Sometimes, things unexpectedly fall apart.
When that happens it's vital that one be able to think on ones feet and improvise.

Here's an example of what I mean.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:06 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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So...what's the backup plan?

Well, to begin with, we must deal with what is in front of us, and it is not pleasant.



 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:04 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Well said.

The big problem with the Democratic government over the past four years has been that they haven't owned or even properly addressed any of the serious underlying problems they've been facing.  Everything has been laid at the door of the previous administration, with the tacit assumption that now that the Republicans were out of power, the problems would be solved by fiat.

How to approach this over the next four years (as a conservative or libertarian) is tricky.  Getting liberals to admit that they have a problem and need to find a solution (really, many problems, and many solutions) is essential, but when people are invested in something, it becomes very difficult to get them to admit they made a mistake.  They will often back up their mistake with increasingly irrational responses rather than admit that the original decision was wrong.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wed Nov 7 06:38:37 2012 (PiXy!)

2 Bricky, you make some very good points, but you're too optomistic.  I and a number of people said the same thing regarding the social conservatives four years ago -- they were poison to our cause.  We tried to make a (third-party) go of it then, but failed due to lack of money, leadership, focus, and everything else needed to succeed.  Oh, and the minor matter of a schism -- by the social conservatives.  We never recovered, and I can tell you -- the liberals can't tell the them from the Tea Parties, and nobody can tell either from the "false flag" operations mounted by the GOP.

In four years, it won't be "difficult"; it will be impossible.  The EU will fall into chaos by then, and I expect Europe to start falling under the sway of fascists in fact if not name, with war to follow.  Greece is already heading there.  We'll be suffering from a broken economy, China will be in a succession crises and looking for a diversion, and Mexico is a mess. 

What to do now?  We can't "close the deal" when half the country thinks the "deal" is being taken care of the other half's productivity.  The voters will (continue to) flock to whomever promises them food and security. 

I'm too old and decrepit to tilt at windmills any more.  My plan is to hunker down in a ringside seat with a drink and try to survive watching the fall of Western Civilization.  The end is beer.

This assumes I'm not in the equivalent of a re-education camp somewhere for wrongspeak.

Oh wait, been there, done that.  It was called "diversity training."

Posted by: ubu at Wed Nov 7 13:29:26 2012 (SlLGE)

3 Ubu: I'm most assuredly not optimistic.
I'm a history buff. The road we are on is well traveled, but only in one direction.

Still, despair is a sin, and we simply must turn this around, because civilization is precious  and there is nowhere to run.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Nov 7 15:20:44 2012 (e9h6K)

4 1.  The NEA has raised a couple generations of American students to expect the government to give them what they want, and that there is no need to actually go out and earn it themselves.  Most of the young voters I have talked to have never been exposed an alternative political argument, and in fact have been conditioned to tune out any opposing viewpoints because they are, by definition, racist/sexist/Fascist/etc.

2.  The majority of the members of the supposed Fourth Estate were educated as "journalists", which means they feel their purpose is to advance a social agenda, and not report facts .  In other words, they are political propagandists.  Even as a growing number of voters turn away from traditional sources such as newspapers, magazines, and TV/radio news programs, most are still being spoon-fed one political viewpoint disguised as "news".

3.  The majority of the entertainment industry is also committed to pushing leftist agendas, just so long as they are exempted with special tax breaks, etc.

Right now, I just don't see any prospects to turning things around in my lifetime...

Posted by: Siergen at Wed Nov 7 19:23:21 2012 (Ao4Kw)

5 Eh... not all the glories of Rome were in the era of the Republic.

The one bright ray of sunshine, if you can call it that, is that though we are beset by problems, it's worse almost everywhere else. Things are exceedingly unlikely to go wrong here first, and the worse off it is elsewhere, the more we benefit in terms of relative competitiveness. Already it's one of the prime enablers of our spending spree - the treasury bonds keep coming in because if the US goes under, there's no other safe harbor for the money anyway.

And if things go bad everywhere? Well, not to put it too bluntly, but in a savage world of tooth and claw, nobody has fangs to match ours. In point of fact, nobody is even in the same class, excepting the broad class of "countries who have nuclear weapons", and of those none other have anything even remotely like our ability to project power abroad. You could even go so far to say that the current system of international trade and commerce exists entirely at the whim of the US - were we determined to stop it, not a single tanker would reach port, nor a single pipeline continue to pump gas. It's not good to make too big a deal of it, and obviously it would be PREFERABLE not to have to go down that road, but if the shit hits the fan...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wed Nov 7 22:56:07 2012 (pWQz4)

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Dixville Notch, a town in New Hampshire traditionally opens the polls at 12:01 on election day. As the town has less than 20 people they certify their vote early. They've been an accurate predictor in the past every single year since...um...2000.

Anyway they're the first polling location to have certified results as of a few minutes ago and the result was...A TIE!

I think we can all reach a bipartisan consensus that as omens go, this is a bad one.

UPDATE: Oh yeah...a prediction. I think its likely to be EITHER Obama in a squeaker, or Romney in a blowout.  That is, if it's Obama he will just get his base and little else. If it's Romney then some states will have shifted dramatically and I think it will be a cascade of red across the map.

