Anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny; for no power that is not limited by laws can ever be protected by them. – John Milton
It’s really too bad there weren’t more good Halloween-themed links this week; though I’ve featured a few over the past month only three of these are seasonally-appropriate, and the second video only accomplishes that by stretching a point in a corny (though amusing) fashion. Now, if the zombie planet orbited Wolf 359, Aldebaran or one of the Hyades I might have a different opinion…ah, well. The science/horror connection is much more interestingly explored in the link just above it, which you won’t appreciate without reading Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” first. I reckon the holiday was overshadowed by a freakishly-large, freakishly-late tropical storm freakishly making first landfall in the media center of the world, plus the impending American presidential election; my opinion on the latter is expressed perfectly by the little girl in the first video, which came to my attention via Radley Balko (who also contributed the links down to it). Those between the videos were contributed by Jacob Sullum, Jesse Walker, Popehat, Grace (two links) and Mike Siegel (two links).
- Meanwhile, the US dumps zillions into inefficient wind farms, solar energy boondoggles, environmentally-destructive ethanol schemes…
- Federal judge rules that cops have the right to trespass on private property and install hidden cameras without a warrant.
- Cop murders two people by shooting them from a helicopter because he “suspected” they were smuggling drugs.
- This week’s edition of “Never call the cops for any reason whatsoever.”
- Cop tases 10-year-old boy for refusing to clean his police car.
- In Florida, card-playing is equivalent to a violent felony.
At this age, I thought “Frank Sinatra” was one word (like “Frankenstein”).
- Obama supporters repudiate his positions as bad and dangerous…as long as the questioner represents them as Romney’s positions.
- Every human now alive is descended from a group of roughly 1000 individuals who lived about 70,000 years ago.
- One of the Texas cops involved in the Tenaha extortion ring insists that God ordered him to rob people.
- An app for those who just can’t get enough of William Shatner.
- Well, elephants are sort of like the land equivalent of whales.
- Who is the worst civil liberties president in US history?
- Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Not to be confused with The Phantom Planet:
- The federally-supported Gary, Indiana airport costs taxpayers $3 million annually and serves exactly two flights (from Sanford, Florida) per week.
- Daylight Saving Time ended in the US at 3 AM today; here are two good arguments why we should never go back on it again.
- Police chief of Oakland, California used spam filters to auto-delete emails on boring subjects like “police brutality”.
- Amsterdam’s cannabis cafés will remain open to foreigners for now.
- Would you have been accused of witchcraft?
RE: Daylight Savings Time
Back when I was still working I very much liked DST since after I got off work I’d still have time to go out in the evenings and go bike riding. It didn’t matter if there was less light in the mornings since I took the bus to work and didn’t have to drive. Now that I’m retired there are days during the week when I go out early and it’s dark for a while and DST is a disadvantage on those days.
All this goes to show is that it varies by the individual as to how DST affects them, some it helps, some it hurts, and some it just doesn’t matter.
It depends on where you live, whether DST is a good or bad thing: here, in the far north it’s a good thing — and we are almost 30 minutes behind GMT.
As to its origins, i rather like the story that it was invented by an executive who wanted to play golf after work, but the evenings were too dark. Bingo! An urban myth perhaps, but still amusing.
You seem to be fascinated with extreme possibilities within our physical world, like the one described in the paper about the effects of a giant “spacetime bibble” (link: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.). I went through the paper, written in a professional style (I am a physicist). Everything seems possible, like the sudden appearance of a deformation of our spacetime. But…what is the probability of this to happen? We have both terrestrial and space-based teleescopes patroling the sky 24/365, and the spacetime probed by these telescopes is many orders of magnitude larger than that probed by our own planet orbiting around the Sun. If phenomena like the one proposed can happen within the age of the Universe, our telescopes should have detected (more or less) 100-1000 of them every year. But we do not see them….
Best
Marco (a dedicated physicist)
Marco, as I wrote in the introductory paragraph that paper is a sort of game; it was written by a physicist who is also a fan of H.P. Lovecraft and treats the events of his horror tale “The Call of Cthulhu” as though they really happened. It’s related to those essays in which physicists try to figure out how Star Trek technology like warp drive and transporters could work in real life.
You are right Maggie! SSorry, I overlooked your intro, I was indeed quite intrigued by the paper itself. The article meentions also “wormholes”, a fascinating speculative idea put forward by famous Russian physicists, and taken also by Stanley Kubrick in his Space Odyssey..Nice paper, I liked it.
Ya know – we can berate the politicians in the U.S. all we want – but in reality, it’s WE the voters who suck badly.
I’m convinced both the Dimmocrits and the other party run by a bunch of Ayatollahs are nothing more than Socialists. The parasitic bastards need our money to keep flowing into their coffers so that they keep their power.
We’re too stupid to realize this.
