What did Trump and Xi Jinping talk about?

Can there have been any less news coverage of the top meet-up yet between Donald Trump and a foreign leader than there was for the 24 hours Xi and Trump spent at Mar a Lago. Crickets and a hopeful sign.. El Sisi, Abdullah II, Netanyahu, Merkel, May had bigger photo ops,and made joint public statements.  It was crickets, however, for the meeting with the leader of the second-strongest power on earth, leader of the world's most populous nation, leader of America's largest source of imports and leader of the country most able to position itself as a warring enemy or a respected competitor.
On top of that Thursday night, after the steak and before the sorbet,  president Trump told premier Xi that he's bombing a Syrian airfield.  I jumped out of bed Friday morning to hear the joint communique.

No communique.  Instead, intriguing bits of goodwill.  "Lots of very bad problems will be going away" was the extent of American verbosity plus a cute moment of the grand-kids singing in Chinese to the guests.      This reads to me as a peace indicator, not a warlike one.   Keeping things private and personal is the right setting to explore new ground. Everything public would be posturing, locking un-examined positions in place.

And what's with "Yi-Wan-Ka" and the Trump grandchildren singing in Chinese?  Another indicator for co-regency instead of war.   Ivanka is a life model to many Chinese women.

Two days later, a little information emerged.

Forget about world peace

An all-time great bumper sticker:
Forget about world peace.  Visualize using your turn signal.

St. Joseph selling houses for New Agers

A gifted and agnostic friend wants to sell her house.  She heard a rumor that if you plant a statue of St. Joseph in the ground, upside down, this will bring you a buyer.


To cover her bets, she went to a Christian book store asking for a statue of St. Joseph.  "Which one do you want?  The one for selling houses?"

Canada's Ho-hum Birthing in the British House of Commons

The National Post has a wonderful write up on the passage of the British North America Act and the creation of Canada. 150 years ago this month,   The Colonial Secretary apologized for taking up their time. The order paper was shared with The Criminal Lunatics bill.  Voting in part of northern Ontario was amended from being open to "every British Subject" to being open to "every Male British Subject". Sir John A. McDonald, who observed from the gallery thought it was treated like a “private bill uniting two or three English parishes”. The next bill up stirred greater debate.  (“I see no reason why the duty payable for a greyhound should be reduced 75 per cent, nor why the tax upon poodles and pug dogs should be reduced”)

Enjoy.


Mark Twain: “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

As the tasks of civilization shrink, human nature goes obsolete.

Baked in human behaviour for mating and resource capture is going obsolete.  This is not just for culture but for the human life form itself.   Life-time sex pairing doesn't mean the same when a lifetime is twice as long and none to two children with near 100% survival rates are reared.  Seniors' mates are chosen from a different pool than young singles use.   Sexual norms don't mean what they used to mean, now the food supply allows girls to reach menarche before 12 instead of closer to 18 and boys can impregnate much younger,too. In the past, kids weren't in a position to have their own to raise until they themselves were adults and "marriageable".     Even the pleasures of sex evolved to ensure successful propagation of our genes in the next generation.  The next generation is way less important than it used to be but sex just as much fun.  This helps explain the Gender vs Sex battling.  Again, because specialization has produced a welfare state to look after many needs, we don't need children to look after us in our dotage.  The result is we have consumed now and put debt onto future generations that matter less to us.  Hello deficits and governmental debt.  Indenturing someone else's offspring with our current consumption is a genius benefit of prosperity and specialization.

In resource capture there is food for calories and protected territory for hunting and gathering.  Who needs it when a day's office work can provide a week's good food and the problem is obesity, not hunger?  Most of us don't have neighbours who will kill us, steal our cattle, burn our fields, rape or kill our spouses.  We don't bother to put up fences around our homes and stone walls around our towns.  Men and women don't need to divide the survival tasks up by hunt/fight and gather/care but our baked-in nature still does.  

The etiquette of civilization is going obsolete as the tasks of civilization shrink, are delegated to specialists or simply passed onto software and automated devices.  The near future brings loss and unexpected change, though rewards will accelerate for many.  Our baked in human nature can't keep up but our tech-driven potential will surge, with or without us.   We're coming up on a world with many surplus but nonetheless well-fed and fairly content people on the sidelines of life.

Dumbing math down to the feelz

Copied from ace.mu.nu who copied it from someone else.  It's been around for years.
Copied from ace

Mauldin on Men Without Work - an out of the box view.

Four keys from John Mauldin's March 28th  letter and the underlying book being reviewed, "Men Without Work" by Eberstadt.    Canada has an advantage.

Male participation declining for 60 years.

Work age males have been steadily leaving the paid work force for 60 years. Who knew? The loss of male workers was masked by the many females who entered the workforce from 1970 to 2000. Net participation is on the decline again.

Male and female joint participation rose for 30 years
and has been falling for 20 years

At the same time, life expectancy for white males in the 45-54 (top earning) range has been increasing in most developed countries but has not in the United States. This is noteworthy because Canada next door has not taken part in the U.S. stagnation. The chart is in deaths-per-100,000 people.


The U.S.A. has about 20 million people with felony records and more with dismissed felony charges. These are mostly men, their population has quintupled since the sixties thanks to policy change, and they have a hard time getting hired.  There is no door back in for them.

Lastly, who is most likely to be full-time in the work force?  It's not race and education. It's who is married and who is a first generation immigrant.   These are the males most likely to be at work this morning.  They are the most motivated groups.

