didn't understand the Stanford shit; he saw the administrators stupidly pushing it because it was New And Improved And Progressive And Really Really Smart; he saw the kids failing to learn because it was shit. But he wasn't in a position to stop any of it. He could only sympathize quietly with the older teachers, try to assure them that they weren't moronic or out-of-date; it was the curriculum that was moronic.

= = = = =

Footnote 2: Nice irony: at about the same time, Russian math education was switching to the one-room schoolhouse approach. Learn by concrete interaction and discovery, with lots of discussion and teamwork toward solving real problems. Their math and science education remains superior and liberating, while ours remains stultified and stupefied. Makes me wonder quite seriously: Was SMSG a Soviet plot? If it wasn't, the effect was the same.

= = = = =

Conclusion: Our ruling class used Sputnik to convince us that we were 20 years behind the Russians in math. We weren't, and it didn't matter anyway.

Our ruling class then proceeded to destroy our math curriculum, which actually put us 20 years behind the Russians.

Since then, our ruling class has perfected the art of national sabotage, and practices it in all aspects of government, religion, science, education and culture.

Labels: Experiential education, switchover

  ¶ 5:58 AM

  Sotuuuuuuuu


Polistra heard one good thing in Pasha Obama's speech: "Faster than planes in some places ... without the patdown."

He seems serious about high-speed rail.

May be serious about cutting regulations; but the last president who proposed this was Clinton, who let Algore "handle" the idea, ie discard it.

On the other well-known rail of politics, Pasha Obama said something vague about reforming Social Security, then immediately ruled out all the actual ways to reform it. Cute.

On education, he has consistently pushed vo-tech and soft-pedalled the "traditional" abstract college education. Excellent message, and the first president in recent decades who has pushed in this direction rhetorically. But action belies words. Right now his Dept of Ed is making life difficult for the very same private tech schools that he verbally praises.
  ¶ 6:53 PM

  Zero tolerance, infinite appetite
Polistra has discussed this before in the context of impurity and pollution, but it applies equally well to the more positive parts of life.

From an editorial in New Superstitionist:

Good news from Africa. We may be in a position to eradicate the guinea worm (see "Southern Sudan's votes could kill an ancient disease"). If we succeed, this will only be the second human disease to be wiped out, after smallpox in 1980.

The optimism comes because the people of Southern Sudan have peacefully voted for independence. Thanks to international pressure on their current governors to accept the vote, the independence plan may just work.

Southern Sudan has already helped bring the cattle disease rinderpest close to eradication, despite civil war. But guinea worm is harder. There is no vaccine. You have to be there when the worm emerges from every victim, and stop it infecting anyone else. To finish off the worm, the Southern Sudanese need peace and they need money for development.

We know poverty breeds war, anger and disease that can threaten us all. This time, the poor have voted for a new future - one without the guinea worm. That's a remarkable peace dividend.

One of three correct.

Poverty breeds disease, yes. Anger and war? Nope.

Look at any war in recent memory. You'll find the war was started by a rich tribe who wanted even more riches (or more macho) ... or by a rich tribe who wanted to bring down a competing rich tribe.

= = = = =

Impoverished people are concrete. They understand how life works. Above all they instinctively understand Diminishing Returns, or in mathy terms the sigmoid curve or tanh function. Life is all about the tanh. (Just ask Snookih!)



Poor people understand the limits at both ends. Static friction and drag. You have to push the cart for a while before it starts to move; then you can move it faster by pushing harder; but beyond a certain speed extra effort doesn't gain more speed. Diminishing returns.


= = =

More broadly, a certain amount of effort is needed to start anything. You have to build a fence around your livestock or plow the fields or set up the fruit stand by the roadside.


= = =

After that, you're in the small linear region, where increasing effort will bring increasing return. Water the crops more, or feed the hogs more, you get more food. Spend more hours selling fruit, you get more money.


= = =

And poor people also understand that beyond a certain point your results will hit a ceiling, a saturation point where the friction negates your effort. So they don't try to quadruple their returns, and they don't try to steal their neighbor's livestock.


= = =

Most importantly, the poor understand the emotional aspects of Diminishing Returns. They know that having more cattle than you can handle is not better than having enough cattle to feed your kids. They sense that enjoyment does not continue to increase after you reach sufficiency.

