Usually, these completely silly UFO blather manias - twice per decade for 80 years - start to fade after a year or so of evidence-free jabber. Alas, this time - because public diversion now serves some major world elites - the episode seems to be just getting worse.
Hence, for what little good it will do, here’s another call for at least some of you to actually think about this awful distraction from our real business – making a civilization that truly is worthy of the stars.
First some news:
“On July 13, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced a measure that asserts eminent domain over “any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin…that may be controlled by private persons or entities.”
I like Schumer. Here, he goes for something both logical and practical, in addition to being sci fi imaginative. O-o-okay then! Demand revelation from the secretive owner castes! With that, we’re now getting into territory similar to my novel Existence! Wherein rich collectors, ancient families and priesthoods may have squirreled away secret ‘relics’ or artifacts for a very long time, perhaps millennia.
Think Indiana Jones #4, only with a much better premise. Let me know if you see any panicky struldbrugs scurrying to their ancient family vaults or safe deposit boxes, because of the Schumer Bill. A good place to start? Look closer at whoever is bloaking such a common sense bill, that at worst would be harmless and at-best reveal hidden wonders.
Alas, typically, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), along with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and two other Republican senators, are doing something far stupider. They introduced legislation compelling immediate public revelation of all “UFO secrets" held by government agencies at any level, without apparently ever pondering what I call Question Number One.
But I’ll save that Big Question for last, down at bottom.
== A devastating critique – and so now they’re invoking… Mussolini? ==
Brian Dunning’s latest Skeptoid posting does a fantastic job dissecting the ‘testimony’ (supported by softball questions) recently given by Mr. David Grusch before a theatrical Congressional hearing on UFOs. And indeed, alas and jeepers, the most recent 'whistle blower' is an even worse jibberer than I had inferred from the news.
I am one of them! And I keep demanding one question of the Roswellists… “Did it ever occur to any of you to ask us?
"To ask the most rambunctiously independent-minded and creative techies in the world? Instead of dismissing us as some kind of Blofeld-lackey, obediently controlled, James Bond henchmen clichés? Or to track the whereabouts and activities of those who blatantly would have been involved in such an urgent study?"
No? Didn’t think so. Some truth detectives!
Look at what Hollywood has done to you.
== And now they bring in Il Duce? ==
Only, times do change, a little. Increasingly, the UFO community (ahem, cult) has shifted away from the thoroughly-discredited Roswell stuff… to a relatively new story that was never seen until it got triggered by one muttered remark in the nineties, then lavishly embellished just recently. A tale that Benito Mussolini had his own 'crashed alien ship' way back in 1933! Shared it with the Japanese and Nazis, in fact. And then...
…and then what? Not one scientist from any of those three countries is known to have disappeared into the kind of emergency research program that such a 'find' would have merited or incited, especially during desperate wartime.
Nor was there even a single suspicious leap in any kind of technology. Not even any new alloys - a trivial thing to get from any advanced wreckage. The turbopumps and gyros developed by Von Braun for the V2 were clever increments on Goddard... and only increments. Likewise, when the Americans supposedly seized all the 'Italian materials' – the wreckage and alien bodies? Hey, now that makes the whole Megillah NINETY years of near-perfect secrecy....
...despite successive U.S. administrations who hated each others' guts! And who would gladly have distracted the public by exposing the other party's nefarious coverup!
So, when the Mussolini Wreck story gets dropped, what’s the next reset? That it goes back even earlier?
That H.G. Wells based his alien invasion story on a stranded pack of spaced invaders?
Hey, I participated in that anthology! See War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches.
== Puh- lease? ==
Mind you I am "Mr. Aliens," having studied such notions in astrophysics, SETI, NASA and innumerable science fiction thought experiments. I would do a 180 in an instant, if you showed me anything other than vapor, pareidolia and hallucinations.
There are big differences. Both SETI and sci fi are exploratory. On the other hand, shrieking ‘coverup!’ at civil servants who have way better things to be doing with our tax dollars? Raving masturbatory, fantasy what-ifs and yammering that it all must be real, because I want it to be!
That's the biggest reason why I am so sick of the UFO nonsense. Not because contact isn't possible! I'm open to that. Rather, because all of the scenarios we’re offered are insipid, time-wasting and dumb!
Mr. Dunning sifts through the now-most-popular UFO fetishisms -- other than recent ‘tictacs,’ which are a completely separate matter than the ‘crashed ship cult. (See below - at least those assertions can be grappled-with, as I do, elsewhere.)
Dunning’s most caustic critique is aimed toward the Congressional shills who put us through all this endlessly, tediously recurring ‘crashed ship’ nonsense for their own political reasons, without doing a scintilla of due diligence:
“Now, researching this episode took me the better part of a week, because I had to track down every part and verify each with solid references. If I was a US Congressman, like Tim Burchett who is the one most responsible for putting Grusch on this stage, I would have at least assigned a staffer (an intern, an aide, anyone) to spend at least a day or two on the Internet to verify this guy Grusch's story just to make sure I wouldn't end up looking like a fool. Well, Burchett felt confident enough not to do that, and now he looks like a fool — because a lot of people like me can do this research, and we have easy platforms to get it out there.
“And David Grusch, bless his heart, I'm sure he's honest and he believes deeply in what he's saying; he just seems to have a very, very low bar for the quality of evidence that he accepts, to the point that he doesn't even double check it before testifying to it before Congress as fact. And this is common, not just for Grusch and other UFOlogists, but for all of us: When we hear something that supports our preferred worldview, we tend to accept it uncritically. Too few of us apply the same scrutiny to things we agree with as we do to things we disagree with. It's just one more of countless examples we have, reminding us that we should always be skeptical.”
== The Question No One Ever asks ==
Okay, here’s one you’ve not heard elsewhere, which is a pity, in light of the dumb Gillibrand-Rubio bill.
IF tens of thousands of US experts have been studying alien ships for 80 years without a single outcome or leak - despite every modern temptation to seek either transparency and/or publicity - then have you considered this? That these folks – our very best and smartest people – might have a good reason to keep it secret? A reason that has convinced those tens of thousands to stifle their own natural, strong impulse to shout "Look at what I've been doing!!"
In which case - if their consensus-agreed reason is that strong - then who the F are YOU fools to screech at them over possibly existential-level reasons for discretion?”
Sure, the fellow saying that to you right now is widely called “Mister Transparency!” Transparent accountability is key to our civilization!
But I am also a sci fi author and historian and hence I can imagine more than a dozen scenarios in which the sage answer – consensus agreed by all those thousands of our best people - would be: “We’d better keep this quiet for a while.”
Certainly they'd have to have 'reasons' a whole lot better than the clichés we hear bandied about: National Security (???) or 'prevent public panic!' (seriously?)... or the dumbest one: protecting military contracts. (You imply that revealing the existence of unfriendly aliens would reduce defense spending?)
No, it would take something really compelling. Maybe something *I* can't even imagine! (Hey, it's happened.) Moreover, if ALL of those thousands so-agreed, and kept to that consensus across 80+ years, then who the heck are you to declare – without any of the facts – that we should spasm it all?
What a stunningly self-centered and bratty position to take!
(In fact, I explored exactly this scenario in a novella called “Senses, Three and Six.”)
Okay... in that case...
...want a solution? A middle ground?
Form a commission of the dozen most respected and trusted human beings on Earth. Maybe start with – um – Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman and Oprah? Add Kip Thorne and Neil Tyson and Beyoncé and Bill Nye and Patrick Stewart? Give them go anywhere passes to see anything and question everyone.
And then let them tell us:
“We found nada –“
Or “We found THIS! –“
Or else maybe - “Everybody Shut th’F up. Sit down. We mean it.”
== It’s time to shift tactics, dear UFO folks ==
Seriously, the entire premise of the ‘crashed ship' cult is so execrably dumb that it seems quite compatible with a different ET contact scenario... that aliens are spewing down at us some kind of stoopid ray!
The cult really would be advised to drop that 'crashed ship' part of their catechism, altogether. Along with all the silly-debunked ‘photos’ from the 1950s and such.
(With ten million times as many active cameras on Earth today, why do the ‘images’ get fuzzier, every year?)
Instead of the insanely ludicrous Crashed Ship stuff, you could focus on the present, like the ‘tic-tacs’! Those recent ‘sightings’ of blurry, zipping glow-balls, reported by Navy pilots and such. The few of them that haven’t been clearly debunked by Mick West, that is.
Those few exceptions do appear maybe to be glowing dots, flitting about in the atomosphere above US Navy test ranges! And at least the tictac thing doesn’t pre-suppose that tens of thousands of top humans are movie cliché lemming-henchman!
So sure, offer up your cheap sci fi star drives that violate every known law of nature and physics! (I can do much better!) Yeah, I suppose a magical zippy-drive that crushes, Newton & Einstein & Thorne might rank somewhere at the very low end of a long list of Tic-Tac UAP possibilities.
Though maybe you might first consider more plausible explanations, as I do here? Theories for the phenomena that don’t require viciously nasty space teasers breaking every law of science?
== By far a more likely “they’re here!’ scenario! ==
A few final thoughts on this, for now. Especially something that MIGHT ACTUALLY BE HAPPENING.
Consider. If ‘they’ do exist and are truly are here in the solar system, would they not already be on the Internet?
Isn’t our technology supposed to be child’s play for such beings?
Picture them amused by our primitive political thrashings and TV shows and fetishes… maybe selling it all to Galacto-Netflix as space-voyeur reality TV? ("Oh, Those Funny Humans!")
Indeed, maybe…reading - and chuckling over - what I just typed, just now?
And what you type in response? Maybe hacking your webcam and phones etc., for giggles? (Shouldn’t that possibility make you a wee bit…angry?)
Isn’t that scenario vastly, vastly more plausible than vapidly vaporous and incompetent ‘crashed ships’? (Ships that the aliens never seem interested in recovering, or their lost comrades?) Or flitting-teaser fuzzballs, desperately adjusting their blurr-rays, as we keep improving our cameras?
Let’s dive into that Internet Lurker Scenario for a bit. If aliens or probes are listening in on our TV and Internet (a form of ET contact that I do believe does have a small chance of being true, as I depict in Existence), then they must be laughing, or shaking their heads, sadly, over this recurring UFO mania.
In fact – as a physicist and science fiction author – I deem that to be a form of first contact some of us may live to see! Perhaps when we reach the Asteroid Belt and encounter ancient Von Neumann replicator probes…
It might even happen in time for some of us living today to witness. If we have patience. If NASA gets out of the current, silly Moon-fetishism and lifts our gaze beyond that sandbox of useless poison dust, leaving that playpen for the symbolism-hungry, Apollo-wannabe kiddies...
...so we can get back to exploring farther out, where the real riches await. And possibly much more than mere riches.
Above all, it might happen if we fix our immature manias and focus on doing something that UFO cultism doesn’t help with, at all…
…growing up.
143 comments:
Not one scientist from any of those three countries is known to have disappeared into the kind of emergency research program that such a 'find' would have merited or incited, especially during desperate wartime.
Nor was there even a single suspicious leap in any kind of technology...
There is, of course, one example of this happening. Hiding in plain sight. Quite topical at the moment.
(Meaning no disrespect to the scientists and engineers who *actually* put in the hard yakka, but it's the weekend. Chill.)
Actually, there's another. Brainwashing of the masses has been a SF trope for decades. I've previously noted the eerie parallels between the rise of Trump, Brexit, Cambridge Analytica, and the capped masses of John Christopher's Tripod novels This idea probably had roots in the rise of mass media like TV and, even more so, radio. (Watch Chaplin's Great Dictator speech to see how it was perceived at the time.). Christopher's alien Masters resorted to the Trippy Show when they realised that their psychological tech was more advanced than their weaponry.
Christopher was 'cocking a snook' at a critique from Aldiss, but maybe Goebbel's masters came to the same conclusion?
As I said, it's the weekend.
Beyoncé. Hmm. Well she did release "Alien Superstar" last year.
The idea of a crashed spacecraft being abandoned where clever apes could study it seems bizarre, no "Grey" in their right mind would leave that much tech in our grasp. Even a scenario like James P. Hogan* wrote for his Giants series would be questionable.
*But couldn't he write a fun story before he drank from the "Metaphoric firehose of fertilizer".
