Thursday 10 November 2016

What's with Democrats looking heavenward on election night? Jumbotron weirdness.

Hillary's election night rally is strangely full of people looking to the heavens, hoping for news from above.  It's the Jumbotron at the ceiling but it sure looks strange, as if a space ship is landing to rescue them or a flaming voice of judgement is descending from the clouds.  (These are clips from a wonderful series at the Daily Mail which you should check out.)


Robots can even play better than you. A.I. will find a way into Canadian politics too.

Last week:  4.94 seconds.
This week:  "Robot solves a Rubik's cube in just 0.637 SECONDS"
What will we be doing when we aren't really needed to keep the wheels of industry rolling, the markets trading, dinner made and the dishes washed up?   When the cost of keeping people alive and well is a heritage DNA project?  When governing policy becomes semi-automated with feedback loops better than the hustings?

Wikipedia last week:

This week:

Tuesday 8 November 2016

National Post breakdown, Trump up.

Difficult to believe the echo chamber chutzpah at National Post. This headline was updated at 2:00 a.m. Wednesday:  "The Scale Of This Calamity Is Just Without Parallel".  The quote marks are the only relief.   In recent weeks the Post has been gratuituously astink over a man that Justin will soon be phoning to congratulate.


Monday 31 October 2016

Will Obama Pull The Plug On Hillary?

If President Obama lets Hillary go down under indictment and the Democrats lose the presidency, has he lost very much?  His influence in the party will be intact.  Hers will be degraded.

Sunday 30 October 2016

The Ice Caps Melted and the Sea Rose Already. But Politics.

The disastrous flooding of populated lands by the sea has already happened, and in modern times.
Those beautiful cave painting from Altamira, Spain are thousands of years older than the great sea floods that destroyed Doggerland, Sundaland, Beringia and the land bridge from Prince Rupert to Haida Gwaii and placed them under hundreds of metres of brine.

Click to enlarge.




We live with the ice cap leftovers and have our panties in a knot about another few feet of flood.  This is quite likely to happen at some point but not when the King Canute types in science and politics  try to command the sea.




Saturday 8 October 2016

Tidy drawers = My wife amazed me.

The picture shows it:   Store folded fabric with the edge up, not the flat side up.  Towels and panties and tops fit snugly in one drawer.  At a glance you can see what's there.  No shuffling through the pile which, for me, always means messing stuff up.  She's getting rid of two dressers.


Thursday 15 September 2016

I'll be back when Trump is IN

I haven't had the heart to blog regularly from a battlefield of microaggressions, taking-the-knee, mattress carrying, selfie-loving,  the-science-is-settled, what-difference-does-it-make retreats from civilization, courage and humanity.  I'l be back when Trump is IN and commoners can't point out the Emperor has no clothes.  Meanwhile, Twitter, Facebook, Google and all the primary media are working to get Clinton in.  My desktop is this cartoon:

Tuesday 26 July 2016

Hillary's Vast Conspiracy

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has morphed into the Vast Russian - Left Wing - Right Wing Conspiracy against her.  Everything but the kitchen sink takes blame.
Russians are trying to defeat her with Wikileaks.
The Left Wing is trying to undo her.  ("Lock her up" chants coming from the left)
And the old standby, Right Wing Conspiracy is still hard at work.


Monday 25 July 2016

Media Democrats can't watch a movie that pans their party.

Rotten Tomatoes ratings for D'Souza's "Hillary's America" is screaming evidence that the media are "Democratic Operatives With Bylines".
Audience Score: 83%
Critics Score:  5%

Sunday 10 July 2016

Dallas is the Preamble when Laws Exempt Clintons.

In a war zone, besides BLM guns and ISIS bombs you get every grievance group, crook, zealot and political operative who sees an advantage.  When the leaders of civil society lose the respect of the governed,  power devolves to those who will take it.


