Shaky Danny

The slush piles are brimming with Trump stories. If I were a reader I would filter out anything with Trump in it, just as I do click bait. The premise for this one is that the Russians are disgusted with the lack of return on their investment. Envision Putin ranting. Not sure who to cast for Putin. Perhaps a computer generated image. He could sue but the argument is that his persona is in the public domain. Do the same thing with Trump. The lawsuit would be good publicity. If we can’t say Trump, say Stump, Putin; Putting. The joke is that Putin is speaking extremely vulgar Russian, or even breaking into heavily accented English but the sub titles are very proper. Maybe this will keep a PG rating. The title is rolling while Putin screams obscenities.  -We can’t even get his fucking briefing books. -There’s no actionable intelligence. -We have the briefing books. -You ugly ass wipe, that’s not the point. That fat shit can’t read. - What use is he, if he can’t rea...

I thought of this term while visiting Indianapolis and seeing their library and a nearby church converted to residential. Mullet refers to a hairstyle that is: -business in the front and party in back. A mullet is a type of catfish. Mullet head is a derogatory word implying poor and therefore stupid. This word became associated with the hairstyle a few decades ago. While I claim credit for Chicago Facade, peeling the facade off an old building then pasting it on a new one to satisfy nostalgia, the Mullet Architecture term already exists. Examples given are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winslow house in River Forest and modernist houses built in Nazi Germany which maintained a severe front. I am extending the term to Mullet houses that meet the requirements of historic districts while allowing large family rooms and kitchens. This type of restoration arises from envy of the Ranch styles with their dramatic living/dining and open kitchen areas. People living in Craftsman, Victori...

It seems feasible that we could have a spacecraft that hurtles toward the sun becoming a comet. The idea would be to apply acceleration at various orbital points that maximize speed with minimum expenditure. If we can go fast enough the relativistic effect would compensate for our lack of resources. After sufficient orbits we could then rejoin the Earth. To us it would seem that we had been gone a few months or even years, but we would have moved forward in time by hundreds of years. It should be possible to do some science at the outer boundary of our orbit. Measure the cosmic radiation, red shift, various observations of deep space. Maybe our UFO’s are other primates who are moving forward in time in order to avoid us. The reason of course is that once we had rejoined humanity, assuming that we are still here, we could then ask them, after we figured out how they spoke: -What do you think of Donald Trump? They would answer: -Who?

I don’t know what happened. Dope means they toyed with her and that is why she broke. I hate the word surreal. We all have some commitment to Bayesian analysis. Recognize that it is a probability and all probabilities include frustration as an outcome. Calvinism, the widely held belief enshrining Bayesian outcomes that things are as they are, frequently fails. This may be explained as fractal dynamic or failures of framing, but may simply be the consequence of chance. Confusing improbable with surreal simply means that your smug world view has been challenged by experience. Likely is not always so. Explication still requires likely. We are indisposed to accept the miraculous, even when it is so. In the case of Sandra Bland the difficult anomaly is that she died stoned. If you believe that she somehow smuggled the dope in herself, I suggest you attempt it. If all the various formality and process of incarceration guarantee anything, they ensure that you will not have marijuana...

Warfare has countless examples of ignoring the obvious, cavalry before World War I, fortified emplacements before World War II, techno-war before Vietnam; generals begin fighting each war with the lessons learned from the past. Now we have fighter planes. Drones are currently successful because they are used for ground support. This is a mission that has long been neglected. It is difficult to justify expenditure on fixed wing propeller aircraft even though they are the best means of assisting ground troops. Drones have stepped into this vacuum.  The next obvious step in Drone evolution is to give them jet capability. This is a disruptive technology. Defense companies are disinterested because it will end their expensive all-purpose fighter jets. Air forces don’t want to lose their fighter pilot culture. What a tremendous profit opportunity and with such a low entry level cost. Just as electric cars have made power engineers sexy again, stealth given opportunity to rad...