You raise an interesting point there about those tens of thousands possibly being convinced that there's one or more Good Reasons To Keep Our Yaps Shut. The "Stargate Command" scenario is a variant of this, right?
I could just about believe that there was something important and serious enough to keep 100 people quiet
But thousands? even a thousand SMART people will include several that are smart on one topic and dumb as on others
Tony the best working theory for the Trump Phenomenon - is Mule Powers. From you know where.
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Actually the true sci fi singer + gorgeous star is Janelled Monae!
Woof.
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One of the few things I disliked about Stargate was keeping the screcy long past due date. Season One? Season Two? Well, sure.
But AFTER USA citizens lead a planet-wide federation that has xonquered and liberated THE WHOLE FREAKING GALAXY? Seriously, such a revelation coulda kept the lots spinning 2 more years!
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Duncan the Manhattan Project was almost that big & secure. But under VERY hard conditions and leaving a lot of people sure they knew what was going on.
Good point about the Manhattan Project!!
Yah... and the Manhattan Project still leaked.
In my day job I have infosec and opsec responsibilities. They try to hammer those ideas into our heads yearly with training and with day to day processes.
It's not 100% effective.
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I'm amused when someone trots out the 'military contracts' excuse. It's highly unlikely they've ever tried to win one, let alone keep it when it comes up again for re-bidding.
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Another group to 'just ask' are document archivists. I did that many years ago when I wanted copies of official docs on the old Halley solar sail project. I couldn't find them online, so I wrote to the JPL archives people. They mistakenly thought I was doing a FOIA thing (I think) and went through the process to test if the docs they had could be declassified. Turns out they could, so they sent me copies many months later. I learned a lot about government contracts once I got to read them.
Offer a substantial cash reward for unambiguous PROOF of ET visitation: Actual beings (living or dead) and/or actual technology which cannot have been human produced. Appoint a panel of volunteer engineers, biologists, and physical scientists to evaluate all such claims.
Mike Byron’s general approach – confront specific or general assertions with demands for clear proof with $$ on the line – is one I have been pushing for years. That plus commissions of respected individuals who are selected semi-randomly from large pools of qualified folks – to prevent the yammer “You picked guys who are in on it!”
All right, some of you are software briliant. I am NOT! Yet, I am trying to subsidize/promote the TASAT project for a website that could possibly save civilization some time, by referring decision makers to sci fi thought experiments that might be pertinent, when
'something strange' is encountered.
The one volunteer I have working hard on it recently said the following... and it it makes sense to any of you and/or if you KNOW someone who might have useful expertise, please speak up and/or contact me?:
**** After configuring and testing a brief hosted trial account, I'm still optimistic that the Discourse forum platform can do just about all the things on our initial wishlist. It's quite expensive as a hosted service though, so the next test was to see if it was realistic to self-host it on an affordable hosting plan.
After trying several providers and finding services and/or support to lack in one way or another, I'm currently working on getting Discourse running on an Alpine Linux VPS server at Vultr.com. I've had to learn a lot more than I expected about virtualization, Docker containers, Github, IPv6, SSH keys, email validation, etc...
I know that's a lot of technobabble, but anyone especially versed in these areas is welcome to evaluate my current puzzle...
For affordability purposes I selected an IPv6 host rather than IPv4 -- only to later learn that Github, which hosts the official Discourse package & updates, stubbornly remains IPv4-only. I was able to route around this to a point using a third-party trans-IP proxy: the OS can now reach Github; however the software setup running within a Docker container cannot reach Github. I can either pursue a fix for this, or take a few steps back and start with an Ubuntu server on IPv4, a more conventional environment. Any tips on what's more likely to succeed are welcome. ****
He's had one answer in our discussion group"
**** I have little time, but I do have experience with setting up cloud instances. I have basic technical questions:
1. Can the Discourse setup use Docker containers?
2. Git should be supported on both those Linux variants. Some Uris for GitHub can be unusual depending on how you clone. If you are grabbing a release with curl then you have to follow a redirect.****
Again, there is a VERY small chance that this could one day have IMMENSE value.
Heck I expect someone like Locumranch - a flatlander grouch who knows a LOT of old timey sci fi - would be a quick and rapid participant, actually proving - at some crucial moment - useful to a planet, species and civilization that he grumpily claims to despise.
The cloud can be crazy-making. For VM/Docker/SSH stuff, I always work first on a local sandbox rig. This defers most hosting hassles and provides a safe (private), low pressure dev platform (the very worst thing you can do is to piss off early users and subscribers). If I can't get a local stack working, then I know I can't wrangle a cloud one. Sorry, that's all I can contribute right now.
scidata it's be great to get you on the xoming zoom conference call. But it's up to you.
Oppenheimer (the movie) had a scene about infosec, where Groves (iirc) complained that the civilian scientists he needed had no concept of secrecy - and the smartest ones were the hardest to shut up.
Regarding opsec, I still remember the 1979 story which came out later where the madam of a local bordello in - NV, I think - had phoned up the local base commander and asked "Is this mission to rescue the hostages in Iran supposed to be a secret? Because the Delta Force boys we have in here can't stop talking about it."
So, yeah, from either end of the grunt/nerd spectrum, I can't believe in a huge decades-long "Stargate Command" secret being kept by thousands of guys*. I guess if you threw in those MIB flashy-thingies, though...
*and fewer girls, but the same would apply.
Pappenheimer
Sure, if I can. I've been using Zoom a bit this year but I still have no web cam working. Laconic is my middle name, so I'd sit way at the back. You have my email.
"Offer a substantial cash reward for unambiguous PROOF..."
James Randi tried that to discredit parapsychology. It was well publicized. I don't think it made an appreciable dent in the woo. Randi's investigations also indicated that many dowsers are massive whiners, but some who actually thought they could sense water were stunned to find out they couldn't. No tested dowser did better than random chance. Yet there are still people out there dowsing - and being paid for it.
Pappenheimer
Nyone know how to find out if this fine video is archived somewhere?
The Neo Project aims to create a vividly beautiful film, combining science and art with optimism. They feature my blather about peering into the future. Vivid imagery and remarkable sound editing. http://anewbreedofhuman.com/announcement-trailer
David
According to this https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/about-githubs-ip-addresses , GitHub has several IPV6 addresses.
David
But that's only for their API. From the web https://www.nslookup.io/domains/github.com/webservers/ they only make an IPV4 address available.
If it's any consolation, David, I came back into the industry a couple of years ago after a ten year hiatus, and found such things as git and asynchronous programming to be a rude culture shock!
("It's version control and multi-tasking, Jim, but not as we know it") Still, I managed to bob to the surface, eventually. ('Git' is aptly named, but at least the online manuals are comprehensive, and can be relied on to get you out of most scrapes)
I have had a quick glance on the github doc pages, and it seems that ipv6 support is coming... whenever.
You claim to be able to access github repositories from the base server OS, but not a docker instance? That sounds like an issue with the port configurations in the docker instance. It might be that you have to duplicate whatever you did in the base server to talk to Github within the instance. Getting access keys set up can be a pain as well.
Another trick you might try is to download the required repository to your server, and share the folder with the docker instance. Kludgy, but it might work for now.
Actually, the more I think of it, the more I wonder why the docker needs to access Github. A docker image should be built from scratch, and not need to be updated after.
I might be available for a conference call, although the time differences will be fun to wrangle, and I am certainly no expert in web hosting and cloudiness stuff.
Tony you still have my email? Drop me a line. Thanks.
Sent a message to your gmail account
You need a legit sysadmin. I play at being one just enough to avoid asking a few stupid questions, but the real talent can snap their fingers and make those things happen easily.
You need someone with dbadmin and some app-admin skills too. I built an IT career doing app-admin work because sysadmins and dbadmins who've been around awhile want desperately to shove app tasks onto others. Finding all this in one person isn't easy. Building the skills yourself... is a path that leads to trauma. There's nothing quite like having your system invaded and repurposed. Been there.
But if I understand the architecture...
1) Discourse running within a Docker instance running on a Linux instance running within a Host's environment.
2) The Host will usually enable easy stand-up of a virtual server (the Linux instance in this case) but what you do on it is your business... including establishing decent security.
3) If you pick a well know Linux variant, you should be able to find a pre-compiled "Discourse" Docker image, but you'll need to keep that image up to date in terms of security. That means someone operating at the Linux level (your primary OS as far as you're concerned) has to patch the Docker image AND the Linux OS periodically to keep the bad guys out.
4) What actually runs inside Docker depends on what Discourse actually looks like in terms of its design.
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Making all of this run and remain security compliant requires knowing each tool, what it needs to access, and how it is accessed. For example, users getting to Discourse have to be able to get responses from it even though it is a few layers down in this abstraction. The sysadmin has to be able to keep things patched at each level of abstraction. The Discourse admin has to be able to reach whatever tools they need as well. And... someone's responsible for backing things up, right? Those go somewhere too.
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Most likely you need a few volunteers or one very talented one that you'll have to replace some day with a few less talented ones... because... volunteers.
Re Dowsers
When I worked for the council water was one of my learning points
Where I am we are situated on a river plane - this flat area has been made over millions of years by the river wandering back and forth and depositing gravel, silt and sand - hundreds of meters thick
The whole plane has water slowly flowing through it
What we need for a water SUPPLY is a volume of free flowing gravel so that when we pump the water out it can be replenished
The river has wagged its tail over the whole area - if you drill 20 meters away then you can get an entirely different picture
We simply do not know where to drill
Using a "Dowser" adds a rounding error to the cost of a test bore -
I did get banned from the test bore sites when the dowser was there as too much of a skeptic!!
@ Dr. Brin: Re: Original Topic:
I'm afraid I'm missing something here.
1) We haven't been visited by aliens in UFOs.
2) According to a National Geographic poll, 36% of Americans, about 80 million people believe UFOs exist, and a tenth believe they have spotted one. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that approximately 65% of Americans concur that extraterrestrials exist, and about 51% say that UFO sightings reported by members of the U.S. military represent visits from intelligent aliens. In a 2019 survey by Gallup, 33% of U.S. adults said that they believed that alien spacecraft have been among some UFO sightings in the past.
(https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ufos-exist-americans-national-geographic-survey/story?id=16661311)
3) Perhaps a large percentage of these people will NOT be dissuaded by evidence, anymore
than most MAGAs will change their beliefs based on evidence; in fact, they will deny the evidence and double-down in their beliefs.
4) My question is: why does it matter if many people mistakenly believe there are aliens in UFOs?
Climate change-, election-, and vaccine deniers? I can see problems here.
UFOnians? Not so much of one....
Cheers,
Keith
Our ruling castes have always justified their right-to-rule by an appeal to & an argument from greater authority.
From our ancient Royal & Priestly Castes who claimed the right-to-rule by divine authority to our more modern Expert Castes who claim the right-to-rule by stint of superior education & intellect, the assertion is always the same:
Our rulers derive their authority to rule from being more than human.
But, now our current ruling Expert Caste is embroiled in a faith-based crisis of its own devising. Faced with huge problems that run the gamut from the political to the financial to the climatic, our Expert Caste has been revealed as merely HUMAN, being immensely fallible & entirely devoid of greater authority.
This is the sense behind the promotion of 'UFO Mania', along with its implied repository of alien knowledge & technology, as it is a ruse by a desperate ruling caste to justify its continued right-to-rule by invoking greater authority.
Unfortunately, it is 'too little, too late' because humanity will only follow & obey their BETTERS, not their equals & inferiors, and our current leaders are exceedingly common, relatively uninspiring, extremely old, physically debilitated and apparently demented.
We will not follow those who cannot lead, the end result being anarchy.
Best
Keith... opinion polls that are not carefully parsed are absurd. People will sway toward whatever seems cool or whatever the pollster seems to be aiming for. BOTH encourage UFO pro-answers.
L: "Our ruling castes have always justified their right-to-rule by an appeal to & an argument from greater authority." Sure, across 6000 years of your nasty feudalism masturbation to lords who claim authority from Heaven. So? The Enlightenment was and is a rebellion against that crap.
Us nerds ain't immune to logical fallacies, just taught to notice them... and denounce them in each other, a competitive correction process that poor L is utterly, utterly unable to parse, any more than he 'gets" 'blue' or 'up.'
