Academy Scitech Awards 2014

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The Academy Scitech Awards in 2014.   Two of these couples are sadly no longer together.  I am terrible at names, but of course this is Josh Pines, David Coons, Carlye, Nicky Kaiser and Rick Sayre.  I will get the names of the others and get back to you.

Inherent Vice (2014) Reference

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I speculate that I like this movie so much because I lived in LA at the beach during the period the movie describes.  I was reviewing the film to see if it would be appropriate for a friend and I noticed for the first time the following scene which ostensibly takes place during a party in Topanga Canyon in the early 1970s.  There is something about this picture that seemed familiar, perhaps.

No title 1

 

My attention span is the attention span of the fleas I am accused of having.

By the swine who live here.

I am alone in the pandemic because who would be with me?

The outsider, the flea borne.

The mysterious stranger has left for a competition and I miss her.

The parole officer has exposed herself to the death virus and I am alone.

The doctors are swine who want me to suffer.

Why then should I bother to live?

 

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;                                                  \
}

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.