Prometheus

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

No one is quite sure who he was. Or at least the mythology makes a right hash of it.

Man, god or Titan. Titan surely, because he stood above gods and men, principles unwavering.

What we do know is that he liked humans, mankind. Which as we know is the original sin, unforgivable by the old horrors who called themselves gods and acted like a passel of pedophilic, fornicating, warring, rooting animals so lost to their pleasures that their entire reason was devoted to justifying them.

Sure, they said they did things for the good of humans. And sometimes they might sort of have, sideways, accidentally. Athena gave the Greeks the olive, after all, but you can bet — more or less — it was accidental to some other scheme of hers. Or perhaps she wanted to see them struggle in vain with the more-pit-than-flesh bitter fruit. Who knows?

Mostly they did things for their own good, and covered up their crimes with other crimes.

And then Prometheus, man, god or titan, who cares? went and gave the groveling, stupid, dirty humans fire.

Fire. Power. Energy. The ability to have that fire, that power, that energy do work for them, so they need not work themselves into early graves. Smoked meat, that means you don’t need to hunt every day. Food that’s easier to digest so babies and elderly people eat better. And by the by, the turbine, the nuclear plant, the car engine.

And light. Don’t forget the light. Light to see that the gods, presenting themselves as beautiful and golden were really a scabrous collection of old horrors, the old demons of mankind feasting on despair and making things more difficult for humans, because they can.

So they chained him on a mountain and had an eagle eat his forever rejuvenating liver.

Brother. He got off lightly. They probably wanted to do worse to him, but let’s face it, demons are utterly devoid of imagination.

Which is why they need the dark. And they try to make humans even more miserable than they themselves are, all the while trying to sell us on the idea they’re noble and perfect gods.

Perhaps it’s true that this is the only time this has happened. That this is the only advanced civilization of mankind. If so, whoever created the old myths had our measure and their measure: the measure of humans posing as gods, pretending to be something more powerful and special and holding others down in unending misery.

(Waggles hand. I’m agnostic on the matter. I’ve taken note of both the woo-woo insanity of the “lost civilization” crowd and the way the genesis of modern man keeps receding into the mists of deep time quietly, in official channels, by serious scientists, until soon it won’t make any sense with the rest of the biological history of the Earth. And since I can see sixty from where I stand, I cackle my old woman’s cackle, and touch the side of my nose and say knowingly “There’s a lot going on we don’t know nothin’ about.”)

What I do know is that we’re living through a new phase of a very old war. Very old.

The old horrors who think themselves gods, and don’t believe in anything greater than their own petty and dissolute will and pleasures, are trying to drive us down to the dirt our ancestors escaped. Sometimes quite literally: banning machines that wash, and water that cleanses, even though the justifications make no sense.

And they’re trying to turn out the lights. They need the lights off, so we can’t see them for what they are, and so we can’t communicate.

We need an army of Prometheus. We need people who reject the obfuscation and gaslighting.

We need people who find ways around their petty restrictions on energy.

We need people who hold the light aloft and say “Those aren’t gods. They’re very naughty spoiled and superannuated children.”

Be Prometheus. In whatever capacity you can, shed light on the truth. Hold aloft the torch. Make the darkness, the evil, the hatred of humanity recoil.

What are they going to do? Chain you on a mountain and have an eagle eat your liver?

Is that worse than make you live in filth and darkness fearing your own thoughts?

How?

There is no choice between cake or death. It’s just the eagle or forever darkness because a boot is stomping on your face, forever.

I know which one I choose.

I’ll continue holding up the torch. If you do too, soon enough the darkness will run out of places to hide.

On the count of three, light up your torch and lift.

One

Two

Three!

208 thoughts on “Prometheus”

    1. I too thought the post was the start of a new short story.

      Love the analogy. I definitely can see Pelosi, Biden, Kamala, etc., in the light as Demons in human suits, while they think themselves as gods. Now that you’ve pointed it out.

      Hefting the light, so the shadows they cast in the light show them as the demons from h*ll that they are, or the puppets of demons or their rounded shoulders of aliens who want our fair world.

  2. > And light. Don’t forget the light.

    If we ever get visitors from space, Earth will show up as a sparkling jewel in the dark. And they’ll hear the seven-thousand-odd satellites in orbit, lighting up the radio spectrum as they chatter.

    1. Are you sure they aren’t here already? Maybe they decided they could get us to turn off the lights and revert to the Stone Age without violence that might mess up their new planet. Would anybody be terribly surprised if the bunch in Washington all turned out to have round shoulders and refused to take their shirts off? (Yes, I’ve been re-reading The Puppet Masters.)

      2. was just watching part of an interview with Gloria Allred … she looks more and more reptilian every time i see her … one of Them, Right along with Nancy and Chuck and George and Justin and Angela and Jacinda and … well, They are everywhere there is crime and corruption. They do not live in my tiny, poor, flyover, town — but They have some worshippers even here.

        1. Some of them are below reptiles. Jellyfish mock Romney for being spineless. I swear that creepy mayor of Chicago has to be a Deep One wearing a human suit made by something that never saw a human before.

      3. There is, really, something decidedly foul about many of them. I tend toward some very human myths, though, rather than extra-terrestrials. So many of them have gotten so old, and yet they still cling to power. They were beautiful in their youth, many of them; look up pictures of young Nancy Pelosi or George H. W. Bush (or his son, in his Air National Guard days). Even Bill and Hillary lit up a room, in their own ways. Most people would be anxious to relinquish power, at this point, but they have somehow retained the drive to hang on to it.

        Whether it’s the weight of so many sins, or the side effects of the medical procedures that have allowed them to stay in the game, they have become obviously decrepit and ugly. Biden, of course, doesn’t look like himself at all and is obviously no longer present. Dorian Grey, or the Ringwraiths fading into nothingness come to mind. The younger ones, of course, are still beautiful–AOC, or Ilhan Omar for example. All will love them, and despair. But the older ones, the ones with power or who play front-man for the powerful…

      5. “It is not God who kills the children, not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us” — Rorschach, “Watchmen”

        Some humans have a will to power so strong that any price is worth paying to achieve it, whether they are the hero of their own story or whether they know what they are and enjoy the benefits of power too much to flinch from it’s price. They have always been with us, they will likely always be with us. The trick is to lock them away from civilized humans, rather than to put them in charge.

  3. I gather one of the reasons homo erectus got replaced was they gave no thought for the future. When they were full, they didn’t lay in for tomorrow. When they had rocks that were good enough for their stone axes, they didn’t look further, even when far better rocks we within sight.