"Unfortunately, it is 'too little, too late' because humanity will only follow & obey their BETTERS, not their equals & inferiors, and our current leaders are exceedingly common, relatively uninspiring, extremely old, physically debilitated and apparently demented."
no that's what YOU and your terrified co-confederates see in the mirror. You do not understand our species and hate us, despite all your lives relying upon us, utterly.
Dear Dr. Brin:
Help!
You started saying you wanted a place for people to talk. The next thing you know, I read:
"I'm currently working on getting Discourse running on an Alpine Linux VPS server at Vultr.com. I've had to learn a lot more than I expected about virtualization, Docker containers, Github, IPv6, SSH keys, email validation, etc..."
"You need someone with dbadmin and some app-admin skills too."
"Discourse running within a Docker instance running on a Linux instance running within a Host's environment."
"That means someone operating at the Linux level (your primary OS as far as you're concerned) has to patch the Docker image AND the Linux OS periodically"
The whooshing sound you hear is all that flying over my head. I know, I'm a technopeasant and you are of the High Nerdhood. Still though, what is all that technobabble about? Are you attempting to make high-security environment where UFO witnesses can talk freely? If so, then the technobabble is sufficient cryptography all by itself.
Throw in a turboencabulator and you've got a deal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag
Locumranch:
"humanity will only follow & obey their BETTERS, not their equals & inferiors"
Certainly you jest. People follow each other all the time, and as for following inferiors, have you been paying attention lately?
Thanks, Dr. Brin. I agree- those figures seem AWFULLY high. Let's assume it's just a small fraction of that- what does it matter if a small fraction of people believe something false and apparently harmless? A large fraction believe something(s) false and clearly harmful...
@Paradoctor I think David added the nerdspeak to emphasise that he, too, was a techno-peasant in this area.
As Alfred inferred with his distinction between dbadmins and sysadmins, IT has become increasingly specialised over time.
Tony Fisk: I get it, but what's the nerdspeak for? What's the purpose of the dbadmins and sysadmins and prefabulated amulite?
Paradoctor makes an excellent point:
Although the US government appears to dominated by our intellectual inferiors, the 117th US Congress is actually dominated by EXPERTS, as 44% of the US House of Representatives and 37% of the US Senate possess advanced degrees in Jurisprudence, proving once & for all that membership in our educated Expert Caste is no proof against IDIOCY, a situation much aggravated by those experts who claim the right-to-rule by stint of their superior education & intellect.
This is a sad state of affairs which is often mistaken for a 'War on Smart People', even though there is no such war (or, even a bias) against the merely intelligent, but rather a staunch opposition to those egotistical IDIOTS who claim the right-to-rule over others by stint of their superior education & intellect.
Do you understand the distinction that I am making between those experts who are merely smart versus those experts, egoists & tyrants who claim the right-to-rule over others?
Indeed, it is quite telling how our fine host tends to confuse this 'War on TYRANNY' with a 'War on Smart People', as it is one thing to be a smart agreeable nerd and quite another to be a hyper-competitive smart alecky pocket dictator, since the former is non-threatening & the latter is unforgivable.
Sic Semper Tyrannis !
Best
_____
What some describe as 'nerdspeak', it's another name for 'jargon', defined by Oxford Languages as "special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand", from late Middle English meaning ‘twittering, chattering’ and ‘gibberish’.
Jargon serves two main purposes: First, to make the jargon user seem smarter; and, second, as an Ingroup/Outgroup identifier.
We use jargon in medicine to make silly descriptions seem extra-intelligent, as in the case of the 'wormy-looking dangling thing' which transliterates into an impressive 'vermiform appendix'.
Ay carumba. I have sometimes thumbnailed 'war vs smart people.' but always amend that and say much more often the oligarchy and their MAGA/confederate lemmings wage 'war vs FACT professions!'
Anyone who claims lawyers are SMART is likely on target. Those calling lawyers 'fact professionals' would be... what's the term? Oh, yeah, idiots.
Shelby, DeSantis, Sen Kennedy... the number of Ivy League Rhodes Scholars who suddenly developed hick accents to manipulate marching morons proves the case. Smart, feral predators are not fact-professionals.
Still a VAST majority of American citizens voted for the party to which all the scientists, doctors and other fact professionals have fled the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. But for gerrymandering and oppressive cheats, the US Congress would not be so pathetic
There are many dem reps and sens who are lawyers. WAGER NOW comparing fractions who have been indicted by grand juries or who are - or are affiliated with - child molesters and so on.
paradoc, iI quoted directly from the one volunteer single handedly making the TASAT site, in hope some folks would spread it around and help recruit some qualified helped.
One irony is that locumranch might actually use TASAT to become actually useful to civilization.
Dr Brin @ 9:41,
(And for everybody's information, I am neither in or from the US so my comments might miss something significant. I stopped commenting on DailyKos some years back for that very reason after I ignited a flame war because I didn't realise the full connotations of the term 'White Trash'.)
That said, it doesn't appear to me from afar that the majority voting anti-MAGA is vast. Surely even given the gerrymander that's the basic problem. There is too high a chance that we're going to see a President elected who by his own words has stated his intention to become a dictator.
Your point about elite-educated Republican politicians pretending to be stupid is valid, but if they continuously pander to their base it doesn't matter because they are not in any way in control. In fact they're making matters worse, in an attempt to retain some of their personal privileges, because at least SOME people are going to vote Republican due to THEIR rhetoric.
I am on holiday, so just a quick comment about your technical questions.
The 'bitnami' discourse image on dockerhub gives a quick how-to on setting up discourse (and its dependencies) in a docker environment, including advice on persistent volumes, backups, and the like. Just glancing at it, it seems to be a relatively straightforward process for anyone familiar with docker. If one can get some sort of server - a VPS (virtual private server) might be fine, if it can run nested virtualization (needed to run docker containers), and that is not always the case with virtual servers - with whatever Linux-based OS one prefers, install docker, and follow the instructions, then one should have a working (for some minimal value of 'working') discourse environment.
But, as Alfred notes above, that is just barely the beginning. Discourse uses databases (both Postgres and Redis), so one will need at least a minimum level of DB knowledge, as well as knowing at least something about system security and probably application management.
@paradoctor, you didn't ask but, having been given a definition of nerdspeak *and* jargon*, I will try and offer a translation of the terms that were used in the piece:
"I'm currently working on getting Discourse running on an Alpine Linux VPS server at Vultr.com. I've had to learn a lot more than I expected about virtualization, Docker containers, Github, IPv6, SSH keys, email validation, etc..."
"You need someone with dbadmin and some app-admin skills too."
"Discourse running within a Docker instance running on a Linux instance running within a Host's environment."
"That means someone operating at the Linux level (your primary OS as far as you're concerned) has to patch the Docker image AND the Linux OS periodically
It could be boiled down to 'boxes within boxes', but each box has its purpose...
Discourse: a program that provides a social media environment. The emphasis is on discussion, and (I think) it is what is being contemplated to provide TASAT. How to run this program? That would be...
Alpine Linux: Linux is a derivation of Unix, and is an open source operating system that comes in many forms. Ubuntu is a popular form with many additional apps and features. Alpine is a 'clean' bare bones version that is suitable for dedicated environments with only a couple of specific activities, like Discourse. Now, where to run it?
VPS: Virtual Private Server. A computer dedicated to running many operating environments.
Vultr.com: a website that offers VPS instances for people to use as databases, websites etc. Such companies usually provide backup and recovery services. All for a doubtless modest fee.
virtualization: creating one or more operating system environments within another. eg you can run Linux systems within Windows, and vice versa. See VPS.
Docker containers: Docker defines a self-contained virtual operating environment or container, and allows you to create as many identical copies of that container as you wish. This is very useful when running things like web farms, where thousands of computers may be doing the same thing for different purposes. So, a docker container built to include Alpine Linux and Discourse may be slotted straight into a VPS and start operating immediately (in theory)
Github: another VPS website that is dedicated to provide Git repositories (say what? See below).
Git: a version control system that allows software developers to keep a history of incremental changes to code. This is a whole new rabbit warren in itself, so I'll leave at that.
IPv6: Internet Protocol version 6. A successor to the trusty but limited IPv4 on which most website hub addresses are based. IPv6 offers far more website addresses, and has been around for a long time, but uptake and support has been slow. Including, it seems, GitHub.
SSH Keys: encryption keys. In this case, I would say they are needed to allow a project coder secure access to a GitHub repository. You also need something similar to be able to host a website via the secured https: protocol
email validation: Sending emails requires a valid source. This is usually handled by your email system, but an application sending status messages needs to provide its own validation.
dbadmin: database administrator. They who define users and their permissions to access stuff.
sysadmin: systems administrator. They who define users and monitor computer system operations. May also handle security, but that can be another role again.
I hope some of that unpacks into something intelligible. As you can see, the modern software development environment is quite an ecosystem!
* It's been noted that warfare triggers rapid development of jargon. Language changed so quickly for one Melanesian tribe that returning hunting parties found they had some catching up to do. I seek a more peaceful state.
As most volunteers would probably agree, restaurant napkin ideas can quickly sprawl into vast, complex, resource-sucking behemoths. Of course, project potential and interest also blossom, which is what drives it forward.
My own experience has taught me these lessons:
- keep detailed logs and lab notes for continuity across time & people
- don't be 'Gaussian' about such logs (remain able & willing to show your work)
- play nice and be generous (these projects can get siloed as they grow)
- build and use sandboxes for safety, learning, and iterative development
- stay open to new tech & ideas (write on slate not granite)
- don't be afraid of a little creative destruction along the way
- when I'm really stuck, I revert to my Forth 'n Chips methodology
(everybody has at least one such comfort zone)
Tony Fisk:
IT has become increasingly specialised over time.
No kidding! When I began my adult career as a programmer in the late 1980s, programmers routinely performed actions like rebooting a server or installing a new colleague's phone and monitor. In the corporate world today, everything is siloed with strict limits on permissions, and you have to fill out a ticket to have your password reset.
"Benito Mussolini had his own 'crashed alien ship' way back in 1933"
And yet despite access to advanced Alien tech the Italian military still sucked in WW2.
OTOH, that would make a great "What-If" alternate history story:
Reverse engineering Alien tech gives Italy the most advanced military and industrial technology in the world.
These weapons make their first appearance in secret in Ethiopia, and later during the Spanish Civil war with the Fascists winning in less than a year, and making Franco beholden to Musso.
When general war comes, Italy sweeps across the Med, taking in quick succession: Gibraltar, French colonial Africa, Malta, Egypt and Suez, the Nile down through East Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East oil fields.
The British surrender when the Italian fleet can finally enter the Atlantic and join the Germans in Sealion. Italy gains control of most of colonial Africa at the peace table.
Outwardly pleased, in private Hitler is livid that Musso has shown him up.
Germany, America and Russia scramble to catch up with Italian tech and weaponry, which is hundreds of years ahead of them.
Barbarossa starts on schedule with an Italian expeditionary force fighting along side Army Group South and an Italian invasion of the Caucasus (with the Baku oil fields) ensuring a rapid defeat of the USSR.
Afterwards there is a cold war between the now rival Axis powers.
Some spark triggers an actual war between the Reich and New Rome, with both sides now having more or less equal quality weapons as well as nukes. The oppressed peoples of Europe and Africa take the opportunity to rise up against their rulers.
Europe is reduced to rubble and ashes, recovering only because of American generosity during the post war occupation and relief efforts.
Best explanation ever as to why MAGA (aka "Low conscientiousness conservatives") hate educated liberal elites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISYL1WsuR78
Aliens affecting the outcome of WW2 has been done a lot (especially by Turtledove's World War series), but aside from "Thor Meets Captain America" not many examples of dark satanic/pagan magic affecting the war.
Which is odd because the Nazis loved the occult (Thule Society, expeditions to find Shambala in Tibet, the ice moon theory, the belief that the Earth is actually inside an infinite expanse of rock, trying to acquire the ark of the covenant, the spear of destiny and the holy grail, etc.).
@DP have you read Stross's 'Atrocity Archive'? That has Nazi occultism getting results... of a sort.
Malcolm Nance responds to Elon Musk on Xitter...
https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1701237166494433651?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
REAL TALK, @elonmusk
.
