Well happy new year.
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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.
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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 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.
/****************************************************************************/ /* 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; \ }
"Motherfucker's got eyes, they just can't see."
This post is to bring to your attention that something has happened recently that has almost certainly caused concern and sleepless nights for many people. It may sound innocuous if a little aggressive but it may actually signal that something important is about to happen. The particular event involves the silencing of a Norwegian underwater sensor system which probably had the ability to track Russian submarines which work very hard not to be tracked.
See the following story. These people have a good reputation for discussing things of interest without using secret sources.
Even when rivals do not intend to go to war, they do things we might call provocative and not all that trusting or friendly. So for example, since WW2 we have flown jets somewhere close to the Russian border to see how long it takes for their radar to light up, where they are, and a bunch of what is sometimes called "signals intelligence", which means we may not know what they are saying but we know they are talking. Russia might fly a strategic bomber towards the UK to see how long it takes for them to be intercepted. This is all normal peacetime activities. If you want peace, they say, prepare for war. So far so good. But there is more to it than that. When JFK was assassinated and people asked why the pentagon did not go on alert, the guy in charge of that said something like "the board was clear", the board probably referring to something called NMIC. in other words, yes, the president had been assassinated which could be the opening stage of a war, but none of the other things they look for had happened. What sort of things? Well there is a list of things. Assassinations for example, mobilization of the ground forces which are in maneuver near the border. Important reconnaissance systems becoming inoperative. The satellites go dark. The relevant embassy or embassies starts destroying classified material. All of these things happen now and then, sometimes for innocent reasons (e.g. a satellite went dark but thats because it simply broke, no need to get your panties in a bunch over it.) But there is more history here.
When Israel was about to do the 1967 preemptive strike they told us to take a listening post, a ship in the Mediterranean, away. We refused or ignored them and they blew up the USS Liberty so that we could not hear the fighters being scrambled for Egypt (even if we did not know what the pilots were saying, they wanted surprise so no warnings). There is a fuzzy line between what you might normally do, try to catch spies for example, and things you might do if you were about to attack and needed tactical surprise (or in some cases strategic surprise, a whole other thing). Its one thing for Russia to roll up an amphibious tank onto a beach in Sweden to spy on a naval base in the middle of the night, but its a whole other thing to cut underwater cables, revealing they have that ability, which is a big deal independent of the cables actually cut. We knew they had that capability but they had not demonstrated it on operational cables of a strategic listening system by a neighbor. You only do that right before you need to do something you dont want people to see. Something fairly big.
So in deterrence theory we say that if there is nuclear war it is very important to have a few days notice, if you can, because all kinds of things can be moved around for safety. So we keep a 24/7 team in the basement of the pentagon connected to a bunch of different sources to ask what is going on. Are the satellites mysteriously going silent? Have NATO generals suddenly disappeared? Are the bad guys on maneuvers near the border. Are the underwater cables going out?
The job of the people on the ground is to read the clues and form the right conclusions about what is going on. Thats what they get paid for.
But in the case of COVID which is very different from the flu and much more dangerous (at least until the really bad flu like 1918 comes around again) the CDC wanted to make sure that the cases of COVID-19 got reported and the cause of death correctly attributed. So my guess is that they sent out information fliers requesting local doctors and hospitals to be particularly diligent and if there were multiple probable causes of death, to make sure that COVID-19 is listed. And of course our nutty Republicans who are not too smart saw this as a conspiracy to inflate the figures.
I dont know if this is even close to what happened. But I would like to believe that our Republicans are just stupid and paranoid and wrong but not deliberately malicious about distorting information that can and does cause the death of otherwise clueless people. That would be negligent, criminally negligent. I hope therefore that the Republicans are just wrong. Maybe they just heard a rumor made up by some paranoid nut like the Trump moron and just took it at face value and repeated it. Maybe the CDC did nothing at all. Maybe we will never know why the Republicans believe the nutty things they believe.
So I am on my back, breathing nitrous oxide, while the dentist uses a hammer and chisel on my teeth, unable to talk, barely even mumble, and the assistants are discussing Halloween movies, and in particular Nightmare Before Christmas. I try to talk but the dentist / torturer tells me to lie still or I will regret it, and when it is over and I can almost talk although its more of a mumble I try to tell them that friends of mine worked on the movie, and that I consider the opening to be among the best openings of any film, animated or live, and how proud I was of them. And one of the assistants says that she was born the month the movie came out and I thought to myself, what should it be, pistols at dawn, or should I just commit ritual suicide right here. Pardon me, but could I borrow that very sharp knife? Thank you. Goodbye cruel world!
