Chaos Manor View, Friday, May 27, 2016
Migration without assimilation is invasion.
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide.
Under Capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under Socialism, the powerful become rich.
Under Socialism, government employees become powerful.
I’ve been working in the Monk’s Cell, fiction only, and making considerable progress. I’ve worked on Mamelukes, and I have all the problems sorted out, who ends where – well mostly. The Avalon novel, about the first interstellar colony, has also some work done. And I am doing the Five Tibetan Rites, which I recommend to everyone at any age. I’ve written about them many times. Here’s one link. You can also find a good demonstration by Hugh Howey and Amber. Just Google. I’ve been neglecting my exercises, and it shows, but I am returning from vegetation, and I won’t relapse again this time. I stopped early this year when I got the flu, and any excuse not to exercise, and besides I was having problems with the computer up in the Monk’s Cell. Whereupon vegetation took control. Not again.
Of course I also stopped going up there because the old ThinkPad I kept up there had problems adjusting to updates and some other wireless problems, and I used that as more excuses to avoid work. I have the ThinkPad working well enough for now — long enough to buy time deciding on its replacement, anyway. The candidates are the new 15” ASUS, and a MacBook Pro running OSX and Office 365. The keyboards of both ASUS and MacBook are superior for my needs. When I was a touch typist – before the stroke – I used a ComfortCurve keyboard whenever possible including wirelessly to the ThinkPad when it was up in the Monk’s Cell; when the ThinkPad came with me on trips, of course, I left both ComfortCurve keyboard and external monitor up there. This time I probably will not use the upstairs machine for road warrior duty – I have a Surface Pro for that – but I will try using the laptop’s keyboard. In fact, I will try using a 15” screen and all. I’ll be sitting close to it, I’ll buy the right furniture if it works, and maybe I won’t need a big external screen; it’s for word production and not much else. I will still have to stare at the screen when I type two fingers, but I just might see some of a laptop’s screen as I type. I miss seeing what I am typing and I’d sure love to get back to that.
Anyway, I am back in the Monk’s Cell producing words daily. (Well right now I am in the back room with Swan, but that’s where I go at night, walker and all.)
I have just got some information on the possibility of an elevator to my upstairs front office and Great Hall. Apparently they have a new, inexpensive, small and compact design that I could afford – we’ll see. I do my columns – did my columns – in the upstairs library. But that’s for another time entirely. Right now it’s exciting enough that I’ve got the Monk’s Cell again.
For those puzzled about just how big IS Chaos Manor, it’s big. Built in early 1930’s as a physician’s house with his consulting office – now my downstairs office – it was a bit deteriorated and I got it very cheap. My old college roommate and I fixed it up enough to live in, then Sarge Workman and I did a lot more work, and after my first best-sellers I managed to add a new upstairs, Great Hall and Office and book storage room and bathroom and cable closet; that is the suite I can’t get to now, and if I get another best seller I may put an elevator to. The original house had two upstairs rooms at the back of the house with a gentle staircase. That’s where the Monk’s Cell is. The two upstairs do not connect, not even through an unfinished attic. There are unconnected attics, too. So it sounds confusing, but don’t worry about it; it IS confusing. And a rather big house for two people, but it’s paid for and in a good location. And enough of that chatter.
It’s official. Trump has enough delegates to win a majority on the first ballot, so barring an assassination – not an impossible event – he will be the Republican nominee. The Republican Establishment got both houses of Congress and a majority of Governors, but was a miserable failure at opposition. The deficit rose and rose, the budget grew and grew, the size of government went up and up, government workers got more and more pay, and meanwhile the Depression continued. Unemployment officially went down to manageable levels, but only because definitions were changed, so that those who just gave up and stopped looking for employment were no longer “unemployed” and were not counted in figuring the unemployment rate.
So we don’t have long lines of people looking for work; instead they sullenly stay home, or a few joyfully take the dole, food stamps, and all the other entitlements. Most Americans don’t like doing that. They want jobs. But the jobs are gone, sent overseas along with the equipment they worked with, and the economy settled into one of opening containers of goods from China, and “paying” for these cheap goods by borrowing the money from China to give it to the not-unemployed people who used to have jobs but don’t any more. And the deficit grows, the economy stagnates, people get more angry, and many of the Republican establishment long for the old days when nobody expected them to WIN for heaven’s sake. They were the permanent opposition, always employed with great benefits and retirement, and no ambition to be much more. They ran the only man Bill Clinton could beat in 1996, after which the defeated candidate made Viagra adds.