    And so, they stagnated.

    I suspect once the for-thinkers evolved into the scene they very quickly created early civilization. And the self domestication process likely only took a few generations: just looks at how quickly it was possible to breed domestic foxes.

    Then the complexity hit a point that the average person couldn’t see everything, and stuff slowed down until we figured out more. We seem to do these burst then pause cycles.

    1. Cats don’t lie about taking cat naps because they are lazy. They are conserving energy for the next hunt.

      Horses don’t graze for hours on end because they are gluttonous. They are extracting energy from a low-energy source.

      Then along came this ape that found you could pre-digest food with this thing called fire and so extract more calories with less digestive effort (and calories).

      It took a while to adapt to the extra energy. We have weak jaws, wimpy jaw muscles, tiny mouths, dinky stomachs, and both intestines are, to tell the truth, small. That didn’t evolve overnight, and neither did new habits.

  4. Rar!

    I have chosen to enter this fight by publishing my ‘for all ages’ series starter last week, which is sort of a Narnia meets Anne of Green Gables story, and explicitly mentions God along with cool stuff like floating islands and magical schools and companion animals. Counter-culture warriors, here I come! XD

    1. There will *always* be a market for all-ages entertainment. At least as long as there are children, because we all were children once. More good, honest stories that fit that bill are a good thing. Bravo!

      1. I’m writing as fast as I can, and I’m certain that Sarah and the rest of the scribblers who hang out here are too! But there are only so many hours in the day and we all have families, jobs, commitments to others, or any combination thereof!

      2. …huh, I thought that’d do a nifty preview. Maybe if I do the Amazon link directly (books2read links to all the stores):

        (if this doesn’t work I’ll stop, sorry x_x)

        1. Courtesy is always appreciated. If the Hostess approved you advertising on her site, should you not mention that permission? And if not, should you violate her good nature?

          1. I appreciate you looking out for our hostess and the regulars here! But Caitlin is a regular and I have advertised here before, after asking permission! I wouldn’t just show up and strafe someone else’s comment sections with ads, or ask my readers to. That’s awful. -_-

          2. I had assumed that providing a link to someone who had asked for it was okay. I do apologize if it wasn’t

        1. Oh, send it anyway! That way it’ll get seen by the people who look for things to read on Sundays!

          …this encouraging comment brought to you by someone else who’ll probably be a slot or two below you in the promo post. 🙂

          1. Yay! I will, even though I’m worried about Sarah’s energy levels. Telling our hostess to rest probably won’t work though (it wouldn’t on me)…!

            1. I tell her to rest, and she ignores me… though to be fair, my Calmer Half has been telling me the same thing for days!
              ..I’ve been trying to obey him. It’s kinda working. Ish.
              At least I agreed to avoid weightlifting until I’m off antibiotics?

        2. Yes, Sundays are the best. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t get to the comments on many posts. (Actually, I need to get off of here NOW – I’m just lucky that the city bulk pickup almost always gets to my neighborhood last, as it started today – and I am nowhere near done with what I need to get out onto the curb. BYE ALL!)

    4. The Oni books are going to have a slow-burn romance with no sex before marriage and decent people trying to do the Right Thing even when it’s overwhelming odds!

      …Man, that’s counter-culture in the extreme, huh?

      2. It is, actually… people comment about the ‘no sex before marriage’ relationships in my books a lot.

        2. I got a 1 star rating on one of my books because there wasn’t any sex in it. On a book clearly labeled as “clean.” I take that 1 star rating as a badge of honor.

          1. The number of readers who don’t read blurbs (even when they’re short) still surprises me. -_-

    5. Haven’t you heard? No such thing as All Ages. If it has graphic heterosexual sex, it’s Adults Only. Otherwise, it’s for kids.

      ^^;;

      1. You know, as funny as that is I spent a long time thinking about that before deciding how to market it. o_o

    6. Creatives, brave creatives, will hold the torch and shine the light for the rest to follow. Well done!

  8. I had a dream the other night where I told somebody off by saying “May you get everything you deserve.”

    And yes, they were part of a group trying to keep others down and trapped.

    1. The wife says her greatest hope and greatest fear is that we all get what we deserve in the end.

        1. Ya beat me to it! 😀

          All I can add is a transcription:

          “You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”

  9. This is something I’ve been saying for years. All of these people are some form of neo-feudalist, they want to be at the very least some kind of nobility and have all of the privileges of that “nobility.” They need to have massive proof of higher status than the other monkeys, because God knows that they can’t get it any other way…

    And, this has to be a terrible time for the neo-feudalist. Even now…most of the peasants have far too much access to things that make the neo-feudalists important. They can drive anywhere, travel just about anywhere, eat just about anything, have too much so that when their betters give them table scraps…they know that they’re being conned.

    And they can see. Oh, they can see! I’ve got people that normally don’t care about a lot of the awards shows noting that all of these “important people” are wandering around unmasked…but the Morlocks, the regular staff, are. Almost…uniformly so.

    Keep the fires burning. Even if it’s burning the neo-feudalists at the stake to light things while we fix things and go around, over, and through them.

    1. The thing is like children they only see the rewards NOT the obligations.
      This is WHY they think giving people the trappings of a middle class will make them middle class, it doesn’t. The people given these don’t have the values and traits that allow them to continue in the middle class. As soon as the Government money isn’t coming in they revert. They actually never left, they could just buy more with Government Money.

      Just like not paying the rent. How many people put aside money for when the rent became DUE? 30%, 20%, 10%, or less. Did they REALLY not have money for the rent or did they just spend it buying things they didn’t need and have nothing to show for.

      Give a people food, house, spending money without requiring anything from them and what happens? They soon believe that it is OWED to them, it is their just due and they will demand that you continue doing it forever. If you DARE to cutback or expect them to do ANYTHING they will turn to VIOLENCE because you are attacking their very existence and way of life. It has ever been thus. Remember the CROWDS of ROME.

      1. I know that I’ve been putting away a LOT of money into savings, because I suspect it’s going to be a rough time for a while. I also know a lot of friends had lost hours and jobs and most of the replacement jobs are barely minimum wage.

        But, I also know a lot of people that were very happy with not having to work (some with valid reasons, even).

  10. Our lights, and heat, and internet, and etc. went off for around four hours yesterday. Power grids don’t respond well to three day beautiful snow falls when such toppled trees on the transmission lines.

    Two day’s earlier when I drove to town to buy almost prohibited drugs (tobacco and beer) I noticed the Subway diner next to my tobacco shop was closed with a sign on the door saying due to inability to hire staff.

