-
Alt Hopper
I happened to read a little filler about the American origins of our “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Chinese” food. Familiar territory, including the development of chili on cattle drives. This got me thinking about alt history for cattle drives. Our media and movies treat the Wild West as a long period of widespread wildness. In…
-
Make your own holiday day!
Today is Make Your Own Holiday Day! In keeping with multiple narrative levels, Polistra declares BE YOUR OWN BEACON DAY! = = = = = START REHASH: After seeing a picture of the Elgin Observatory and realizing the building still exists, I had to animate it. Because it’s a National Historical Landmark, there’s a document…
-
CNN’s mother
CNN and Fox figured out how to pose a soap opera as “news”. Stories run for months or years without any real plot movement. Shit happens, but shit has no consequences. The characters just keep on doing more shit. CBS introduced the genre in 1949. Only a few episodes of Wendy Warren and the News…
-
Leave the gangstering to gangsters.
Via Daily Mail. Aiden Pleterski, a Canadian bitcoin swindler, supposedly made the mistake of swindling the wrong people who then supposedly kidnapped and tortured him. This part of the story might be real but sounds more like a publicity stunt. Unsupposedly he was running an especially stupid Ponzi. He didn’t bother to pay back the…
-
Reverting to the meanest
Trump is taking the Sucker Filter to new depths. Previously he was selecting dissatisfied working men and making them look horrible. Now he has gone back to his NYC Mafia and Roy Cohn roots. His rhetoric is designed to appeal to the most vicious criminals and blackmailers and gangsters. Normal discontented people recoil in utter…
-
USA = Rodarbal
I’ve been bothered for many years by one vicious inconsistency. 1. US loves and obeys countries that have actually attacked us in one way or another. England, Germany, Japan, Israel, Saudi, China. 2. US hates countries that have never attacked us. Above all Russia, which has always tried to be our friend. We’ve been steadily…
-
Better example
Random train of thought, returning to a not quite random location… Noticed that bitcoin gang leader Do Kwon was finally arrested in Montenegro. This is the least famous bit of the former Yugoslavia. The other little Balkan countries have made the news often. We started a war between Serbia and Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo…
-
It’s simple.
I noticed that a lawsuit by publishers against Archive.org has been decided in favor of the publishers. The web coverage of this decision is uniformly one-sided, calling it unfair and illegal. After reading the actual decision, it’s obviously correct and should be uncontroversial. There’s no question of free speech or censorship. The books in question…
-
Bitcoin = pot.
3/19 was my jail anniversary, so I was thinking about the process as usual. New click: The bitcoin movement of this decade is IDENTICAL to the hippie movement of the ’60s. High-status influencers advertise the stuff and sell the stuff under CIA auspices, while pretending to be against the government. Alienated youngsters buy the stuff,…
-
Solvometer
The pussyass cowardass Repooflicans in Congress have been in control of the House for 3 months and so far they’ve done exactly nothing. They haven’t even TRIED. No problems solved, just a lot of obnoxious farts. Ordinary people in ordinary jobs do a lot of routine uninteresting work, and also solve problems daily. Every normal…
-
Two of my favorite people
A Reddit ‘filler’ says that the honeydew melon was introduced to China by Henry Wallace. China already had its own melons, but quickly grew to love the honeydew and even named it after Wallace. This happened on one of Wallace’s foreign Goodwill Tours, which the demonic HUAC later tried to call treason. One of the…
-
Fashions for an engineer’s wife
The eyes are up here! No wait, the eyes are… Speaking of which, Can you find the engineer?
-
Wrong question as usual
Via MindMatters. The idea that the higher the human population the scarcer earth’s resources become is prevalent and mainstream. It is behind many of the doomsday alarmist calls for population control and influences much of economic theory and practice. But what if it’s wrong? Marian Tupy offers a different account. The earth’s resources and innovation…
-
Itchy
The semi-prosecution of celebrity bitcoin influencers bothers me. There’s nothing new about celebrity endorsers who know absolutely nothing about the product they endorse. Their managers and agents make the arrangements, and the celebrities just read the script like any movie or show. Punishing an action that was effectively legal at the time of the endorsement…
-
Copyright comprehension
Jectoons understands the copyright problem, and he practices what he preaches by specifying public domain. He wants to have a chance of leaving a legacy.
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 