101 thoughts on “Everything The Sun Touches Is Memed”
Somehow I doubt Erika Kirk would even run for POTUS, but swap her picture for SecWar Pete’s and I have to ask “How far in advance can I cast my ballot?”
Reminds me of the guy who started a foot massage business in Washington State. He was doing fine until Bigfoot found out about him. Business went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
I like the Trump Vance Vance Kirk Kirk Trump Trump meme but I suspect we may need to slide Rubio Rubio in there somewhere. From the Meme to the Author’s ear…
As for the Enterprise Kirk meme, although Enterprise CVN-65 has been decommissioned and is headed for the breakers, a new Ford class CVN (CVN-80) has been commissioned with the name Enterprise. CVN-80 has 20 tons of steel recycled from CVN-65 and 4 portholes repurposed from the WWII CV-6 Enterprise. CVN-80 will be moving out of dry docks soon (late November was the last date I saw), but will be fitting out and then on sea trials well into 2029 before she is officially in service.
The Reader prefers double DeSantis to double Rubio. Rubio’s support of amnesty over more than a decade in the Senate would keep the Reader from voting for him to get the nomination.
As do I but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t act as a female Cincinnatus if required. Honestly if she can deal with TPUSA’s frantic growth and keep her sanity after what she has been throw it will be far more than enough.
Political circumstances are always temporary. The talk earlier this year of Harris or Walz in 2028 was premature, and as a serious forecast talking 2-3 presidential terms out is chickens before hatching.
A complete collapse of the Democrats probably means an eventual fission of the current Republican coalition.
A single party winning without having to compete is generally a bad thing for what that party delivers.
If our factions prosper, we would have a lot of potential talent to recruit from.
Pre cascade politicians will not always be that good compared to later competition.
My “End Of The World Veteran” patch goes all the way down to the cuff. May need to start on the other shoulder. ~:D “I was alive for the Bay of Pigs, you whippersnappers!”
If we did “Moral Panic Veteran” it would be both arms and a leg.
If you did ‘Climate Catastrophe! Veteran’ there wouldn’t be enough surface area on the entire uniform. If you did ‘crises made up to promote left-wing politics’ you would suffocate under the weight. 😮
I was 5 or so, and don’t remember. But I -do- remember the Cuban Missile Crisis because my dad was sick for two days, because it was the literal end of the world. This was a guy who -never- missed work. Finally recovered when Khrushchev turned the ships around.
And I remember the JFK shooting. I was at school, out for recess when the word came that Kennedy had been assassinated.
It’s a different world now. Imagine my grandfather, born in the 1890s when Victoria was still queen. From no cars and no aircraft to the moon landing.
“…a great AI bust is probably on the way…”
Oh yeah. There’s no question. AI is the biggest hype bubble since the Internet was going to end the world in the 90s. Remember how that turned out?
Somebody wake me when AI can cut my lawn for less than the price of a Ferrari.
It was sixty-five years, seven months, and three days from takeoff at Kitty Hawk to touchdown at the Sea of Tranquility. My great-grandmother was age seven for the former, and when the latter happened still had twenty-five birthdays left to celebrate. The 20th century was an utterly amazing time.
(And I was around for Apollo 11. I was in my crib, but I was around.)
I remember going past the road leading to MacDill, back in the days when we were still doing Tampa Bay Comic Con (before its current promoter kept raising booth rates while attendee spending kept going down, at which point we called it quits).
The Great AI Bust pretty much has to be on the way, unless we’re on the very threshold of a new Age of Miracles. (One of the advantages of an X account, even a borrowed non-posting one, is as a listening post onto the still-revving Mad AI Hype Machine; and even Elon Musk’s own posts and retweets are off the chain. Intelligence will be a product, at near-zero cost! Mathematicians will be obsolete! By next year AI will be making new original discoveries..!)
2025 turns out to be the 60th anniversary of I. J. “Jack” Good’s original paper on “ultraintelligence” and an “intelligence explosion” (it’s suprisingly difficult to find when the real publication date was). And the very first sentence of his paper turns out to be…
“The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine.”
Well, sufficiently bizarre sampling implies that we can predict that mathematicians are already obsolete.
In general, if you select your examples carefully and make strange assumptions, it is possible to show that mathematics is completely useless.
In practice, this may have the problem that it requires us to make valid value statements on behalf of a very large group of other people.
Technically speaking, computers have previously made mathematicians essentially obsolete for a narrow subset of human computer tasks.
There are a couple of applied mathematics tasks that I am not sure of being able to automate. One is telling good from evil. A second is sorting through the available mathematics automation, and understanding how well it can solve the problems I am interested in.
Of course, if I am deranged enough, I could be very poor at these tasks, and a machine would be able to do better.
I personally think that the current craze of the “Large Language Model” AI is a turn in the wrong direction, but eventually AI will be developed that will revolutionize a whole lot more things than even the current hype machine can think of.
As for mathematicians, well, it’s been more than 20 years, but fewer than 40 years since I read an article where a specialized AI program was set to investigating mathematics, starting from set theory. Before they declared their experiment a success and shut it down, it had progressed to developing a theorem for paired prime numbers. Not mentioned in the article, but I consider t be a likely reason that the experiment was shut down: The program was probably slowing down too much to be useful due to the size of the subject matter it was having to search in order to come up with new theorems.
I’m one of the people calling the AI hype a bubble and predicting it’ll pop, but I have no idea when. The dot-com bubble lasted about 1-2 years longer than I thought it would back in 2000, so “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” is perfectly true (or rather, in my case, “longer than you think it can” is more relevant because I’m not going to invest in AI, no sirree).
