I was just thinking Blazing Saddles, keep a Bart. It would shut up all the people who insist you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today. It would be hilarious for Kermit to play the super drunk Waco Kid. That said, I’m not sure if the treatment would push the satire of racism, or defang it.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious… At first Ford formed a theory to account for this human behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on excercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

One of my favorite passages from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

For some reason being a nerd about heraldry scratches an itch for me. Traditionally the “stain” Sanguine represents blood.

Red is the most common color in national flags. I wouldn’t want to cede the color to Nazis.

There’s something kind of clever about heraldic implications of the original (intentional or not) that this misses.

Supposedly, the first rule of heraldry is " the rule of tincture: metal should not be placed upon metal, nor color upon color". White represents sliver and yellow represents gold, so they should not touch (metal upon metal). There are many exceptions in heraldry, but the rule still kicks around. Vatican City’s flag explicitly breaks this rule to demonstrate that “Vatican follows God’s rules and not man’s.”

I find it clever that a flag of capitalism would have a field of gold and a giant roundel of silver (called a plate when silver, silver plates are also associated with wealth), and they touch to demonstrate that capitalism doesn’t care about the rules.

In heraldry red often stands for courage, and that’s not a virtue I associate with capitalism. Also a red roundel is called a tart, and tarts are delicious.

According to some myths, King Solomon did something like this. With his wisdom he learned the true name of a powerful genie, and with the true name a of a genie he could bind them and force them to obey him. So he commands the bound genie to give him all the true names he knew, and bring these genies to him. Once he had these genies, repeat the process until all the genies were bound under his seal.

There’s lots of talk about the kids who didn’t wait 5 minutes, but I also find it interesting to read about the kids who did delay gratification. It’s not that they were superior specimens, or junior ascetics, or reborn Buddhist monks. They were as tempted as the rest.

They mostly avoided temptation by coming up with games to distract themselves. It’s something creative and it can both be learned and improved like a skill. It reminds me of the people who compete in memory games. It’s not a super normal talent, it’s games people can practice.

It does raise a question why kids who could do this were more academically successful later, and if kids who are taught this will have similar success later. Important questions that should be considered carefully.

I mean, obviously I don’t know how the internals of how the party works from first hand experience. That said I seriously don’t think we should build them up into a bete noir. Every party is in the business of winning. The party went to the center because Nixon walloped McGovern, and Reagan crushed both his elections. Also, the DLC found a way to fund the party after labor support waned for a variety of reasons.

Did the party impede Sanders’ primary campaign against Hillary? It’s been acknowledged that they did. Of course he’s been a career independent, and not a party member for one thing. Probably more importantly, party leadership still doesn’t think going to the left will win nationally. Of course we choose our candidates through a primary process, but like it or not, the party’s job is to win elections, and it’s not outside the party’s mandate to support candidates who they think will win.

But party leadership isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t a conspiracy. It is a group of people trying to make sense of things and find a way to succeed. Of course the old guard is resisting change because they still think they’ve got the recipe for success. Time will tell how it plays out. It’s going to be hard work, and as party voters our ability to influence change in the party has been diluted by a bunch of consultants that are telling the old guard what they want to hear, and only face a reckoning every two years. I imagine, in the face of fascistic tendencies in the rightwing party, moderation and compromise will be even less attractive, even to a center left party. We’ve got to make our voice heard, and when we get a crack, we’ve got to deliver wins.

Indeed. It feels like a lot of historical context is missing in Lemmy political discussions. The Democratic party was the party of FDR, JFK, and LBJ. The Democratic Leadership Council took over the party after the left candidates failed to deliver election successes, but even then, the DLC had to do the work to take the party leadership positions, build a funding network, and win elections. Before that FDR had to wrestle party control from the the Dixiecrats.

Hopefully Hogg and allies will be successful in reforming the party once again.

The number of warheads each nation maintains is agreed on in the START treaties, and those levels are determined by stockpile effectiveness. The US is recognized to have superior targeting and guidance systems, so they need fewer warheads to maintain parity with Russia’s stockpile.

The best possible outcome is for SDI and it’s descendants to be a complete waste of taxpayer money. If some clever chap comes up with a practical missile defense system, Russia would immediately generate enough warheads to overwhelm such a system and maintain parity.

Each missile represents a potential fault path to WWIII. We’ve been lucky with at least a couple near misses in our history. I don’t look forward to a future with more.

The scientific method is more about falsification than problem solving.

“If you ever succeed, devise and implement a test to see if it was a fluke.”

I too grew up in an era of action movies, where the good guy decisively self-defenses the bad guy to death, saves the world, goes home and has marital relations with the prom queen. It’s a powerful story, but ultimately it’s just a story.

Peaceful resistance does work, but there isn’t a single event that achieves change. It has to be an accumulation.

Rosa Park’s arrest didn’t achieve anything “in terms of change”.

Ghandi’s protest fasts didn’t achieve anything “in terms of change”.

When the Baltics had their singing revolutions, there wasn’t a single performance that achieved anything “in terms of change”.

All these were parts of larger efforts of peaceful resistance that culminated in change.

What did Cory Booker’s speech achieve? It’s too early to say. It’s possible it will be part of an accumulation that culminates in measurable results. On the other hand, it’s possible cynicism will poison the resistance and it will achieve nothing. We’ll only know once the history is written.

There was a period where it was still a skill to know how to use a computer. If you had a computer in your house it was a part of your identity, you were a computer owner. Using a computer was something you did. The computer is a powerful tool, and the user had an opportunity to overcome the challenge of learning how to use it.

Now a computer is an appliance. People know how to do what they do with it, but see no reason to explore farther. They aren’t interested in delving into the device’s potential. Owning a computer is like owning a car. They want it for the function they use it for. Learning more is like learning to change the oil in a car. In principle easy, but more of a chore than an opportunity.

I remember watching an interview with the CEO of SUN microsystems in the 90’s argue that you didn’t need to know how to run a nuclear power plant to use a light switch, and you shouldn’t have to know how a computer works to use one.

I guess his vision came true, and we’re mad about it?

Without a purity test how can I tell which members of the tribe are loyal and which might betray me?

The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor’s yards. I’m the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.

A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.

I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn’t remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.

Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.

I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.

It’s interesting to me that in the medieval period the term outlaw applied to persons who broke the law and were no longer protected by it. They were entirely outside its auspices.

I guess around the enlightenment philosophy changed, and a class of rights were considered unalienable. Society protects itself from law breakers, but even the worst offenders have some protection under law, even if the case law considers their life forfeit.

When Popper posed the paradox of tolerance one imagines he supposed a tolerant society extending tolerance as an unalienable right. I quite agree the social contact resolution to the paradox of tolerance neatly solves the paradox, but I think it introduces interesting questions about what behavior is beyond the pale, and how we as a society resolve what we find acceptable. The extremes are easy, but edge cases are introduced. I hope we assess those cases with our eyes open.

In both cases, maybe I’d more frequently be able to resist the temptation to talk about both subjects if I had the option to use them at work.

In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…