As a career veteran of the US armed forces & intelligence, a rescuer on 9/11. a Ukrainian Army Legionnaire and a man who spent his whole life happily defending your constitutional right to openly love & embrace fascists, genocidaires, racists, antisemites, terrorists & insurrectionists, I KNOW you’d never fight or die for America bc you love our enemy’s money & your own ego more than the country that took your diamond smuggling, lazy Bond Villain ass in.
YOU are an execrable, disgraceful #TreasonWeasel to America & all it stands for. But that’s just my professional opinion.
* * *
Also, after being quiet for so long that I stopped checking, Stonekettle has several new posts since August.
https://www.stonekettle.com/
It's not just me...
https://www.stonekettle.com/2023/08/what-happens-in-vegas-doesnt-always.html
...
My increased crabbiness comes from the fact that I have COVID.
I've been fighting it for the last week or so.
Now, you might be one of those cheerful sick people, but I'm not. I feel like crap most of the time these days, a legacy of spending most of my life in a profession that tends to beat the hell out of you on a good day. Twenty years of that and, well, yeah, I feel lousy most days now. So anything that makes me feel worse isn't something I handle all that well. I'm not a good sick person. And COVID has been kicking the piss out of me for a week with the primary side effect being that it's making me even more unpleasant than usual.
...
I sometimes don't appreciate just how fortunate I am to live in a civilized metropolitan area in a blue state. The other half doesn't live so well.
https://www.stonekettle.com/2023/08/what-happens-in-vegas-doesnt-always.html
...
That first day wasn't too bad. Mild headache. My neck and shoulders ached worse and worse as the day went by. Sneezing. Sore throat. Called my doctor and asked for Paxlovid, only to be told by the receptionist that the practice (three doctors) would not prescribe the antiviral. Beg pardon, I asked? We don't prescribe Paxlovid, she said in a tone dripping with disdain like I'd asked for a big jar of Fentanyl. Like just a blanket won't do it? Not based on patient condition? Just, no? That's right, she said. The doctor eventually called in a prescription for the sore throat, but not pax. Guess I'll be looking for a new doctor then, because that's just bullshit -- but common with conservative doctors in The South since the advent of COVID and politics-based medicine.
...
Many thanks to Larry_H for proving my point about how the public tends to respond to the Tyranny of Smart People:
They respond with sheer unadulterated HATRED, as in the case of the above diatribe against smart guy Elon Musk.
History is full of smart (but not-so-wise) guys who attempted to exert their incisive authority over the less intelligent until those smarties lost their little heads to the unwashed masses.
Still, it never ceases to amuse (and amaze) how Smart People, along with many other self-appointed 'Fact-Users', always assume that they will be loved & obeyed once they start ordering other people around 'for their own good'.
This is also the case for Stonekettle who doesn't seem to have much love, respect or obedience for his physician fact-user when denied a request for Paxlovid, even though this med has multiple cautions, interactions, contraindications & side effects, being ineffective after Covid Day#5.
Unfortunately, this is always the case, as smart people are universally reviled when they dare disobey the whims of an ignorant general public which believes, deep down, that fact-users are their SERVANTS, not their masters.
And, yes, there's a story about that, many of them.
Best
Why do they call conservatives 'conservative'? They don't conserve. In particular, why call a doctor conservative if he categorically won't give an antiviral to a patient with a dangerous virus?
My theory about 'conservatives' is that they are like the Shadows of JMS's award-winning series "Babylon 5". The Shadows believe in causing chaos and conflict in order to hasten evolution. It seems that Stonekettle's doctor wants to evolve super-Floridians with natural resistance to all viruses, without needing any wimpy drugs.
As for smart-but-not-wise guys, locumranch had better beware, lest he accidentally describe himself. As for me, I'm a fool, but I know that I'm a fool.
Paradoctor:
Why do they call conservatives 'conservative'? They don't conserve.
They wish to conserve what used to be, or at least what they perceive to once have been. Thus the "again" in MAGA.
In particular, why call a doctor conservative if he categorically won't give an antiviral to a patient with a dangerous virus?
I'll bet Stonekettle would have been prescribed Ivermectin in a heartbeat had he asked for it. Without regard to "multiple cautions, interactions, contraindications & side effects" either.
In the corporate world today, everything is siloed with strict limits on permissions, and you have to fill out a ticket to have your password reset.
Tickets are a way for the chaps who reset passwords to prove that they are actually doing something. Blame a generation of 'lean' management.
OTOH, I've also had to deal with the messes left behind when someone who knows less than they think they do about technology has attempted to fix something, and turned a small problem into a really large problem. Usually they deny doing this and insist that the problem is really a simple one, and then argue and micromanage you as you try to fix it.
I last programmed when a stack was a data structure, not a programming environment. I'm quite aware of how out-of-date I am. I've had colleagues who are even more out-of-date than myself who insist that they could just fix a problem if they were given sysadmin permissions. They might be right, bit I wouldn't bet on it, and I'd wager my pension that they would cause more problems while implementing their fix. (Because hey, if you have permissions problems, the solution is to give all your processes superuser permissions across the whole network, right? Problem solved!)
Robert:
OTOH, I've also had to deal with the messes left behind when someone who knows less than they think they do about technology has attempted to fix something,
I understand that the technology world has become so sophisticated that we're kinda forced to become specialists rather than generalists. My mother still thinks I can fix her PC because I work with computers. Try telling her that I was a FORTRAN programmer, a database administrator and then an ETL developer, none of which has anything to do with hardware.
Above, I was making an observation more than a complaint.
It becomes a complaint when the job of IT professionals seems to be to serve the ticketing system rather than the other way around. I've mentioned before that when I continued in one of my previous jobs which was outsourced to a contracting company, my supervisor at the time told us that our only deliverable to the business was our timesheet.
Ozajh those are good point. Watch CABARET to the very end where a German oligarch is asked about Nazis – “So, you still think you can control them?”
Greg B and Alfred and Tony and scidata all sound like they could join a zoom about TASAT and contribute meaningfully to at least that one conversation about how to finally set up a site that might – perhaps – one day save the world. Through science fiction!
Tony… you both impressed me and made my head hurt.
What I fear is that the TASAT volunteer has gone so deep into those weeds that he has forgotten the actually quite-simple mission.
DP I sent all that to Harry Turtledove!
Tony: “That has Nazi occultism getting results... of a sort.” Rips off my graphic novel THE LIFE EATERS
“Still, it never ceases to amuse (and amaze) how Smart People, along with many other self-appointed 'Fact-Users', always assume that they will be loved & obeyed once they start ordering other people around 'for their own good'.”
You lie. Your basic premise is a pathetic lie containing zero truth, just masturbation. Hope you coated the ceiling with joy over that sentence. But to us it only proves you to be an idiot.
"There will be no more straining at GNATs - Garish Name Acquisition Techniques." - Some military guy in the Reader's Digest ages ago.
Larry Hart 10:00 am:
It's worse than that. So-called 'Conservatives' do not conserve what used to be, or even what they perceive to have been: they seek to impose what never was, but they imagine to have been.
Thus they are utopians; and according to Bergerud's Law, "Utopian politics always fail, always do damage, and are always incoherent."
Take for instance the 'conservative' quest for the preservation of Southern heritage. 'Heritage' means what you inherit; and whatever you inherit you must triage. Some of it you keep for yourself; some you give to others; and some you trash.
I advise the South to trash all the statues of traitorous failed generals; keep for themselves their charming but edgy manners; and give unto the world their writers and singers. They should tear down the Lee and Jackson statues, and melt them down to make statues of Elvis Presley, William Faulkner, and Louis Armstrong.
What I fear is that the TASAT volunteer has gone so deep into those weeds that he has forgotten the actually quite-simple mission.
Occupational hazard. I note 'they' didn't appear to have got to the Continuous Integration part.
It's true that a modern development environment adds a mountain of bureaucratic overhead to development. In my last job, I spent a considerable amount of time persuading the style checker and the style formatter to agree on spacing (never used lint before, and why are we now type-checking a dynamically typed language? ... ugh!)
Still, for all my curmudgeonly grumbling, I accept that much of the overhead improves the performance of what is now a *distributed* work environment.
I don't know what the mission actually was. It may well be achievable with the clever application of a staple and a hair clip. In the first instance, that might suffice. The maintenance is the thing, though.
Paradoctor:
So-called 'Conservatives' do not conserve what used to be, or even what they perceive to have been: they seek to impose what never was, but they imagine to have been.
What's the difference between "what they perceive to have been" and "what never was, but they imagine to have been"?
For example, certain conservatives want life to look like it did in "Leave it to Beaver". What does it matter whether life was ever really like that or if they just think it was or if they just wish it was?
There are many stories about whiners who gloat when they were correct on certain matters.
But you could think of them as being malcontents—or you could consider their standards as being impossibly high.
The plot ending is the same, though: they whine because no matter what the outcomes are, they’re not satisfied; and spend the rest of their lives complaining.
There actually is some truth in the MAGA outlook
Life is better today
But back in the 60's the USA was simply the best place to be a (white) working man
Today about 30 countries have overtaken the USA in that metric
Tony, Alfred, scidata, GregB please look at the project intro page!
TASAT = There's a Story About That (SciFi Nerds might save the world!) https://tasat.org/
I know what TASAT is attempting. I think I signed up to an earlier version. I know I added a couple (like my Trump/Tripod parallel)
Looking at the current version, my impression is that the first page is too light on context. Interesting pictures, but what are they about? This is User experience (UX) stuff. Yet another branch of specialization.*
As you're doubtless aware: TAGAT (There's A Game About TASAT). Superstruct was an online gamification experiment run by Jane McGonigal and Jamais Cascio (who you know) at IFTF. The individual gaming items are still available, although I wish they had kept the database open.
* I have to wonder how the artistic types it attracts cope with the seriously scary statistical math modelling it can involve! Fortunately, there's a language about that (R)
"The diversity of voices and perspectives featured on this blog is a testament to its inclusivity and commitment to fostering meaningful discussions."
homespares discount code
"Such flatterness. So spammy."
No link here code
Larry Hart 3:45 pm:
It's the difference between reality and desire. I grant that this distinction is philosophically subtle, and entirely missed by some folks. Still, it should be clear that 'Leave It To Beaver' was not a documentary.
One clue to the distinction is that reality is complex but self-consistent while desire is simple but self-contradictory. Another is that reality has laws but desire has demands.
Paradoctor:
It's the difference between reality and desire
True, but I thought the question was what they consider themselves to be "conserving". I said that they were not conserving the way things are today, but rather the way things once were in a better time. I don't know how much it matters whether that better time was real or imagined in that context.
In practice, of course, the distinction matters in that the real past did in fact happen, and so theoretically could happen again. Not necessarily (because of entropy and all that), but at least the real past has a proven track record. An imagined past golden age might well be impossible.
* * *
duncan cairncross:
But back in the 60's the USA was simply the best place to be a (white) working man
True in the same sense that the summer of 1977 was the best time to be me. Time happens, though. The worst impulses of conservatism seem to be about an insistence that time stand still. But that can no more happen than it can for me to remain 16 years old.
Clearly someone has found a new (if predictable) use for chatbots.
LH did you ever see MY FAVORITE YEAR? Such fun.
Gen xers complain. But the very best time to be a teeny bopper (ages 13-to-16) was roughly 77-83. Shopping mall arcades. OMG a flashy, hormone drenched Vegas Strip for teeny boppers, in every single mid to large town.
---
Tony the website is a placeholder to explain the desire. I know so many rich dudes and none of them will pony up to fund any of my ideas. So I gotta work with volunteers to (maybe) save the world!
care to describe superstruct in a few paragraphs?
A nit, "The Atrocity Archive" predates "The Life Eaters" by a bit. Not so much rip off as two gifted authors exploring similar concepts.
Robert Reich had an interesting essay, "Who's most responsive for the monopolization of America?". He suggests Robert Bork and his book "The Antitrust Paradox". "Conservatives" can be such suckers for concepts that look smart, than tribal loyalties hinder the sorely needed discard of duds.
The Wikipedia entry is fairly succinct, but here goes...
Superstruct was a game played over 6 weeks in 2008. Players contributed accounts of events that they imagined taking place ten years in the future. A world forecasting system had just predicted a massive population collapse and possible extinction of Humanity in the next ten years. (For the record, IFTF have settled on ten years as being an interesting forecasting period for their more serious work.)