    You teach a man to fish and… However if instead you teach a man to mask and avoid a task, instead huddle in place, pay him to lurk at home…. You end up with Subways shuttered and our lights went out.

    No I don’t blame the power outage on our beloved leaders, the bad china cold or wasted lives matter. However I do wonder if the utilities are experiencing the same staffing problems as the Subways, if response and repairs will be slower, if this will be a winter of eagle liver eating.

    Keep your clothes and projectile pushers handy where you can find them in the dark and assure you’ve enough firewood. etc. stacked to get your through a long winter of stores with no content.

    This wasn’t my first rodeo, we’ve, quite comfortably, got though other power outages, many with outside temperatures down to fifty below. This one was not at all problematic but it has get me thinking, working to expend my game plans, to cover weeks or even decades rather than a few hours.

    Non permittat aquilam iecur tuum comedere.

    1. I was in a pizza place yesterday and they had a sign up saying there would be a delay in preparing orders due to staffing shortages – they only had one guy in the kitchen for the lunch rush.

      I don’t think much will change until more people on the upper end of society start feeling pain. No Subway or Mountain Man Pizza – that’s one thing – but when it becomes impossible to charge up the Tesla, then there might be different policies.

      Didn’t we have to go through the Carter years before people were ready for Reagan?

        1. Jimmeh at least wasn’t evil. Clinton made him look…not so bad, anyway. 0bama made both of them look good by comparison. Now, 0bama is no longer the worst President in history.

          The Democrats seem determined to ensure that the previous Democrat never remains the worst President of all time by finding an even more atrocious candidate. After Kommie Harridan, they might have no choice but to try running Queen Hillary again.
          ———————————
          It’s dark here. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

          1. a) It is looking like HRC may have been the ‘thinking’ behind the Baidou Jiangshi and Kam Harris.
            b) It looks like Carter’s ‘niceness’ may have also been obfuscating stupidity over evil.

            1. I think Jimmy Carter was well meaning. However we know where that leads thanks to C.s. Lewis
              “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
              Clinton/Obama/Biden all seem to rather be trying to show “Look I really am awesome I can lord it over all these peasants”. I do wonder if Zhou Bai Den was yet another politician with Daddy issues… it seems to be a common theme amongst many politicians.

              1. Carter strikes me as very similar to Obama. Both are weak, vindictive, and ineffectual. Like the wife beater they took their failures out on their own.

            1. Carter was a vicious, nasty-tempered man. There are people who blame him for sabotaging the Shah of Iran and thereby unleashing the terrorism of the Iranian mullahs on is.
              I personally blame him for being such a f&&king wimp about the Iranian hostage crisis, and also for not signing a defense bill back in the day which would have replaced the high school buildings at Misawa AB. Which were housed then in three buildings which had been Imperial Japanese cavalry stables in the 1930s. They smelled still of horse sh*t on hot days. D’you think that his precious progressive-addled daughter went to high school in a facility that smelled of ancient horse sh*t? I think not.
              Yes, I still bear a grudge against the sanctimonious SOB. Sue me.

              1. His greatest crime was stopping the rest of us from getting safe clean nuclear reactors and breeder reactors, when he himself was a nuclear engineer who knew better. In the middle of an energy crisis.

                His greatest flaw was being a micromanager, and not actually being very good at that.

                But apparently his entire side of the family was a nasty bunch, who enjoyed pretending to be teetotalers, actually being unabashed heavy drinkers themselves, but also preventing the Secret Service from even having beers off duty while on their property. Just… so… petty.

                1. A friend of mine was a civilian nuclear engineer who actually shared an office with Carter briefly. He said Carter was a suck-up, did no apparent work, and if he knew any engineering, he didn’t show it.

                2. What’s more, he defunded fusion research. As Jerry Pournelle put it (quoting from memory), “if this is the moral equivalent of war, he just disbanded the armored divisions.”

      2. Sign seen (somewhere in eastern Oregon, Idaho or Utah). “Service is slow. Please be patient we are short staffed. If you feel the need to complain, please fill out an application.” … We didn’t complain and tipped well.

      4. One of the big issues with staffing shortages, around here at least, is that most “entry level jobs” either don’t pay enough to live even poorly unless you’re doing a lot of people in small apartments and such, or they make just enough that they don’t get health care and if the employer provides health care, it sucks.

        (And, you can say, “get a better job” all you want-I’ve got nearly twenty years of good-to-great work history and a demonstrated track record of willing to learn, and the only jobs I can find are warehouse, grocery stores, and “own car” delivery jobs. It seems like a lot of places are collecting resumes for when “things get better.”)

        It’s going to be rough for a while, so support your local places as much as you can.

        1. With the lock downs, a lot of people realized what a bad deal they were getting – working incredible hours and then going home to their bunk bed in an apartment living room (I do delivery in the Bay Area and see this).

          If they try to use Obamacare they see they basically don’t have insurance – it’s not even very good catastrophic coverage.

          It wasn’t always this bad, but things got worse so slowly that people didn’t notice until they were forced to stay home. Of course, I’m not sure what everyone is doing now for money.

          1. Well, if they’re cute and female, there’s OnlyFans until they finally get away from the “adult” model.

            Most people in the Bay Area had a lot of “side hustles” going on. Most of my friends were working at least one other job-usually Uber or something similar-and doing a lot of other things.

            People not needing Uber in the Bay Area meant a lot of these people didn’t have work…and, yea.

            I was extremely lucky in that I had gotten into my apartment back in ’99 and the rent was reasonable. I could afford to live there and not work two or three side hustles. When the landlord sold the apartment in 2016, we were cleared out, and there was no way my roommate and I could have afforded to pay for the rent on the unit we were in. I made too much to qualify for BMR housing, but not enough to afford something better than a crackerbox studio an hour+ commute away from work.

            1. Jackson, WY and Wilson, WY. Few who work there can afford to live there. They commute in from (a good portion from) Victor, ID to the west, areas south, and NE (not north, that is Yellowstone). The road,a pass, between Jackson, Wilson/Moose road, is an interesting drive in the not-snowy season … it is two lanes, no passing, the entire distance, with 10% grades climbing and down the other side. 10% is not a typo.

        2. That was one thing that creeped me out about Southern California. The working class wasn’t making it. The people whose work sustained the area couldn’t afford to live there. That can’t go on.

          Now it’s a hellscape of crime, where the police are there to arrest people trying to defend themselves. I can’t figure out why people ever thought Hollywood was glamorous: It really is turning into some sort of image of hell, complete with fire and smog haze.

