I was just thinking Blazing Saddles, keep a Bart. It would shut up all the people who insist you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today. It would be hilarious for Kermit to play the super drunk Waco Kid. That said, I’m not sure if the treatment would push the satire of racism, or defang it.

I’m pretty sure he was wearing the sash from his first scene in Encounter at Farpoint.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious… At first Ford formed a theory to account for this human behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep on excercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

One of my favorite passages from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

For some reason being a nerd about heraldry scratches an itch for me. Traditionally the “stain” Sanguine represents blood.

Red is the most common color in national flags. I wouldn’t want to cede the color to Nazis.

There’s something kind of clever about heraldic implications of the original (intentional or not) that this misses.

Supposedly, the first rule of heraldry is " the rule of tincture: metal should not be placed upon metal, nor color upon color". White represents sliver and yellow represents gold, so they should not touch (metal upon metal). There are many exceptions in heraldry, but the rule still kicks around. Vatican City’s flag explicitly breaks this rule to demonstrate that “Vatican follows God’s rules and not man’s.”

I find it clever that a flag of capitalism would have a field of gold and a giant roundel of silver (called a plate when silver, silver plates are also associated with wealth), and they touch to demonstrate that capitalism doesn’t care about the rules.

In heraldry red often stands for courage, and that’s not a virtue I associate with capitalism. Also a red roundel is called a tart, and tarts are delicious.

There’s lots of talk about the kids who didn’t wait 5 minutes, but I also find it interesting to read about the kids who did delay gratification. It’s not that they were superior specimens, or junior ascetics, or reborn Buddhist monks. They were as tempted as the rest.

They mostly avoided temptation by coming up with games to distract themselves. It’s something creative and it can both be learned and improved like a skill. It reminds me of the people who compete in memory games. It’s not a super normal talent, it’s games people can practice.

It does raise a question why kids who could do this were more academically successful later, and if kids who are taught this will have similar success later. Important questions that should be considered carefully.

Musk is trying to check all the boxes:

• Iteration X: Tesla, Solar City, Boring Co.
• New World Order: xAI, OpenAI, Zip2
• Progenitors: Neuralink
• Syndicate: PayPal, X (Twitter)
• Void Engineers: Space X

It’s like a Syndicate stooge staged a hostile take of the other conventions of the Technocratic Union, and it’s going about as well as expected. Cybernetics is a bit of a cheat as it’s in the overlap between Progenitors and Iteration X. If anything he’s trying to sideline Progenitors out as he boosts anti-vax statements.

He said force, not kinetic energy. They’re probably treating the acceleration term in F=ma as proportional velocity, which strikes me as naive, but it makes the math easier and it’s correct if the error bars are big enough… Functionally you’re comparing momentum at that point, but I imagine you can find some American truck built to evade CAFE standards that has a 4-1/3:1 weight ratio with some version of the Civic.

I’ve been working my way through NADDPOD, and there was a great session where

It was such a great session. It really emblemizes how I try to approach being a GM. Have a prepared roadmap, but have space around the road for the characters to take a roadrally off-road.

I mean, obviously I don’t know how the internals of how the party works from first hand experience. That said I seriously don’t think we should build them up into a bete noir. Every party is in the business of winning. The party went to the center because Nixon walloped McGovern, and Reagan crushed both his elections. Also, the DLC found a way to fund the party after labor support waned for a variety of reasons.

Did the party impede Sanders’ primary campaign against Hillary? It’s been acknowledged that they did. Of course he’s been a career independent, and not a party member for one thing. Probably more importantly, party leadership still doesn’t think going to the left will win nationally. Of course we choose our candidates through a primary process, but like it or not, the party’s job is to win elections, and it’s not outside the party’s mandate to support candidates who they think will win.

But party leadership isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t a conspiracy. It is a group of people trying to make sense of things and find a way to succeed. Of course the old guard is resisting change because they still think they’ve got the recipe for success. Time will tell how it plays out. It’s going to be hard work, and as party voters our ability to influence change in the party has been diluted by a bunch of consultants that are telling the old guard what they want to hear, and only face a reckoning every two years. I imagine, in the face of fascistic tendencies in the rightwing party, moderation and compromise will be even less attractive, even to a center left party. We’ve got to make our voice heard, and when we get a crack, we’ve got to deliver wins.