The cause was identified as a group of five evolving 'superthreats': pandemic, food shortages, refugees, power conflicts, and (duhn duhn!) the 'griefer' types who delighted in spreading chaos. While not catastrophic on their own, together, these factors could combine to create cascading disasters.
Players were encouraged to imagine solutions, and then try combining the results into 'superstructs' to counter the 'superthreats'.
I think the parallels to TASAT should be clear enough. Instead of players, we have SF authors. And the 'superthreats' have yet to be identified, let alone the 'superstructs'.
The experience was fun. Several hundred people took part to varying degrees. Probably the biggest developmental sticking point in gameplay was the setup of the superstructs themselves. From memory, the game method was to use people's likes and comments as the linkage. It wasn't very effective. Something I noticed during play (and I've noticed it elsewhere) was a phenonemon I called 'diffusion'. We started off as a communicating group but, as the number of events and ideas propagated, people's attention spread out. Interactions became sparser and sparser, other than a few core points. The linking comments dropped off.
The game's database was only made available to players to read and query about halfway through the session. Only then were players able to develop their own methods of linking stuff together. The most effective and flexible way seemed to be via common keyword references, or 'tags'.
The Superstruct archive is here.
Tony: “That has Nazi occultism getting results... of a sort.” Rips off my graphic novel THE LIFE EATERS
Given that Stross published "The Atrocity Archive" in 2001, and the graphic novel The Life Eaters was published in 2003, the accusation of 'ripping off' doesn't hold water.
Tim: Robert Reich had an interesting essay, "Who's most responsive for the monopolization of America?". He suggests Robert Bork and his book "The Antitrust Paradox".
From my (admittedly cursory) study of that aspect of American history, anti-trust legislation seems to have been used more frequently against labour than capital. Bork can lay claim to credit (or blame) for the current situation, but not the first round.
Instead of helping move the United States toward a less concentrated industrial structure, the antitrust laws accelerated the rise of monopolies and oligopolies. Although the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson launched a vigorous anti-monopoly campaign, these efforts, at most, undid only a part of the consolidation that resulted from the merger mania between 1897 and 1904. During this same time, even as the Supreme Court permitted economy-wide consolidation, it applied the antitrust laws to restrict the activities of labor unions. The Department of Justice and the federal courts used the antitrust laws to discipline workers and to limit the ability of unions to apply pressure against hostile employers through secondary boycotts and strikes. In the words of economic historian Richard White, the Sherman Act was “aimed at capital but hit labor.”
Breaking with the mid-twentieth century approach to antitrust, the federal courts and antitrust enforcers, since the late 1970s, have once again interpreted—indeed reinterpreted—antitrust law to expand the autonomy of big capital and restrict the freedom of workers. The executive branch and judiciary have minimized concerns about the power of corporations.
https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3832&context=mlr
Robert
I think Ayn Rand had the right take on antitrust:
"The alleged purpose of the Antitrust laws was to protect competition; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.) The Antitrust laws were the classic example of a moral inversion prevalent in the history of capitalism: an example of the victims, the businessmen, taking the blame for the evils caused by the government, and the government using its own guilt as a justification for acquiring wider powers, on the pretext of “correcting” the evils.
“Free competition enforced by law” is a grotesque contradiction in terms. [http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html]"
We have a real world example in Standard Oil:
"In 1865, when Rockefeller’s market share was still minuscule, a gallon of kerosene cost 58 cents. In 1870, Standard’s market share was 4%, and a gallon cost 26 cents. By 1880, when Standard’s market share had skyrocketed to 90%, a gallon cost only 9 cents — and a decade later, with Standard’s market share still at 90%, the price was 7 cents. These data point to the real cause of Standard Oil’s success — its ability to charge the lowest prices by producing kerosene with unparalleled efficiency. ( http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/13/vindicating-standard-oil-100-years-later/ )."
and another in Alcoa, and another in AT&T, of whose Bell Labs, Jerry Pournelle said "Bell Labs did look ahead, and was arguably the advanced planning department of the human race."
You can either be on Team Musk or Team Nance, not both. It's obvious which one I am on.
https://malcolmnance.substack.com/p/why-i-dog-walked-elon-musk-and-will
...
Despite Elon Musk’s efforts he also did not stop Ukraine’s ingenuity. The AFU developed maritime drones that operated independently of his system. In the summer of 2023, Ukraine defiantly struck the Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol using its highly innovative drone boats, anti-ship missiles, and unmanned submarines. Not once but several times. They destroyed amphibious landing ships and severely damaged a frigate, an intelligence collection ship, and a critical fuel transport. Then Ukraine blew up the critical Kerch bridge … twice.
Nuclear retaliation has yet to occur.
But Musk didn’t cut Starlink to stop Ukraine just once. He did it again last night!
In just the last 24 hours, not a day after my scathing tweet, the Ukrainians struck the main dry dock that repairs the largest of the Black Sea Fleet’s ships damaging an Improved-KILO class cruise missile launching submarine “Rostov-am-Don” and the largest amphibious ship in the fleet. Ukraine managed to accomplish this using a mix of Storm Shadow cruise missiles and suicide drone boats, all without relying on Elon Musk. Yet at the exact time of the attack, Starlink suffered a massive outage across the entire global network for 2-3 hours.
I know I’m famous for using what we amusingly call Nance’s Law of Intelligence Kismet, (“Coincidence takes a lot of planning”) but in this case, it appears that either Musk’s had a standing plan to cut off Starlink in case of any attack on Sevastopol to save the world from Russian nuclear retaliation or his Starlink engineers are really bad. And we will see shortly that he was suckered by previous assurances that atomic war must occur due to Russian law and defense policy.
But if Putin as an ex-KGB officer is worth his salt he will tell Elon that it was his brilliant intervention and financial sacrifice that made Moscow yield from destroying the world even as the dry docks of Sevastopol burn.
...
No surprises here. It's Ok When Republicans Do It...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Sep13-1.html
No House Vote: Back in 2019, McCarthy took to the platform then known as Twitter to declare: "Speaker Pelosi can't decide on impeachment unilaterally. It requires a full vote of the House of Representatives." He has now changed his tune, showing that he's learned at least a little something from Mitch McConnell about one set of rules for Republicans and a different set for Democrats. That said, the important thing here is not that the Speaker is a hypocrite (although many Democrats did not hesitate to point that out yesterday). The important thing is that McCarthy would have brought it up for a vote if he knew he had 220 Republicans. And if he doesn't have 220 votes to merely consider an impeachment, he surely doesn't have 220 votes to actually impeach Biden.
Dr. Brin - "DP I sent all that to Harry Turtledove!"
Let me know what my residuals should be. ;-)
As for the spark that triggers the final conflagration between the Third Reich and New Rome, it would probably be treatment of the Jews.
The Fascists were brutal thugs and murderers in their own right, but Fascism at first didn't really cared about the Jews one way or the other (despite the Catholic Church's age old animosity). It took Nazi pressure and Musso's craven currying of Hitler's favor to get Italy to pass anti-Semitic laws starting in 1938 - a move that split the party with senior Fascists like Balbo vehemently opposing anti-Semitism, and most Italians considering the Germans to be disgusting barbarians in this regard.
(Side note: Famous aviator and head of Italy's Regia Aeronautica would be a major character in this alt history. As New Rome's air force head he would have garnished most of the alien tech weaponry and battlefield glory. He was a rival to Musso in OTL - Musso may have had him killed - and would be an even greater rival in this ATL).
Musso's views were craven and hypocritical.
William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich suggests that Musso enacted the Racial Laws in order to appease his German allies, rather than to satisfy any genuine antisemitic sentiment among the Italian people. Indeed, prior to 1938 and the Pact of Steel alliance, Mussolini and many notable Italian Fascists had been highly critical of Nordicism, biological racism, and antisemitism, especially the virulent and violent antisemitism and biological racism that could be found in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Many early supporters of Italian fascism, including Mussolini's mistress, the writer and socialite Margherita Sarfatti, were in fact middle-class or upper middle-class Italian Jews. (Wikipedia)
So I could see this alternate history Italy, being independent from Germany and desperate for European colonists in their new won African territories, reviving an old British plan for a Zionist homeland in Uganda. Forcing/enticing Jewish subjects of New Rome to move there would have been logistically simple with the war over. Jews fleeing the Third Reich might have found it attractive.
(Side Note: Not to be confused with the Madagascar Plan, which was genocide by other means. When the Nazis originally thought of shipping European Jews to Vichy French Madagascar, they were thinking "Devil's Island" not "Club Med".)
(Side Note: Enrico Fermi, whose wife was Jewish, may not have fled to America in this ATL. He'd be another major character in the series, leading efforts to understand and adopt alien tech.)
Italy being the de facto protectors of European Jewry - even for amoral selfish reasons - would be enough to earn Hitler's animosity. War between them would only need an excuse.
DP:
Side note: Famous aviator [ Italo Balbo ] and head of Italy's Regia Aeronautica would be a major character in this alt history.
In real history, Chicago to this day has a Balbo Drive through Grant Park where the Italian aviator himself landed as a celebrity in (I think) 1933.
Larry - even the Brits liked him:
Upon hearing of the death of Balbo, the Commander-in-Chief of the RAF Middle East Command ordered an aircraft dispatched to fly over the Italian airfield to drop a wreath, with the following note of condolence:
"The British Royal Air Force expresses its sympathy in the death of General Balbo – a great leader and gallant aviator, personally known to me, whom fate has placed on the other side. [signed] Arthur Longmore"
But let's not forget Balbo was also a devoted Fascist with a fair share of blood on his hands.
Tim: “A nit, "The Atrocity Archive" predates "The Life Eaters" by a bit. Not so much rip off as two gifted authors exploring similar concepts”
Robert: “Given that Stross published "The Atrocity Archive" in 2001, and the graphic novel The Life Eaters was published in 2003, the accusation of 'ripping off' doesn't hold water.”
Does it predate the source novella, a Hugo runner-up “Thor Meets Captain America” circa 1985?
Due diligence aimed at refutation that is based upon lazy ‘research’ is misleading and faux. It’s a good example of the shallowness of modern argument.
But let’s be clear. I am NOT ‘accusing’ anything! Stross is brilliant and there’s plenty of room for good ideas to be explored in varied ways. I try to give a little nod to prvious writers in a topic… like when I credited “Von Danekinites’ for the ‘shirt’ cult in the Uplift universe or name characters after previous writers in a topic. But Charlie is welcome to his own standards of honor.
Tim H… Robert Reich is among the few on the Union side with true cogency and imagination combined with scalpel logic and facts.
Tony I speak for and consult with IFTF often. They have realized they need less reflexive doomism and more guarded optimism.
I’ve participated in many ‘future scenarios workshops’ and actually, TASAT is totally different. Much less myopic or propelled by today’s fads or the egos of a few participants.
Robert you cite a standard lefty blather line. But attempts to use anti-trust to break up labor unions always failed. And are you aware of the names STANDARD OIL and AT&T?
Have these tools been suborned and gelded by the oligarchy since Reagan? Sure. But Those travesties CAN be reversed, as when Democrats… yes Democrats … wiped out the Civil Aeronautics Board and Interstate Commerce Commission, when they had become fully owned agents of big airline and big rail.
MCS: "The alleged purpose of the Antitrust laws was to protect competition; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies…”
Utter disproved bullshit, top to bottom, like almost all Randian rationalizations. I could match your anecdote with many others. Fact is, Rand was a Marxist heretic whose heresy was to cancel out the final worker revolution, stop at the immediately previous phase of utter domination by a narrow caste of uber lords, and call it GOOD.
Of course she realized it was just feudalism, all over again, and that her followers would realize it if they ever asked about HEIRS who would inherit power they never personally earned. And THAT is why none of Rand’s super-uber mutant titan demigods ever reproduces – ever. Even once across all her writings.
LH: I like the alt history. To see the Madagascar plan blithely implemented in fiction, Christopher Priests vastly loathsome novel THE SEPARATION.
Balbo is hysterically satirized in that Marx Bros. film where they cross on an ocean liner?
DP: Side note: Famous aviator and head of Italy's Regia Aeronautica would be a major character in this alt history.
What of Marco Pagot? Surely he has a role too?
. Tony. Elaborating: I’ve participated in many ‘future scenarios workshops’ and actually, TASAT is totally different. Much less myopic or propelled by today’s fads or the egos of a few participants.