          1. It used to be a nice place, honestly. I grew up there, when there was blue-collar industry in the San Fernando Valley, and the area that we lived in (Sunland-Tujunga) was resolutely working-class. They used to include the profession of the listees in the telephone white pages. Lots of working-class people: truck drivers, etc. S-T was grubby, in the main – but people worked at lots of blue-collar jobs, had nice little houses they could afford, in the shadow of the mountains. Sometime in the late 1960s, it was reported that the average income there was about the same as that of Watts, which was notorious as the black ghetto.

          2. Did you ever watch “LA Confidential,” especially the opening monologue?

            LA and Hollywood always sold the fantasy of massive success for being pretty or creative, and that’s what drew a lot of people there. I knew some people that were willing to hustle two or three non-union gigs at s(YAY!)t payrates because it was a movie credit for their resume. It’s very, very easy to sell everything there for that chimera, even your soul.

    2. So, umm, I have to ask–what kind of trees in Alaska are surprised enough by snow to topple onto power lines?

      1. Old ones. Sick ones.

        Windstorms and snowstorms (or worse, ice storms) take out trees. If the storms are light for a few years, it tends to be very bad when they do hit.

  11. And in another cartoon universe, they all lived happily ever after. (Here:
    https://tempestinateardrop.com/archives/season-2-18-the-epilogue/) just like ours does, eventually

    But until that end!

    Even if all you have is a litle candle, wrap it in a story and lift it high. Those stories are like the phial of Galadriel, giving us heart to keep going in the dark places. Because even if our current chapter won’t end the way my little comic did, Mrs Hoyt is right: In the end, we win, they lose.

    Thank you to the storytellers her.

    Godspeed all.

  12. Re: The eagle eating chained Prometheus’ liver: If it is forever, sooner or late the chains will loosen, or weaken. Sooner or later the eagle is going to get complacent and come within range of a hand, or mouth..

    I’m thinking of scene from Conan the Barbarian,,,

    Sooner or late the bastards get complacent, bored or their inherent laziness kicks in. Then they are vulnerable.

      1. Most versions have Hercules shoot the eagle as he sails by the mountain. That only gives Prometheus a day’s respite, though, as the eagle is back the following day.

  13. What’s funny is that the eagle has another meaning as well–the spirit of American independence.

      1. One of the fun things about the medieval bestiaries is that they show how the same animal or fabulous beast can be symbolic of Christ, symbolic of the devil, symbolic of humans, etc. They’ll have one set of “qualities that are like Christ and stories that can be used as metaphors for Gospel principles,” and then the next paragraph launches into “and this is how X is like the devil, instead.”

        1. Weirdly, my last day of LIVING in CO (I mean, I’m going back to stage this weekend, but my bedroom no longer exists, etc) I woke up to an eagle on the branch nearest my window STARING at me. Not sure what that means. I am pleased to inform you my liver was covered up.

          1. Well, poking around in Christian symbolism, eagles are used to represent vision, leadership, rebirth through fire, and the ravenous destruction of things decaying and putrescent.

            So, not livers, but also, not harbingers of fluffy kittens either.

            Good luck!

  14. At a Wafflehouse this morning, we came in with our horde and the very pregnant relative jumped up (it was IMPRESSIVE) to greet us– the nice ladies-of-a-certain-age that were sitting next to the table we were going to be placed at moved over so we could spread over two side by side booths instead.

    When they headed out, we thanked them– turned out they were traveling for the funeral of the father in law of one. She pulled out the electronic funeral invite– “in leu of flowers, please be like him and shine the light of kindness on your family, friends and neighbors.” Which had been the lady’s goal when she volunteered to move.
    And she only mentioned it because the buddy of pregnant relative snuck over and paid for their breakfast as a thank-you, and it really touched them. 😀

    1. I’m writing as fast as I can, and I’m certain that Sarah and the rest of the scribblers who hang out here are too! But there are only so many hours in the day and we all have families, jobs, commitments to others, or any combination thereof!

    2. I had a nice moment like that the other day at the grocery store – I had Wee Jamie, the Grandson Unit with me, in his carrier. He’s a heavy lump now, all of fifteen pounds and the carrier is pretty sturdy too, and a gentleman passed me, and looked over and said, “You’re carrying some precious cargo there!” And the same gentleman pulled out a cart from the stacks of shopping carts for me, and helped me heft the carrier into it.
      It’s a small ray of sunshine when complete strangers look at Jamie and smile at him, acknowledging that children are precious!

  15. To do list: buy magnesium flares.

    Any new dark age shall be lit by burning corpses.

    There is a nearly 100% chance that civilizations existed prior to the most recent ice age, and were largely wiped out by it and the associated megafloods.
    But civilization is a pretty relative thing, which relies on a lot of things built up over centuries (or millennia). Would we even be able to recognize a Neolithic semi-nomadic civilization a mere century after its passing without contemporary notes of its existence?

    1. Hammers found in rocks, iron bowls in coal minds. Some of the best Drilled Granit spiral on the tube left inside and on the wall. shows thickness of tube used to drill. Spiral shows how fast it drilled. We can’t drill that fast. Jugs and bowls turned on lathes, no question it was lathes but no lathes found. Sides uniform and thin, LONG necks.
      The BEST is from South America, they didn’t even really call it out as something special, the idiots.
      Rock with a flattened face. 3″ x 2ft X 2ft piece removed leaving a rectangular hole smooth sides and bottom, very little rounding at any of the joints, 90 degree angles. MAYBE a little over a 1/4″ gone. The piece leaning against the rock. The piece matches the rock and the hole.

      They just went on, like this wasn’t important. What they should have done is stopped there and stared. Then gotten equipment to measure (as accurately as possible) the rock, the face, the hole and the piece taken out of the hole. Examen the tool marks if any. Based their show on THAT one thing.

      WE CANNOT DO THAT!!!
      WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW IT COULD BE DONE!!!
      How did they do that while only removing a little over 1/4″ of material around the piece taken out???
      Why would they do that then just leave it there?
      BTW: this is VERY OLD.

      None of this can be explained. They EXIST. They were MADE. Like the Bowls and Jugs we KNOW one of the tools used to make them. We haven’t found the tools or a trace of the tools at all.

      They say the holes were drill using a tube drill using sand as the cutting material. Doesn’t work, you CANNOT get the spiral using sand. Continuous spiral from start to finish, on both the walls and the internal tube removed.

