This is for discussing events in Richmond today. One hopes it will be an uneventful day of successfully protesting the recent assault on Second Amendment rights by the Virginia state government, but we will see.
Category: Uncategorized
That was not how to fix it
Back in 1986, Jerry Pournelle published an essay in Imperial Stars Vol. I: The Stars at War, in which he addressed the economic concerns of the USA’s aging population as it faced the prospect of bankruptcy:
If a family can see that over the next five years they’ve no choice but to spend money that won’t be coming in, they’ve got some decisions to make. Perhaps a second job, or a new source of income; but suppose there aren’t any?
Sell something? But if there’s nothing to sell? Cut expenses? Perhaps, although if the expenses are taxes that’s not going to work either. And governments, it seems, can’t cut expenses. Reagan’s “cuts” were only a slowdown of increases; the 1983 budget is considerably larger (in real dollars) than was the 1982 budget. So while we talk of budget cuts, we don’t mean it, and I don’t suppose we ever will.
Then what’s left? In the case of a family, it’s obvious. Speculative investments. If you’re going to go broke anyway, take a high flyer and the worst that happens is you’re bankrupt sooner; at best you make enough to keep going.
Return now to the US: we have an aging work force. It is absolutely predictable that in a few years there are going to be more people retired, and fewer able to work; and somebody’s got to support the retired. They’re voters, you know, and they’ll be organized.
Project this scenario ahead twenty years, and you can scare yourself; yet I think of no single institution, none whatever, that can and will do anything about it. All parts of our government operate on a much shorter time frame. If we had one hereditary house in Congress—heresy as it is to say—we’d at least have an institution that worried about the next decade, since its members would know they’d still be there to face the problems. They might also be concerned about their children. But we have no such institution in government, and now that the family has become relatively unimportant we don’t have many private ones to look that far ahead either.
Does this mean we’re doomed?
I don’t know. It’s sure a hell of a challenge.
How, then, can we prevent our children from cursing our memory?
The best way, it seems to me, is investment; to do what Keyworth said the administration wants to do; but do it in a big way. Look: we’re facing bankruptcy. They keep projecting federal deficits larger than the whole budget was during the Johnson administration. The remedy, some say, is to raise taxes, but we all know that’s asinine. All higher taxes do is stimulate people to spend effort on tax avoidance rather than wealth creation. Right now we have teams of the brightest people in the nation working for the IRS, and other equally competent teams working for their victims; the vectorial sum of their activity is zero. How is the Republic well served by this?
No: if we’re headed for bankruptcy, we’d as well be hung for sheep as lambs. You’re going to have deficits? Pity; but if so, take some of it and invest. Back long shots. Like space industries. Lunar colonies. Heave money at the universities. Change tax laws to provide really heavy incentives for industry to do basic R&D.
What you’re praying for is a breakthrough; some way to change the very rules of the game. That’s happened often enough in history, although seldom in response to deliberate stimulation; but what the hell, we’re desperate, or should be.
And I mean that: we should be in a state of near panic just now. How can you look into the future and be anything but scared? The work force gets older. Our machines get older. Our taxes get higher, and our savings get lower. More and more people become concerned with “survival”, the underground economy is the only thing that’s booming (and what a marvelous thing that is! We get surgeons out painting their own houses, because it’s cheaper than hiring it done. A real accomplishment). We ought to be scared stiff.
One thing we now know with the benefit of 34 years of hindsight: permitting mass immigration to import a younger work force is absolutely not the answer and will not prevent succeeding generations from cursing the memory of the preceding ones. Bankruptcy and a lower standard of living would have been vastly preferable.
But, unfortunately, that was not considered an acceptable option to the Baby Boomers. Now, ironically enough, and as we may be seeing sooner rather than later in Virginia, there will be war.
Championship Weekend
I like the Titans and the 49ers today, because defense wins championships. Discuss amongst yourselves.
UPDATE: And it’s over. Chiefs just went up 35-17 halfway through the fourth quarter. I did NOT like anything Tennessee did since the last five minutes of the first half. The KC defense was actually better than the Tennessee defense.
Planning Charlottesville 2.0
The disarmament forces are actively seeking to create more anti-gun martyrs as an excuse to continue their war on the Second Amendment and the American people:
The Virginia Citizens Defense League’s yearly rally at the Capitol typically draws just a few hundred gun enthusiasts. This year, however, thousands of gun activists are expected to turn out. Second Amendment groups have identified the state as a rallying point for the fight against what they see as a national erosion of gun rights.
“We’re not going to be quiet anymore. We’re going to fight them in the courts and on the ground. The illegal laws they’re proposing are just straight up unconstitutional,” said Timothy Forster, of Chesterfield, Virginia, an NRA member who had one handgun strapped to his shoulder and another tucked into his waistband as he stood outside a legislative office building earlier this week.