TASAT is about asking nerdy -voracious consumers of 100 years of SF -- guys like locumranch -- and hundreds of other old farts, quickly pinging if they can cite and provide OLD SF thought experiments that are similar to a given scenario.
It would thus:
1- Mine a truly VAST expanse of past-pondered scenarios, offering a wide variety of pertinent ones.
2- Rely on pattern-matching (story gimmicks or situations) by a far wider variety of folks, citing: “this old 1956 Astounding story seems a bit like what you have in mind, but with a unique twist.
3- A database of past questions and links would remain available.
4- Anonymous posting of questions would let – say – the CIA ask about something that might be ACTUALLY HAPPENING in the real world, in real time, and within a day get to consult many decades of pre-worked thought experiments. That point out potential errors.
TASAT = There’s a Story About That (SciFi Nerds might save the world!) https://tasat.org/
When I first noted how fact-users & smart people always seem to assume that they will be loved & obeyed once they gain the ability to give orders, I was called a liar, which seems to imply that the converse of what I said is true:
Does our host therefore mean to suggest that our fact-using & smart people castes are so self-destructive as to seek out power & authority over others IN ORDER TO BE HATED & DISOBEYED?
It seems much more likely that the members of our smart people minority prefer to imagine themselves to be our leaders, liberators, saviors & masters BECAUSE they are intelligent, even when they are most definitely NOT suited for these roles, but only for the role of glorified public servant.
The public servant role is also called 'public service' for a reason, to hopefully avert their self-referential descent into delusions of grandeur and otherwise prevent the false belief that they are our **beloved** betters, bosses & masters.
Yet, apparently, this semantic distinction has been either lost or forgotten (or, maybe, just rejected outright) by intelligent egotists who risk self-destruction with every successful top-down decree, order, law, mandate & commandment that they seek to impose on others.
DP approaches this truth with his alternate histories, so he may want to consider the above thesis as a possible cause for antisemitism, as highly intelligent individuals tend to (falsely & recursively) equate their intelligence (which they value) with both social acceptance & mastery (which correlate well with each other, but not with intelligence).
This seems especially true in the case of the highly intelligent Rothschild & Warburg families who simultaneously (1) financed WW1 on ALL sides, (2) lobbied for the self-beneficial pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration, (3) directly benefited from the financially punitive anti-German Treaty of Versailles and (4) were likely shocked when their brilliant tactics generated the very OPPOSITE of love, obedience & good fellowship.
As noted above, some may attribute this cunning & manipulative behavior to the self-destructive impulses of the highly intelligent, whereas I tend to attribute it to the false & self-referential assumption that their innate intelligence (which they value) somehow makes them more deserving of love & obedience than mere friendliness.
To put it another way, we know that inheritable intelligence is highly correlated with the emotional blunting of autism, so it would follow that the highly intelligent will most likely lack some of the emotional connections necessary to lead, empathize with & gain the loyal following of others.
Best
Re: TASAT
It should go way beyond the 'there was this guy in this predicament who invented his way out of it by...' queries. Don't forget that modern LLMs have read every book, article, and speech ever published. They could be slightly tweaked to do such lookups. It should excel by making real, and often unexpected human connections. I've said before that many of the best amateur astronomers are in red states. So are some of the most erudite SF fans (in my experience). Especially Golden Age stuff.
Robert: “Given that Stross published "The Atrocity Archive" in 2001, and the graphic novel The Life Eaters was published in 2003, the accusation of 'ripping off' doesn't hold water.”
Does it predate the source novella, a Hugo runner-up “Thor Meets Captain America” circa 1985?
Admittedly not, but that's not what you said: "Rips off my graphic novel THE LIFE EATERS". Factually, your statement was incorrect. Think of it as proofreading. (I'd forgotten your short story, although I must have read it as I read every book you published. Too many words through the brain since then.)
Due diligence aimed at refutation that is based upon lazy ‘research’ is misleading and faux. It’s a good example of the shallowness of modern argument.
Maybe, but you are the professional writer. Shouldn't we expect your posts to have fewer factual errors and mistakes than those of us mere mortals. :-)
I am NOT ‘accusing’ anything! Stross is brilliant and there’s plenty of room for good ideas to be explored in varied ways. I try to give a little nod to prvious writers in a topic… like when I credited “Von Danekinites’ for the ‘shirt’ cult in the Uplift universe or name characters after previous writers in a topic. But Charlie is welcome to his own standards of honor.
"Rips off" sounds like an accusation of theft. Maybe you meant "riffs off the same theme I explored in my graphic novel The Life Eaters (and earlier short story "Thor Meets Captain America")", but that's not what you wrote. Again, proofreading.
Or if you prefer, I'm presenting the antithesis to your thesis, allowing for a stronger synthesis to be formed. :-) (Which is much like proofreading, actually. Point out apparent mistakes and inconsistencies so the writer can fix them.)
Nazi occult plots have been around in fiction for a long time. I seem to recall a film with Harrison Ford that used that as a plot point, in 1981. The Spear by James Herbert was earlier, as well as more books I can't recall enough track down (because I wasn't much into horror back then, despite reading a novel a day as a teenager). "Red & black cover with blond man, runes on stone, smells vaguely of mildew" isn't enough to go on — especially as all the (rather abysmal) plots have blurred together.
David,
Have you found a venue for your new Ayn Rand paper? Will you announce that here?
BTW, I totally support Dr. Brin's TASAT project with a single reservation:
The TASAT project must include ALL science fiction stories & scenarios, not just the politically correct ones that conform to liberal-progressive 'End of History' pro-DEI narrative, but also the most conservative, regressive, disturbing, undesirable, militaristic, unsanitary, sexist, racist & sordid narratives imaginable, whether we disapprove of them or not, for once we start to self-censor, the proposed TASAT resource will quickly lose all utility & its ability to advise, prevent, predict or even inform our posterity of our dreams, nightmares & mistakes.
Otherwise, we will just be perpetuating a sham, much in the same way that Alexander the Great ordered the construction of huge saddles & oversized weapons, to be left behind, in order to falsely convince those who came after that the Macedonians were a race of giants & gods.
Best
Robert you cite a standard lefty blather line. But attempts to use anti-trust to break up labor unions always failed. And are you aware of the names STANDARD OIL and AT&T?
Yes. I worked in telecom when AT&T was being broken up. Standard Oil was before my time.
Enacted by Congress in 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act' declared illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states. . . ."' The courts lost no time in applying section 1 of the act to labor union activity. The Supreme Court, in the famous Danbury Hatter's case in 1908, held that labor unions enjoy no blanket immunity from the Sherman Act. In that case the United Hatters Union of North America combined with the American Federation of Labor to force all fur manufacturers to unionize their shops by boycotting the manufacturer's hats and the businesses of those who dealt with them as wholesalers or retailers. The Court affirmed a treble damage judgment against members of the Hatters Union, holding that the combination was in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states within the meaning of the Sherman Act.
It was not until the early 1940's that labor's exemption from anti-trust laws began to take on definable judicial boundaries.
https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4288&context=smulr
continued below...
For more than a decade after its passage, the Sherman Antitrust Act was invoked only rarely against industrial monopolies, and then not successfully. Ironically, its only effective use for a number of years was against labor unions, which were held by the courts to be illegal combinations.
This was the result of intense political pressure from the trusts together with the loose wording of the act. Its critics pointed out that it failed to define such key terms as "combination," "conspiracy," "monopoly" and "trust." Also working against it were narrow judicial interpretations as to what constituted trade or commerce among states.
Five years after its passage, the Supreme Court in effect dismantled the Sherman Antitrust Act in United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895). The court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the other defendants in the case, had not violated the Act despite the fact that it controlled approximately 98 percent of all sugar refining in the U.S. The court's explanation was that the company's control of manufacturing did not constitute control of trade.
President William McKinley launched the trust-busting era in 1898 when he appointed several senators to the U.S. Industrial Commission. The commission's subsequent report to President Theodore Roosevelt then laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's attacks on trusts and finally resulted in the successful employment of the Act.
In a seminal 1904 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Government's suit under the Sherman Antitrust Act to dissolve the Northern Securities Company (a railroad holding company) in State of Minnesota v. Northern Securities Company. Then, in 1911, after years of litigation, the court found Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act because of its excessive restrictions on trade, particularly its practices of eliminating competitors by buying them out directly and by driving them out of business by temporarily slashing prices in a given region.
In this historic decision, the Supreme Court established an important legal standard termed the rule of reason. It stated that large size and monopoly in themselves are not necessarily bad and do not violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Rather, it is the use of certain tactics to attain or preserve such position that is illegal.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/employment-law/pages/sherman-anti-trust-act.aspx
"driving them out of business by temporarily slashing prices in a given region" is precisely what Walmart does to small town businesses. Under both Republicans and Democrats, AFAIK.
Have these tools been suborned and gelded by the oligarchy since Reagan? Sure. But Those travesties CAN be reversed, as when Democrats… yes Democrats … wiped out the Civil Aeronautics Board and Interstate Commerce Commission, when they had become fully owned agents of big airline and big rail.
Reagan is about the same time as Bork, yes? Which would appear to support Reich's argument. But it happened before, too. The articles I quoted talked about before Reagan too.
CELEBRATION! “All Heaven rejoices when a sinner repents!” For the 1st time in living memory, poor locumranch appears to have TRIED TO PARAPHRASE!
“*Does our host therefore mean to suggest that our fact-using & smart people castes are so self-destructive as to seek out power & authority over others IN ORDER TO BE HATED & DISOBEYED?
“It seems much more likely that the members of our smart people minority prefer to imagine themselves to be our leaders, liberators, saviors & masters…”
YES! It DOES seem that way to you! Of course the Scylla-and-charybdis dichotomy he presented is stunningly, jabbering, stark raving insane. It proves that he lives not in Flatland but in Line-land. Poor sod. I didn’t bother even skimming the rest.
-------
Robert your nitpicking editing caught me STRICTLY speaking in a lazy error. So we’re even. Solid!
-----
MCS email me separately. I’ll send you and others a draft of the Rand paper. But you might start here: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/aynrand.html
Dr Brin:
“It seems much more likely that the members of our smart people minority prefer to imagine themselves to be our leaders, liberators, saviors & masters…”
YES! It DOES seem that way to you!
Loc insists that the proper role of intelligent people who know stuff is as servants--I'd say advisors--but in fact, that's all they're trying to be. Anthony Fauci gave us information meant to protect our lives and health. He wasn't trying to be anointed king. The politicians who crave personal deference and obedience are the very ones loc supports because they make us feel bad--the likes of Donald Trump.
Nerds don't think about being loved and adored--well, at least those who aren't right-wingers like Peter Theil or Elon Musk. Maybe frustrated because their good advice is ignored and then bad things happen. That's hardly the same dynamic as that embarrassing cabinet meeting Donald Trump held in which every member fawned over what a privilege it was to lick the man's boots.
I didn’t bother even skimming the rest.
Then, you missed the part about anti-Semitism being the inevitable consequence of Zionist overreach by the Rothschilds in WWI. Which somehow explains the Russian pogroms of 1905, the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock in the sixteenth century, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and so on throughout history.
Dr Brin:
But Those travesties CAN be reversed, as when Democrats… yes Democrats … wiped out the Civil Aeronautics Board and Interstate Commerce Commission, when they had become fully owned agents of big airline and big rail.
Atlas Shrugged is definitely a product of its time. While the book depicts the existence of both air travel and television, their significance pales in comparison to rail travel and radio.
Another element that the message of Atlas Shrugged depends on is the illegality of private ownership of gold. Which was true in the 50s when she wrote, but was also changed in the 1970s, when television ads for South African Krugerrands were suddenly a thing. But Rand acolytes never admit, "Ok, that evil has been overcome." Somehow, the government monopoly on gold is still relevant to their cause, even though it no longer exists.
@Blog Post: Yes, that "question" allows for some speculations that are rather ... dark, Dark Forest style. Or, maybe even somewhat less drastic - one answer could be that those scientists have been shown that certain technologies could easily wipe out everything if not handled properly. Or that the discoveries, while not destructive per se, could cause societal upheaval...like, finding out that religion has been nothing more than an experiment conducted by psychohistorian aliens.
