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| Marble Statue in Villa Borghese in Rome, Italy |
Jeffrey Tucker has a post up about one action President Trump took in his attempt to drain the swamp. It's illuminating.
The Astonishing Implications of Schedule F
Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.”
You are either part of the wolf pact or you are an inconsequential peasant.
Now it might be that Biden's puppet masters think they are doing the world a service by using Ukraine as a foil to drain Russia's ability to make war. I don't buy it. I think they are headless chickens flailing against their first real competition in 50 years. Even The New York Times, once a fervent supporter of the US Government's policy, has changed their tune. Our attempt to bleed Russia is backfiring and causing the West more pain and suffering than we are inflicting on Russia.
It is our hope that our former Western partners will have the courage to admit their strategic miscalculations, which, according to the UN itself, have affected more than 1.5 billion people and provoked a surge in global inflation, food shortages, and the growth of poverty. - former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
I just wonder who the puppet masters are.
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| Same Bird |
I've been thinking we need a new political party, one that is not beholden to the established order. I think there are enough people who are appalled by our current regime that a new party might be viable. There are probably just as many as the number of true believers supporting the current regime. (I'm talking about the 3% of the population that actually thinks about these things. The rest of the people have other, better things to do with their time.) Problem is that the current regime is well entrenched. They have established mechanisms for funding their propaganda. If we wanted to push the old regime out and supplant it with our new, improved system, we would need funding on a massive scale. Elon Musk might be a start, but Elon by himself is not going to be able to push Lockheed aside.
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| Biden the Puppet |
There are basically two methods of running a country. One is a meritocracy where a man's success is determined by his ability, effort, clear thinking and luck. The other is the mafia where you have two levels of society, one level that works are tries, and another that siphons off as much as they want off of the top. Most of the world operates under the second system. I like to think that American government used to be a meritocracy but for the last, I dunno, 70 years?, has been turning into their own particular flavor of mafia.
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| Mencken and the inner soul of the people |
If we were going to form a new political party, we would need some kind of manifesto, some guidelines, a list of principles that we are willing to adhere to. One item might be no more catering to special interests. Hammering that out while trying to enlist billionaire supporters might take ten years.
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| Psychopaths |
And pushing out the old guard would take a long time. We could start small with representatives from out of the way states and work our way up.
Who am I kidding? There have been upstart political parties since the dawn of time and none have made any headway against the established order. Evidently building a new political party with enough power to change things is dang near impossible.
The opposition to all forms of inoculation grew in Pakistan after the CIA organised a fake vaccination drive to help track down al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad.
Good job, spooks.
WellReverend, reverend, please come quick'Cause I've got something to admitI met a man out in the sticks of Good Ol' MissHe drove a series 10 Cadillac and wore a cigar on his lipDon't you know the devil wears a suit and tieSaw him driving down the 61 in early JulyWhite as a cotton field and sharp as a knifeI heard him howling as he passed me byAnd he saidI know you, I know you young manI know you by the state of your handsYou're a six-string pickerJust as I, I amLet me learn you somethingI know a few turns to make all the girls danceDon't you know the devil wears a suit and tieI saw him driving down the 61 in early JulyWhite as a cotton field and sharp as a knifeI heard him howling as he passed me byOhFoolish, foolish was IDamn my foolish eyes'Cause that man's lessonsHad a price, oh, sweet priceMy sweet soul, everlastingA very own eternal lightDon't you know that the devil wears a suit and tieI saw him driving down the 61' in early JulyWhite as a cotton field and sharp as a knifeI heard him howling as he passed me byWell, the devil wears a suit and tieI saw him driving down the 61 in early JulyWhite as a cotton field and sharp as a knifeI heard him howling as he passed me by
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| 1934 Cadillac Series 10 |
A Series 10 Cadillac? Yes, it was a real thing, built in 1934 and 1935. V8 engine, several body styles. I like this. Not what I usually think of when I think of an old Cadillac.