Print your house

Apis Cor, a San Francisco startup, is perfecting the printed, insulated concrete house. The video released in February 2017 shows big improvements over video from last year.  Structural voids formed with polymer concrete can be foam insulated, the exterior finish is smooth enough to apply paint with a roller.  The shapes are wonderfully flexible, accurate, and can be put together in a day. That includes a flat roof and extra man hours to set windows into place and completed for 70% less money.  I'm in the business of fabricating roof trusses and before seeing this video, had been spouting off earlier today about looking ahead to some decades of a similar market before the roof truss business joins cooperage at the roadside of life.  NOT.

Caution:  There's a blitz of cutesy promotion near the front end of the video but lots of detail follows. For example, they put up a tent and build the show home in 24 hours in -35C weather.

Precision death bombing takes out Al Qaeda leader

The story is the picture, not who died.  From above came perfectly targeted death, penetrating a moving vehicle.  No explosion.  No kaboom.

No nearby building collapsed.  A smart, massive bullet steered itself to within inches of its target.  Feeling safe at home in your favourite chair? 

The story about the late Mr. Masri is in the NYT and the photo at a twitter feed linked therein.

Orbits of Mars and Earth have an occasional resonance that drives the macro climate.

For years people wondered why earth's paleo-climate has warm spikes every hundred thousand years or so and other long range fluctuations, Mars may be part of the answer.  Earth and Mars orbits have some slight entanglement which every so often resonates, transferring some angular momentum from one planet to the other, making a small disturbance of the axis and orbit vis a vis the sun.    This is a bit preliminary but there's a signature in alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down some 87 million years ago in what's now Colorado and that's where it points.  Beautiful!!

Excerpted from HotAir.com where I first read about it.


More perspective from an article at iflscience.com:

"We know that orbital patterns known as Milankovitch cycles have been responsible for swings between glacial and interglacial conditions over the last few million years. These are a result of three things: Shifts between a more rounded and more elongated (or eccentric) orbit, the tilt of the Earth's axis, and the season in which Earth is closest to the Sun.  Meyers claims that during the Cretaceous, Martian gravity helped determine the first of these."

Human distinctives

Found in male and female forms, humans live in colonies, have concealed ovulation and almost no pheromones  (Think about that), long gestation times, and high survival rates.  They hide their stools.  They walk on hind legs and have a capacity to learn language.  They specialize food jobs by sex (hunting and gathering),  deceive group members about status, practice monogamy but are opportunistic for adultery and polygamy,  prefer meat but eat anything, trade food  (and other stuff) across the species with individuals that have different DNA, have a male form a little larger than the female form, show evidence of neoteny, have females modified to feed their DNA offspring with milk. Males mate frequently with females but females reproduce rarely, bearing one or at most two young in a year, and  generally have both parents invested in the young's survival.    Colonies are hierarchical with status defined for both females and males.  Competition is chiefly with other members of the same species for status, males with males, females with females, as well as males with females competing with each other for mating.  The head organ has grown dramatically in the last five million years, unlike other members of the ape and monkey families, but rather like the bottle-nosed dolphin which outpaced other dolphins and whales.   This may be to win mating competitions with complex displays of fitness.  Recent technical developments are making some of this irrelevant, perhaps making ourselves irrelevant too.

Thanks for much of this to Matt Ridley who wrote  The Red Queen - Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.  

Justin meets Donald. Two observations and a picture of small hands.

First the small hands.  The photo shows our prime minister's hand buried in the larger hand of the U.S. president.

I was puzzled last night that President Trump tweeted he'd be meeting with our PM and some business women today.
That seems to be exactly what happened except the business women didn't get a high profile news conference.  What is our man doing as part of this joint US/Canada group, standing behind the ladies with his smile? Did Donald Trump think the roundtable discussion was a bigger deal than a meet-and-greet with the Prime Minister of Canada?  Perhaps it was.


  Both Trudeau and Trump called on lesser-known press reps (including The Daily Caller Blog) and got substantial economic questions from them, as Breitbart reports. Mainstream media whined, as The Washington Times reports.  They wanted gotcha questions to embarrass Trump over Flynn, not analysis.

“By handpicking reporters, Trump manages to get through a news conference without being asked about Flynn,” New York Times reporter Peter Baker lamented on Twitter." (See several other quotes at the Washington Times story link.)

Update 8:20pm PST: Breaking news, Flynn has resigned with the finger pointing to credible evidence that he could be blackmailed and with evidence that he lied to presidential staff about talking to Russia about sanctions.  Added:  His letter of resignation posted on line.
Update: CBC has an informative report on the meeting (which I should have read first). It's noteworthy for being reportage, not persifilage.

I've seen the future: You get a real butler, not Siri, Alexa or Google.

Today we're toying with corporatist assistants from Google, Apple and more.  They can influence our vote to support a Trudeau and shun a Trump.   They shape the news we see, guess the ads and maps we will ask for and stand ready to answer whims day or night. Google tells me it's time to leave for the airport because it read the ticket in my inbox, offers a map of YVR while I'm there and comes up with a review page of the restaurant I'm sitting in.   Our characters are so varied that ultimately only a custom product will serve.  This means default "OK Google" and "Siri" software will be displaced by hundreds of competing and customizable apps that will be like a friend and like a servant.

Authors Ezrachi and Stucke write:

 "As the digital butler seamlessly provides more of what interests us and less of what doesn’t, we will grow to like and trust it. Communicating in our preferred language, our assistant will develop the ability to anticipate and fulfill our needs and requests. They can do so, based on our connections, data profile, behavior, and so forth.     The digital assistants have the potential to usurp the current super-platforms, namely Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Not surprisingly, each of these companies is now seeking to become our digital personal assistant. The winner will become our primary interface."