From Michael Yon's despatch:        
"Veterans .. view this news cycle through a different glass.  After things truly began to spin out of control in (Iraq), many people were fighting for vastly different reasons. The situation was difficult to track even for dedicated analysts. .. The always-there lunatic fringe is uncorked. .. The actions of a serial killer look like the work of an insurgent or group. Criminality skyrockets, and what would earlier have been seen as just a bank robbery looks like part of a movement.  ... They will simultaneously fight the government while fighting each other. They inevitably have internal disputes. Wars allow criminals and the insane to fulfill their vast potential.  Young men with guns, no rules, and a sense of divine authority, are the most dangerous animals on earth. 
Image result for michael yonIn the U.S., this could translate into the normal unleashing of the insane, of the criminal elements, and people who are merely fighting “the man,” ethnic divides of many sorts — white and black is only a subset — religious, and other motivations ranging from environmental terrorism, anti-globalism, save the dolphins, save the whales, pro-life, anti-Semitism, and endless sorts of backwater motivations that become wrapped in violence. ... All this white noise is perfect breeding ground for militant Islam, and anti-Islamic violence also no doubt would raise its head. If violence increases to high levels, National Guard will not save the cities. They will be pop up targets.    The BLM movement has its own agenda and, though not baseless, is itself on the verge of terrorism. Meanwhile, a completely different sort of people see the FBI as a puppet for the Clintons and other “elites” who are not just above the law, they are the law. 
The biggest problem at hand is straightforward: millions of Americans see injustice, and disrespect for the population, coming from the government.  Different sorts of people arrive at this conclusion from different roads. BLM comes at it from a racist agenda while others are tired of seeing the .1% sailing above the laws that are made for the 99.9%."
Read the full article and browse his sites.


Wednesday 6 July 2016

CUPW Modernizes Business Banking In Canada

Our shop has been flooded with requests for on-line pay since CUPW threatened to strike and the Crown Corporation went for 72 hour lock-out notice.  We will send and receive payment over the wires for more stuff than ever before.  Thank you guys for the nudge to get with the new technology. We will never go back.

Glad to hear you guys are making a few bucks on small packet delivery.  Hope it's enough to protect those jobs and pensions.

Sunday 26 June 2016

Mark Twain on BREXIT and GLOBAL WARMING

'If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.'


BIG PICTURE
AND THE LITTLE PICTURE







THE BIG PICTURE
AND THE LITTLE PICTURE

h/t smalldeadanimals



Saturday 25 June 2016

PTSD from the reporter who fired an AR15.



Found at Powerline.

To Die Is To Run Out Of Fuel

Dying is not a sacred duty.  Not all things die (or have sex).  Dying, like sex,  is an evolutionary tool to give a competitive renewal edge to our species.  Dying is running out of fuel.   Re-fuel and live a long time.  It's not immoral, just an opportunity.   Refuelling means cleaning up protein tangles on neurons, refreshing heart muscle with our own stem cells,  re-growing flexible clear eyeballs, taking DNA tweaks. It also means having high integrity data backups.   If you are present holographically in more than one location with avatars and sensing some things as if part of your own body, just who the heck are you, anyway?  And if part goes down, are you still there?      We already know that parts of our body can be gone without the "This is me" part disappearing.  Limbs gone or paralyzed don't stop you from saying "I am".  An ear can go, both eyes can go, the lower jaw can go, but the experience of "I" continues.   Add back in sensations that will be coming in from avatars at remote places where people interact with you.  What have you got?  This question is coming up with uncomfortable answers soon.

I should have taken the DNA tweak package
on my 120th birthday.
Death has been treated like religion because up until now you could count on it, plan your life around it, and couldn't skip it.  I think it's becoming optional for some, to be replaced by a balance sheet of how much stuff you have in the world that's working and how much is not.