It may be that Mr. Trump can’t put America first, but he says he wants to. No one else even thinks it is a good idea. At which point I conclude that what the Republicans want to conserve is their jobs as opposition leaders who don’t have to govern. Maybe I’m just bitter. Of course for a while they did govern. They invaded the only real opposition Iran faced, hanged the former leader, disbanded his army, set an oppressed majority up to govern after disarming their former master, were shocked when the Shia began to oppress the Sunni – shocked, I tell you. But it was done democratically, wasn’t it?
Any business run the way the government conducts its business wouldn’t be in business long; fortunately they have an infinite capacity for borrowing money. Each of us owes north of $50,000 so far. You say that’s not that bad, and I point out that each means just that: a family of man, wife, and two children owes more than $200,000, each baby born owes $50,000. Sand that’s this year. Four years from now it will be well over $60,000 each. And the debt goes ever upward.
Salve, Sclave.
Mr. Trump is not an ideal candidate; but when we did run what looked like good candidates, they grew in office, and the budget went up, the deficit went up, the Depression continued, we entered wars in which our interest was not easily discerned and certainly was not served. I guess I had better get me a Trump hat.
I will have more to say on this another time, but spend a couple of minutes watching this. You will not regret it.
http://metrocosm.com/us-immigration-history-map.html
Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind ‘Dilbert’ explains why.
Laptop.
After the ThinkPad line was sold from IBM to Lenovo, I have changed to HP ZBook line of laptops. They are easy to service and have spareparts available several years after the purchase, and the spare parts shop of HP and it’s technical manuals are the best in business.
I am working on a HP Zbook 15 G2, but there is now a Zbook 15 G3:
http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/business-solutions/hp-zbook-15-g3-mobile-workstation—customizable-m9r65av-mb–1
I prefer a somewhat heavier laptop, as is has better expansion and service options, but if you prefer less weight, the Zbook 15u G3 or the Studio Zbooks are slimmer and lighter.Bo Andersen
I have many good reports on reliability of HP laptops. Alas, their keyboard is not usable by me; I need key separation. This seems to be true for many other brands, The ThinkPad hasn’t really enough key separation for me since the stroke. The Apples and ASUS systems are much better that way. And I am using a Logitech K360 wireless. I still hit multiple keys, but not as often.
Are You Sitting Down???
Microsoft Minesweeper for Windows 10 from the Microsoft App Store (Free, but with in-game purchases)…
… is…
… wait for it…
… Are you sitting down?…
… a 98.7 megabyte download.
Minesweeper debuted on Windows 3.1 or so, which ran in 4 Megabytes. 300 megabytes was a fair-sized disk in those days.
98.7 MEGABYTES???
–John R. Strohm
Re: Are You Sitting Down???
Well, that explains why Minesweeper for Windows 10 is a 98.7 megabyte download.
They’ve stuffed it to the gills with high-tech graphics animations and sound effects and probably all kinds of nifty trash.
Not to mention it wants me to log into Xbox Live! when I start it up, and complains if I tell it to jump in the lake.
It’ll still let me play the game.
If Microsoft paid one-quarter as much attention to software quality as they pay to this kind of crap, they would not have the world’s biggest security-related buglist, and they wouldn’t have to stuff operating system upgrades down the throats of their customers.
–John R. Strohm
I can remember when 100 megabytes was a BIG download. And calling Office “bloatware” when it reached 300 megabytes. Not all that long ago.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/27/hiroshima-censure-obama/
President Barack Obama told the world on Friday in Hiroshima that the American decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945 arose from humanity’s worst instincts, including “nationalist fervor or religious zeal.”
The war that ended in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, “grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.”
The speech — delivered on the eve of Memorial Day weekend — was billed by the White House as anything but an apology, but Obama’s words betrayed his true sentiments.
Obama, a native of Honolulu who grew up near Pearl Harbor, said nothing about the fact that Japan started the war; nothing about the fact that the Japanese were responsible for the slaughter of millions of civilians throughout Asia and the Pacific; nothing about the fact that the Japanese refused to surrender after hundreds of thousands had already been killed in conventional bombing.
Obama implied that Americans had not yet considered the human cost of the atomic bomb: we had to “force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell” and “force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see,” he said.
He described the moral dilemmas of nuclear warfare as if no president, and no American, had considered them before. But he left out the moral case for ending the war, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths avoided because of Hiroshima.
The contrast to President Harry S. Truman could not have been clearer. [snip]
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