And watch this – though I’m voting for Obama (who I consider the GREATER of two evils – fuck voting for the lesser, I’ve done that for 30 years and it hasn’t done squat) … I think Willard McDole will be the winner in this election. The GOP will pick up seats in the house and senate …
Then we can all laugh at the Conservative Slaves as they watch ObamaCare – NOT BE REPEALED by the people they elected! LMFAO! There’s no way the GOP will repeal it. They MAY change some things with it and then say … “Heh, we got rid of O-Care – this is some GOOD SHIT here, boy howdy!” But it will just be centrally mismanaged nationalized healthcare brought to us by the GOP. And for the Conservative Slaves out there – they’ll fool themselves into being happy about it.
Tired of the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu!
You are quite correct that American politicians are nothing more than reflections of the American public. This is why political action is futile. All that anyone can do is prepare for when the fact of America’s moral and economic bankruptcy leads to the disintegration of society. As much as I admire Maggie, her efforts on behalf of sex workers are little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to stop trying to fix the unfixable and worry about surviving the inevitable–preferably without losing all the good that the human race has managed to accomplish.
My prediction: in another ten years, we’ll still be here, some things will be worse, several things will be better, and we’ll still be hearing about how society is crumbling and the end is nigh and it’s going to all fall apart any day now.
My next prediction: ten years after that, we’ll still be here, some things…
Most predictions of doom are little more than, “If we let gays marry, society will fall apart!” That’s silly, of course; human societies are quite capable of absorbing such changes. Unfortunately, today’s doom scenario is far more substantial: America already has debt and expenses that are well beyond its ability to pay and there is no sign that anyone is going to do anything about it.
Sooner or later, the economic shit will hit the fan and there is simply no way that America can survive it in anything like its current form. The timing is arguable (mine is based on my belief that American can survive one, but not two, economic disasters like the present one) but not the fact that something awful is heading our way.
The budget deficit is smaller this year than last. A balanced budget, even one in surplus, is possible. It wasn’t that long ago that we had a budget in surplus. We can do it again, and pay down this debt.
Will we? What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros? The answers are the same: elephino! [say it out loud]
The deficit is a red herring; that merely refers to the amount the US is behind budget. If I have all of my credit cards maxed, a huge mortgage and car note and enormous student loans which cost me $5000 per month just to keep up the payments, and this month I have $4800, that’s a $200 deficit; if I have $5500 that’s a $500 surplus. Neither says anything at all about the size of the federal debt, which has been growing too quickly for a century now, much too quickly since World War II and uncontrollably fast for a generation. So no, we can’t pay down this debt, ever, unless we dramatically slash new spending and devote nearly our entire budget to paying it off (equivalent of buying a clunker, moving into a cheap house and living on ramen noodles).
The federal debt alone now approximately equals a year of GDP. Or, put another way, every man, woman, and child in America will have to cough up more than $50,000 in order to pay off the federal debt. The deficit means that that $50,000 is going to go up.
Then there’s the state and individual debts….
And all of these are absolutely dwarfed by the unfunded liabilities and predictable but unbudgeted expenses.
It would be next to impossible to pay all this down even with the best will in the world. And since neither the politicians nor the public are showing any signs of fiscal sanity, this debt will not be paid.
(The elephino joke was old when I was a kid….)
I was kind of hoping elephino was so old as to have been forgotten. I heard it on the Sha Na Na show in the Eighties, and Sha Na Na did songs that were already old by then, so yeah.
twwells is correct: the deficit is that amount by which the debt goes up in a given year. Please note that if the budget is in surplus, the debt isn’t being added to by the budget. It may be added to by interest, though. A budget in surplus can start paying the debt down, even if terribly slowly. A budget in surplus means that if something unexpected happens (like an economic crash, an infrastructure failure, a terrorist attack, a war, or a hurricane) you can increase spending, at least a little bit, at least for a little while, without adding to the debt.
That is NOT what a deficit is. A deficit usually increases the debt, because politicians would rather borrow more money than close down whatever it is that was unfunded. But that does not mean the deficit is the increase in debt, any more than hunger is eating. Furthermore, the debt can increase by much more than the deficit if expenses run over budget; the deficit is only the amount by which income falls short of the planned budget. Clinton fans are fond of saying that he ran a surplus as though that was something he planned and accomplished by wise management, but that’s bullshit; he ran a surplus because the US was experiencing a boom and the revenue was growing faster than the budget had assumed it would. All of that money was still spent; it was not saved or applied to the debt. It was simply more than the budget called for, sort of like people who spend their tax refund on some splurge every year.
Could a budget surplus be applied to paying down the debt?
Is reducing the deficit a good idea in general?
Note that I’m not asking if politicians will be wise. I’m asking, what would wisdom look like?
I assume you mean reducing the debt, not the deficit (which is a temporary phenomenon). “Yes” to both questions.
Wow. I’m quite accustomed to police being little more the roving thugs, but that’s so blatant it’s shocking.
>Ya know – we can berate the politicians in the U.S. all we want – but in reality, it’s WE the voters who suck badly.
I agree. We have a large portion of people in this nation who simply lack the wits to comprehend what’s really happening, the intellectual capacity to investigate or think about issues, and who suffer from superstitious delusions. If you want better government, get better voters.
>I’m convinced both the Dimmocrits and the other party run by a bunch of Ayatollahs are nothing more than Socialists. The parasitic bastards need our money to keep flowing into their coffers so that they keep their power.