VCDL president Philip Van Cleave said he’s heard from groups around the country that plan to send members to Virginia, including the Nevada-based, far-right Oath Keepers, which has promised to organize and train armed posses and militia.
Extremist groups have blanketed social media and online forums with ominous messages and hinted at potential violence. The FBI said it arrested three men linked to a violent white supremacist group Thursday who were planning to attend the rally in Richmond, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation.
Democrats have permanently banned guns inside the Capitol, and Gov. Ralph Northam declared a temporary state of emergency Wednesday that bans all weapons, including guns, from Capitol Square, during the rally to prevent “armed militia groups storming our Capitol.” Gun-rights groups asked the Virginia Supreme Court to rule Northam’s declaration unconstitutional, but the court on Friday upheld the ban.
Northam said there were credible threats of violence – like weaponized drones being deployed over Capitol Square. On Friday, the FAA issued a temporary flight restriction, including for drones, over Capitol airspace during the rally.
The governor said some of the rhetoric used by groups planning to attend Monday’s rally is reminiscent of that used ahead of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. One woman was killed and more than 30 other people were hurt when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters there.
The Virginia State Police, the Virginia Capitol Police and the Richmond Police are all coordinating the event and have plans for a huge police presence at Monday’s rally that will include both uniformed and plainclothes officers. Police plan to limit access to Capitol Square to only one entrance and have warned rally-goers that they may have to wait hours to get past security screening.
The massive “temporary flight restriction” is particularly ominous, as it would appear to be designed to prevent independent camera drones from providing a clear picture of what is happening. While there is no way of knowing what will inspire the eventual collapse of the political union, if Richmond does represent the start of the next stage of the collapse, I very much doubt anyone will be surprised.
Falsifying the NPPN hypothesis
Here is a thought concerning the oft-expressed assertion that an overrepresentation in the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals of Jewish descent is an indicator of Jewish intelligence, or what may be described as the Nobel Prize Per Nation (NPPN) hypothesis. What got me thinking about this was that on Russia Today, it was pointed out by a Los Angeles film critic that the film Jojo Rabbit, which has been nominated for six Oscars, is an average film that would never have been nominated for an award if its subject matter was not the Holocaust.
So, it should be possible to count up the number of Oscar nominations awarded to Holocaust-related films, then compare the Oscar nomination/Holocaust film ratio to the ratio of Oscars nominations given to all non-Holocaust films. My hypothesis is that the Holocaust film overperformance will actually exceed the reported statistical Nobel Prize overperformance of 99,900 percent, and thereby add additional weight to my statistical demolition of the ridiculous “115 average IQ” rhetoric.
I am not going to bother testing the hypothesis for the obvious reason that a) I have already proved what I wanted to prove to my own satisfaction, b) I don’t care who is, on average, smarter than whom, and c) I really don’t care about prizes, Hollywood, or Hollywood prizes. But if some film buff feels like putting in the effort, tell me how it works out and I’ll post the results here.
Of course, the most obvious disproof of the NPPN hypothesis is to simply turn the argument on its head. If it is true that a high ratio of Nobel Prizes per nation is a proof of high average national intelligence, then a low ratio of NPPN must be a proof of low average intelligence. Since China only has 11 Nobel Prize winners despite having a very large population, (6.9 percent of its statistical share) and India has only 10 despite a population of 1.2 billion, (6.6 percent of its statistical share), the NPPN argument rests upon the idea that the Chinese and Indian people are considerably less intelligent than most of the nations on Earth.
It is also worth noting that although Jews are said to have won a total of 41 percent of all the Nobel Prizes in economics, there is no Nobel Prize in economics. It is actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, a prize that was established in 1968 by a donation from Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, on the bank’s 300th anniversary and is not one of the prizes that Alfred Nobel established in his will in 1895.
Anyhow, the Nobel Prizes awarded to Barack Obama and Bob Dylan should be more than sufficient to demonstrate the total absurdity of the hyphothesis. The NPPN hypothesis is no more credible than the argument that the three greatest science fiction novelists are Lois McMaster Bujold, NK Jemisin, and Connie Willis because they have won the most Hugo Awards for Best Novel.
Neither credentials nor participation trophies are indicative of intelligence.
The horrors of dyscivilization
Of course the medical and scientific communities lied about unborn children not feeling pain:
Unborn babies may be able to feel pain before reaching 24 weeks, say scientists – meaning they could suffer as they are being aborted. Until now, the consensus of medical opinion has been that foetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks’ gestation, after which abortion is illegal in Britain except in special cases.
But two medical researchers, including a ‘pro-choice’ British pain expert who used to think there was no chance foetuses could feel pain that early, say recent studies strongly suggest the assumption is incorrect.
The studies indicate unborn babies might be able to feel ‘something like pain’ as early as 13 weeks, they say.