I disagree with the last sentence.  The big players will have an influence, just as Windows can be found in many computers without controlling what you do on them.  Competition demanded by the millions of nearly unique users means big players will be swamped by startups.  Compare how a few network broadcasters and newspapers owned the news twenty years ago and now dozens of medium sized sources and thousands of smaller ones are being watched and read every day.

I look forward to my first fully customizable butler, available online and off-line, a butler with a sense of humour that amuses me, a butler who can take a hint, that will go look for stuff I need or am curious about, a butler who asks unobtrusively if I want to send a thank you note to Aunt Tottie for the slippers.

Neil Stephenson wrote about a future where you buy a suitcase and say"Follow me" to it.  The rest is looked after.   We'll be shopping for personal assistants too and saying, "Follow me!".

Iraqis who'd kill you on the street if you walked alone are angry that Trump's EO will vet them.

A security contractor in Iraq asked his co-workers what would happen if he went out on the town by himself.  They said local people would torture and kill him within the hour. The ex-marine asks, then why would we want you in our country?   Three and a half minutes, 44 million views already on YouTube, h/t Fox News.

Art illustrating politics: A semblance of truth and a passel of lies can co-exist.

The portrait of a young girl, highlighted at Ace of Spaces illustrates this well. The artist, Sully, wrote: From long experience I know that resemblance in a portrait is essential; but no fault will be found with the artist, at least by the sitter, if he improve the appearance."   The face is a good likeness and the legs are stretched beyond belief.  We now call this "photoshopping" in images and "spin" in politics.

Lincoln: Don't trust the internet

How newspapers disguise attacks on Trump as news. Four tweets.

From Kevin Reiss' twitter feed, ranked from fair to ferocious fiddle faddle.

Russians hacked the elections? Two cartoons

Winning: Support for Islamic terrorism in Pakistan suddenly muted in late January

The threat of adding Pakistan to the list of temporary travel bans is making our world a safer place and doing it cheaply.  "What made this threat so convincing is that the newly (since January 20th) installed U.S. government started keeping campaign promises".  (Strategy Page).   No bullets were fired or marines deployed.

"Surprisingly the vocal popular support for Islamic terrorism in Pakistan was suddenly muted in late January as the military made some unexpected concessions regarding its support for terrorism and the government was able to go after a major Islamic charity that was long known (by literally everyone) as a front for Islamic terrorist fund raising. What caused this sudden change was the unexpected American threat to declare Pakistan a supporter of Islamic terrorism and restrict the movement of Pakistanis to and from the United States.What made this threat so convincing is that the newly (since January 20th) installed U.S. government started keeping campaign promises and banned seven nations (Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen) that have long been the source of most Islamic terrorism. Many in South Asia believe Pakistan should be on the list. Afghanistan and India have long called for such action against Pakistan but Pakistanis thought the Americans would never do it. The leaders of Pakistan’s Islamic parties, who normally call for violent demonstrations against any effort to shut down Islamic terrorists who only attack outside Pakistan were quiet. That was because many of their key supporters may be enthusiastic about Islamic terrorism, they are more concerned about family in the West, especially the United States, or seeking to go there. ... The fear may not last, but it’s a refreshing change of attitude for people in the region, including most Pakistanis."

And this: "January 29, 2017: In Pakistan, three days after pro-Islamic terrorist host Amir Liaqat was banned from appearing on TV, four of five online critics of the military who had mysteriously disappeared three weeks earlier reappeared and two of them promptly left the country."

Voter fraud? The exception proves the rule

You've heard the line about progressive politicians: "If they didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all".  (Maybe this applies to all successful politicians.)

Dissent was the highest form of patriotism, and then it wasn't and now it is again.  A supermajority was needed to pass important bills until Obamacare when a majority of 1 was enough. Now a supermajority is back for Democrats.       Filibuster was good until the Democrats got the upper hand, when it became bad.  Now it's good again.   The electoral college was good until it didn't favour Democrats and then it was bad.  Fearing Russia's power was foolish '80s policy but the danger of Russia is now obvious to every Democrat in Christendom.   Texas secession was for crazed rednecks but now it's favoured by one third of enlightened Californians.

The one standard that never changes when Democrats are in power or out of power is the claim there's no problem with vote integrity.  That tells me that leaving an unexamined and undisciplined voter policy in place is a bedrock value.   Voter integrity doesn't affect their sojourn in Washington but it must play a big role at the margins for getting Democrats there in the first place.

Some painful background on the voting swamp: Read the excerpt from Fitton of Justice Watch's book.
You get a pdf download of a chapter that is worth reading.

Dressing up as assholes: Vagina costumes

Enough said.

The First Hundred Hours

No need to debate "The First Hundred Days" of President Trump.  The first hundred hours is enough Winning.   Never in my life have I seen more consequential leadership. Even press conferences are entertaining and move the needle. A sip of this cordial will be nice in Ottawa too.

The Trump Restauration (and Ezra's comment)

"Restoring something to its proper or original condition, renewal of something which has been lost." Domestically:  This morning, business leaders and union leaders were equally enthusiastic about President Trump's support.  (See quotes below). In the Middle East:   Israel is enthusiastic about Trump's direction and some Arabs like the Iran angle.  (See quotes below).  
Enemies finding common cause? Better than dogs sleeping with cats.