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I hear that from time to time. As some of you know I'm in college. So on those occasions I allow myself, either be accident or design to by "outed" as to my political leanings I frequently get words to that effect.

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After some flickering, we have power back here, but in NYC, It's as bad as was feared.



As I type this power is out in Manhattan, the subways are flooding and the storm is not half over. AOL reports at least 13 people are dead.

This security cam pic is making the rounds, purporting to be of one of the Tunnels.

No power and 3 feet of water in the streets...

Weather Nerd posted this pic of the situation in Brooklyn:

UPDATE: and to the South, the Graveyard of the Atlantic claimed another ship and two of her crew.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:52 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Water water everywhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Oct 30 21:08:12 2012 (PiXy!)

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So the other night I was looking at Vocaloid videos, many of which had several less well known members of the Vocaloid pantheon.  In the process, I blundered into this one and was curious which particular Vocaloids these...
...Vocaloi..
...loi..
.....Oh no.
Oh dear God no...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Vonies?
Poor Fluttershy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Oct 29 18:55:04 2012 (PiXy!)

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We were already getting gale force winds and rain when it was down off Georgia. Hurricane force winds extend 110 miles from the center. Tropical storm force winds extend out nearly 500 miles.

UPDATE 14:50 Monday.
Raining cats and dogs outside wind is about 20 kts with gusts up to 50.

 It started raining gently around noon....in the bathroom.

Turns out the turbine vent was not sealed properly when the house was re-roofed last month. We've also lost some shingles. Much scampering was done, on a roof in high winds. My 70 year old dad refused to stay off the roof.  In any event thanks to a tarp, a trash bag and a hose clamp the precipitation in the bathroom has ceased.

Two feet of water standing in back yard, and our street is impassible to the west.  It took me twice as long as usual to get to work this morning due to detours due to flooding and horizontal trees.  Winds here are expected to pick up dramatically tonight  and return to tropical storm force for 16-20 hours. We're in that odd position of having had the storm pass us ....yet its getting closer.

Keep in mind we here in Virginia have only been and only will be grazed by this storm, In comparison New Jersey, PA and NYC (and possibly the Appalachians)  are going to get CLOBBERED tonight and tomorrow. I sincerely hope no one else is hurt...but I also hope James Woolcott gets very very wet.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:20 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 Keep your head down and watch for falling trees!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun Oct 28 14:15:05 2012 (+rSRq)

2 For some reason I can add a comment to this posting, but not to your most recent one.  Perhaps the newest post was water-damaged by the hurricane...

Posted by: Siergen at Tue Oct 30 19:04:39 2012 (Ao4Kw)

3 It was a PEBKAC error but Pixy fixed it anyway, because he is awesome!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Oct 30 21:16:47 2012 (e9h6K)

4 Not really PEBKAC, more of a corner case that should be handled better by the system.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wed Oct 31 02:35:54 2012 (PiXy!)

5 Musta been because you spelled "catastrophe" wrong, eh?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Oct 31 10:58:45 2012 (+rSRq)

6 Well, THAT was embarrassing. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Oct 31 12:29:25 2012 (e9h6K)

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^{"Hey. Are you a wildly unlikely coincidence? Guess what? I am too!"}

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I thought that the Gangnam meme was pretty played out, but via Ace  comes this...which is truly a thing of beauty, (unless you are sufficiently deprived and pitiful as to be unaware of Jack Burton)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:03 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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This is a couple of weeks old but it's kind of odd. It seems that up in Canada millions of gallons of Maple syrup went missing some time ago. Now the police have seized 600 barrels from a store in New Brunswick which has been implicated in the heist.

But that's not the odd part...

The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers reported large quantities of syrup missing last month during a routine inventory, finding empty barrels at a site of the province's global strategic reserve ...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:28 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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....Oregon is in the crosshairs. It looks like Steven's smugness has jinxed Oregon and doomed us all.

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... because with this screencap and caption, Sea Slugs has won.

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It's a bit early in the game to loose sleep over one of these fickle beasts, but Brendan Loy thinks this might well be a big thing.  In any event it could be quite bad to be in NYC or New England next week.

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A few weeks ago (on Drudge I think) there was a story about how Internet service providers were getting astoundingly efficient at tracking people who log into sketchy download sites like Mediafire and the sites that link to them heavily, but that they didn't seem to be doing anything about it and it was unclear what they were up to. I'll be damned if I can find it now, but I thought of it when I read this.

Under the new copyright alert system, Internet service providers (ISPs) will send a series of alerts to subscribers whose accounts may have been used to illegally distribute music, movies or other entertainment content via file-sharing. If the subscriber does not respond to the first set of alerts, which will include educational material on protecting copyrights and the consequences of illegal file-sharing, the Internet service provider may temporarily slow down their Internet speeds, direct them to an online tutorial when they try to access popular websites or implement other penalties--called "mitigation measures."

Internet users in Japan who illegally download copyright content will face new penalties after a change to the law. They will now face up to two years in jail or up fines to two million yen (US$25,700).

...uploaders of copyright infringing music and videos face a maximum penalty of a 10-year prison sentence and a 10 million yen fine (US$128, 318 ), said BBC news.

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^{The desmugification process will take years...So it's heartening to finally see someone take the first step.}

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