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Took longer than they thought
American Radio Library has added more issues of Philco News. Skimming through the sequence shows the fadeout of US electronics. From 1930 to 1950, Philco was a top producer of consumer products, from radios and TVs to appliances. Philco was proud of its focus on consumers instead of shareholders. After 1950, the magazine focuses more…
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Buchanan retires
Pat Buchanan is retiring from writing. I’m joining the tributes because his columns helped to turn me away from neocon idiocy and BACK to the localist/socialist position I started with. The linked article is a career biography showing how Buchanan started inside the Deepest waters of Imperialist Deepstate under Nixon, then gradually diverged toward the…
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Accidentally marked bills
News item: Amazon warns its developers not to use ChatGPT as a search engine or problem-solver. AI learns from every conversation, which means that a conversation including trade secrets will automatically become part of what AI knows. Amazon’s counterspies have noticed some trade secrets showing up in their tests of ChatGPT. This is the inverse…
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Charlie sweeps out the trash
King Charles is starting out strong. He has literally evicted Andrew from all royal palaces and offices and titles and honors. No American politician has ever kicked out an Epstein agent, because “both” “parties” are totally owned by Epstein. All of the recent “presidents” have been openly and proudly associated with the Epstein Blackmail Factory.…
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Guilds returning?
Since 2015 I’ve been bitching about the total lack of guild spirit. Every single profession eagerly joined first the partisan inquisition of Trump, and then the “virus” NAZI TORTURE concentration camp. NOBODY tried to enforce or encourage the supposed ethics of professionalism. Now we’re seeing some scattered exceptions. The securities regulators are pursuing bitcoin scammers…
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Revolutionary design?
NASA announces with great fanfare a revolutionary method of propelling rockets. The RDRE differs from a traditional rocket engine by generating thrust using a supersonic combustion phenomenon known as a detonation. This design produces more power while using less fuel than today’s propulsion systems and has the potential to power both human landers and interplanetary…
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~π
Today isn’t Pi Day, but a couple of half-decent Pi jokes showed up today. First, from a rare ’40s radio show, one of the many with high quality music and low quality but often funny comedy. This poem was featured in Fountain of Fun from November 1942 when rationing was the hot topic. Food and…
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Tech overreach
Still exploring the strange world of pre-electric starting systems. Winton was first with a compressed air system in 1908. Pierce adopted a similar system in 1911. The Pierce was more complicated, but also described and illustrated better, so I’ll go with it here. The self-starter on the Pierce-Arrow cars consists primarily of a four-cylinder air…
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Parkinson before Parkinson
I enjoy reading books written by advertising men from pre-Deepstate times. Admen were the real social scientists. They had to do real experiments on real people with real money at stake. Their experiments were automatically limited in scope by profit. They needed living breathing working customers. Admen weren’t funded by Deepstate, so they had no…
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Bureaucratic genes and epigenes
I read and understood Parkinson 50 years ago, and haven’t yet seen any contrary evidence. In fact the real situation is vastly worse now than when he was writing. My usual question is: Given that criminal agencies and organizations CAN’T AND WON’T be deleted, how do we set up competing forces? My usual answer is…
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Y no strikes?
Reddit pointed to this important article on the Final Victory of the financial sector over the real economy. = = = = = START QUOTE: The financialisation of households is an important overlooked missing piece of the declining strike activity ‘puzzle’. The term ‘financialisation’ broadly describes the increasing dependence of nonfinancial actors on financial institutions…
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The one time we broke Parkinson
Demonic bureaucracies can’t be “reformed” or “investigated”. They must be deleted. Back in 2016 I was trying to figure out how Wilson’s demonic bureaucracies were removed. His US Food Administration and US Shipping Board controlled a large section of the economy in a precise way that sounds mighty familiar now, with good old Phases and…
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Be careful what you wish for
When RFK jr started organizing around the vaccines, I was instantly suspicious. As I repeated endlessly, vax is a proper part of public health, while strangulation and imprisonment are proper parts of war and crime and mass murder. When you see a Good Part / Bad Part separation, it means the Bad Part is going…
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Same price
This house in Enid was featured in a real estate ad in EnidBuzz: Elegant old mansion in an elegant part of town. Zillow showed a house in my part of Spokane for exactly the same price: Default FHA module from the late ’40s, in a drab working-class neighborhood. What’s the exact same price? $350k. Well…
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The open source spirit
Halfway related to skill as copyright and secret. One of my perpetual Why So Late questions is electric starting for cars. Electric cars came before gas cars, and several of the early makers had both types at once. Studebaker electrified its buggy in 1902, then bought the Garford company in 1904 to join the gas…
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