Remember. If you want to you can always just "Google it."
Oh.

Google search is hiding auto-completed text related to the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

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^{Oatmeal rendered by Suzuki Falco}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:35 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Heh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Mar 25 17:52:47 2019 (PiXy!)

2 If I didn't hate cream of wheat so much I can't make myself gin up faux outrage over it, I'd've found a controversy for ya.

Posted by: Rick C at Mon Mar 25 20:34:13 2019 (Iwkd4)

3 Ah, but what do you put on it?

Posted by: EdwardM at Tue Mar 26 20:23:23 2019 (i8IsI)

4 Raisins usually.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Mar 26 21:39:13 2019 (xOgT9)

5 Cream of Wheat is farina, not oatmeal. Oatmeal has texture. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Mar 27 08:36:47 2019 (JPmnA)

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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It appears that our posts are being lost between chair and keyboard and we have decided that this is due to tachyon interference from transmissions emitted by the Dero from far beneath the Earth's crust in an attempt  to break the tyrannical hold on their third and fourth chakras that is being exercised by the Shapeshifting Reptoids from Draco who have taken refuge with the Antarctic Space Nazis in the hollow Earth after having to abandon their forward operating base in Cydonia after the Greys razed it with ortillery to prevent the Reptoid's and Nazi's joint (and evil) plan for global domination from interfering with the Greys' seedy and completely illicit fetish tourism and surprisingly lucrative manipulation of local (Terran) cattle futures. 

It is possible that the situation may be more or less complicated than that, but further investigation is needed and in any event things are hectic here, so we've decided to conclude this second rambling run-on-sentence with a picture of Grea who is a shining example of the societal virtues facilitated by hybrid vigor (and who has probably appeared in more TV series than any other half-dragonette).

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:27 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Greetings gentle reader, we are working diligently to keep our comments free of salt, water, modified potato starch, sugar, sodium nitrite, pork and.......ham.
So, as I run down the ingredients on a can of SPAM,
I note the ingredients list both pork AND ham.
The world is all muddled,
and I am befuddled
so I'll just throw up my hands and scream "Damn!"

While I contemplate this conundrum, here is a period panorama by Pochi.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:03 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Art by Nanasin

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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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While we weren't looking, Nebraska got wet.

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This is is developing, but it appears that an unclear number of people-shaped colostomy bags stormed into New Zealand holy places and slaughtered people until they ran out of ammo, or in one case, were repelled by an armed citizen.

Like with the Charleston shooting some years ago and the recent atrocity in Pittsburgh, these servants of Moloch butchered a room full of innocents whose only crime was that they had shown up to render alms and pray. 

Before engaging in this obscenity, one of these fiends published a manifesto in which he praised environmentalism, Trump, the white race, and....Candace Owens. He denounced capitalism, individuality, global warming, immigrants, overpopulation, and pop culture.

The repugnant ghoul has thus very helpfully provided everybody in our highly polarized society with some issue they can use to pin this obscenity on their political opponents.

And everyone seems to be taking the bait.

I sit in dread of where this will lead, but I am numb, and too sickened to express my foreboding in words. Here, instead, is an excerpt from Yeats.  

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^{Art by Kurushi}

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We have, from top to bottom:
A: A stoic, calm, and reasoned You-Tube commentator.
B: A Brexiteer and, well,  a bit of a troll.
C: A mellow, and yet delightfully wackadoodle libertarian loon from Vermont.
D: A generally left leaning journalist whose reporting has been quite wide ranging.

A: Matt Christensen



B: Sargon


C: Styxhexxenhammer

D: Tim Pool


All have been focusing on threats to free speech of late and most, if not all have been targeted over the last week or so by doxxings and calls for deplatforming.


Meanwhile, as this is being typed, other Youtube channels seem to be fine.
It's probably nothing. Just an odd coincidence.

UPDATE: As of 19:00, all 4 sites are back up, but they were down for over an hour.

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...regarding best practices for salespeople in the Taco industry from an expert in the field.

^{"Spam and tacos are a singularly unappealing combination."}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:35 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Neat!
Some sculptor in Spain, using the extant sculptures as models, is creating hyper-realistic busts of the Roman Emperors.   

Julius Caesar


Nero

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Here's something to give existential threat assessors hives, and the rest of us hope.