= = = = =


Rich educated people don't know tanh. They have never planted a crop or turned a wrench or rocked a cradle. They have dealt with life at a clean distance, through lawyers and spreadsheets and Disposable Mexican Servants. They assume that life runs on a straight line.


They believe added effort will always yield added income. Most importantly they assume that increased income will continue to yield more enjoyment. Rich educated man thinks: "I have lots of Money and Power and Lebensraum, and I enjoy them. If I have twice as much Money and Power and Lebensraum, I will enjoy them twice as much. If I have 584358934859389508390589 times as much Money and Power and Lebensraum, I will enjoy them 584358934859389508390589 times as much. MORE! MORE! MORE! MINE! MINE! MINE! ALL MINE! ALL MINE! ALL MINE! YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY! ALL MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE! ALL MEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

That's why rich educated people make war. They don't know where to stop. They don't know that pleasure needs a foundation and has a roof. They are too fucking stupid to understand tanh.
  ¶ 12:19 PM

  Jane Jacobs needed
Sociologist Jane Jacobs (and many others) have used a sort of A/B experiment to distinguish innate characteristics of an ethnic group from the characteristics forced by their usual rulers.

Find two cohesive communities of the same group, living under very different kinds of government. Ask: do these people fail at home and flourish in diaspora? If so, their usual native government is the limiting factor.

Or do they perform roughly the same in both places? If so, their own characteristics are the limiting factor.

Korea is the purest laboratory-quality experiment. Not even a diaspora, so geography and weather aren't variables. Same people on the same land, divided in half by an arbitrary boundary; horrible government imposed on one half, decent government on the other. Under horrible government they simply starved. Under decent government, they became the most competent country in the world.

Chinese are the classic example of better performance outside the native land. Their native government has been oppressive most of the time, stifling progress. When they gather in other countries, they quickly show all kinds of superior talents for business and science. Thus the problem (until very recently) has been the government.

Africans are the opposite. Native governments in Africa are oppressive, but Africans in other countries are still corrupt, unintelligent and violent. Crime rates in black communities of the West are identical to crime rates in natively-ruled African countries. Thus the problem is innate characteristics.

= = = = =

After anguishing over the "Fighting Hamster" clip, I started thinking about Slavs in this context. Clearly the native Russian gov't has been consistently oppressive for many centuries, with a peak of nastiness during the Soviet era. The alcohol-fueled demographic suicide of Russia is an obvious result. But what happens when they gather elsewhere?

Spokane should be a good experiment for some Jane Jacobs type. Since 1989, Spokane went from zero Slavic to 15% "fresh" Slavic. The local Russians (and Bosnians, Ukranians, etc) don't stand out. They haven't taken over the drunk tank; they work very hard, start small businesses, and keep their houses neat. Aside from language and sometimes costume, the only way you can spot them is by the smoke!

This webpage caught my attention as a sort of icon ... or should that be икон? ... of Slavic flowering in this area. Look at the top picture. Now compare with Fighting Hamster.
  ¶ 4:52 AM

  Atheist joke
Ran across this joke when searching for a different joke. This one is much better than the one I was trying to find!


An Atheist accosted a preacher. "Do you believe in eternal life?" The preacher has no time to reply. "Well it's a load of rubbish!" shouted the Atheist. "I believe in science, evolution, survival of the fittest, and when we die, that's it! No eternal life, no great judgment, and no God!" The Atheist continues his assault against the preacher repetitiously and tirelessly. "Eternal life! Eternal life! Ha! It's all pie in the sky! When I die that's it, the end, no eternal life, no nothing." He continues, until he reaches his climax, "I will be buried six feet under when I die and that's it! Nothing! Caput! When I die I am utterly convinced that that will be the end of me!"

"Well, thank God for that" replies the preacher.


Comes from this webpage. Poor spelling and punctuation, but lots of truly funny jokes.


  ¶ 7:35 AM

  Vermont tries to get it right
Vermont's new governor is pushing for a single-payer health plan within the state. This doesn't seem to have entered the national discussion, but it's definitely worth watching.

You can't honestly argue the basic point now. Countries with single-payer plans have better health, better competitiveness, better business, and more opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Obama's plan is a huge step backwards from single-payer; it maintains all the current redundant and conflicting segments of American health care, and adds yet another redundant and conflicting segment with vastly more rules than the other redundant and conflicting segments, and no co-ordination between any of the segments. The only advantage of Obama's plan is that it guarantees even more profit to insurance companies, at tremendously increased cost to business and workers.