Proposed Congressional legislation: 1. The National Security Agency is only authorized to intercept communications. Any other such authorization it may require must be obtained from the Defense Department. 2. Nuclear weapons can only be launched with the initiative of the president and the four senior military commanders. There is no individual initiative to launch and any attempt to supersede this initiative nullifies it. 3. The President has no authority to initiate military action. All such action must be initiated by Congress. Congress must annually explicitly approve all military missions. Loss of approval ends the mission. Military violation of a nation’s sovereignty without explicit consent of congress receives minimum sentence of five years.  It has become obvious that our nation’s electorate does not respect the executive. For the safety of the country and the world, Congress must act. National Security Authority has been abused on several occasions, most notably ...

In the south, the British were freeing slaves. They were the side of freedom. Admittedly not enough to make a difference, else the British would have won. Up north, Attucks, who was a seaman and used to being treated even was just cutting up. John Adams, defending the British soldiers who fired on the crowd at, their trial, described Attucks as one of a “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mullatoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs". Attucks was upset about impressment and competition for jobs, ignoring slavery. One of the reasons for the revolution that Attucks started was to maintain slavery. A chump is someone who ignores the big picture: The legendary black sniper who fought for the confederacy or all the slaves who returned with Lee from Gettysburg. The 442 nd infantry regiment of Japanese Americans who fought while their families were interred. All pales in the face of 2.5 million Indians fighting for Britain after repetitive starvation holocausts contin...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently excoriated a reporter who revealed Emanuel’s travel plan to Cuba. It is generally thought that he was taking umbrage after a difficult interview. But most reporters are respectful of itinerary and family information, and Emanuel may well have had reasonable expectations that were violated. This brings me to the legendary example of the danger of this sort of privacy violation. One of the good things about People Magazine is that it provides an archive. So I will give you the offending article directly. This was in the Chatter column 11/10/1980 : “Hanging 5 Reportedly worth more than $150 million, John Lennon stands to augment that considerably when his new album, Double Fantasy, which he made with wife Yoko Ono, comes out this month. Where does all that money go? Well, the ex-Beatle has been investing heavily of late in the works of a young artist. Patrons of a gallery on Manhattan's Upper West Side saw one of the canvases when an employee of ...

Conspiracy theory is in disrepute because it has become a religion.  People want to believe that there is someone in charge who knows what they are doing.  Just because there isn’t someone in charge who knows what they are doing doesn’t mean that people don’t conspire.  Watergate is where conspiracy theory becomes pop art criticism. I have a possibility. Everyone imagines a conversation where Nixon is told that he has to take the fall and he says in that Nixon voice: -I’m not going without a pardon. My question is when that conversation takes place and with whom. People naturally put that conversation at the end of his service.  This doesn’t make logistical sense unless it occurred at least as far back as the second election. Nixon has to be complicit in his own impeachment. Why would Nixon want to be impeached?  Because he required a pardon. Tricky Dicky, the evil monster with the world on his enemies list, knew that he would spend the rest of his li...

No one believes Trump will be President. They fail to realize that he will, of course, change all his positions after he is nominated: -Of course I was lying, how else would I get the nomination?  Usually politicians shade their position rather than flat out contradict it. But we are talking Trump: -Abortion is necessary. You think I’m stupid? Hey, I’ll kill the kids myself. If Carson can be president, I can be a doctor. -Open borders, everybody gets in. Why check? They can’t be worse than what we’ve got. -When I’m president, I’ll turn the Pentagon into a combination mall, condos and offices. -If Warren won’t be Vice President then I want her in treasury.  -No more Obamacare. We will have traditional Republican single payer. -Legalize it, all of it. -Get the Police off the streets, safer for everyone. -My first act as president will be to line Goldman Sachs against the wall and shoot them. Citibank? What Citibank? HSBC goes to Guantanamo, after we send t...