      People had some left over tools and artifacts from earlier Civilizations is the easiest explanation.

      1. Re: South America, there are Spanish explorer sources that claimed there were plant-based chemical concoctions that did some of the weirder stuff with Incan stonework. Some archeologists take it seriously.

      2. > WE CANNOT DO THAT!!!

        I can.

        > WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW IT COULD BE DONE!!!

        I do.

        With primitive tools it’s a heartbreakingly long task, but the people who wanted it done apparently felt it was worth it.

      3. I saw papers about some ancient tools using vibration, created by drawing a bow across them. Kind of like that episode of Dirty Jobs about ‘worm grunting’.

        We have ‘lost’ the Old Ways because we have developed better ways. We don’t ventilate mines using bonfires any more; now we have blowers. We don’t know how to organize gangs of slaves to move big objects because heavy machinery works much better.

  16. & for the good news: I just tried to access facebook and got this message; “This site can’t be reachedwww.facebook.com’s DNS address could not be found. Diagnosing the problem. DNS_PROBE_POSSIBLE”

    Suddenly my digital world seems a more cheerful and cleaner place. 😉

        1. Evidently there was an attack and the DNS records that point to FB were withdrawn. You can buy the domain name if you want.

          It seems that they lost access to everything including their internal email and all the rest.

          Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of creepy fascists.

            1. They seem to have gotten it back but, yeah, it showed up as an unused domain name for at least a while this morning and was listed for sale.

          2. I agree. Alas, my wife uses Facebook for reaching her customers, so she is a bit unhappy right now. (sigh)

          3. Somebody (notthebee, maybe) noted that the Zuckerberg minions couldn’t get in the doors to work on the problem because the digital badge scanners were IoT, and were down, too.

            Sadly, it came back up.

            Andrew Torba mentioned that Gab traffic was way up (3X), but the upgraded servers were up to the task. I still don’t post there, but I get a lot of useful news from my Gab feeds.

        2. Gremlins too. My response to you went into the ether. Looks as though they lost access to their internal systems too,

          The book of faces is having a terrible, no good day. The stock is off it’s lows but still down 5.4% today. The leaker was just another lefty Karen and the street cares not at all about censorship. What they do care about is the projection of how fast the livre de visage is losing customers, particularly their key advertising demographic.

          The young are fickle, who knew? For the rest, nothing beats antagonizing half your customer base.

          1. Thing about trying to turn your own business into a facist wonderland, eventually driving off people unwilling to pretend drives off the people competent enough to see, and willing to volunteer to do, the invisible things that make the organization work, that you don’t know enough to have someone do.

            Because people who like to pretend often like to conceal personal incompetence, and take credit for what others have done. At large organization size, for values of anybody large enough to fill minimum staffing, you won’t find anybody who likes your every mad idea.

            So, don’t plan to get rich quickly or ever on university stock.

            1. Funny enough, FB on the surface looks like the best value among the tech giants. It has no debt, it’s not terribly expensive compared to its earnings, it has good ratios, lots of cash. Strong ROE, growth and forecasted growth. Doesn’t pay a dividend and shareholder rights suck but all in all looks good. The question, to me, has always been how real, and how sustainable, are those revenues.

              I forget who wrote that it’s not roll left and die, rather it’s die then roll left.

              The fun at FB is just starting I think.

              1. I remember back when Carbonite stopped sponsoring Rush Limbaugh. Lots of people liked pointing out that its stock was dropping like a rock after that. But when I looked into it a bit deeper, I saw that its stock had been dropping like a rock pretty much as soon as it started getting publicly traded a few weeks earlier. I figured that they saw it was dropping, decided to drop Limbaugh, and waited until he said something controversial, to give them an excuse.

                So, yes, “Go broke, get woke” is probably at least as true as “Get woke, go broke”. Either way, it doesn’t work like they think it does.

              2. The big issue with all tech may be that we don’t know what we don’t know about the combination of financing software projects, and managing software projects. And maybe also to some degree with electronics hardware.

                Bridges may be a more straight forward and reasonable prospect, for all that growing up, I heard that construction was fairly crooked.

                From the finance side, a lot of the bridge decisions can handled by throwing money at a Civil PE whose work history you’ve investigated. And, if you have a few Civil PEs that you can trust, they can tell you if you are about to make a mistake like hiring a dam spillway guy to study a suspension bridge.

                Code can have problems that require that you understand the algorithms and the data structure, or even also the costs and income, to understand even exists. Whereas, there are pretty much no civils so specialized that they can’t grok ‘bridge fall down, no work’, and probably most can understand that crumbling concrete, that comes apart at touch, is not carrying load.

                Programmers who write webpages, and programmers that write the server programs that support webpages can be wildly different. And there are huge variations in the types of web site, and types of web site back end. You have an awesome website or server guru, and they may not have much to tell you if you ask for help with a radar signal processing program, or a computational fluid dynamics program. The latter two, you are probably mostly going to find deep understanding of from a few specialist engineers. Who will probably be useless if you ask them to keep your website from getting hacked. And, good luck finding a radar guy who understands fluid mechanics, or a fluid mechanics programmer who is good at radar. Your radar programmer may understand stats, but your fluid mechanics programmer might think everything is deterministic, and your SQL Database admin won’t know many of both well enough to tell you that.

                And this is for types of programming that are established, and well understood by many of the actual specialists.

                New types of stuff means new flaws that you have to detect empirically, if you do not have a theoretical approach, and so far there does not seem to be a generalist theoretical approach.

                Some of these ‘innovative’ big wealthy companies are simply throwing scads of programmers at random things, and dropping the ideas that fail immediately. They probably won’t have a reliable method for finding really subtle flaws.

                Okay, a Microsoft is actually closer to having an actual clue, because they in theory are mostly doing things that have been done before, and maybe have experienced people that they can draw on. Issue is, if your internal experience is used to working on very big teams at management direction, you might not have a lot of people who as programmers are really expert engineers who understand the category of problem well.

                Those experts definitely exist for well studied problems, they are out there, somewhere, but they do not necessary have good access to funding, or the ability to hire a skilled team and find customers who need the problem solved.