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| National Kaiser Wilhelm Monument |
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| From top to bottom: F-15 Eagle, T-33 Shooting Star and P-51 Mustang flying by Mt. Hood |
Looking at this picture I immediately identified the P-51 and the F-15. I saw the one in the middle and said 'Starfire', but that's not quite right. The F-94 Starfire was developed from the T-33, but can be distinguished by the longer nose.
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| F-94 Starfire |
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| F-14 Tomcat |
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| Big Nose |
Liz Hinds has a post up about her olfactory abilities, or lack thereof. My nose doesn't work too well. I used to get sinus infections annually and some of them were pretty bad. One went on for so long that I got double vision. I suspect something in my head swole up and was pushing on my eyeball. It went on for so long that I got a pair of glasses made to correct it. After a while (six months maybe?) it went away and my vision returned to normal.
Anyway, somewhere along the way I seem to have lost my sense of smell. My wife will notice an odor and tell me about it, but I will smell nothing. I do pick up faint whiffs of odd things occasionally, so my nose isn't completely dead.
But that whole sense of smell never seemed that important to me and there aren't any smells I particularly miss. Some things smell better than others, but I don't get any particular enjoyment out of them. I can still smell smoke, which is good. Probably a very primitive survival instinct which may be why I haven't lost that ability.
I kind of wonder if smell training would help me, but I already have several regimens that I fail to keep up with. Don't really need another one.
Designed to mark the 1969 Stonewall riots and LGBTQ rights, Pride Month has become an opportunity for multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Intel and so on to vomit rainbow colors onto their social media profiles like a herd of bulimic unicorns. - RT
Director April Mullen and writer Tim Doiron’s latest collaboration is a paranoid thriller too twisty for its own good.
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| Ukrainian soldiers move a US-supplied M777 howitzer into position to fire at Russian positions in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region. © AP / Efrem Lukatsky |
Glenn Diesen: As propaganda about a Ukrainian ‘victory’ retreats, is a split emerging in the West?
opens with some history:
During the Russian Civil War, the journalist Walter Lippman observed the dilemma of propaganda – it had the positive effect of mobilizing the public for conflict, but the negative outcome of obstructing a workable peace agreement.
The British had drummed up public support for intervention in the conflict by reporting on Polish victories, fleeing communists, and the pending collapse of the Bolsheviks. In reality, the opposite was happening. Lippman argued that because the UK public had been promised victory, there was no political appetite for a reaching a diplomatic settlement.
The Russian Civil War? Oh, you mean the Bolshevik Revolution that started during tail end of WW1 and went on for six years. And Walter Lippman - that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. The 'observed' link goes to an archived copy of a study Lippman wrote for the New Republic back in 1920 that looks at the bias in reporting on the Russian Civil War.
Mr. Diesen goes on to compare the propaganda campaign being waged against Russia and how that is going to affect any kind of settlement.
I don't know what those chowder heads in the Biden administration are trying to do. It looks to me like they are funneling money to the defense industry at the expense of everyone else in America in order to destroy Ukraine.
I'm reading a post by Joseph Moore on Yard Sale of the Mind and I come across this phrase:
"discerned out of the priesthood"
which throws me. I've heard all of those words before, but not in that combination. What in tarnation is he talking about? A story on Catholic News Agency explains it. It concerns people discerning their calling. If they decide they want to be a priest and join a seminary, they are 'discerned in'. If they later decide that the priesthood is not for them and leave the seminary, they are 'discerned out'.
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| Vybuty in the Pskov Province 198 piece jigsaw puzzle |
I don't know what "Vybuty in the Pskov Province" means. Google Translates Vybuty as 'go out' or 'knocked out'. It sounds like those Star Trek aliens who only speak in metaphors.
Google Maps didn't have any trouble locating it.
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| Google Photo Sphere |
Here we have another view of the same building from 1500 feet away.
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| Google Photo Sphere |
Looking at the original picture I was torn between thinking whether this looked like a cozy rural setting or a remote desolate outpost. So much depends on the context. In movies, it depends on the music. Spooky music and this place could look very grim. Cheerful music and it could be very comfortable.