It seems completely impossible and unfair, but Kathleen Quaife Hodge passed away suddenly in her sleep a few days ago. I am heartbroken. She had been in a relationship with Mike Cedeno for 9 years or so and they were going to get married.
I met Kathleen at Roto Effects of America and we hired her as a freelance animator for the motion platform ride "Journey to the 4th Dimension" for Harper Films and Landmark Entertainment.
It may look like a garden, but its really more of a snake pit. Its not the paper thin walls, or the windows that have been painted over so many times that they will never open, or the termites, or the weird (unwritten) rules, or the obsolete electrical system, or the baroque legacy gas system where you are as likely to be paying for your neighbor's utilities as your own. Its not the suicides of which there have been two in recent years. Its the people. The smile to your face, stab you in the back people that is the problem here. The emotionally-challenged woman who thinks that every man lusts for her calves and complains about invasion of privacy when no such thing has occurred. Or the neighbor who sang Joni Mitchell songs at night whenever she got drunk (which was every night) but complained to management that I used the telephone. I didnt appreciate it when Management threw her out with 3 days notice, I think that she deserved more compassion than that, even if she had stabbed me in the back. But by far the worse part of this was the new landlady, one of those who is scared of computers and doesnt know much about them, and is willing to say the most appalling things in writing apparently too stupid to realize that she was letting both herself and the Magnolia in for an astonishing lawsuit that they would lose, if I did lawsuits, which I dont. And neither does my patron, whose guest I was. And so, may I advise you, dear reader, if you are considering the Magnolia to save yourself some trouble and go elsewhere. Life is too short.
I could use some help figuring out what we believe the long term deaths and wounded statistics of the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl is the gold standard by which to measure the failure of a government to cope with a crisis and the long term effects of their incompetence. But its hard to get good numbers of the long term deaths and wounded of Chernobyl. There are reasons for this beyond mere suppression of the facts for political purposes (like we find in this country). They may be trying to avoid despair which causes death through other self inflicted wounds such as tobacco and alcohol. If you believe you are going to die of radiation poisoning anyway why not smoke another pack of cigarettes a day and drink more vodka?
I am pretty sure though that America and a few other countries like Brazil can proudly say that their failed governments have been much more incompetent and caused many more deaths than the USSR and successor states. In fact, the Republican response may still be killing a Chernobyls worth of their own citizens every 100 days. Oddly, these deaths of the last six months are restricted almost entirely to the unvaccinated, who are almost all Republicans. This will not affect elections since voter suppression and the supreme court's destruction of voter rights have the intent and effect of delegitimizing elections and installing more right wing thugs like Trump and is self perpetuating. But the reports I have read suggest that the USSR and successor countries have devoted and still devote huge resources to social and medical welfare to people in the various affected regions even when it is likely that they were not affected. Our country, with its corrupt right wing judiciary, throws people on the street if they are 3 days late on rent. I had to hear a lot of shit about how bad communism was and how great western democracy is. Not so sure about the former but about the latter I can be quite sure. We laugh at people saying that under Socialism an NKRP reactor (or whatever) cant explode. Well in this country we have trump and the moron republicans (there are only republicans, the people who oppose them and a third group which is passive) saying the virus is a hoax, that the democrats are using it to defeat trump, who is the chosen one, that the virus is just bad flu, that quinine water or horse tenderizer will keep you from getting bad virus, and that there has never been a time when any american has been forced to exercise basic public health protocols (because the people saying it are too stupid to know about the history in this country of cholera, yellow fever, basic sewage, speed limits and water controls, etc). The Republicans did this, and caused what will be no less than a million unnecessary deaths (we are very close to that number now).
Shouldnt I be hearing a lot of people talking about the failures of the western democracy and capitalism?
Why are these companies so bad at software? I dont know, but it looks like they do not do minimal testing and they do minimal, if any, design reviews. My guess is that they know better but have budget limitations. Just a guess.
A real time simulation of the early RAND buildings at 1700 Main Street in Santa Barbara. This is a screenshot from version 53.