Quotes from the business leaders:
Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical: "He is going to make us more competitive"
Mark Fields of Ford Motor Company:  "The president is very, very serious about making sure that the United States economy is going to be strong.  And have policy, tax, regulatory or trade, to drive that. And I think that encourages all of us."

Quotes from the union leaders:
Wayne Ranick of United Steelworkers said on behalf of the group: "When the President laid out his plans about how he is going to handle trade, how he is going to invest on infrastructure, and how he is going to level the playing field for construction workers and all Americans across this country...and then took the time to take every one of us into the Oval Office and show them the seat of power in the world...the respect he just showed for us ... and when he shows it to us he shows to three million of our members in the United States .. was nothing short of incredible, and we will work with him and his administration."
And two more union quotes from the last couple days:
James Hoffa of Teamsters:  "Today, President Trump made good on his campaign promise to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. With this decision, the president has taken the first step toward fixing 30 years of bad trade policies that have cost working Americans millions of good-paying jobs."
Rich Trumka of AFL-CIO said TPP withdrawal is "a good first step toward building trade policies that benefit all workers.".

Quotes from Israeli leaders:
Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat: "I applaud President Trump on his historic announcement that the White House has begun discussions regarding moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.  President Trump has proven that he is a true friend of the State of Israel and a leader who keeps his promises."
Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli deputy minister of foreign affairs:  "I think that all the declarations of the Trump administration were showing a deep friendship to Israel.  They understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East."
Prime Minister, Netanyahu: "After eight years in which I withstood enormous pressure on various issues, primarily Iran and the settlements, I certainly welcome the change of approach, President Trump believes that peace will only be achieved through direct negotiations. Does that sound familiar?” said Netanyahu. “He spoke to me at length about the threat from Iran. He also believes the nuclear deal with Iran is a bad deal. That certainly must ring a bell. We are facing great and significant opportunities for the security and future of the State of Israel."

Quotes from the Arab world:
The first foreign government to congratulate Trump November 9th:   'Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi congratulated Donald Trump on Wednesday on his victory in the U.S. presidential election and said he hoped his election would unleash a new era of closer ties with Washington. The Egyptian Arab Republic is looking forward to the period of Donald Trump's presidency to imbue new spirit into the path of Egyptian-American ties with more cooperation and coordination in the interests of both the Egyptian and American people," he said in a statement.'
From a Maclean interview in Dubai: 'Gulf Arab states are quietly applauding the arrival in the White House of a hawkish leader opposed to their adversary Iran, even if they suspect Donald Trump's short temper and abrasive Tweets may at times heighten tensions.'
Also quoted, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a veteran Saudi commentator:  "Trump does not look like the kind of guy who will bend towards Iran or anyone else. .. If he behaves as he says, then we will see another Ronald Reagan, someone all the forces in the region will take seriously. That's what we have missed in the past eight years, unfortunately."  "We hope Trump can correct (Obama's) policy, and while we are not sure of that yet, his choices to run the administration all sound experienced."
A Gulf Arab businessman:  "I think he is going to be very, very tough on Iran. He will be decisive", noting he expected the deal-maker Trump would demand something in return.

A rince-bouche to finish the tale, this one a tweet from Ezra Levant:
"While the Media Party was obsessing over tweets and crowd size, Donald Trump just took over the blue collar wing of the Democratic party."

Holding the election is more important than winning it. Kudos to Stephen Harper for Bill C36 (2007)

A fair open challenge by popular vote at regular intervals is far more important than which party wins.  The body politic is forced to renew itself or displace its rulers bloodlessly.  This is done by institutionalizing the violence that otherwise would develop.    Calls in the U.S. to have a third term for Barack Obama or to overturn the results of the 2016 vote invite the death of democracy.

Has it not always been so?  The latest iteration is Turkey's Erdogan:  "Democracy is like a train. You get off once you have reached your destination".    In Canada, we don't have a president-for-life as Kazakhstan seems to have, but we used to game the system with election dates.  The prime minister could juggle to get a three to five year term, watching the polls and choosing the best moment in two years to strike and recapture the spoils of power.  The party in power always had its thumb on the scale.

Stephen Harper brought in Bill C-36 in 2007.  Wikipedia summarizes:

 "It requires that each general election take place on the third Monday in October in the fourth calendar year after the previous poll, starting with October 19, 2009. During the legislative process, the Liberal-dominated Senate added an amendment listing conditions under which an election date could be modified, in order to avoid clashes with religious holidays, municipal elections, and referenda, but the House of Commons, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives, rejected the amendment and the Senate did not pursue it."

Kudos to Stephen Harper.

 

Toronto Zoo and Orangutan Earwax - Too good to skip

From a US health and medicine website comes this gem in Statnews on the dangers of poking at earwax:

"Ear canal cleaning is a hard habit to kick. It may be as innate as tool use itself. (Dr. Vito) Forte was once called to the Toronto Zoo to treat an orangutan that seemed to be having ear trouble — and found out that the ape was known to pick up secondhand wads of chewing gum, check them for stickiness, and then use them to extract whatever might have been buried in its ears."

Picture source 

The article also cites a survey of a teaching hospital that found over 90% of the health professionals there admitted sticking objects into their ears to get at wax.

First ever Super Nova Prediction 2022 - Show the kids.

An eclipsing pair of binary stars are going to spiral into each other in 2022, give or take a few months and for half a year will probably become the brightest star in the sky.  This is amazing!    Their light pulses every 11 hours as they block each other from earth view.  This viciously fast orbit has been picking up speed lately and some orbital math shows they have about six earth years left until they spiral into each other and self-obliterate.  The red nova will appear in Cygnus, The Swan.   Watch for the  end-of-life explosion of KIC 9832227, some 1800 light years away.

