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;                                                  \
}

Democrats Have Eyes But They Just Can't See

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The mainstream Democrats, as represented by Joe Biden, have learned nothing from the Trump disaster.  They long for an America that hasnt existed for two decades and so they fail and fail and we are cursed to suffer and to suffer because they refuse to open their eyes.  They want those good old days of bipartisan gentleman behavior to return.  They dont understand that it is dead.

 

As Aldrick says at the end of No Sudden Moves (2021):

"Motherfucker's got eyes, they just can't see."

 

Driving Home from Home Depot

So I am coming home from Home Depot (owned by a right wing nut) with a big heavy thing in the back and my seat is scrunched up so I am driving extra carefully. And on my approach home here in Santa Barbara, about 2 miles out, I get a big van behind me, and he is really unhappy. He is honking at me whenever I stop at a stop sign or intersection and its weird. He is pissed off about something, but I dont know what it is. And it concerns me because I am driving to my house and he will see where I live and he is pissed off. Like I am afraid he is going to try and ram me or something, or get out of the car or whatever. So I pull into my driveway and he honks a few times to indicate how much he hates me, and his partner, in a big van behind him does the same thing and it beats me what this is about.


So I am home unloading and I notice something. I have an Antifa sticker on my bumper. You figure it out.

Observations on a Vegetable Garden in Santa Barbara vs Escondido

I am into my third season of a Santa Barbara container garden and I can make some comparisons to Escondido.  You might at first glance not think that there would be much difference or if there was that there would be a balance of good and bad things between the two locales but there isnt.  Santa Barbara seems to be superior in all the ways I measure.  This assumes, in both cases, that there is adequate sun for your designated plants and sufficient water.  

 

But given these requirements, in Santa Barbara we have much less problem with plants bolting.  I have basil and lettuce that have not yet bolted which would have been long gone in Escondido.  We also have less predators in Santa Barbara. I have had only one instance of tomato hornworm, no spider mites, and no aphids.  There is some of that fungus mold stuff for the tomato and bean leaves, the usual bordeaux solution seems to knock it back but it can get out of control.  

 

I dont know why Santa Barbara is so much better but I speculate that the moderation in weather (less hot, less cold) helps keep things from bolting.  

Indications of War and the Underwater Surveillance System of Norway

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[If this event in Norway had happened, wouldnt we have heard about it from many sources?  Wouldnt it be a big deal?  I am guessing that either this did not happen or people are being seriously discreet.  Well I guess we will find out.]

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. 

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43094/norwegian-undersea-surveillance-network-had-its-cables-mysteriously-cut

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.

 

Possible Explanation for A Conservative Meme about COVID-19

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If you examine the following article you will find a discussion of a Republican doctor who claims that the CDC is grossly inflating COVID-19 death statistics.  Are the Republicans just making this stuff up or is there even the slightest reason to believe it? So I have a theory about where this baseless story came from which I present here. Its total speculation on my part so dont go around saying this is what happened.  I am just thinking out loud.

First the article.  The doctor in question is midway through the story.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/montana-extreme-trump/2021/10/22/0f82afbc-0037-11ec-a664-4f6de3e17ff0_story.html

 

Now for my theory.  Did you know that we dont know how many people die of the flu each year?  Well we dont and the CDC admits its statistics are wrong.  There are a number of reasons for this and they are not because of bad people doing bad things, unfortunately because that (bad people) would be easier to fix.  Here are two examples of why the statistics understate the real numbers.  In the first scenario, someone goes to the hospital with bad flu and dies of cardiac failure.  Now, did that person die of a heart attack or did that person die from the flu? What do you put in the "cause of death" field on the form?   In the second scenario, someone gets bad flu and dies at home and nothing is reported because the person was old, and got sick, and it doesnt seem important to report the cause of death in a way that the CDC can capture. Maybe the cause of death is reported as "complications of old age".  In this case, its quite possible that "flu" was never formally diagnosed. The flu has been with us a long time, most people think it is the same as the "common cold".  It just doesnt get reported.

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.

Vegetarian Oatmeal Banana Muffin Things

Not vegan unless butter substitute is used.

4 bananas 

2 tsp vanilla

1 pinch salt

1 measuring unit brown sugar

2 units oatmeal

2 units flour

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp cloves

2 tsp baking powder

3 tablespoons flaxseed meal

1/2 of an orange, juiced

1/2 unit water 

3 tablespoons water (for flaxseed meal)

3/4 stick of butter or substitute.

Prepare flaxseed meal 15 minutes in advance with tablespoons of water in separate container.  Combine everything in a blender or food processor until completely mixed.  If consistency is not right add oatmeal and flour in equal amounts.  Bake in small cake pan(s) (see picture) at 375 for 18 minutes.  Serve warm and with butter if appropriate.

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Incident in Westlake Village

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!