Indeed. It feels like a lot of historical context is missing in Lemmy political discussions. The Democratic party was the party of FDR, JFK, and LBJ. The Democratic Leadership Council took over the party after the left candidates failed to deliver election successes, but even then, the DLC had to do the work to take the party leadership positions, build a funding network, and win elections. Before that FDR had to wrestle party control from the the Dixiecrats.

Hopefully Hogg and allies will be successful in reforming the party once again.

If she’s anything like Phyllis Schlafly, why yes, the moment her husband tells her to get back in the kitchen she absolutely will! Right away! She’ll drop everything, her privilege, her power, her perks. Her entire staff will be S.O.L. after just a word from her husband. If he just says the word, why, she wouldn’t utter a word of protest. Honest!

I’m often reminded that while Jesus counselled his followers to turn the other cheek, he reviled the hypocrites.

Have you seen Dmge ? It’s web based, but it has fog of war and a few other nice tricks, if you’ve got the maps.

The number of warheads each nation maintains is agreed on in the START treaties, and those levels are determined by stockpile effectiveness. The US is recognized to have superior targeting and guidance systems, so they need fewer warheads to maintain parity with Russia’s stockpile.

The best possible outcome is for SDI and it’s descendants to be a complete waste of taxpayer money. If some clever chap comes up with a practical missile defense system, Russia would immediately generate enough warheads to overwhelm such a system and maintain parity.

Each missile represents a potential fault path to WWIII. We’ve been lucky with at least a couple near misses in our history. I don’t look forward to a future with more.

The scientific method is more about falsification than problem solving.

“If you ever succeed, devise and implement a test to see if it was a fluke.”

I too grew up in an era of action movies, where the good guy decisively self-defenses the bad guy to death, saves the world, goes home and has marital relations with the prom queen. It’s a powerful story, but ultimately it’s just a story.

Peaceful resistance does work, but there isn’t a single event that achieves change. It has to be an accumulation.

Rosa Park’s arrest didn’t achieve anything “in terms of change”.

Ghandi’s protest fasts didn’t achieve anything “in terms of change”.

When the Baltics had their singing revolutions, there wasn’t a single performance that achieved anything “in terms of change”.

All these were parts of larger efforts of peaceful resistance that culminated in change.

What did Cory Booker’s speech achieve? It’s too early to say. It’s possible it will be part of an accumulation that culminates in measurable results. On the other hand, it’s possible cynicism will poison the resistance and it will achieve nothing. We’ll only know once the history is written.

For comparison, the Betacel boasted 25 microwatts per cubic centimeter, and this Betavolt battery appears to have 88 microwatts per cubic centimeter. This will also have a longer lifetime also.

The Betacel was successfully used to power pacemakers. I suspect there will be more applications for power sources in this range today.

We’ve literally been told money is speech, but just as soon as people start organizing to vote with our dollar, we’re sabotaging everything.

Ok, so sure, a reasonably large chunk of all states education budget is going away, but for the states that do well, the hole will both be a smaller portion of the overall budget, and easier to make up.

No child left behind testing goes away, so the testing and standards all go away. You can bet the bottom 25 states in education ranking will quietly stop testing and claim they’re doing just great!

It’s the special Ed programs that are really going to catch hell. No dept. of Ed. no enforcement of standards. It will be the easiest portion to cut to save money, and the families left in the lurch will get nothing but thoughts and prayers to fill the gap.

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel more sympathy for the Democratic party. The party simply can’t win with the left.

The party leadership worked against Sanders candidacy because they are convinced a liberal can’t win in America. I don’t agree, but recognize with Nixon and Reagan dominating over leftist candidates, Carter ekeing out a win as a centrist, Clinton winning convincingly as a centrist, and Obama winning as a rather vague candidate, recent history has given limited reason think a leftist national candidate is a safe bet.

But if voters are supporting Cuomo and the party doesn’t intervene the party is the wrong for not ignoring the will of the voters and tanking his candidacy.

I mean I get it. The left wants their candidates to win, but the lack of consistency is grating. It makes the centrist seem more sensible.