Reported at National Geographic and The Daily Mail.

There was an earlier prediction of a supernova appearing in 2016 but of a very different character.
Light from that one had arrived here by several pathways, some via a gravitational lens.  After seeing the supernova once, scientists were able to predict additional images would appear soon. The KIC 9832227 story will allow us to observe the violence as it happens and is predicted from first principles.

The Inman Aligner: Orthodontics Fast And Cheap

This Orthodontic front-tooth aligner looks promising.
Eight to twelve weeks is probably enough time.
Cost looks like $2000-$4000.
You can take the Aligner out yourself part of every day which makes it easy to clean your teeth.
It's less obvious than the traditional braces and you can leave it at home for a few hours a day.
If just works on the front teeth but they're the one's everybody sees.
It has a middle push section and two sides that anchor the spring-loaded connections.
It doesn't need to be re-calibrated because the springs can travel all the way from the starting point to the place you want the teeth to end up.
You can get a hidden retainer spring wire bonded into place behind the straightened teeth so they stay put.
You still need an initial mold and the orthodontist will keep an eye on progress every few weeks.

Where I read about it:  The Daily Mail
The Inman Aligner home page.

The Hoity Toity don't get to live my life for me. "Trump Voter"

"Be yourself.  Everyone else is already taken" is good advice.  And the Hoity-Toity don't get to live my life for me.  Not even when they are brainier than me, better educated than me, more globalized than me, more gender-neutral than me and more woke than me.  Ace from Ace of Spades explains it:

"Suppose you want an architect to draw up plans for a house. You want a dining room because you never had one as a kid, and always associated it -- from old magazine pictures, from old movies, whatever -- with a stable and happy home.
Suppose your architect comes back with no dining room -- just one big great room combining living room, kitchen, and dining area.
"Where's the dining room I asked for?" you want to know.
"No one has dining rooms any more," the expert tells you. "It's all Open Concept now, one room sweeping into the other, bringing together the family in one big room at all times."
"That may well be, but I want a dining room."
"Walls are passe," the experts smugly tells you. "They interrupt the sight-lines."
"I don't care about sight-lines. And honestly, I love my kids, but I'm not so crazy about them so much I want to be locked in a giant room with them 24/7. I want walls and I want a dining room," you say again.
"No one eats in a dining room and anyway dining rooms are too formal."
"I'd like to be formal on occasion."
"Well," the architect tells you, "I've decided that dining rooms are in bad taste and I'm the expert and you can't have one. You're getting Open Concept whether you like it or not, Trump Voter."

Bicycle helmet for a four year old on a trike in a parking lot.
Four recycle bins but no garbage.
Spank a kid and be a criminal.
Thinking "He" and "She" for the men and women you meet every day means you're a gender thug.
Take off your shoes and be treated like a criminal to board a plane.
Buy plastic bags because the grocery store wants you to use dirty fabric bags instead.
Hire a HazMat subcontractor before installing a new plug in older drywall in BC.
( "Exposure control plan for cutting small amounts..." )
I don't want my betters telling me what to do, a one-size-fits-all policy swamping common sense.

California likely to become "A cross between Tijuana and Hawaii, a land for the aging rich and their servants"

Joel Kotkin crystallizes California with this unforgettable observation.  Follow the link.

Your Daily Trump Trolling: CIA Intelligence

A calculated tweet from The Donald again reverses the narrative.
Old narrative:  Trump doesn't think he needs intelligence briefings and wants Putin for his bro.
New narrative:  Is the CIA politicized and using the media to undermine the president elect?
I love it when he says don't brief him yet with possibly suspect information.  The experts have to come clean first.

Remember, if you follow Donald Trump tweets, you are ahead of the news cycle.

In case you think this is all bird-brained impulse, take another look at his signature.  Neither you nor I can write in that angular style without energy and intentioned hand control.

Perfect soft-boiled eggs from an egg cooker - Points to remember

Egg steamers are awesome and can deliver a perfect soft-boiled egg but there's points to remember:

1  Don't use the clever egg-puncture pin.   (Egg white leaks out, foams up, the device turns off too soon and it's hell to clean).

2  Consider using bought water if you like clean tools.   A wipe with a paper towel or dishcloth will keep the base shiny.Tap water leaves residue when it evaporates and is hard to clean. If you don't care, don't bother.  The eggs will taste the same.

  (Water Note:  If you have a cooker that lets steam come up from below through the empty egg holes, you'll find an odd instruction:  The more eggs you cook at a time, the less water you need because the steam escapes slowly when more of the holes are filled with eggs.  So yes, you add more water to get a hard boiled egg but you also add less water to get six hard boiled eggs than you do for one hard boiled egg.)

3   When cooking is almost done, sprinkle some salt and pepper in a row on a piece of paper towel and keep it handy.

4   You can let eggs sit in the cooker when they're done.  They keep cooking for a while. That way you can get really soft for your wife and half-firm for yourself from the same batch. 

5   Chill briefly under cold water so you can hold an egg in your hand and to help pop the membrane free from the egg.

6   Open the fat end of the egg first.  There's a little bubble at that end which makes it easier to start.

7   Use a teaspoon to peel open the egg.  Pick a spoon with about the same curve as your egg.

8   Don't bother cracking the egg shell a lot before you start peeling.  The shell can come off in large sheets.

9    Use a teaspoon!!

10  When I get the teaspoon started, I slide it most of the way down and then twist it towards my other hand holding the egg.  This cuts the membrane.  Then twist the spoon in the other direction and see if you can get the rest of the shell off in one or two pieces.  