Here’s where we disagree. Socialists believe in power to the people.This lot believes in power over people. There’s a big difference there. Our current government is guided by two principles above all: That a small minority of people should be allowed to make maximum profit, however they wish, and regardless of consequences to others, and that in order to do so they must keep the votes of the minority who wish to force their religious delusions onto others. That’s not socialism.
I agree. Our government is fascist, not socialist.
Indeed. Socialism is when the government controls industries directly via nationalization (e.g., the government is the car company). Fascism involves the government taking more indirect, but still very real, control over various businesses and industries (e.g., the government has so much control over the car company/companies that the cease to be self-directing entities in any meaningful sense).
They’re not opposing ideologies, really, they’re both variants on the notion that people must be prevented from making their own decisions. While socialism is generally unpopular, various fascist policies enjoy widespread democratic support. *shudder*
What you’re calling fascism would be, well, pretty much just an indirect form of nationalization.
Fascism is something of a ill defined and calling anything other than the nations that specifically called themselves fascists is always at least moderately inaccurate.
No, it isn’t. Just because the term is often misused doesn’t mean there isn’t a valid definition; this explanation of the 14 defining characteristics of fascism explains it quite clearly.
I see a couple of flaws in that article, as it ignores the racial element of fascism and the obsession with a glorious past. The points are also pretty vague.
It doesn’t “ignore” them; they’re simply not vital components of fascism. Just because some fascist states have those characteristics doesn’t make them defining ones.
Wait, I see the problem, you’re using fascist states to mean authoritarian state, while I’m thinking of a specific subset of authoritarian regimes that did have a strong racial element among several other distinct features.
No, I’m using “fascist” in the accepted meaning of the term, whereas you’re applying your own personal definition.
The accepted meaning of a term that is often used incorrectly. There are two definitions of the term, one refers to any authoritarian state, while I’m using the more limited definitions referring specifically Nazi Germany, Italy and political movements that were directly influenced by them.
asmallnotch: “Liberal” fascists like to claim that they aren’t fascist because they aren’t racist, but the history of the officially fascist nations shows that exaggerated racism and antisemitism was a peculiarity of Hitler’s version of fascism, not a key feature of fascism in general. “Exaggerated” is a key point here: up to 1945, racism and antisemitism were endemic in Europe and in Europeans overseas. Mussolini’s Fascism and Franco’s Falangism were not free of racism, but they weren’t quite as bad as France or Great Britain, and certainly came nowhere near American treatment of blacks (for example). During WWII, Franco sheltered Jews that managed to reach Spain, while the US turned back thousands of Jews, and the Royal Navy patrolled against refugee ships headed for Palestine.
Which shouldn’t be surprising, given that they’re both ideologies centered around collective, top-down management of the economy and the population as a whole. There’s a reason why the parties that form fascist states so often refer to themselves as ‘national socialists’ – fascism is essentially just socialism less a few peripheral policies.
Re: Cop shoots and kills two people from helicopter.
It’s illegal to shoot GAME ANIMALS from a helicopter but apparently police have an fleeing illegal immigrant exception?
This reminds me of the BATF bastards at Waco who shot and killed a nursing mother from an “unarmed” helicopter. You see, we find out later from the FBI negotiator tapes that the helicopter was “unarmed” because the guns weren’t mounted to the frame.
Malovelent evil bastards, one and all.
re: “would you have been accused of being a witch”?
Would harlotry have been the basis of an accusation? I’m quite being educated would have been.
Absolutely. Unusually beautiful or sexually powerful women (including whores) were often accused of literally bewitching men.
I had to smile at the PDF re: Space-Time Bubble in the South Pacific. Incidentially, I had read ‘The Call of Cthulu’ only 2 nights ago. I was pondering what someone termed as “boredass” the perhaps political(?) persons that very recently initiated news reports of overhyped incidents of unions sending back home non-union electrical workers from the deep South to assist the people of NYC and NJ recovering from Sandy (although it is with some truth in insolated incidents – see Snopes on this subject if so inclined)… but henceforth whenever I think of the term “boredass,” I will always think of this PDF – not to say that it was not well-written and well-thought out as an amusing peer review paper 🙂 I say this from a philosophic viewpoint with an interest in quantum mechanics, although I am not a physicist. Thanks for the link – I enjoyed it!
Sweden’s got a good thing going with this garbage thing. That doesn’t mean that solar and wind are bad. The US is a nation with a lot of sunshine and a lot of wind. We’d be foolish not to use both.
70,000 BC… the time of Korg!
When Koshi can ask for a cracker… no really, I think this is amazing. Go elephants!
I know of Cthulhu and Lovecraft and such, but have read very little of same. So this didn’t do anything for me. Ah well.
You don’t expect a whole planet to be one of those “not really dead” cases. But there it is: Fomalhaut b.
Really, this “national weed pass” idea was just plain dumb. But tourists, if the Netherlands is ever dumb enough to do this for real, just head for Portugal. They’ve also got warm beaches.
Get the stake ready; I’m a’gonna burn.