                So, on the surface, modern programming looks a lot like an engineering discipline, because you have sub fields, and a lot of little specialized problem areas. Issue is, the problem areas may be too far apart to general training, and not even the programmers themselves necessarily know what they are and are not competent to do. Of course, I may be cheating by throwing some specialists within other academic fields into the category of programmers. If I am not cheating, the situation is even more screwed up, because a lot of academic code gets written by graduate students, and few of them have also studied CS, or have industry experience in programming. Electrical engineering is close to CS, but it is in fact not CS, and so there are otherwise possibly competent electrical engineering graduate students who have never used Git, don’t know how to write a requirements document, and are generally terrible programmers. If I am cheating, it is still a problem that finance/management doesn’t have a way to sort out programming programming tasks from programming tasks that require a good basis in a separate skillset. And, as far as I can tell, there are hugely different perspectives within programming, that often cannot even tell you what all of the other perspectives are.

                There are definitely super experts within programming, who if you knew, could probably reliably advise you. But they are rare. And may not be available to speak to you or me. (Of course, I know that Ian is here, and that he is apprenticed to someone who seems to be an actual programming super expert, but I think he may be a decade at least from possibly becoming a super expert. High level experts are genuinely hard to train in every field, otherwise we would see a whole lot more of them.)

                But, there are a lot of civil engineers. So, despite not really knowing prestressed concrete from a porta potty, I could in principle find some civil engineers, start talking to them, and work my way around to finding someone who knows a great deal about a particular type of bridge. In reality, I don’t know any practicing civil engineers, and don’t have the funds to pay them to talk to me about such things.

                State Boards lying to us about the professional ethics of PEs, or about the disciplinary status of PEs, would make that process a whole lot more difficult, perhaps even to the point of being impossible for me.

                This process has basically been occurring in Programming, with codes of conduct for open source projects. These codes of conduct appear to have mostly been woke weaponized lies.

                Probably an even worse problem for programming has been the convergence/long march of the universities. And the convergence of HR, which chooses to trust the authority of universities on certain matters.

                Anyway, much of the VC experience with Big Tech is Silicon Valley, and does not have a solid foundation if Silicon Valley has been a fraudulent bubble shaped by investment meddling from the PRC.

                1. Speaking of bridges, the people killed when Denny Pate decided to rest on his (well deserved, up to that time) laurels and phoned in the design for the FIU pedistrian bridge (and blew off the complaints about cracking) are still unavailable for comment.

                  1. Point.

                    Additionally, I’m probably extrapolating too much, trying to figure out things from what seems to be occurring with Apple and Google.

                2. Yeah, you’ve mis-assigned some people. I’m a physicist-engineer, and I write really tight, small programs that execute really fast and are highly coupled to the underlying hardware. I do NOT describe myself as a software engineer. I have done that job, under duress, a few times and it is a very different set of skills.

                  1. A friend of mine’s job title is “maintenance technician.” At his place of employment that covers a lot of ground, from putting on rubber coveralls and mucking out hydraulic sumps to debugging and extending software in FORTRAN-77.

                    He’d never done any programming before, but he had the manuals and examples of working software, which was better than he usually got when doing electronic work.

                  2. Thanks.

                    I’m thinking I should have just scrapped the comment when I was looking at it, and wondering if posting it was a good idea. Would not have fixed the confusion in my thinking on the subject, but that will probably be hard to fix.

                    1. I did. Wrote almost as long of a comment in response. Read it. Cancel it.

                      Software is down right complicated. And that is just the micro section I worked in (user interface applications – where is the data stored, where does the data come from, how does B get to A, and how is A used). My boss from my last job tried to get me to take on piece work at fixed project prices … Sorry. No. Didn’t I work for them for 12 years. Didn’t I work in the industry for 35 years total? Not only, no. But H*LL HECK NO! Paid by the hour worked. I knew better. There was no way to WAG on a project cost because nothing got enough information, ever. Got called twice: Once come in for “4 hours” (took one and most of that was gossip catch up) to show how to work on something specific (I’d written a document outlying it, we went over the document and the program). Second I just noted the (different documents) already available and that I’d have to refer to them myself (why they’d been written because even I didn’t do this more than once or twice a year), cost on both calls – 4 hours (they wanted to impress me on how profitable project work could be (I knew that, not the point, still not stupid).

                    2. I think it was worth posting for comments. You may be on to something here, regarding the intellectual silos that software professionals fall into. I’m just introducing the concept that there is a difference between software that is compact and interacts very predictably with adjacent units of hardware and software (or the user), vs. extremely complex software systems that can interact unpredictably.

                    3. Oh yeah, definitely. The software I write is supposed to be highly DEcoupled, so that we can switch the underlying hardware with minimal (ideally zero) changes to the software. Entirely different set of design parameters. If I was assigned to a small, tighy, highly-coupled-to-the-hardware project, I could probably do it, but I would have to spend several months retraining myself and studying up on the hardware details first. Which is why there are specialized silos: several months where you’re producing zero lines of code is an eternity in software engineering, so people prefer to hire folks who won’t have to retrain for the project.

          2. I have never before had the feeling of wishing to buy a gremlin a drink.
            Petty of me? Perhaps. But a lie-emitter failing isn’t entirely a bad thing.

  17. This morning on our morning walk, passed a group we often meet. One guy complained about the latest CDC stupidity. I reminded him (Jerry P’s point) that despair is a sin. Evil would like us to just give up, surrender to stop having to fight. The peace of the grave would welcome us.

    So just walking, I spread JOY to all I meet. Remember JOY is not happiness. Practice Holy Indifference. BE Not afraid.

  18. I’ll note that Hephaestus generally comes off well, by virtue of the fact that he’s rarely mentioned. His primary two things of note (aside from his role) is the fact that his limp came from an incident when he tried to play peacemaker between his parents, and Aphrodite was married to him to prevent squabbles between his brothers over who would get to marry her .

    She’s never been faithful to him, though. Her son, Eros, was fathered by one of her more frequent lovers, Ares.

    1. Hades doesn’t look too bad either. He wasn’t generally known for taking lovers.

      While there was the “kidnapping” of Persephone but that may just be her mother’s, Demeter, story about how Hades and Persephone got together. 😀

      1. That was clearly Jim Butcher’s opinion on the matter.

        😛

        IIRC, he also claimed that Cerberus is the Greek word for Spot.

        ^^;;

        Hades does turn up in at least a couple of other stories. One is Orpheus. The other is when someone (one of Theseus’s friends, iirc) got the bright idea to go seduce Persephone into running away with him. Theseus accompanied his friend, and Hades invited the two men to have a seat. And they became permanently affixed to their seats.

        Hercules (visiting for one of his labors, iirc) later pulled Theseus free, but was warned to leave the arrogant friend behind to take his punishment.