11  Briefly rinse the egg to clean off any bits of shell.

12  On the paper, roll each egg along it once so it's evenly coated with salt and pepper. There's room for several side by side paths without using up all the salt.

13  Use the paper towel to wipe things up.

13  Eggs stay hot for several minutes which helps you get a warm breakfast on the table.

Palestinian terrorist kills U.S. presidential candidate: Remember Sirhan?

Sirhan Sirhan, the American Palestinian shooter, was briefly in the news asking for parole the fifteenth time.  Looking back at accounts of the time, I see nothing has changed.  Despite his repeated statements that he planned the shooting with acknowledged malice aforethought, planned because Robert Kennedy spoke in support of Israel and supported selling bombers to Israel, officialdom denied it.   Like the Fort Hood shooting and all the others, he was treated as a kid gone wrong showing bad behaviour with a gun.   The judge wouldn't let him confess.  Sirhan wasn't a Muslim jihadist, so there's that.  The rest fits the discredited narrative that Trump may, hopefully, bury.

From Wikipedia:

In 1989, he told David Frost:
"My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians". Some scholars believe the assassination was one of the first major incidents of political violence in the United States stemming from the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East.                 The interpretation that he was mostly motivated by Middle Eastern politics has been criticized as an oversimplification that ignores Sirhan's deeper psychological problems. During his trial, Sirhan's lawyers attempted to use a defense of diminished responsibility, while their client tried to confess to the crime and change his plea to guilty on several occasions. Sirhan testified that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought". The judge did not accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.

To see all Physics in a glass of water

Ask the right questions while observing a glass of water and you can come across most of physics, discovering the nature of light, of electricity, of gravity, and more.  You could have beat Newton to discovering the composition of light with a prism.  Your curiosity could have been piqued by the meniscus curve a couple millimetres up the side of the glass caused by surface tension involving a layer of nearly free electrons.  You could wonder why bubbles form out of a liquid and why they cling to some surfaces and why they rise at a certain speed and what triggers these changes. You could wonder where the beads of water on the outside of the glass came from.  You could wonder why the glass doesn't drift off the table and why the water doesn't fly away and yet disappears slowly over time.  These observations are triggered by activity at atomic and subatomic levels.  You could look at specks on the water and wonder why they float.  You might be curious enough to see if you could float a pin and then wonder why the pin slowly turns to a north-south direction.  It's all there if you have eyes to see and a good question or two to ask.

Blake wrote of this in Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

Democracy is a means, not an end

From the comments at Instapundit:

Democracy is not the end state.  It is a process to establish and maintain rights-respecting governance.  "Ritchie the Riveter"

Don't feed the kids what Mom fed you. They'll be fatties.

2500 calories daily for a man and 2000 for a woman was gospel fifty years ago and a recipe for fatness today.  Don't bemoan the temporary surge in obesity.  You're looking at a feature, not a bug.  We expend less energy to prosper, find shelter and work and to socialize.   Humans will prevail better.  Now de-program two generations that grew up on Mom's serving sizes and still think that's the norm.  We get the results we want in life for less effort and that means fewer calories IN and more surplus time and energy for OUT.  Blaming people for sitting around is to miss the point.

"Modern lifestyles ... have allowed people to become so inter-connected that they barely need to leave their desks or sofas to work, socialise or shop.
Recommended calorie counts, which have been about 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women since the First World War, were set at a time when people naturally moved far more in their daily lives. But the new study suggests those counts may now be too high and researchers say that people need to stop eating the way their parents taught them.
Trade deals between countries have also caused food prices to tumble, creating virtually unlimited access to unrestricted calories for most people, while on-tap entertainment through television, smartphones and personal computers has replaced many traditional hobbies and activities."  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/26/meals-parents-made-now-calorific-modern-lifestyles/

Are we one? Thought experiment to prove it.

In three dimensions, everyone is clearly separate except for an umbilical moment at birth.  In four dimensions, adding time, everyone has physical continuity to others at some moment. The key is to see humans have two kinds of body.  Like insects we have a metamorphosis of our own.  Most of our life is spent as passionate bipedal mammals but we also transform into gametes made from our own body with our DNA.  The gametes are sent out into the world (sperm) and strategically placed (ova) to build new bipedal mammal nodes in the net of human life.   They occasionally meet and merge and where they do there is always physical continuity.  Brief, over-looked until pregnancy occurs, but real.  There is no gap.  The gamete human is pretty simple compared to Homo Sapiens but is clearly "us" and can be transformed into H Sapiens or created from H Sapiens.  This may stretch your brain to consider having two life forms which metamorphose into each other.

Imagine viewing your body from a fixed viewpoint in space.  From this point picture seeing all of it at all times since you "began" until today.  Picture this as a series of snapshots, moments apart, over the years and add a corkscrewing corkscrewing corkscrew motion to represent your spin on the world's surface and the spin of the world around the sun and maybe a little supplementary motion from galactic spiralling.  From time to time there are spider threads of continuity between you and other people.  (Viewing this as a 3-D corkscrew helps because it gives enough "space" to display lifetimes.)

I've searched the internet before and found no image close to a triply spiralling spiral.  The closest I've found is this short segment of a curve with a spiral following it.  These various spiralling spirals are touching at certain spots.  If you think of the paths as electrical circuits, a signal can be sent from any person to any other person, just not at the same time.

