Happy New Year! Too Bad About Our Decline Into Neo-Fascism, Though

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Dear REDACTED

Well happy new year. 

 

I doubt most americans realize that their country is in a serious decline, essentially a dive, but I think the rest of the world understands that we live in a failing democracy. I dont know if this ever could have been avoided after the double fuck that the supreme court threw at their country, first by overthrowing the election of 2000, and second by destroying the key clause of the voting rights act. The electoral college and the supreme court were obviously illegitimate after 2000 but the dumb bunnies, the democrats, refused to face reality and do anything. Of course Obama and Biden were failures but it isnt all their fault. We are all of us responsible. I have no doubt that when our generation is judged we will be found to be not up to the challenges we faced. We were not the worst generation, but can not compare to the people who faced the depression and world war 2. I am exhausted by the stupidity and that is what the movie Dont Look Up (2021) was about. The stupidity of social media, our government, our failure to face reality and take action. That is why its an important movie and there is no other movie I am aware of that begins to address the issues. The fact that this movie is goofy in many ways is irrelevant. Many people are going to get hurt but its too late now. And I can prove it to you by pointing out that no one is proposing a plan that can avert this well-deserved disaster. Its all just wishful thinking as usual. As you well know, the Nile is not a river in Egypt. I wish I had the money so I could go on a world tour for 20 years and not have to worry about it. But to be fair, we deserve this. We asked for it. 

 

Have a wonderful new year! 

 

 

Will California Protect Us?

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A friend asked if California would be able to protect its citizens from a fascist federal government.  Well, probably not, but its not black and white.

1. Any proactive blue state that can control their republican nuts in their state legislature should be able to pass laws that protect people, or their state attorney general can declare that they will not enforce a law, and the state police forces technically work for the governor. Then the DOJ can sue the state and tie things up in court.

2. But who controls the National Guard and can they be called out in spite of the Governor of the state saying no? Yes, they can. The president can declare that there is an insurrection and send in guard units from any state, not just the state with the insurrection, so called. Now when you have a shit-for-brains fascist like Trump, why would he ever be limited by the law or the constitution?

3. The FBI works for the DOJ and COINTELPRO and other history proves that under the right circumstances they will violate any law, any constitutional right, and not be punished for it. We dont know how many people the internal security forces framed and sometimes killed during the 1960s.

4. The judiciary has been stuffed with right wing nuts who will do whatever the right wants, no matter how egregious. See for example Kavanaugh and Barrett but at the appeals court level as well as the Supreme Court. Do you trust Kavanaugh or Barrett to protect your rights?

5. Fascists do not recognize any law that interferes with their power. The standard play is to call their supporters to "protect the country", see Jan 6. Why not send the various right wing militia groups into california to "restore order"?

So, IMHO, if we lose congress or the presidency, I am very skeptical that our institutions will protect us. I looked in vain as the country failed to protect us during the Trump administration.

A friend explained it to me, please excuse the semi-sexist language. "The Constitution is a gentlemen's agreement", my friend said. The whole thing fails when you have low class shits like Trump, Barr, Kavanaugh, etc.

Where is Wilford Brimley When We Need Him?

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Dear REDACTED,

How did we get here? That you would suggest that I was overly simplistic about matters of principle? Me? I merely want to remind my friends what is at stake here. This is not your everyday serial rape of children by rich people in public flying their powerful friends, like Trump or Clinton, around to do so, and then making a deal with the Florida DA to avoid any semblance of justice or compensation for the victims. As if the law were a joke to be flouted unless you were black or poor. This is nothing trivial like that. This is a series of crimes against the republic, not one crime (and I mean that in some sort of literal, legalistic sense) but a whole series of them. You say its more complicated than I realize, but I am trying to communicate, and failing, that I think that I know very well what a clusterfuck this is, even if I may indeed be ignorant of the details of what the SDNY or the DOJ may face. My response is that this is why they get paid the big bucks. And now, having been paid, many of us wish them to do their goddamn job. I am certainly not right about everything. I never thought in a million years that Trump would, again in plain sight, try to overturn the election in which Gore, excuse me, I meant to say Biden, obviously won. That he would on network television incite his followers to overthrow the constitution, attack the Congress and attempt to murder the leading Democrats in the House, defecate in the halls of congress, both literally and figuratively, and then people would say, "we must not overreact". You have got to be kidding me. I want my money back.

At the end of "No Sudden Moves" by Soderbergh, the Aldrick character says "They have eyes but they just cant see".

Hollywood is at fault. Yes, the glamourous and rewarding motion picture industry lied to me. Well, some of them did. I guess we all see what we want to see. I am a goofy idealist who ignored Hammett and Chandler and without realizing it, believed that it wasnt that bleak, that justice would be done. I am a fool. A naive idiot. Instead I believed Brimley in that fabulous courtroom drama, Absence of Malice (1981), that completely goofy Paul Newman and Sally Fields melodrama nominally about the freedom of the press in the form of Sally Fields as she attempts to increase newspaper readership and bring down Paul Newman with the help of an ambitious "jew lawyer" from the DOJ.   Then in a nearly perfect justice ex machina, Wilford Brimley, cast as the aw shucks US assistant attorney general, sweeps in like an "Old Testament" Angel of the LORD and smites the wicked.  

 

Brimley in Absence of Malice (1981)

Brimley starts off the show here (in low quality youtube video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqBJJF2yvE

And Newman and Brimley finish it off here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMj3uqFKG84

What a fool I have been. There is no Brimley and there is no Justice. I have been lied to and those of us who pinned our hopes on elections and the justice system have been betrayed. 

Vector and Matrix Math for OpenGL

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If you are trying to use OpenGL from C, you might want a vector and matrix math package so you dont have to write your own.  Here is one that looks pretty good to me.

https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/treecode/vectmath.h.html

And the internet being the way it is, I include the source code here: 

/****************************************************************************/
/* VECTMATH.H: include file for vector/matrix operations.                   */
/* Copyright (c) 1999 by Joshua E. Barnes, Tokyo, JAPAN.                    */
/****************************************************************************/

#ifndef _vectmath_h
#define _vectmath_h

#include "vectdefs.h"

/*
 * Vector operations.
 */

#define CLRV(v)                 /* CLeaR Vector */                      \
{                                                                       \
    int _i;                                                             \
    for (_i = 0; _i < NDIM; _i++)                                       \
        (v)[_i] = 0.0;                                                  \
}