In truth the place is about 150 miles southwest of St. Petersburg (Leningrad for all you die hard commies out there) and ten miles east of Estonia.
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| Industrial Medicine |
Covid Exposed the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex by Mark Oshinskie
"Medicine is the new American religion."
I sort on knew the Medical Industrial Complex was getting out of hand, but I didn't realize just how bad it was.
You know who the absolute worst villains are in movies and TV shows? The guys who are so polite and self-effacing as they feed you into a wood chipper. That's who. Kind of like the critters in Congress.
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| Eileen Sheridan |
Google estimates it would take you a bit longer:Eileen Sheridan on her record-breaking ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 1954. She did the 842 miles in 2 days 11 hours and 7 minutes. - daily timewaster
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| Land’s End to John O’Groats via bicycle (83 hours) |
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| Curly Stays on a Hetchins bicycle |
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| Hetchins custom handlebar stem |
The general idea is we have an attractive, slim young woman with anger management issues who beats up a bunch of big, strong men. I've seen enough movies like this that the big fight scene is kind of boring. There are a lot of other fight scenes though, and they are pretty great, because they are all unique maybe?
The movie is very silly and it knows it, so we have a lot of deliberate comedy. It's very funny, in a gruesome / off color kind of way. There is some treachery and deception, but that is just the line they use to hang all the action scenes on.
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| Jai Courtney |
The leading man, Jai Courtney, reminds of any number of Disney animated heroes , like Buzz Lightyear.
All around pretty great.
One hour and a half on Amazon Prime
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| Holt McCallany |
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| Elizabeth from the video game Bioshock 300 piece jigsaw puzzle |
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| Zebra in the grasslands of the Serengeti in Tanzania, East Africa. (Shutterstock) |
Diabolical daughter brought this puzzle to our regular exercise-the-old-man's-brain session the other day. Otherwise known as Einstein's Riddle, we have five houses and a list statements concerning each of these houses, things like their nationality of the person who lives there, the kind of pet they keep, what brand of cigarette they smoke, etc.
We worked on it for a bit and eventually came to realize that we were not going to be able to solve this with pure logic. We would need to arbitrarily assign some people to houses and see what shakes out. We only had to go down two or three blind alleys before we came up with a solution.
I'm looking at this and I'm thinking I could easily write a computer program to solve it, so I did. But it doesn't work. I've gone over the logic with a fine tooth comb and I can find nothing wrong. Obviously I am missing something, so I thought I would try and explain the logic in English and maybe something will jump out at me.
The statements typically state that same guy who smokes brand X of cigarettes also favors drink Y. If all the statements were like that, it would be simple to sort it out, but some of the statements tells us that the guy who keeps animal Z lives next door to the house painted with color C.
So for each rule, I scan the table that contains our proposed solution, looking for the first item. If I find it, I check the slot for the second item in this house and the adjacent houses, depending on what the statement says.
That all seems great. For each rule I place two items and if I get through all the rules, I should have all items placed in the table, but when I get to the end, there are still several empty slots. How can that be?
That was yesterday. Last night I found the problem - array index out of bounds. Kind of amazing that it didn't cause a crash. I guess it wasn't that far out of bounds.
When I was writing this program I thought I would be cute and define the array that holds the answer to have six columns, one more than the number of houses. From reading the problem, we see that the houses are apparently numbered one through five. I could use an array with five columns, but then every time I wanted to use a house number to index into this array I would need to remember to reduce it by one. So we have six columns and we use the house number to index into this array. Since I have an extra column (column zero) I used it for labels.
Pretty silly since I only used the house number in a couple of spots. But now since I am starting my index from one instead of from zero I think I should increase the limit by one, which was a big fat error being as I using the dimension of the array as the limit. Adding one to the defined limit means you are going to step over the line when you get to the end. The problem was obvious when I was finally able to see it.