Funny snack sign at the bowling alley: Socks $2.00 Hot chocolate $2.00

A juicy sock well-stewed



       might have helped Charlie Chaplin with his shoe.
(Scene from "The Gold Rush" available free on line).

Mobbing Ivanka: Four reasons elections have gone feral.

Designers brag they will never dress her.
Others want us to know they will shun her line of designer clothes.
Artists posture that she must take their paintings off her apartment wall right this minute.
She's flying coach and a guy boasts on twitter that his husband is going to harass Ivanka because she's on the same flight.  "Your father is ruining this country" "Why are you on this flight, you should be flying private".
She wasn't on her Dad's ticket, for heaven's sake, and Donald isn't even president yet!

I see four reasons for this uncivil meltdown:

1.   Government has been plus-sized and embiggened until it's such a large part of the economy and our personal lives that to win an election has more consequence than in years past.
2.   The Politics of Identity is the antithesis of a republic.   The latter is a rule of law under which all citizens have equal standing.  The former I despise, but it prevails.
3.    The speed of news has picked up.  The uncivil can gang up on others in minutes when formerly they'd hear a snippet of news long after the opportunity to brag in front of cameras had passed.
4.    Civility is undervalued and under-taught.   What sets us above beasts if not manners?

Is Donald Trump Your President?

Flow chart points out the obvious but somehow undetected fact:

Is Socialism Caused by Climate? Voting Democrat and Global Warming

Interesting maps to compare:  One shows where people have experienced the most record high temperatures.  These people are likely to believe in Global Warming as unassailable fact.   The second map shows the Democrats' "Archipelago" where the most socialist voters are found.  Kind of similar.

Darker grey is where the most people believe most in Global Warming.  Red dots are where the most record high temperatures have been recorded. (Science Daily News)

The Clinton Archipelago describing the Clinton vote in 2016.

Bigger brains go with shorter guts, say Scientists

Brain is expensive tissue to maintain and hogs oxygen.  This is paid for with a trade-off  in smarter food harvesting which in turn means you can get by with less gut to digest the high value food you eat.   Science Daily News gives the example of some large brain Mormyrid fish (3% of body mass) compared to other Mormyrid fish with smaller brains.  (For comparison, human brains run 2.0 to 2.5% body mass.)  The same connection was found in a study of 30 species of frog and toad.

Illustration from the linked article

Bitter Clingers at the White House (Cartoons)

h/t Powerlineblog



h/t powerlineblog

The Media Hating on Donald will put them under the same shower of gold that funded Jill Stein

The media will be happy whinging about The Donald for the next 8 years.  Paycheques will be covered and reporters will feel needed.
When Jill Stein can pick up way more cash trying to dump Donald that she ever saw sight of for herself, you know it will be good.

Update from NY Times:

"Mr. Carter seized the moment with a red home page banner calling Vanity Fair “The Magazine Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Read” and imploring visitors, “Subscribe Now!”
Lo and behold, subscriptions spiked a hundredfold over their daily average, the magazine said, bringing Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast, the biggest number of new daily sign-ups in its 116-year history. (The tally had hit 42,000 by Sunday.)
in the weeks since the election, magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair; newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post; and nonprofits like NPR and ProPublica have been reporting big boosts in subscription rates or donations."

"Bug Bounty": Markets will protect us from hackers.

The US Army is eliminating the middle man and offering cash rewards direct to successful hackers.  "Cheaper and usually generates better results".  This could be applied to digital voting too.  It makes sense because generating useful data is a big investment while stolen data sells for pennies on the dollar.

  From Strategy Page:

"The American Army has recently launched the “Hack the Army” campaign. This is a bug bounty program in which the Army will offer cash rewards to hackers who find vulnerabilities in some selected systems and websites. This “Hack the Army” is a direct successor of previous "Hack the Pentagon" program launched earlier this year with the support from HackerOne, an organization dedicated to making the Internet a safer place for users. The program has brought many surprising discoveries when it comes to government websites. It was even commented by U.S. Defense Secretary who emphasized that this way is cheaper than the use of traditional penetration tests and tiger teams (which require a lot of expensive contractors). Moreover offering bug bounties, as many commercial software firms have discovered, is a lot cheaper and usually generates better results. As a result many even some of the biggest software companies, like Google, Microsoft or Facebook are using “bug bounty” programs because of these advantages." 

Media Ignoring Major Trump Statement On Trade

The Donald tweeted, of course.  The press weren't called in to filter the news.   In Canadian terms, this is Justin Trudeau saying we will abolish interprovincial trade barriers, halve the corporate tax rate but if you leave Canada after we get off your back, we'll tax the heck out of anything you sell back.

Here's the statement in full, extracted from six consecutive tweets this morning:

"The U.S. is going to substantially reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell is product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence, is WRONG!  There will be a tax on our soon-to-be-strong border of 35% for these companies wanting to sell their product, cars, A.C. units, etc., back across the border. This tax will make leaving financially difficult, but these companies are able to move between all 50 states, with no tax or tariff being charged. Please be forewarned prior to making a very expensive mistake!  THE UNITED STATES IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS."

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/realdonaldtrump?lang=en  December 4th 2016.
This will surely be misrepresented.  Trump says the first move is the government's move, to reduce tax and regulation.  The companies will face punitive tax only if they reject freer trade at home and only if their foreign plants target the U.S. for sales.

The statement is rough-and-ready but not hard to parse.
The culture in which CEO's make choices has been altered as well.