I also like the idea that the aliens originally planned to hinder UFO research by purposefully creating false evidence, playing with our minds, making UFO believers look like loonies (because that's what they usually are) and then find out, to their shock, that those loonies have been elected to positions of power, and they are at a loss to what to do next.
One plot hole, for me, would be the question:who or what keeps the remainder of those in the know in line? Sure, most reasonable people might agree to shut up, but what if one of this circle - for a variety of reasons* - breaks the silence, with proof? If it is another shadowy deep state government conspiracy (BORING!) we are at the square one problem - they themselves have to keep their mouths shut and have to be funded, recruited and trained by someone. Mind Control techniques? Employed by whom?
*Like, narcicissm, disagreement on the consensus, a perceived error in the other scientists' conclusions, the risk is worth the try, nihilism etc pp.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Since Nazi Germany and WWII was a topic in this thread, a question to the readers:
Has Germany been
a) Defeated
b) Conquered
c) Liberated
d) all of it
at the end of the war?
What is it for you, the victors of WWII?
(The Far Right currently pushes the debate to change the "Culture of Memory". They lean towards answers a) and b) to fuel grievances. Answer c) has been the version of the "political establishment" for the last decade. I personally think it is d), depending on your former position in the Third Reich, whether you agreed with the system, kept your mouth shut, or were a victim actively persecuted by the Nazis. And what happened to you in the final days and after the war, during the occupation and territorial losses.)
Der Oger,
I'd say the answer is - which side of Germany are are you talking about? And which Germans? I'd agree with your last sentence.
Both halves were definitely defeated. I'm certain the eastern half was conquered. As for liberation - well, Germans of the time, faced with armies coming from two directions, voted with their feet on who to surrender to. Not many walked east*. Can occupation be seen as a median point between liberation and conquest? I know that there were Germans happy to free of the Nazis but the cost was horrendous. Some Germans, the ones who survived the concentration camps or managed to stay hidden for years, were definitely liberated.
*Not that the French and Belgian troops in the west were in much mood to be magnanimous.
I'm too young to have personal experience, and my acquaintances who did were not Germans - they were American, mostly, with singular Dutch and Korean voices - so take this for what it's worth.
Pappenheimer
“Loc insists that the proper role of intelligent people who know stuff is as servants…”
Well, the British way of maintaining oligarchic rule despite the needs of tech and empire was to channel bright sons of the lower orders into sci-tech to be ‘boffins’ who cannot grasp governance issues taught to aristos who were classics majors. (See a flick – NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY - that shows boffin Jimmy Stewart sympathetically, but still in that zero-sum way. Also the terrific Glynis Johns.)
Of course locum MUST do this. He can only see others as being just like himself. He sees a hater in the mirror, so, we must hate him. His cult seeks absolute power to oppress others they don’t like, so that must be our goal. He cannot even imagine positive sum… or color or 3 dimensions… so all talk of complexity or negotiation or nonzero sum must be confusing mumbo jumbo meant to ensnare.
I am glad I did not read beyond, as he apparently slid from stupid-insane into pure evil. Fortunately he is also harmless. And I get mileage out of shrug-tolerating.
The hypocrisy of Randites NEVER mentioning that the political process they despise eliminated the federal institution Rand hated most… the ICC… and that it’s democrats and ALWAYS democrats who pull govt back from excesses… e.g. the damned Drug War.
Der Oger: clearly (d). No one in Japan or Germany expected us top actually implement the doctrine of uplifting enemies, that Wilson proposed in 1919 and that could have saved the world from 30 years of utter hell.
Germany & Japan returned the favor by almost destroying the US auto industry in the 60s & 80s… and it DESERVED to be destroyed! Till we rediscovered quality. It actually was a favor.
UFO theory #1: they are making gazillions of Quatlus off “Oh, those humans!” reality show, especially since they incited varied lunacies down here.
Der Oger:
Has Germany been
a) Defeated
b) Conquered
c) Liberated
d) all of it
at the end of the war?
The Nazis were certainly defeated. The German military and the Gestapo too.
I'm torn between a) and c) for the German population. The charitable view is that Germans were captives of the Nazi government. In practice, I'm also aware that much of the population was all in with Naziism. So whether individual Germans were defeated or liberated depends on their prior relationship to their government. I can envision an analogous situation here in the States. Did the 2020 elections defeat the American public or liberate us? Depends where one stands.
This may be just me, but I have a hard time using the word "conquered" for the thing that happened to the conquerors. I mean, Germany conquered France and Poland, and tried to conquer Britain. What the allies did (IMHO) is to throw off the conqueror. Again, this is my semantic hang-up, and may not be generally accepted.
A right-winger on the old Cerebus list used to go further than that, denying that D-Day even counted as an "invasion". I disagreed with that. So, your mileage may vary.
The captives and slaves of the Nazis were certainly liberated, but that's not what you asked about.
Robert your nitpicking editing caught me STRICTLY speaking in a lazy error. So we’re even. Solid!
That's what you pay me for. :-)
"The commitment to staying relevant and up-to-date in this blog is impressive. It's always on the cutting edge of knowledge and trends."
https://savingcentstogether.com/promotions/parcel-pending-promo-code
Der Oger: Has Germany been
a) Defeated
b) Conquered
c) Liberated
d) all of it
at the end of the war?
Definitely defeated.
I could see an argument that it had also be conquered, using the dictionary definition of conquer as "overcome and take control of (a place or people) by use of military force". How much control did Germans have over their own country after the war? From what I've read, very little, especially in Soviet territory. Wasn't Germany under military governors until almost 1950? And occupied by allied armies into the 50s )on both sides of the cold war)?
Liberated? That's a question that only Germans can answer. If they think they were freed, then they were. If not, then no. The answer is probably different for different generations, social classes, and locations, and you'd know the answer better than I. Although I'll bet a lot that those Germans who were in camps definitely thought they were freed.
Despite the similarities I see, I am aware that TASAT and Superstruct have (or had) different objectives. I did think the underlying methods were worth comparing.
[TASAT is..] "much less myopic or propelled by today’s fads or the egos of a few participants."
I hope so. Superstruct was driven by the 'fads' of fifteen years ago: social media and the 'wisdom of crowds' (not a criticism: it was an experiment to see how this stuff could operate)
To be fair, Loki did make a salient point about TASAT needing to consider all sources of SF writing. An obvious point, to be sure. Still...
Occupying forces stayed in Germany for about 45 yrs, until the Nazi generation were dying off.
In Japan only seven yrs: smaller nation; island.
Alan Brooks,
Depending on your point of view, there are still occupying forces in both Germany and Japan.
David,
I've read and thought about both of your articles about Ayn Rand. It took a while to figure out how best to describe them. I'll borrow a phrase from Wolfgang Pauli - "That's not right, that's not even wrong". They aren't about Ayn Rand's work at all. For example, there isn't a single mention of Objectivism in either of them.
Enough of that.
The enlightenment was even bigger than you've described it. I like the way Jonah Goldberg put it in "Suicide of the West":
"Imagine you’re an alien assigned with keeping tabs on Homo sapiens over the last 250,000 years. Every 10,000 years you check in.
In your notebook, you’d record something like this:
Visit 1: Semi-hairless, upright, nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food.
Visit 2: Semi-hairless, upright, bands of nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food. No change.
Visit 3: Semi-hairless, upright, bands of nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food. No change.
Except for a few interesting details about their migrations and subsequent changes in diet, forms of rudimentary tools, and competition with Neanderthals, you’d write the same thing roughly twenty-three times over 230,000 years. On the twenty-fourth visit, you’d note some amazing changes. Basic agriculture and animal domestication have been discovered by many of the scattered human populations. Some are using metal for weapons and tools. Clay pottery has advanced considerably. Rudimentary mud and grass shelters dot some landscapes (introducing a new concept in human history: the home). But there are no roads, no stone buildings worthy of the label. Still, a pretty impressive advance in such a short period of time, a mere 10,000 years.
Eagerly returning 10,000 years later, our “alien visitor’s ship would doubtless get spotted by NORAD. He might even get here in time to see Janet Jackson play the halftime show at the Super Bowl."
Like Jonah Goldberg, Deirdre McCloskey and others have noted, something very strange and inexplicable happened around the year 1700 in England. I like the way Jonah Goldberg put it, again from "Suicide of the West":
"Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world. It didn’t seem obvious, but it was as if the great parade of humanity had started walking through a portal to a different world."
Depending on your point of view, there are still Confederate forces occupying areas of the South.
Alan Brooks,
Exactly. The "occupying forces" in West Germany ceased to be occupying forces long before the 45 year mark.
Alan: Depending on your point of view, there are still Confederate forces occupying areas of the South.
I have non-white relatives who are very careful where they go in the South. Always have been. That they have the right to freely travel there doesn't make it safe. Having the Good Ole Boys follow you out of town in their pickups after you stop for gas will do that. Of the many things you shouldn't try in a small town, apparently using the wrong bathroom is one of them.
Taking the text of their Holy Second Amendment at face value, all those armed good ole boys are militias (that's why they need guns, right?) so there are still Confederate forces in the South, still flying the flag, still fighting for the cause…
Lived in the South; it reminds me of the Goodfellas region I grew up in:
instead of Genoveses & Gottis,
there were Thurmonds and Wallaces.
But you can’t reason with people who are still resentful concerning a war that was 160 yrs ago.
It's not just me :)
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Sep14-5.html
But as Yogi Berra helpfully pointed out, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
David,
Here's one that's right out of TASAT:
"Interestingly, a sense of the opacity of formal systems had surfaced in popular culture even before the computer. Particularly apposite here are Isaac Asimov’s early robot stories, some of which dramatized the difference between human and machinic thought and drew attention to the surprises that lurk within even quite simple formal systems. Stories such as “Runaround” explore ways in which Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics could have unexpected consequences [18]. The tension in these stories is the drama of debugging, as unpredictable or divergent robot behavior is gradually revealed to be a consequence of the interplay of an apparently simple and transparent set of rules." (behind paywall https://ieeecs-media.computer.org/media/marketing/cedge_digital/ce-sep23-final.pdf)
Eisenhower broadcast into Germany in 2/1945 “We come as conquerors, not as oppressors.” So yes. It was all four and a lot more.
----"To be fair, Loki did make a salient point about TASAT needing to consider all sources of SF writing. An obvious point, to be sure.”
The system will minimize moderator meddling to eliminating trash. No policing of which past SF stories get linked. HOW would we even do that?
---------
MCS there’s not a word about ‘objectivism’ for one simple reason – it is an incredible incantation scam, based on Plato’s stunning assertion that he can know what’s true by TALKING about it. When we know that humans are inherently delusional and that we can only incrementally approach truth by iterative processes of experimentationand reciprocal criticism.
Objectivism is stark, jabbering insane, in that regard. Dig it. Rand made zero efforts… zero… to understand modern science, to talk to scientists, to understand nature or biology. Her assertions about evolution were all wrong. Indeed the very notion of exposing her assertions to tests was anathema to her.
Dig it, in science you make assertions, test them against current knowledge and outsider criticism… but above all, subject them to PREDICTIVE TESTS. Like the fact that “Supply Side” made predictions since 1981 that have all – universally – proved false. What Randians never, ever confront is their own spectacular failures of predictive outcomes.
Especially hypocritical? Refusal to recognize that almost all reforms aimed at keeping market competition alive have come from Democrats, while oligarchs and the corrupt CEO caste and inheritance brats ALWAYS conspire to eliminate creative competition, as feudal lords did, across 6000 years.
"Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world.”
Sure… great. Adam Smith saw it and brilliantly laid out ways to prevent it from being ruined by age-old human CHEATING tendencies. And the American enlightenment experiment has had to quell oligarchic-cheaters every generation since. A bloody miracle that may give us the stars!... if we can do it one more time.
Dr Brin:
Especially hypocritical? Refusal to recognize that almost all reforms aimed at keeping market competition alive have come from Democrats,
In fairness, Rand most likely didn't consider herself a Republican. It's kind of bizarre that the ostensibly-religious Republican Party claims the militant atheist Rand as one of their own. She would most certainly not be a Christian Nationalist.
mcsandberg
oh - David forgot another thing that Ayn Rand didn't understand capitalist economics. And your examples regarding monopolies - prove it. Monopolies may well be the most efficient producers, but using raw material producers like Excel Oil as and example is not a good idea. Firstly, they rely for their monopoly on government enforced property rights and secondly today the price of oil is kept lower than it might be by the government owned Aramco sitting on the largest and cheapest to produce oil reserves, ironic that isn't it. And it is very strange that somebody so absolutely against government planning is also all for private planning (not that a modern day would do what ATT did in the day, not since "shareholder value" and managerialism took over).