The Vermont plan, if the Feds will allow it to be set up properly, should blaze the trail for the rest of the country. Above all, it must find a way to fold both Medicare and Medicaid into the plan, so there are NO redundant/conflicting rules and NO redundant/conflicting bureaucracies. Single means single, dammit.
  ¶ 5:49 AM

  Language update: blank


Professor Polistra has noticed something... typically she would have a new Language Update about now, a blackboard full of annoying misuses and trendy buzzwords.

The last Update was in September, and it usually takes 3 or 4 months to accumulate enough wordcrap to fill the blackboard. But since September, I haven't noted anything new and annoying. What's going on? Am I getting less fussy with age? Highly unlikely.

Aha! Since September I've watched almost zero television.

Therefore, the non-barking blackboard implies that television, especially cable "news", is the prime culprit in linguistic distortion. Radio and the web must be somewhat less prone to mindlessly copied mispronunciations and stupid insider jargon.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 6:38 PM

  Russians don't change much
Caution, this clip is not for the faint of heart.

The title means "[The] fighting evil-hamster attacks!"

Russian hooligans tease a giant black-bellied hamster, and it bites their fingers. In drunken glee, they proudly show off the pouring blood and keep teasing. I don't know why the hamster is giant and black-bellied; maybe heavy metal pollution, maybe it was bred for fighting.

The whole situation is qualitatively different from modern western pranks. American hooligans, even when drunk, would have enough sense to avoid a rabid-looking hamster. You'd have to go back a century or two to find this level of suicidal drunken oblivion.

= = = = =

Later thoughts here.
  ¶ 5:25 PM

  The pre-17th senate returns briefly
Oklahoma has now joined the set of lawsuits against the Infinite Profit For Insurance Companies Act of 2010 (aka Obamacare).

At this point, delegates of 28 state governments are taking official action against this law. 28 of 50 would be a nice majority in any functional legislature.

Before it was ruined by the 17th Amendment, the Senate performed this function. Each senator was appointed by the state legislature and thus served as a delegate from the state government. These delegates were mainly meant to analyze, revise, or stop the laws passed by the lower house.

After the 17th, the Senate turned into a second lower house, except with zero accountability. Senators no longer represented anything in particular, so they ended up representing only their own personal power-hunger.

To some extent the Supremes picked up the job of checking laws, but after the Supremes were taken over by Soviet Agent Earl Warren, they have mostly been writing laws to replace and wreck the Constitution.

It's sort of interesting to see an original legislative function popping to the surface again, even though it has to work outside the rotten structure of the legislature.

In modern America, valid and legal actions can only occur as temporary ad hoc workarounds.
  ¶ 5:13 PM

  Boortz's fine idea
Usually I find Neal Boortz annoyingly Randian. Today he offered a strong and original idea that could be a real nation-saver.

Repealing Obamacare is meaningless unless you simultaneously replace it with something better. Boortz says we should replace it with Charter Health Care, analogous to Charter Schools.

Charter School is a retronym, a fancy phrase for a special school that operates the way all schools used to operate in the days when schools were somewhat effective. Without the idiocy of mandates forced by various special interest groups, and with wide latitude for the principal to set locally appropriate policies.

Charter insurance would be the same. The feds would license or charter several private insurance companies to operate without state and federal mandates.

If you're a sane older heterosexual male, you can be sure that you aren't going to get pregnant, or get AIDS, or get an abortion, or get [voluntary] psychiatric care, or have a sex-change operation. Thus you should be able to buy a simple insurance plan purely for catastrophic stuff, from a company that doesn't waste any money on those physically impossible risks.

Currently, each state requires some of those things to be covered by every insurance plan, which jacks up the cost for people who will never need those services, and for people who have enough goddamn sense to pay for extra crap on their own. And even in these parlous times, with federal mandates indefinite and potentially infinite, states keep piling on more and more mandates. Fucking egregious treasonous monstrosities.

Sidenote: Would governments behave differently if they knew how many Americans pray fervently and daily for Sheikh Osama to try again and get it right this time? On his first try he missed most of Wall Street and he missed the Capitol, thus leaving us in the same totally fucked condition.
  ¶ 2:44 PM