I used Wikipedia's example as my basis.
The program is not as clean as it could be, I copied and pasted a few lines of code in several spots. It didn't seem worthwhile to rearrange the world just to eliminate these few duplicate lines.
Some people have tried writing programs that will read the English text of the problem, interpret it, and then find a solution. That might be an interesting project, but a project it would be. I already have too many projects. I just did this for fun.
I've uploaded the source to github.
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| UNIVAC Office in Marina City, Chicago, 1967 |
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| Су-27 Украины [Su-27 of Ukraine] 120 piece jigsaw puzzle |
Su-27 has appeared here before, though they are usually from Russia, not Ukraine.
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| 2015 Chevrolet Colorado Dashboard |
The procedure for getting in my car, starting it and getting going is a little different now than the way it used to be. In the old days, I would:
Yesterday at lunch I heard a somewhat bizarre story about how an error in a math calculation caused an industrial disaster. While there have been incidents where a computer error resulted in a disaster (the Ariane space rocket (above) being one) I haven't found any confirmation of this particular story. But while I was looking I did find a couple of curious items.
Both of these items are relatively ancient, one is from 2006 and the other is from 2015. Both contained short programs that demonstrated their problems, so I tried them out on my machine and the same problem appeared. Well, looky there, magic!
I'm only posting this as a waypoint marker. We'll see if I get any farther down this road.
My test program for 2006 problem on github.
My test program for 2015 problem on github.
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| Britain, 2049 |
Britain, 2049
You’ll own nothing, and you won’t be particularly happy about it
By Sam Ashworth-Hayes
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| Revolver |
This idea just occurred to me. I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad one. I am sure that most everyone will object to it. Whatever. Here goes.
How about we require everyone who carries a gun to carry a large liability policy, like, I dunno, a million dollars or so. Of course many people have guns at home and do not normally carry them, but since they have them in their possession they easily could pick them up and carry them. So everyone who has a gun would need one of these policies.
Now people of the gun will object that it infringes on "their right to bear arms", and enforcing a requirement that all gun owners obtain such a policy would be an invasion of privacy.
Making it an absolute requirement that all gun owners carry such liability insurance would never fly. But we could start by making it a requirement that you need to show proof of such insurance in order to buy a gun or ammunition. It's pretty much universal that you need to have insurance in order to operate a motor vehicle, so requiring insurance for certain activities is nothing new.
Now people are going to object to the government keeping records of all the gun and ammunition sales, but it doesn't need to be like that. The government has made it a legal requirement that you need to demonstrate that you are of age in order to buy liquor, but the government doesn't keep track of all those transactions.
But where is this insurance going to come from? From insurance companies, presumably, certainly not from the Federal government.
Now the rates might be kind of high to start with, but as more people acquire policies, the rates should drop. Given that there are a zillion gun owners in the USA, and given the small number of incidents where a previously solid citizen goes off the deep end and kills someone, insurance shouldn't cost the individual gun owner more than about ten dollars a year.
It would be up to the insurance companies to vet the applicant. Some insurance companies may discriminate against some people for any number of reasons, and you really couldn't blame them. They are signing up to be on the hook for a million smackolas if Johnny Q. Customer decides to go round the bend. But insurance is a private business, not a government thing, so there might be other companies that would be willing to insure Johnny Q.
Hopefully, by putting insurance companies in charge of deciding who is qualified to carry a firearm could reduce the number of nut cases who can obtain guns. And if they do, and they do run amok, well, at least the victims will get some compensation.
It would probably be ten years or so before such a policy started making an impact.
Yup, I'm late to the party San Jose passed a law back in January. As expected, some people are contesting it. If it passes the challenges, the law is supposed take effect in August.
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| Joker on the Street - Lefteris Pitarakis |
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| F/V Kari Marie |
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| Marine Traffic around Dutch Harbor Alaska |
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| Cheshire Cat and Alice - VailedValor |
From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad,” asked Alice?
“You must be,” said the cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”