Fleecing the Sheep

What amused me most on the occasions I tuned in to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck were the commercials. Gold was being pushed big-time, and at a time when gold was already oversold. Those cynical advertisers certainly knew where to find the goldbugs. Obama the Muslim Anti-Christ was going to bring on the Apocalypse, and only gold would retain any value, see. It's common sense, don't ya know.

Well, turns out gold has fallen from 1700/oz to 1200/oz this year. That is a double-digit decline, and the bottom of the market is not even in sight yet. I expect that the market will fall to as low as $800 an ounce. Looks to me like the right-wing sheep have been shorn, and those gold merchants are cackling all the way to the bank. I suppose they knew their audience and capitalized upon them. Ain't that just the beauty of Capitalism?

I may not the greatest forecaster of markets, but I know one thing. Buy cheap, sell dear.

And if an investment is being sold through paid advertisements, then it definitely is not a good investment. I wouldn't be interested in anything sold by commercial on Fox News, because it would be tainted already in my view. Something is wrong with the program, and something is wrong with the products being promoted during breaks.

Good Memories

When a loved one dies, whether friend or family, one remembers the good days, the Spring, Summer and Fall, but not the Winter of life. The same applies as when savoring a pot of tea--can it be judged by the dregs? I cherish the good memories, but dismiss the last stages of decline as being irrelevant, other than providing a lesson. I will probably want to skip the very worst stages of decline myself rather than endure them, because I don't really see the point, all things considered. I don't put any stock in religious notions of leaving existence "in God's hands." I will place my own existence in my own hands, thank you very much, and keep the change. Indeed, we are the hands of God.

New Espionage Post for China in New York

China purchased a new espionage headquarters in New York City today--the Waldorf Astoria, where lots of Western elite discuss secret and personal matters. How much do you want to bet that the top business and political leaders in the U.S. will be totally clueless and book rooms there without any awareness that everything they do, say, and transmit through cyberspace will go directly to China?

If You Booze, You Lose

Based on the content of the some of the comments I've received, particularly from Anonymous readers, I am recommending the Freethinkers Alcoholics Anonymous web site to help those damaged and impaired minds kick their addiction to alcohol. Hell is found in a bottle. Remember, if you booze, you lose. Be a winner. Stop drinking, and start Thinking. Turn that frown upside down!

China's Hired Thugs

More news from Hong Kong. I really don't see how anyone can defend China. Whatever it was before, a communist dictatorship evolving into a capitalist dictatorship, right now it's a kleptocracy, with crooks holding the power and unwilling to share any with the people.

A country with no morality at all and no legitimate legal system and no free press and no uncensored Internet is not the country I want to download software from. For that matter, I don't think our Western business leaders are wise to send all our jobs over to China. They may make a little money in the short-term but in the long-term they or their descendents will regret that fateful decision.

Young People Have to Tackle Climate Change

The young people are going to have to tackle climate change, because they are the ones that will be chiefly impacted by it--they and, moreover, their descendents. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that they are politically active and intensely engaged in the electoral process.

I'm sure that is the case. I'm sure young people are very concerned about politics right now, and not too interested in video games, mobile devices, music or social media. I'm sure everyone in the 18-25 range is voting in every election and reading about politics on a daily basis.

If not, too bad for them. The planet, she is a-changing, and there's not really much being done to stop the changing. Pretty much business as usual is the rule of the day. Either people are interested in politics, or they're not. They don't see climate change as impacting their daily lives yet. By the time it does, that will be too late. Surely the stock market will suffer repercussions. Betting on those 401-K's probably isn't as safe as people think it is. More of a gamble, I would think, a gamble that the investments will actually pay off, that the market will be around, the government be around. Governments, companies, and the wealth of nations have come and gone in human history. I bet the Romans thought their government would be around forever. Well, it wasn't. One day the barbarians took over and stole all the crown jewels. It used to be that England was one of the richest countries in the world. Of course, America has lost much wealth in recent history, due to the stupidity of the leaders who will just blow money on anything, money that the nation does not have, by the way. Deeper in debt we go, year after year.