It runs best in Google Chrome by the way, but it will run in any browser that has WebGL enabled. It may take a few seconds to load textures.
https://mwahrman.com/dist_053/rand_0_53.html
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You may wish to read this post about assumptions. See http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2021/05/assumptions-are-mother-of-all-fuckup.html
In the last 3-6 months I have gone from cautious optimism to genuine pessimism. I needed to see how Biden worked out, and of course that is better than expected. But there are other "indicators" to use a phrase from nuclear deterrence that are really not good. I use "indicator" in the sense of something like "N Korea is attacking us again verbally, but they are not on alert, they are not on maneuvers, and they have not started shelling the DMZ, they are probably not going to attack us this week".
But the indicators I see are more like this, "The Republicans really do capture about 45 percent of the vote, sometimes more, sometimes less, even without voter suppression. Furthermore, those voters really are 75% or so supportive of Trump which is astonishing and very troubling. And although there are variations in that support and the reasons for it, those reasons include such things as living in a delusional world about very important topics (note, not merely uncaring or indifferent, but genuinely delusional and with strong opinions) and supportive of policies that are really bad, really dangerous, and they dont mind, in fact, they insist on it. " Another reason why Trump has such strong support is that he is overtly and unambiguously racist and they like that. A third reason is that most of his supporters are anti-science and are perfectly happy to believe whatever garbage they are fed by the right wing press. Or for example, "Republicans have no trouble setting up barriers to voting for people of color, and people who are working class, and people who are financially disadvantaged or disabled. In fact, they are determined to do this, period, in any state they control, and that means since the elections are usually close that they will win those elections, continue control of the statehouses, regain control of the houses of congress, and probably elect a president over the will of the people." Or, "Biden has no chance of passing any bill through the senate as long as the filibuster exists. Every bill will be blocked. That is what McConnell says he will do, and that is what they have done and will do. Nothing short of a miracle will change that. If we lose the senate, even nominations for important posts wont be approved." Or "I watched Republican Congressman and Senators violate the law in egregious ways that damaged our national security, and they were not punished. See the incidents involving outing the whistleblowers. This means our government is impotent, and can not even enforce the most important and most serious of laws, and that elected congressmen are willing and determined to damage our country to achieve their goals of power".
If we really controlled the senate, then this would be different, perhaps, but we dont. We will lose the next election because the election will be stolen. Another 4 year period or 2 year period where the Republicans can do what they like will complete the destruction of the country for a minimum of 30 years, or longer.
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These problems of "decline and fall" are too big to reduce to emails, because a complete discussion of any topic would be exhausting to write and tiresome to read. My doom and gloom has some unstated assumptions that might make the conclusions seem more reasonable or at least understandable.
First, we are always talking about probabilities not certainties. But that is very important for planning because a 10% chance of destroying the world is something to pay attention to even if it doesnt happen. Second, all models are wrong but some models are useful. Third, the notion of "enlightened self interest" and the "rational actor" theories of economic and political decision making does not have a great track record. Therefore arguments based on these assumptions do not have a lot of credibility with me unless substantiated by other data. Fourth, in the debate between the "conspiracy" vs "screw up" explanations of events its important to remember that the correct answer is usually "both". Fifth, although both people and organizations can change, in general they dont, and past behavior can usefully be used to predict the immediate and distant future of behavior. This can be stated biblically "As it is at the beginning, so it is at the end". Sixth, trust must be earned, and the higher the stakes, the more it must be earned or controlled for. Seventh, I expect to be able to learn from my mistakes. Eighth, with great power comes great responsibility but there is a reason for this, and that is because you really can make things better or worse in many (but not all) cases. Ninth, the past isnt over, it isnt even past yet. Tenth, every great power has declined but stupidity can always make things worse.
These assumptions, when applied to the last 20 years, leads to some predictions and they are not good.
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I admit that I am impressed with some of the things I learn about how our government works. So for example if you want to have a dictatorship but pretend you don't have a dictatorship and you want to pretend that you have a justice system and that people can file a lawsuit to get the government to do something reasonable, or to stop committing what are obviously crimes, then all you have to do is put in a 6 month statute of limitations which would be nearly impossible for most people to comply with unless this is what they did for a living and they had plenty of resources and they had a law firm ready to go which I think we can comfortably say doesn't happen. At least private individuals are unlikely to be able to comply with this requirement but possibly mid- to large- corporations could. Thus corporations are able to protect themselves, or at least have a tool that might allow them to protect themselves, but the private citizen not so much.