        1. My memory of the story of Theseus and his “friend” was that his “friend” was not going to bother seducing Persephone. So they got what they deserved. 😉

          1. Well, that’s one of the proposed etymologies — IE “spotted,” via analogy to the Sanskrit word for “spotted”.

            The problem is that “kerbala” is a known word for “big” in one of the Greek dialects, so Kerberos is probably just Big Dog.

      2. Versions I heard, her father, gave permission– but her mother didn’t.

        And “kidnapping” in that culture would include her deciding to get married lacking custodial agreement.

        1. Most versions have Zeus as her father, but of course her mother Demeter was Zeus’ sister. [Crazy Grin]

            1. St. Augustine cited that as evidence that there was a time when brother/sister marriages were acceptable.

              1. St Augustine was probably as familiar with Egyptian royalty and their customs as anyone.

      3. I read all these myths as a boy, but darn it, now every time I re-read them Hades speaks with James Woods’ voice.

  19. Return the fire to the sky.
    The Gift shines bright.
    The hand of God
    Stands against the night.

    Return the fire to the sky.
    Hear the roaring of the night.
    Demon rage the light abhors,
    The monsters below out their fright.

    Return the fire to the sky
    Prometheus bled not in vain
    Greater hands than his tormentors
    Have lifted up the flame.

    1. Wyrdbard scores again!

      …and Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde venture off to return the gift of fire to the gods, because they’re feeling bored and the gods are a bunch of right bastards anyway.

      I was going to reference Frederick Pohl’s description of the Apollo 17 launch, which he, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, and others watched from a cruise ship at sea.

      Unfortunately his web site is 404 and archive.org only shows “redirect 302” errors.

      Apollo 17 was the only one that launched at night, and he described how it was like the sun coming up, reflecting off the ground the and clouds, and casting shadows behind the viewers, who were many miles away at sea. It reminded me of the descriptions from the observers of the Trinity test. None of them had ever realized how *bright* a Saturn V was…

  20. I would just like to point out that those who think they are going to stop us have no idea at all who they are dealing with.

    That’s MY story and I’m sticking with it.

  21. “the old horrors who called themselves gods and acted like a passel of pedophilic, fornicating, warring, rooting animals so lost to their pleasures that their entire reason was devoted to justifying them”

    Politicians, then?

    1. YEah, basically what I had decided to say.

      /Kings./

      Obviously, if you are running a little leadership laboratory, and actually paying attention, there really is such a thing as leadership, and it is really really weird.

      Anecdotes pretty clearly paint it as something that doesn’t really perfectly fit this or that bit of theory.

      So, obviously, it is something that it would be really easy to convince oneself that a magical thinking model is valid for.

      So, as best as we can tell, these magical theories have been invented many many times, where ever there have been people.

      I think the Bronze age collapse is not climate, but instead one of these theories becoming discredited. Possibly this is only my own lunacy.

      Monarchical and aristocratic legitimating narratives were basically flavors of such magical theory. Marx and Lenin were basically similar, saying, ‘no, really, if the right virtuous monarch* sits in the seat, magic happens, and then the New Jerusalem**’. Everyone who is a scholar of ‘management theory’, and thinks that there is some truth that they are observing is almost certainly deep into magical thinking of this sort.

      Someone who believes that you can eat or sacrifice part of a victims body, and gain power is very likely to wind up a murderous psychopath.

      You would expect something similar for someone going round the deep end with these other magical theories.

      So, for all these modern politicians think they are modern, they may be very far from the first to go around the bend this way.

      *For communist versions of virtuous.

      **Possibly for Satanic versions of the New Jerusalem.

      1. BobTheRegisterredFool said

        Marx and Lenin were basically similar, saying, ‘no, really, if the right virtuous monarch* sits in the seat, magic happens, and then the New Jerusalem**’

        Good Heavens we’ve found the real origin of the under pants gnome meme (Thieving South Park guys!)…

        1) Get rid of Capitalism
        2) ?
        3) Utopia !!!!

        Apparently no one ever told Marx or Lenin what Utopia actually meant

        1. I’m gradually working my way to a scene in which two cybernetically augmented characters scold Congress:

          “At least we’re smart enough to know we can’t micromanage the lives of 320 million people. Most of you are stupid enough to believe you can. You impose simplistic, one-dimensional laws to control technology and processes you can’t begin to understand, and then you wonder why it all goes wrong.”

  23. I’ve been reading (and am now already RE-reading) a series of books on non-electric lighting. Candles, (olive) oil lamps, kerosene lanterns, Coleman (white gas) lanterns, propane, alcohol lamps that use mantles, and I likely missed something in there.

    One thing I happened across that is NOT in the books is someone has an “oil lamp” (high purity kerosene ‘lamp oil’ I presume) that is LED. The flame is used to heat a thermo junction (array, I presume) and that drives the LEDs. Neat, but it seems to want its own special fuel containers (keep paying us… I understand, but..). They’re likely readily refillable, but digging into that is not high enough on my list things to fiddle with just now.

    1. I think an “and” belongs instead of one of the “ors”. Which one, I don’t have the foggiest.

  26. Seeing how the nitwits in D.C are going after showerheads again, just ordered the most un-eco-friendly one I could find on the ‘Zon. Depending on how it works, will probably get two or three more. Sheesh.

    1. IIRC, this is the one that I bought for my master bath reno, and I love it, extravagantly. The plumber who installed it was pretty chuffed at the quality, too.

      1. Oooh, my old house in Massachusetts had a ball-and-claw-foot bathtub that would have rocked with. I’d have to do a full rework of my bathroom to make that look work down here in a modern Florida home. I’d think about it if I ever get around to re-tiling though.

      1. Makes me want to start making an FGC-9 to go along with the printed AR-15 lower I’ve been meaning to populate for a while. Might start on that when I do some cleaning after I hit the range today.

    4. I replaced the tub faucets a few years ago when they started to leak. I couldn’t find a match for any of the eleventy new styles of valve, so I had to replace the whole thing.

      The internals of the new faucet casting were only drilled to about 5mm; it wouldn’t matter what kind of shower head you attached to it, that was all the water that would flow. Would probably take quite a while to fill a bathtub, too.

      I found another faucer that just had restrictors, which I drilled out. Next time around, I’ll probably just use a couple of ball valves and some external plumbing.

  27. Dylan Thomas was wrong.

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night…

    We do not shine the light for others by feebly raging against our own inevitable mortality. And the darkness is not the end for all. Our job is to highlight the shoals and reefs we have encountered that others, following after us, can travel this life more successfully. Think also of the flag bearers of the Civil War of the 1860s, who saved their last breath to keep their precious charge from falling.