Perhaps the survivalists are right, and it's a good time to stockpile food, tools, and weapons. The trouble with their strategy lies in predicting the actual timing and severity of calamity. Climate change by its very nature is unpredictable. I would expect random, gradual alterations rather than anything sudden that would justify hiding in a hole. I'm not against hiding in a hole. Certainly an underground cave would be preferable to above-ground radiation, extreme climate, or violent conflict. I think survivalists may be trapped in a nuclear apocalypse mindset, thinking that a crisis will be sharp and sudden, rather than slow and inexorable. It is difficult for me to believe that nations would be foolish enough to exchange nuclear weapons against each other. Self-preservation is a powerful instinct.

Lesson of Hong Kong

China is reneging on its promise to let Hong Kong be free for fifty years only because its leaders have calculated with cold political calculus that they can defy and break their promise to the West and get away with it due to the economic interdependency between the West and China and the new strength of China. This is worth noting. In the future, expect China to break all promises, whenever and wherever it can, because it is absolute evil aligned with the darkness. If annihilating all Americans would produce a profit and no consequences, then the Chinese would do so. They do not know the concept of morality and misinterpret it as weakness, as evil-doers always do. I foresee that China will take Taiwan, and risk the next world war when they also muscle into neighboring countries, such as Japan and the two Koreas. First will come demands for concession, which will only increase, and then will come land grabs, because the leadership thirsts for power, for domination. Perhaps America will be diminished then and incapable of being the white knight any longer, because our strength is every year squandered stomping ants and anthills to no purpose, squandered on pointless exercises in pride and vanity to remind our greying population of past glories in WW2. But the glory days are gone, and debts accumulate, and not much is made in the U.S.A. anymore, and the U.S. is dumbing down and wallowing in corruption and chronic mismanagement that only gets worse year after year with no end in sight. There must some day arise a new champion in the West, a land with better governance--where will that be?

China's Nastiness

Anyone in doubt of how nasty China can be need only look at Hong Kong, where the population has been told "no more democracy."

China is a tyranny, same as it was twenty and even fifty years ago, and anyone alive in 2014 who doesn't recognize that is delusional. I've listened to students from China tell me everything is OK over there. Well, everything is OK for them, because their parents are in the Communist Party elite that can afford to send them overseas for a nice education in the U.S. Everything is not OK for the other billion-odd people in China that have to work for a living instead of stealing through graft and corruption in the Communist Party. Also, those apologist students from China know next to nothing about their own country and its history other than what the CP feeds them. China today is a feudal system, with knights, barons, dukes and a king and his court, and a vast number of no-account peasants the leadership regards as disposable, to the extent that the very air they are allowed to breathe brings death and misery. "Gas 'em like the cockroaches they are," the Chinese leadership says about their own people. Look up the rates of asthma and other diseases related to poor air quality in China for an eye-opener, that is if the authorities even publish such data in a system where virtually all facts deemed even slightly embarrassing are censored, and those who embarrass the leadership are sent to prison--if they're lucky enough to matter; if not they get the knife in the back, and their body tossed in a ditch.

Republicans Envy China

The only reason Republicans are gung-ho to invade the Middle East again is there's no one that can put up a fight over there. It's a pretty safe way to use a bunch of munitions and thus enrich the defense contractors that bankroll Republican candidates. We have just as much cause to invade Hong Kong on the side of the protesters, who just want democracy. But Republicans are scared of China. They also admire China, and want the U.S. to be exactly like China, with no voting rights, and workers earning $1 an hour with no benefits, and the political elite taking billions for their own personal wealth. That is Republican Heaven. The Republicans are doing everything in their power to remake the U.S. into China. They scaled back voting rights wherever and however they could, kept the minimum wage frozen for decades, and have siphoned trillions from the Treasury and the Social Security fund to finance their overseas adventures. Now the U.S. is trillions in debt to China, the darling of the Republican party. Instead of building factories or doing anything good in the U.S., all those trillions got flushed down the toilet in the Middle East, just so defense contractors could score easy money without working or thinking very hard.