In that way you can see the corruption and crimes of the government can operate with complete freedom. This is most excellent. Obviously if we wanted a free society this rule would not exist.
(Policy Recommendation #2: Change or eliminate this statute of limitations).
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Not everyone appreciates the great depth and intelligence that can be found beneath the surface of the Marvel Cinematic portrayal of comic book superheroes, and its faithful and wry discussion of the many contradictions of our civilization as portrayed by Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and so forth. The latest MCU Disney + series (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) has the setup that the Winter Soldier (a nice guy who was forced/programmed to be an assassin during the cold war) has to see a therapist as a condition of his parole.
I think it is completely hilarious and I so relate since I also have PTSD and really do not see much point about talking about it with a therapist.
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I can just hear the morons, the Republicans, say "Now is not the time to discuss gun restrictions" and all the nuts screaming "2nd Amendment!!!" How long will we permit Americans to be murdered by the gun nuts? This is America, a failed state, where democracy is destroyed and where the Republicans advocate the violent overthrow of the government, so we may never have elementary gun laws. Too bad.
The collapse of the american civilization has revealed things about ourselves that maybe we would rather not know. But then when we learn those things, many of us would prefer to believe that those things are not true. They would deny their fellow americans the dignity of their decisions. They would deny that their fellow citizens know their own minds. They would deny them their free will. Yes, deny them that very self-awareness that the slaveowners and murderers who wrote the constitution required as a fundamental assumption of our so called and very undemocratic democracy. The facts are that some huge percentage of the voting Americans chose racism and hatred. They chose to deny equal justice before the law. They chose to take children from their mothers and put them in a jail and destroy their lives as a policy of this republic. They did that. They said "hate" but my fellow "democrats" insist they meant "love". Oh no, my liberal friends say, they didnt mean that. But I say they knew what they were saying. They werent fooled by Trump and Fox News or the traitors in Congress although admittedly those three are guilty of inciting people to violence, and of supporting treason, and other criminal and immoral or at least amoral acts. They, the sovereign people of the united states of america knew that they were voting to put right wing nuts on the judiciary to create a judicial dictatorship against the will of the majority. They knew that the knee of oppression was being put on our throats to choke the life out of our country. This is bitter tea, perhaps, to many of us. Perhaps their immortal soul is capable of turning away from evil but perhaps not, also. They stood before god and man and said we choose racism and lies and we know what we are doing. They are not pretending to be racist. Who are you to deny them the right to have and own their beliefs?
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Excerpted from a conversation with [REDACTED]
"Nomadland" was a big disappointment for me. I had been led to believe that it was a movie about zombies that attack a trailer park. Well! Fuck me! No such luck. I did appreciate that whats her name shat (past tense of shit) in a bucket but that one element, as appealing as it is on the surface, could not carry the film.
Regarding influencing public opinion, I did not explain myself well. In my obsessive doom scrolling, I read review/analysis articles by annointed pundits (did you know that this word came via the British adventure in india and refers to a "pandit" who is a type of Hindu scholar knowledgeable about the Vedic scriptures among other topics?) who purport to tell me what I and any reasonable person should like and hate. In particular, this pundit pointed out that The Joker was an abomination and no sensible person would like that yucky film. Well, you know what? Although I resisted seeing yet another film anywhere at all related to "The Batman" I have to admit that this was an interesting film, at least in part, with some very strong performances. So fuck him. Fuck all of them, if you see where I am going with this.
I want to say something nice about "Tenet" which as you know is not a terribly well regarded film. Well, although the concept is "just OK", I think it gets a bad rap for reasons that are not actually part of the film itself. If Nolan was an unknown, and made this movie (in a somewhat reduced form) for ... (making this up) ... maybe 1/3 to 1/4 the budget, then I think it would be regarded as a somewhat entertaining action adventure film. This is the well understood problem of giving a filmmaker too much money and of course people having expectations.
Setting expectations is so important.
It is very clear to me that visual effects has lost its way. The best visual effects film of the year might be one without time travel or space craft it may be a film with 30 shots, not 3000 shots, although I dont know what this film is. I think the vfx section suffers from the problems that accrue from self-important people whose very small dick, metaphorically speaking, has gone to their head... wait that image needs work. I need to think about this.