Re: TASAT
I needed to stand up another Linux machine for my SELDON I work. I'm putting a Discourse sandbox on it just so I can learn a bit. A bit early, but I can say that the real complexity is in hosting & security, not the server itself. I'm more of an intranet guy, so that cloudy stuff scrambles my brain too.
"In fairness, Rand most likely didn't consider herself a Republican."
None of that matters. Her cult's central spite is the same as that of the oligarchs who own the GOP and the confederate MAGA masses who march to that drummer. Hatred of Universities and all that they spawn. And the egalitarian impulses that those elite places (ironically) spawn. She would be VASTLY more comfortable with a TV evangelist than with a professor of paleontology and anthropology.
The Tesla "Dojo" computer will be a top 5 supercomputer seeon raising from several exaflops toward a projected 100Efl. Dang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDeYLYTRngo
Back in the days of PPC Macs there were G5 clusters, wonder how much more an M2 cluster could manage? In less space, and with less energy?
Donald Trump Celebrated As 'Destroyer' of America on Russian State TV…Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, made the remarks on the Russian talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. A clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday shows Sidorov, Solovyov and other guests discussing their support for Trump and suggesting he could bring about "civil war" in the U.S.
I'm willing to sit in on a TASAT zoom call. Just be aware that I'm all too familiar with the kind of IT skills obsolescence V.Vinge described in RAINBOWS END. I was strongest as an app admin, but those skills are fading into uselessness at warp speed.
Nowadays I'm best at being that annoying guy on the team who warns why certain things "just aren't done" because... security. Younger folks believe that about as much as they believe in their own mortality. 8)
You know who has done more damage to democracy than almost anybody else? The single issue voter. That is the exact opposite of being a responsible citizen. I am strongly aware of this because a crazy party is standing in elections in Germany:
https://verjuengungsforschung.de/about_us
They have that covered, too. They can say that Rand worked for Christian interests although she wasn’t one. Works in mysterious ways, and all that. Trump isn’t a conservative in their schema—but works for conservative interests.
Remember: they’ve been doing this sort of logic chopping for 1,900 yrs.
scidata said...
Re: TASAT
It should go way beyond the 'there was this guy in this predicament who invented his way out of it by...' queries. Don't forget that modern LLMs have read every book, article, and speech ever published. They could be slightly tweaked to do such lookups.
I would suggest that this is not true.
LLMs are nothing more than (very complex) predictive text machines, but they lack any understanding of the texts they ingest and the text they output.
With careful tweaking, an LLM might be able to tell you that text Y comes from source X, or that source X contains text Y, but LLMs are completely incapable of telling you how or why - or even whether - some story might be relevant to some possibly-similar situation. This because an LLM has no understanding of a 'situation', let alone what a 'similar' situation might be.
--
I would also be willing to attempt a zoom call, but a) it will probably be a couple of weeks before I finish my holiday and catch up from where I will be behind as a result; and b) I am in the Central European (Summer) Time zone, which may make coordinating with the west coast somewhat difficult.
gregory byshenk: [LLMs] lack any understanding of the texts they ingest
me: are there any books about sousveillance?
ChatGPT: "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?" by David Brin - While not solely focused on sousveillance, this book discusses the broader themes of transparency and surveillance, including the idea of individuals using technology to watch those in power.
(a small snippet of the response and discussion showing understanding)
Re: Tesla Dojo
Several years ago I retired the last of my CPU+GPU+infrastructure+PowerSupply box computers. I've been using only tiny computers using System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architectures since. These are complete computers, not just in the sense of Turing completeness, but in the sense of actual modern computers with everything they need to work on real tasks in a modern context. Putting a million such critters on a chip is the eventual goal of the SELDON I. I'm gratified to see Apple and Tesla following my lead.
AB: They already call Trup “The New Cyrus” doing God’s will even as a pagan.
The rationalizations about. They cannot mention Adam Smith or the word 'competition' since they are now the party of oligarchy andf every pro-competition measure is taken by Democrats.
As for Rand, they DO talk a lot about competition. They also admit it is wrecked far MORE by conniving aristo cheaters than by sappy liberal/socialists who are more the TOOLS of the 'looters' than the actual looters, themselves. She makes that clear in almost every chapter.
And yet, time and again they let themselves be bought out by today's oligarch looters. The last thing they will ever notice is who banished the CAB and ICC and is backing out of the Drug War.
To OGH and my fellow MOTTs: "Shana Tova" or as they say in Santa Cruz: "Shiny Tofu".
Keith D. Halperin:
my fellow MOTTs
Is that like a Red Sea pedestrian?
@ Larry H: Same thing, though them're called RSPs, don't ya know...
Best,
Keith
If you talk to them, you can tell them: although Trump might appear as a Cyrus, he could be a wolf in Cyrus’ clothing. They pay attention to that sort of thing—yet it doesn’t change their thinking, so perhaps there’s no purpose in trying to communicate with them.
They say America is about the rights of individuals; thus, to them, competition that benefits individual Christians; their families; and the Flock, is positive
Gives you an idea of their thinking:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/covid-and-the-gates-of-hell/
Alan Brooks:
If you talk to them, you can tell them: although Trump might appear as a Cyrus, he could be a wolf in Cyrus’ clothing. They pay attention to that sort of thing
Trump at least shows superficial respect for Christianity and professes to be (a great) one. No matter how he falls short of what Christians are supposed to be like, he at least shows the proper deference for their superiority.
Ayn Rand did the opposite. She openly disdained the whole idea of religion. That's why I find it more bizarre that (some) Christianist Republicans claim Ayn Rand than that they do Trump.
They say America is about the rights of individuals; thus, to them, competition that benefits individual Christians; their families; and the Flock, is positive
What is offensive about Christian Nationalists is not the particular rights that they claim for themselves, but the fact that they outright deny those rights to anyone else. Their presumption is that white Christians are the rightful owners of America, and that the rest of the population are guests, hired help, or intruders.
From the American Conservative article linked by Alan Brooks:
Fortunately, members of Team Reality—that brave group of people who resisted joining the Covid cult—are taking precautions against the precautions. For instance, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas signed off on a law that prohibits “mask vaccine, and shutdown mandates” at public institutions.
Yes, it shows their thinking, but I fail to see how this represents "competition that benefits individual Christians; their families; and the Flock". More of them than of us will get sick or die? Churches will spread disease more than other institutions? I don't get it being a win for them.
BTW, I used to look in on The American Conservative many years ago. They used to be more normal, focusing on tax policy or gun rights. When did they join the cult?
Apparently, sometimes right-wingers do believe in science...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/opinion/abortion-pills-testing-poland.html
For years, reproductive rights advocates have assured American women that when these medications are taken by mouth, a doctor cannot determine whether they were taken to induce an early abortion because the symptoms are indistinguishable from a miscarriage and because the drugs don’t show up on toxicology screens.
But Polish scientists claim they’ve devised laboratory methods to detect mifepristone and misoprostol in biological specimens, and a spokeswoman for the regional prosecutor’s office in Wroclaw confirmed that these tests have been used in Poland to investigate pregnancy outcomes.
In a paper published last October in the journal Molecules, a group of researchers at Wroclaw Medical University’s department of forensic medicine and the Institute of Toxicology Research in Poland described a technique for detecting misoprostol acid, a substance produced by the metabolism of misoprostol, in tissue taken from the placenta and the fetal liver. Weeks later, they published a second paper describing the development of a “rapid, sensitive and reliable method” to detect the other abortion drug, mifepristone, in maternal blood. The studies were conducted as part of a state-funded research project started in 2022.
...
Dr Brin:
...the source novella, a Hugo runner-up “Thor Meets Captain America” circa 1985?
One of my favorites that I re-read every few years. I hope it doesn't offend that I like the short story better than the graphic novel (though I have them both).
I first read it much later than 1985, but still long before the Marvel Cinematic phenomenon took off. Superman and Batman were always there in the public consciousness, and to a lesser extent, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man. The Hulk too, I suppose, thanks to Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby. But the rest of the Marvel stable went largely unrecognized except for nerdy fandom.
I've always wondered what inspired you to use that as a title. I mean, as a Marvel fan from the 1970s, I got the reference and understood its ironic relationship to the story the way I guess you meant me to. But I wonder how many other readers did.
They say America is about the rights of individuals
As long as those individuals are straight white christian men, or properly subservient to them.
Robert,
You're not wrong...there's long been a discussion over whether the 1776 Revolution was at least partly sparked by rich white Southern plantation owners seeing the way the winds were blowing in England and realizing that if they stayed in the Empire, they would lose their slaves - though slaveowners on the Caribbean British islands were compensated when emancipation finally did happen, the erosion of social status must have been excruciating. Poor babies.
Pappenheimer
P.S. It is frightening to see American politicians explicitly reject and defund public goods such as immunization programs and libraries and being praised by their constituents, but there does appear to be some sort of thermidor occurring. Not enough of one, I suspect. 2024 is going to be an interesting year, because the Trump tax cuts will expire in 2025 unless a Republican is elected to office, and that means massive billionaire support for Trump Horror Term Two no matter what they think of him personally. Because Trump will win the nomination unless he's had a stroke.
Maybe even if he's had a stroke.
Alan Brooks 9:58:
That's just sad.
As near as I can tell, the whole anti-mask, anti-vax* thing started with Trump failing at covid response; and since the narcissist cannot admit error**, he hardened his mistake to a loyalty test.
Covid, a brainless virus, outwitted both the PRC and the GOP. The first tried to fight covid with propaganda; the second tried PR. Both mind-control methods failed on the virus, which has no mind.
* and therefore pro-virus
** Like the Pope. IGEA: Infallibilism guarantees error accumulation.
Vivek is a straight Asian Hindu male:
a properly subservient political chimera. Maybe he’s also a warlock,
as his politics are a witch’s brew.
Correction to the previous post:
IEEA: Infallibilism ensures error accumulation.
I want this to sound like a scream, not like mediocre Swedish furniture.
It is, of course, CITOKATE's dark shadow.
They have a reply for that as well: the world is passing away, therefor it doesn’t matter—because Christ has overcome the world. One might say that for them time is illusory. Many wish for the Apocalypse, preferably to occur after they die. Their descendants? Tough luck.
The reward is in Heaven; the punishment is for those who travel to the retirement community with central heating year-round.
Can’t argue with them, but one can discuss with them their own secret doubts as to their place in Heaven, because they know they can fall from Grace.
For starters, ask them if they forgive their enemies.
The American Conservative joined the cult c. 2016.
Alan Brooks:
The reward is in Heaven; the punishment is for those who travel to the retirement community with central heating year-round
They might be surprised to find that global warming has turned Heaven into its own lake of fire. Limbo might be the new sweet place. Or Valhalla?
Their concern is with souls, so it’s a
non-starter. But if you were to discuss the possibility of their falling from Grace, you could get somewhere.
They have interesting truisms:
“Jesus is married to the backslider”
AB: Those are not the folks we need to ‘convert’. All we need for this phase of the confederacy to collapse is to peel off just 1 million or so. Those who are residually sane and not motivated by volcanic hatred of all nerds. Those who recite the incantations they inhale and suckle while desperately clutching the Fox glass teat. But who notice when you demand wagers over verifiable facts…
…, and when you refuse to let go of the matter at hand, when they desperately shout “But whatabout…?” Those who are approachable - through their frantic surface obduracy - are also the smartest, hence we would rob the new McVeighs of anyone with the IQ above a flatworm
LH: “I've always wondered what inspired you to use that as a title. I mean, as a Marvel fan from the 1970s, I got the reference…”
Well, the characters were always around us deep nerds! The third Marvel character featured in the GN was, of course, a take on Iron Man! In fact that is the central plot!
Unknown: “Maybe even if he's had a stroke.”
As I’ve said, I give even odds the oligarchy will try to martyr him in a way that triggers violent civil war. Yay Secret Service!
onward
onward
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