Alcoholism and Republicanism: A Perfect Match

Alcoholism and voting Republican go hand-in-glove. If one doesn't think, it's easy to vote Republican, and drinking stops thinking better than any other substance. If you don't value your own life and don't really care about the world, then Republicans are a natural choice. They promise no change--the status quo--the country falling deeper into debt, getting more polluted, with fewer jobs and more overseas conflicts.

It's the people that think about things and care about things that are going to vote for good governance. They care about the future and want a world worth living in.

NewEgg

NewEgg is cool except for one little thing--and you know that a geek is going to find that one little thing, and NewEgg caters to geeks, so they must have been forewarned.

NewEgg decided on its own without so much as a by-your-leave to change all their existing and future reviews to publish the customer's real name. The problem with that is that you may not want your negative review on a defective motherboard to pop up first thing when a potential employer is doing a Google search for your name.

I prefer to live my life in the way human beings have lived it since time began. My opinions, feelings, doubts and anxieties I keep to myself and my friends, and to potential customers and business associates, I present my professional self. I think it's stupid to spill your heart in public on the Internet, if you can possibly avoid it, that is, if you care at all about working in a corporate office environment at some point in the future. Jobs are hard enough to get without having an employer pass you over because you hated a hard drive NewEgg sold you ten years ago and spoke your mind about it, or didn't use proper punctuation or proper grammar.

All NewEgg cares about is NewEgg. They think their reviews gain more credibility with real names attached, and perhaps that is the case, but tough titty. I may buy from NewEgg on occasion to save myself the sales tax, but I won't review anything on NewEgg ever again.

Hong Kong Free No More

Over in Hong Kong, students are protesting the disintegration of "One Country, Two Systems" policy that allowed HK to be an oasis of liberty in the tyranny that is China.

Of course, if you read much Distrowatch, China is equal to the U.S., and we should all install Chinese software on our computers. Good luck with that.

China is the #1 threat to the world, with the actual means to achieve their dark vision, but Americans are obsessed over a bunch of nutcases in the Middle East that could not reason their way out of a paper bag. While we squander whatever is left of our treasury [Oops, nothing left there] the credit line China extends to us on bombing the ignorant savages in ISIS, China is just building more factories and taking more Western jobs away from the delusional West.

Bombing ISIS isn't in itself a bad idea, but how about using the very cheapest forms of munition, the cheapest, possibly expired stuff from the Viet Nam conflict, rather than these million-dollar precision bombs that are going to put us deeper in debt. Also, it seems to me that these rich Arabs could be paying us for the mercenary services we are rendering. If they want to hide under their robes while we do the fighting, then they need to cough up some of that oil money we pay them. I think the fight against ISIS is all about enriching the cronies of the Washington elite, just as overseas conflicts always are. National interest my foot. Beheadings of journalists who strayed into enemy territory do not equal a clear and present danger to the homeland. As usual, working people are ordered to pay the bill in order to enrich the elite, who are either stupid or corrupt--or quite possibly both.

ISIS Retards

The beheadings ISIS conducted seem like childish gestures compared to the vengeance the U.S. will wreak upon their organization. Perhaps ISIS is a good example of the influence of Thanatos. Anyone with half a brain can see that the beheadings were contrary to the long-term interests of ISIS and its leadership. Not that much is required actually to antagonize U.S. leaders and get them in the mood for intervention, as anyone knows. Yet ISIS is not motivated by Reason, but by the desire to suffer and die, a basic human desire, apparently, a desire accentuated by their primitive, false religion. That Islam is a complete fabrication with no basis in reality and no beneficial influence upon mankind is also obvious to anyone with half a brain. At least Christianity had a nice message--love thy neighbor, and God is love. Islam is Submit or die, which is mere barbarism. And rather than submit or die, there is the third option--many of us proud infidels will opt to annihilate the fanatical Muslim(s). That seems like the better option, all in all, from every perspective.