It's Ryan Weed,  the CEO of Positron Dynamics who claims to have solved antimatter's production and containment issues. He's getting around the storage problem by the elegant method of avoiding it totally. They're generating positrons  on the spot (using Krypton79 decaying to Kr78 ) and firing them into deuterium to catalyze fusion. The neutrons from the reaction transmutes the Kr78 back to Kr79 and the associated 'splody travels out the tailpipe and goes "woosh".  Research is looking promising, but there are already some interesting spinoffs, which include a nuclear battery with a yield of as much as 100 watts a kilogram. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:55 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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^{*UPDATE: Welcome Dustbury readers!*}

One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes reports on the evolving opinions among the intelligentsia regarding the merits of distributing our metaphorical 'eggs' among interplanetary baskets, as well as freedom and individuality in general.

^{"Gimme a minute. I need more coffee and a couple of BCs after watching that."}

Well, while she's composing herself, let's check her open tabs and hop right into this interview of Phil Torres, by the Publisher of Universe Today, astronomy podcaster Fraiser Cain.



OK. Now MY head hurts.

Phil Torres is an expert in 'existential risk assessment' (which sounds like a potentially depressing job) and in the interview, he and Mr. Cain discuss and speculate upon various, mostly man made total catastrophe scenarios until about 35 minutes in when Cain brings up the importance of human space settlement as a potential hedge against omnicical unpleasantness.

Torres is strongly opposed to this. He believes that space settlement greatly increases the possibility of the total extinction of all life. Among his reasons is the notion that low probabilities given enough time eventually approach a value of 1. Many omnicidal scenarios involving a disgruntled knave or careless researcher with access to a lot of technology unleashing something unpleasant (like a super-flu or grey goo). Thus increasing the technology level as well as number of people exponentially (as is likely with a Dyson Swarm) will increase the odds that someone will somehow kill everyone and everything. Furthermore, he postulates that  in an age of extremely powerful technologies, game theory dictates that these societies would have to kill each other at the first opportunity.
...
...
He goes a bit further and states that the biggest problem is the impracticality of having an effective system wide government with light hour, minute, day, year lags. There will be so many different groups that they won't be controllable, thus chaos will reign and, again, game theory will dictate that they all have to kill each other, for some reason.


While this odd conclusion serves on the one hand to reinforce my preconceived misgivings about certain strict secularists who seek to use game theory as a stand in for morality^a , as someone who doesn't pretend to be particularly expert on the topic, I strongly suspect that torres doesn't quite grok Game Theory, (you know, the thought processes that got us through the Cold War without a human extinction event).

Torres does offer some solutions to his postulated problem, between 49:50 and 52:08. They mainly involve not letting people colonize space and being ruled by what sure sounds like a global totalitarian surveillance state. But it's OK because Professor Existential Risk Assessor suggests that it be run by an A.I. (!) He also suggests modifying people through drugs and gene therapy to be more compliant, peaceful and docile.

^{"Golly! That doesn't seem dystopian at all; She says with bitter sarcasm before getting more coffee."}

 This is the kind of stuff that you hear from some tipsy caller on late night AM radio right before they cut to an interview with Richard C. Hoagland^b.

But this isn't some secondhand report of what some shadowy figure at a conference allegedly said. This is a fellow who seems to be at least respectable. And he is openly advocating crazy horrible stuff.  

Alright, so a professor at a think tank is strong with the Cray-Cray. Honestly, this wouldn't warrant so many keystrokes were it not for the fact that this fellow is getting a lot of coverage right now, with this article being reprinted in a number of places.

And he's not actually alone in this view.

Daniel Deudney, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins has, for several years, been making the rounds with a similar message that space travel beyond LEO for earth observation is a waste, potentially dangerous to humanity as a whole and, indeed, immoral.

As I tend to avoid the sorts of totalitarians that to my dismay apparently inhabit college philosophy departments, encountering this anti-humanist claptrap was disheartening. However it was not as surprising as it might be in a sane, well adjusted world. You see, similar opinions albeit with different rationale have been percolating with increasing frequency for some years as the possibility of space settlement has become more plausible.

Some of this criticism is based on pessimistic (albeit science based) assessments of the practicality of, say, a Mars colony, but there's a certain 'crab bucket' dynamic in some of the pieces expressing skepticism of the whole enterprise.  Now, the proper response to these notions has been that if one doesn't approve or think it's safe, then one is free not to go.