FORD Robot taxis in sixty months

Ford is going head to head with Uber and Lyft, Bloomberg reports.

"The carmaker has promised to put 100,000 robot taxis -- without steering wheel, gas or brake pedals -- on the road in five years."

Your beefs about turn lanes, signals,  crazy men, women and kids behind the wheel, about weaving vehicles, tailgaters and honkers, will trend to irrelevant.  The interface between safe robot vehicles and dangerous people ones will be the cutting edge.  Persuading men in particular to let go of the steering wheel, rethinking everything you ever knew about insurance, and the elimination of driver licences as a rite of passage are  almost upon us.  A car becomes a leisure space and communication hub, if you bother to own one.

The rate of change of the rate of change is going up.

On Trump: "When the officer class fails, the warrant officers and sergeants have to take over"

Your time will be rewarded reading Barrel Strength's two views:  That of his eloquent officer class friend who is dismayed that Trump has advanced and his own eloquent riposte.

Ethnic map of USA

The largest group is "other" since the Daily Mail figures add up to about 240 out of 317 million Americans.  Some 20 million now consider themselves simply "American", many of these formerly of "English" extraction.   Heritage in order of size by millions:
German (49)   Afro-American (41)    Irish (35)      Mexican (32)     English (26)   "American" (20)    Hispanic/Spanish (18)     Polish (10)     French (9)

The map is coloured by "most named" heritage for every county in the U.S.  It's astonishing how Germans, who never had a New World colony, are geographically represented the most.  This doesn't mean in the majority in each county, just the most common.  Also noteworthy are Black Americans in two northern cities and a band across the south.

People are surprised? "Romney for Secretary of State"

Didn't something like this happen once before in recorded history?  Obama picked Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.

See what I mean about horses?

Harper Worse Than Trump? US Civil Service Faces Pruning By The MRHIBBX Donald

MRHIBBX = Mysognist Racist Hater Islamophobe Bully Bigot Xenophobe.
Trump's people have a plan for the US Civil Service.  As the Washington Post say, "They won't like it".

“Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.”

Compare The National Post 2014:

Canada’s Conservative government has wiped nearly 37,000 people off the federal payroll and reduced key services for Canada’s veterans and the unemployed and budgets for food safety in the “rush” to pay for its promised tax cuts, according to a new report.

And, "Is Harper The Worst Prime Minister In Canadian History". (National Observor)

Canadian Morals Hit Hard As R.O.I. On Sex Goes Down

The return on investment of sex for reproduction is going down. Although I don’t care for homoerotic pandering, LGBT is economically viable these days. So is serial monogamy without children. So is the possibility that a pair bond for seniors will be different from the one that raised the kids. Marriage norms were embedded in a culture when people died by fifty. Marriage hasn’t been tested much from there to a hundred.   The Canada I grew up in won't be there for my grandchildren.  It won't even make sense to them.

We have fewer kids. Government policy offering a Baby Bonus will never turn that around. The gains (and joy) of having kids are real but a much smaller dose of parenthood can bring it on.  Since a child born is pretty much a child that reaches adulthood, way fewer births will produce the same number of viable adults. Since the economics of industry and nation states mean that individuals can support themselves with a job outside the family and tribe, and they can count on pension income and medical care without their kids when they age, they don’t need to reproduce to survive personally.

Reproductive pairing brings childbirth pain and includes two decades of expensive, vulnerable, tied-down safe-space to raise a crop of youngsters.. This was once the only way to survive. Now it’s becoming optional. It was also the only way for the tribe to survive which meant parents controlled who paired with whom. Now individuals generally decide and romance is factored in too. 

Such pairing and need of safe space has mandated marriage and cultural institutions that protect it and the offspring. That isn’t so today for many Canadians. Although marriage often works well into the grey and wrinkled years, it was designed for teens who could expect to put in a couple dozen years “being fruitful and multiplying” before dropping dead.

The Canadian census will have startling findings in years to come.  

The Left Hijacked The Presidency: Of Course They Are Crying When Trump Inherits An Imperial One.

Americans have gotten an Imperial Presidency.  It's a presidency that can rule with a pen and a phone and elevates the man in the office to god-like eminence, distributing the nation's treasure and showered with it himself.  It's no wonder people are crying that Trump is president-elect, that they are running to safe spaces with Play-Doh and warm puppies and that others are cursing, waving Mexican flags, and rioting in the streets.  They are losing control of their hi-jacked presidency.

I think it comes down to this: The President has too much power.   An election shouldn't cause a meltdown in peoples' lives.   The President is the chief executive officer of the United States.  The CEO has duty with discretion to carry out the mandate of congress and none other (except briefly in times of emergency).  This "I have a pen and I have a phone" talk is abhorrent and unpresidential.  When the new president carries out the mandate of congress with a Republican or Democratic spin, he or she is doing it right.  No riots.  No tears.  No emigration.

H/T Powerline
for the cartoon.

Humor: "Trump Delivers Play-Doh to College Campuses"

h/t Powerline.

Two Solitudes: Unique election map describes U.S.

The New York Times shows that two solitudes make up the US.  Counties that went for Hillary are shown as bodies of water on the Republican map and counties that went for Trump are shown as bodies of water on the Democrat map.  The "Santa Fe Sea" on Trump's map is "Albuquerque Island" on Hillary's map.

The Democrats map is an island archipelago.  The Republican map is continental. The populations, though similar, are divided by culture.   "Two Solitudes"  The new president is from the archipelago. The mainland voted him in.