Duplicates

One of the nice things in Windows 8.1 is that when one copies files in Windows Explorer, the file manager drops duplicates to the end of the copy queue rather than querying the user immediately with a prompt. In every Linux file manager I've ever used, the file manager prompts the user the moment it encounters a duplicate. What this means is that if you go away from your computer for five hours, then return, you may discover that the copy has not completed due to one duplicate file, and whether you choose to overwrite or skip that file, the copying may have another five hours left to go.

This is another of the reasons I upgraded from Linux to Windows 8.1 on my workhorse computers. I don't need to be waiting around for files to copy.

Lack of Class Consciousness

The paradox observed in the U.S., where working people continue to vote Republican, reminds me of domestic violence victims that continue to live with their attacker/rapist, and refuse to assist police in any arrest or testify against them, should the police arrest their attacker without their consent. Some people want to be poor and feel deep down that they deserve it. They feel that rich people are better than they are, and they gain a peculiar satisfaction from knowing their place, and the place of their children, who they feel, deep down, do not deserve good governance or any hope for a better future. That is why people vote Republican--it is an embrace of the powerful dark force of Thanatos, the inner desire to suffer and to die and be one with annihilation, the destructive force of the Universe. I think Thanatos explains much human behavior and is the primary counter-force opposing Reason.

Sticking with 14

I'm sticking with version 14 of Dungeon Crawl for the time being, because it seems to me the Devs just changed game play in 15 rather than adding new and interesting features to the game, and game play was the least of all my concerns. I may tune back in with version 16 if it has something really appealing to entice download.

Rich v. Poor Law

The verdict in the Oscar Pistorius case is explained in three sentences. The rich kill and then go free to kill again. The poor go to jail. This is our corrupt system of justice, and it has not changed since ancient times. The father of the victim has the moral right to slay the murderer, and I doubt any jury would condemn him for it.

Things that Make You Go Hm...

My playing of the latest Crawl, 14.1, has resulted in some "Hm..." moments. For one thing, there's some kind of Ring of Liberalism I discovered in the Ziggurat Sprint. Could that just possibly be a tip of the hat to me or my regen.bat? Also, Death Knights are now recommended class for Ogres, as I maintained here in my blog was only right and just, all things considered. And then too, potions of poison now have a different description after my criticism. On a negative note, Spriggans had their wings clipped after I made note of their being better than any other race, which at one time they certainly were--back in the day when they could wear more armour. And lastly, Mummies have become empowered, now able to cast Vampiric Draining to regain hit points and benefit from rings of regeneration. Either my brainwaves are tuned into the same channel as the Devs or else there's another explanation. What I think is that a Dev or two has read this humble blog of mine, just browsing perhaps without really making a big fuss.

Well, enjoy! For I have long enjoyed the game and continue to do so. It is far better than its predecessors, although Larn did have rather a nice flavor, a personality, a culture all its own--but Larn has languished too long, while Crawl has flourished. I especially like Crawl's relatively new Sprint and the Zot Defender modules, for variety's sake, a bit of spice for an old-time crawler like myself. I will never in a thousand years get into the modern high-resource video games when my imagination can be easily and cheaply engaged by Dungeon Crawl, which has such superb strategic features. Thank goodness that some people continue to develop it and add amazing new features.

Scotland's Independence?

I am opposed to Scotland going its own way, because the UK is a fine country as it is, and I don't want anything to weaken it. More division and more atomization is not what the present age calls for. How will Scotland compete with China and Russia? How will Scotland deal with war and other crisis on its own? It seems silly and backwards to me to abandon the UK with its marvelous public health system and public welfare system and for what? I have yet to read any solid reason for separation other than dissatisfaction with the current administration.

Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is the funniest man alive. . . and his Daily Show will be watched even a thousand years from now for insight into our time. Of course, he is backed up by a phenomenal team, brilliant writers who furnish him with killer material by research, insight and wit. It is a mistake to overlook these silent partners, but I do not know their names. Yet if I did, then we would overlook the people who support and nourish those people, such as their families and friends, and so on in a neverending chain that eventually encompasses the whole world. Jon is golden product of our age, and we are proud to have produced him. He is creating classic television that will never die.