However, the fatuous ivory tower arguments noted at the beginning are particularly troubling as they give those opposed to the expansion of humanity beyond this pale blue dot an argument based not upon bitter resentments, but upon the notion that men of letters say other people going forth to settle the void are a threat to Earth .

The arguments by Torres and Deudeny seem to me to be dubious at best. Even assuming that their notion that existence of people are a threat to peoples existence(!) and that more people represent a bigger threat, then you still have the the fact that the threat will never be zero until people don't exist. Presumably one wants to keep that variable at a nonzero value. As Torres himself points out, the probability of a catastrophe increases with time, so you're probably best advised to disperse targets, since something bad is going to happen eventually.

The notion that game theory requires a polity to destroy its enemies preemptively says rather more about the character of America's university philosophy departments than it does any prospective espatiers. Space is big enough that if two groups are culturally incompatible, they ought to be able to live apart^c.

Of course the merits of the theory are beside the point. This is indicated by the ear to ear grin Professor Torres has on his face as he explains how "sub-optimal" it is that we need to restrict people's freedom, but that it's OK because the brilliant minds proposing this are "progressives'. Once again, we have a problem, a crisis, an existential threat, and like all such solutions for every other crisis real or imagined, the academy have decided that the solution is reduced personal autonomy, increased government power and re-education. And above all, this crisis requires that those who dare to dream and have the courage to try and wrest a living from a hostile^d frontier never be allowed to escape.

Be aware as well, that those who demand we put all our metaphorical eggs in one basket, have a poor record of egg stewardship. For they have a tendency to embezzle those eggs to make omelets that never materialize.



<sup>a:The crazy, evil ones mostly

b: Seriously! Can you people please come up with a plan that does not sound like two dimensional villain in a grim-dark young adult novel. This would strain credulity as a parody. Hell, Prof. Deudney is literally advocating in one of the linked papers for one world government ASAP. Giving Alex Jones credibility helps no one except those who build water purifiers.

c: OTOH if the Westborro Church and Gay Aryan Thrust set up their O'Neal Cylinders next to each other, well that's their problem and if they kill each other then it's to our benefit aside from any need to clean up the debris field.
 
d:A lot of space enthusiasts do underestimate just HOW hostile space is. It's dry, radioactive, has no food and ventilation is charitably described as "poor".This doesn't mean that it's unlikely to be settled or undesireable to do so. Just that some paint too rosy a picture.</sup>

***************

^{"Science Babe" is actually Misaka Mikoto (or her 'sister') from A Certain Scientific
Railgun.}

^{*******************}

^{UPDATE: Edited particularly egregious run-on sentence. Replaced closing sentence that I'd managed to delete when I added the footnotes.}

^{*******************}

 

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The most important part of a successful manned spacecraft is the ability to return It's crew safely.

Oh look!

 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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...I was sitting at one of the deceptively spartan tables in one of Norfolk's best Chinese takeout places eating a dish called Marinated Boneless Crispy Chicken (With Vegetables) and noting that unlike Dragon and Phoenix, this one is exactly what it says on the tin. As I did so I became aware of an elderly woman going on and ON about something with the store's delivery driver and who seemed to be quite agitated about something when one sentence fragment caught my ear.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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All in all, I'm liking it. It's basically Firefox streamlined and with better privacy, though not as good in that regard as Epic. Like in Epic, I note that suspiciously relevant ads tend not to show up. It's less clunky and faster, but as a trade-off is not as comprehensive with its ad blocker as Epic. It doesn't update "trackers blocked" in the sidebar, but New Moon has a better search engine, and on the blog allows certain formatting options Epic didn't as noted in the previous post.  All in all, it seems to be a pretty decent browser and I'm pleased.

I've nevertheless been very happy with Epic and will still use it fairly often. For  instance, thanks to Epic's very aggressive ad and tracker blocking, (which sometimes causes issues) I'd forgotten what it was like to to be constantly assaulted by You Tube ads. Well, Pale/New Moon runs them just fine.

Still, privacy issues aside,  It's been a while since I forswore Firefox and I'd forgotten how pleasant that a browser based on its engine can be.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Testing to see how the blog functions in the New Moon browser, which is the Mac version of Pale Moon.

I’m not going to discuss the relative merits of astrology, but I’m going to say when an entire civilization formed on the enlightenment principles chases after it, things have gone seriously wrong.

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