Our Robot Overlords

Robots and AI networks will be making battlefield calls:
"Bots will enable the automation of terrorism (a truly transformational development) ..... When any bot learns something, it can then share that "understanding" with every other bot connected to the cloud".  From John Robb (CIA consultant on future weapon systems) at Global Guerillas.
Think about it.  When one device learns a tactic, they all learn it.  A drone can fly into the soccer stadium and spray fake poison powder to stampede the crowd, or it can set off real explosives next to the head of a presidential candidate at the mike.  We can hack our enemies AI defence and teach all devices to bow and pray to Allah instead of firing a weapon when attacked.  This ain't Star Wars.  Some of it is off-the-shelf technology you can order from amazon.  It just hasn't been weaponized yet.  To own and defend The Cloud is to own the high ground.

Saturday 11 June 2016

LA Times accidentally reveals Clinton "Pay to Play" in Hillary-friendly story.

Calling Susie Tompkins Buell "Hillary's Soul Mate", the LA Times reveals that the first $100,000 donation she made to the Clintons came out of the blue.  
The Clinton campaign was confused,    They asked me what I wanted,” she said.

I want to throw away my garbage, not redeem it.

Stuff you used to throw away is now embedded in religious ritual.  Children are taught the three Rs but it has nothing to do with Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic.  Instead it is Reduce, Re-Use, and Re-Cycle.  Those 3R's make a certain amount of sense but expect to be shunned and shamed if you don't spend unpaid hours every month kowtowing to the blue box and the compost pail, the organics bin and the paper and cardboard bins and the plastic & glass recycle bins, and a separate place if there is a deposit for the container, and the special drop off for styrofoams and another one for paints.  Perhaps you drop off your empty plastic bags and tetrapaks at the grocery store, too.   Are you running containers through the dishwasher with hot water.  They're supposed to be clean! Drive a $20,000 car to the recycle depot with paint and old TVs.  Instead of being preoccupied with pee and poo, folks are fixated on the arsehole of society and everything that was cast out formerly must now be retained and played with.   Clearly cost is nothing and ritual all.  Cost is how the market gives us a clue about what is wise behaviour and what is foolish.  Did I mention that your time is free?  You don't get minimum wage, you don't get a dime a day for your trouble, just a sense of virtue and escape from those who carp at your failings.  The politicians and rent seekers price in the paid workers but your reward is just virtue, a religious good.  The recycling movement is a net cost to society and everyone is poorer.  Good judgement will always find things to reduce and others to re-use and still others to recycle but the priests of garbage want it all.

The entire waste of North America for the next hundred years could fit into a cubic mile of land fill in the desert.  If I had been born about fifty years later, a few years from now I'd be bidding for landfill sites to make my first billion dollars sorting them with high tech at a single site.  They are gold mines.  Money and officialdom gave us rules that make garbage nearly illegal.  The costs of cleaning it, sorting it, washing it and blessing it with new credentials has soared.  This should be redirected to challenge the market to find a way to make a buck transforming garbage into dirt and oil and copper and feed-stocks and fuel without relying on unpaid labour from you and me.

The recycle bins at our condo have a restrictive sticker saying what can go in them.  Now the sticker has a sticker over top of the first one with even more restrictive nonsensical rules.  No more lids.  Only clean containers.  Give me a gigantic break.   Bring back something big I can throw stuff into and charge me so much a month for the deal.  YOU fix it up.  I don't expect to compost my body waste before flushing the toilet and I don't expect to redeem my garbage before I hand it over to someone expert and efficient at handling it.

Reason is the garnish, culture is the meal.


























Cartoon showing how liberals think is pretty much true for how everybody thinks. h/t Powerline


Monday 6 June 2016

College for Profit: Two rules

Pick a useful degree.
Finish the course.

That's the takeaway in Casselman's article.
While you dawdle in school, debts pile onto debts and if you don't go for a skill degree, then income to pay the loans back and to start a home or family just isn't going to be there.

Source at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-is-less-damn-high/ , scroll down past the rents section to the schooling part.