Reason dictated that no abortions be permitted until it was possible to conclusively determine when life began. But there has never been anything reasonable about the Promethean agenda to destabilize Western civilization and normalize child sacrifice.
And wishing that reality were different than it has been reliably observed to be is no basis for science. For technology, yes, but science, no.
Choose wisely
The former His Royal Highness didn’t:
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will no longer use HRH titles, will REPAY £2.4million of public cash spent on their Frogmore Cottage home and receive no more public cash.
Notice how behavioral patterns trumped situational status here.
UPDATE: Apparently reports that they will not be using HRH titles are not correct, as Meghan Markle has already sent out a tweet using it.
Where everybody knows your face
I’ve seen this facial recognition software in action. It’s both creepy and impressive.
Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.
Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Being publicly recognizable is not really a concern to someone like me, since I was never given a choice about going public on the Internet or not. But it is a massive problem for the average individual, even those who have been careful to avoid social media. Sooner, rather than later, nations and their lawmakers are going to have to decide whether to embrace or reject the use of identification technology. I assume that most of them are going to embrace it, although the governments that come after the complete collapse of the neo-liberal world order may not.
Apples to apples
I was pretty sure that I was faster than Derrick Henry back in the day, but I didn’t realize I was THAT much faster:
Also a standout track & field athlete, Henry competed as a sprinter at Yulee from 2010 to 2011. He posted a personal-best time of 11.11 seconds in the 100-meter dash at the 2011 FHSAA 2A District 3 Championships, where he placed seventh.
I found that mildly amusing, as my best high school 100-meter time was 10.82. Of course, it’s not just Henry’s speed that makes him a great running back. It’s one thing to run that fast at 135 pounds, it’s another thing to do it at 235. I remember watching Darrell Thompson play at the University of Minnesota during my college track days and thinking, “I wonder if I could do that? He’s slower than me… but then, he is probably a LOT harder to bring down.” Thompson and I were at the same meet once, but we didn’t run against each other. He was beaten by one of my teammates, though.
It’s even more amusing to see that Wikipedia considers Henry to be “a standout track & field athlete” when it doesn’t even mention my track & field career, which included multiple conference championships, both individual and team, at the high school and NCAA D1 levels.
UPDATE: An alternate history sidenote. In my very brief football career, which ended at the age of 8, I almost never got on the field because the coach always played this one boy who was very fast and strong at running back. The boy also grew up to be an excellent sprinter in high school, although we never happened to run against each other due to being in different conferences and regions. But there was no shame in sitting on the bench behind him, as he wound up being an All-American running back who held his conference’s career rushing record for 12 years.
Years later, that coach apologized to me for never even trying to give me a chance to get on the field. But I didn’t have a problem with it at the time, and it was probably a blessing in the end because I’m the only one of the three Minnesota sprinters mentioned who hasn’t had any knee or hip surgeries. I certainly wouldn’t still be playing soccer. But it is intriguing to think of how good one high school’s football and track teams might have been if I’d stayed in the public school system and continued playing football instead of soccer.
It’s not as if he’s wrong
The truth is that many of the U.S. military’s leaders and senior officials are losers, dopes, and babies. Just look at their track record. They’re fortunate that Trump isn’t as ruthless as Stalin, who would have had them all shot for their obvious inability to complete their missions, if not treason:
The president reportedly called Afghanistan a “loser war,” and told his military leaders: “You’re all losers… You don’t know how to win anymore… I want to win… We don’t win any wars anymore… We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.” It’s reported that Trump was so angry at this point that he wasn’t breathing properly.
In his most incendiary comment, Trump—a man who, remember, managed to get out of military duty in Vietnam due to a supposed bone-spur problem—is said to have told the assembled forces, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people… You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
The comment reportedly left the room dumbfounded. Tillerson was “visibly seething,” and decided to speak up. The secretary of state said, “No, that’s just wrong… Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.” When the meeting ended soon afterward, Tillerson reportedly stood with a small group of confidants and said, “He’s a fucking moron.”
One senior official summed up the meeting: “We needed to change how he thinks about this, to course correct… They were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views.”
For all the feigned indignation of the Washington Post writers, the fact is that the god-emperor was absolutely right and is still absolutely right about the ineptitude of the U.S. military leadership. Notice the wildly inappropriate attitude of the senior official – almost certainly Deep State – who clearly believes that his views, and the views of his colleagues, take precedence over the views of the American people and their duly-elected President of the United States.
Julius Caesar won the Gallic War in eight years. The Allies won World War II in six years. This pathetic collection of inept, corrupt, and mediocre perfumed princes haven’t been able to defeat anyone since 1950. Except, of course, Grenada.
At this point, I don’t like the new U.S. Space Force’s odds against the space invaders. Or even the asteroids, for that matter.