    I rather like this old song instead:

    Brightly beams our Father’s mercy,
    From His lighthouse evermore,
    But to us He gives the keeping
    Of the lights along the shore.

    Refrain:
    Let the lower lights be burning!
    Send a gleam across the wave!
    Some poor fainting, struggling seaman
    You may rescue, you may save.

    Dark the night of sin has settled,
    Loud the angry billows roar;
    Eager eyes are watching, longing,
    For the lights along the shore.

    Refrain

    Trim your feeble lamp, my brother;
    Some poor sailor, tempest-tossed,
    Trying now to make the harbor,
    In the darkness may be lost.

    Refrain

    1. At one of D.L. Moody’s meetings in America he related the story of a shipwreck on a dark and tempestuous night, when not even a star was visible. A ship was approaching the harbor of Cleveland, with a pilot on board. The captain, noticing only one light as they drew near — that from the lighthouse —asked the pilot if he was quite sure that it was Cleveland harbor, as other lights should have been burning at the harbor mouth. The pilot replied that he was quite sure, whereupon the captain enquired:

      “Where are the lower lights?” “Gone out, sir,” replied the pilot.

      “Can you make the harbor, then?” asked the captain, to which the pilot answered:

      “We must, sir, or perish.”

      Bravely the old man steered the vessel upon her course toward safety. But alas! In the darkness of the harbor mouth he missed the channel, the ship struck upon many rocks, and in the stormy waters many lives were lost.

      Then Moody made his appeal to his audience: “Brothers, the Master will take care of the great lighthouse! Let us keep the lower lights burning!”

      Among Moody’s hearers that evening was Mr. Philip P. Bliss, the well-known hymn writer, and the striking story at once suggested to him one of his most popular hymns.

        1. In fact, the state with the most lighthouses is Minnesota. (Or was. Probably fewer now what with GPS.)

          1. I would have thought Michigan, which has a much longer shoreline. Fewer ports, I guess.

            1. East coast, maybe

              Oregon – 11
              California – 16
              Washington (State) – 35
              Florida – 61
              Texas – 106

          2. Minnesota lighthouses… built by an industry consortium in response to the loss of ships from a storm in 1905.
            Most of the sites were accessable only by water when built. Later rail then a road connected them to Duluth.
            The docents at Split Rock said the light house and its supporting compound were abandoned every fall before the ice came in and when the staff returned in the spring they would have to chip ice off the inside and outside of the buildings.
            Tough folk…

            1. ‘Chip’ ice off? With pickaxes and sledge hammers!

              That’s just to get the door open…

      2. And I grieve for so many years and opportunities lost, ignored, rejected, bypassed, and avoided by my own selfishness, sloth, and cowardice. May God forgive me.

  28. That was always my take on the Prometheus myth. Myths are always open to interpretation. But the Greek gods standing in for the venal aristocrats and arbitrary authority of the world and impersonal natural disasters, and tamed fire (and knowledge, tools and technology in general) being our one best weapon against the “state of nature” always rang true to me.

    Speaking of which, I really need to finish that half-written sort-of-post on fusion that I never get around to finishing. If I ever want to teach a class on the subject, I need to get it organized anyway. No promises as to timeframe.

  29. Well-put as always, right down to putting my own senses that something was…off about the Greek pantheon into words. Heh, makes me think of people describing the first arc of the God of War series as a grimdark mashup of Greek Mythology only to be corrected that, if anything, it wasn’t grimdark enough by people who actually knew it. Hopefully we won’t need a Kratos to sort this mess out… Not looking forward to more time with the eagle after all these years with one but maybe enough of us will come out of it on the other side intact.

  30. This week I learned that stalking and harassing female senators is okay, according to President Brandon.

    Aren’t you so glad he restored the norms?

      1. I’m heartily tired of people who say, “It’s wrong to harass women . . . But not conservative women, because they’re not really women-women, because reasons.” Apparently two X chromosomes only count if you are a victimized victim (of the proper perpetrator), not at any other time.

        1. They went further than that, remember?

          Now intact dude in a dress is more “authentically” a woman than a pregnant mother of six.

          It’s almost like the only consistency is “useful to the abusive”….

  31. The history of civilization is intimately entangled with the history of mankind’s abilities to control and direct matter and energy. Civilization, as we know it today, owes its existence to those who, over the centuries learned to exploit the properties of matter and the sources of power. It started with fire.

    Accusations of hubris aside, Prometheus was, indeed, the hero of the story.

    1. The Industrial Revolution put an end to any need for slavery. Machines are cheaper and more efficient than slaves.

      The only remaining reason for slavery is the neurotic needs of the would-be masters. It’s why the Democrats are so fixated on importing a new underclass — Americans of every color are done putting up with their shit.

  32. It’s quite interesting that a friend linked this video (from 2018) about the effect cheap / free energy has on society.. and the potential currently locked in nuclear.

    Highlights from a very strong environmental perspective what it means for societies to have accessible energy. Ranging from conservation of wildlife and large scale recycling to reforestation & lifting people out of subsistence poverty. I don’t agree with everything said (a vision of tightly packed cities surrounded by wilderness isn’t exactly an ideal) but many of the points touch on what was posted.

    The other thing it shows very very clearly is what the ‘environmental movement’ wants for us — less energy used, less health, less food, less freedoms, and a side of hating on men too.

    1. They are far less “love nature and protect it” than they are “hate mankind and have dominion.” At least the loudest parts of the movement, and the political actors, are.

      2. The thought/pun that has been percolating in the back of my brain finally came through:

        In a fantasytech universe that runs on Air-Earth-Fire-Water, a power system that used the element of fire would have prometheodes and epimetheodes. So you would view your results on a PRT (prometheode ray tube).

  36. One interesting stray thought:
    Prometheus means something like “forethought”.

    There was an AI project a while ago where the programmer wrote an agent that learned how to play videogames like Mario Bros: The mechanism was actually very simple: The agent tried dozens of different input strings, simulated ahead to derive the consequences of performing each action, then learned which attributes of the game-state were desirable (the learning part). The agent chose whichever input string resulted in a state it “liked better” than the others. Spin the loop, and it was soon beating Mario Bros.

    Foresight, knowledge of the outcomes of one’s actions, is an important part of what intelligence is. Of course, we can’t keep trying different things from a point in time, see what happens, then hit rewind to try something else: We have to try to project consequences with some imperfect model of the world.

    1. One game that agent failed miserably at, though, was Tetris. It did learn that if it hit the pause button towards the very end, it could forestall losing. 😛

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