And I’ll note that I was still a college student studying computer science in 2000, but even then I was aware that the dot-com hype was overblown. Sure there was plenty of potential in the Internet — I wouldn’t have been much of a computer science student if I couldn’t see that — but I also knew that there was no business model at all behind some of those companies. What I did NOT see coming at the time was how profitable Internet advertising would become, which is why some of the same “you have no business model” startups that failed in 2000 have since succeeded. E.g., I bet Spotify would have failed had they been started in 2000, but starting in 2006 let them hit the sweet spot when Internet advertising was starting to become more profitable as companies saw its potential and were willing to pay more for it.
I’m investing deeply in AI, for a contentious definition of AI.
The less contentious definition is that the CS people commonly use it for the methods based in the neural net stuffs.
I don’t want to deal with the neural net stuffs, partly because I think I am not clever enough, and partly because I think the amount of training data is expensive for what it does.
My bet is that there is a fairly broad category of programs which adjust their outputs in an adaptive way, and that I can study the simple stuff, and still make money off of it, no matter what happens in the neural net space. (The outputs are a filter based on weights, and the weights are adjusted automatically based on training data and or what data came in during the last so long.)
There are problems with the assumptions in this betting strategy. Including the possibilities that I am too stupid, too disorganized, or too crazy.
Yesterday on wikipedia I heard about graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) (graphSLAM). I am wondering if I want to ask a dude about that.
Neural networks are the complex, data-intensive, and powerful end of a whole spectrum of Machine Learning techniques. (LLMs and vision/image models even more so.) The less flashy stuff still works perfectly fine and isn’t as costly in terms of data and compute.
Check out Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, or decision trees for some common classification techniques. (Kalman filters sound like a great project too.) If you’re feeling more comprehensive, Russell and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is a solid intro textbook.
I’ll probably still have a computer, and I may actually be able to write a Kalman filter in a couple months.
(My personal future of skills aquisition is looking a little uncertain, I stayed up too late last night. Because I was tired.)
So the hardware is still going to be available, and it is not like we are gonna have a mass murder of the programmers.
I am pretty sure that there are severe market distortions that will expensively correct, but it is probably not as simple as a bubble. I feel politics, finance, and university inspired insanity might be coupled in a way where we will not fully understand how to classify until well after the surprise.
The Reader’s take is that no two bubbles are alike, but they rhyme. The investment in computing hardware and infrastructure is a bubble. Some twenty something is going to do to the massive data centers full of NVIDIA chips what hundreds of PC motherboards and ethernet cables did to Cray Computer and its Japanese clones. Hopefully we get some good nuclear power plants out of it.
With Y2K, we had a rural neighbor who was certain modern civilization was going to end when year 2000 began and had prepped accordingly. A friend and I fantasized about sneaking into his farmyard and pulling the main breakers on his yard power pole right at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Is it time to declare the Democrat party a terrorist organization, or should we wait until they purge more of the ones that are not completely batshit crazy?
Yes. but Older Son doesn’t like being called that. (Depending on cut of shoe, either 15 1/2 wide or 17 1/2 wide.) His brother with the size 13 has the dainty feet in the family.
Guys, it is not the ‘left’ radicalizing people into violent terrorist politics, it is the universities.
There are like three ways to learn ideas involving violence.
One can involve some body to body contact. This is your actual sports or combat art training. Highschool wrestling, or that stuff in kung fu that is called qi but which might just be how internal muscles are used.
Two is cultural.
These first two groups are the normal things that make sense to ordinary human perception, except maybe the rampant magical thinking in some types of martial art.
Almost everything else is some combination of abstraction and aggregation. The influence of those ideas runs through the universities, and the universities are objectively having a harmful and incorrect effect there that is implicated in the various crimes.
The university ideas are just awful, and it can be shown that they imply that the university bros should be murdered.
American culture is much better, and basically the outcomes are sure to be better for the university bros.
(Also, the NSDAP has not been issuing valid membership cards for around eighty years, there are virtually no actual Nazis young enough to be personally carrying out acts of violence. )
I wanted to name my son Aragorn and daughter Eowyn, but was forbidden. If I had met a woman who was honor bound to name her firstborn Megatron, oh, how history would have changed…
But the woman I DID find was happy with a name out of the Knights of the Round Table and one that’s prominently featured in a couple of Shakespeare plays (both of which are also not unusual to modern ears, thus saving my children some probable angst), so I think we all came out ahead in that deal. :)
And yet not a gawd-damned one resigned and went public, and the common element of their defense, from their sinecures in FBI offices country wide, was a mass chorus of “sternly-worded letters” claiming they “vere only folloving orders from the High Command in ze Vashington Field Office.”
For some reason, I’m understanding why it’s not a hard stretch for the Left to get people, who only pay attention occasionally and to “official sources”, to believe the comparison of the ICE / FBI / etc. who are actually working hard on cleaning up the corruption under the new management to Nazi stormtroopers: that’s the behavioral template they’ve seen out of actual mass coverage events since Waco.
“But Steve, why don’t you still distrust them; they’re in the same uniforms…..” Two reasons, either of which would be sufficient:
2024. I made no secret of the fact that I expected the 2024 election to be frauded just like 2020 was, only harder. But I still worked with True the Vote, volunteered as a poll watcher, etc., because I wanted to see if hard work and voting harder would actually make a difference; if it wasn’t enough, that would confirm my hypothesis that actual war was required. And mirabile’ dictu, we actually had a candidate and his effective organization that was willing to be as legally rude and nasty as the mutants we were facing, and he won. No GOPe surrender monkeys, no Vichy Mitchy backstabbers, fighting and winning. I’ve been praying for that since the Tea Party days, and God saw fit to answer.
His personnel picks since. Most of them I’ve seen have had one thing in common: on some level, they’ve been screwed over by the bureaucratic legal system in this country, so they have a better idea of what to look for, and they have a thorough distrust of the long term bureaucracy.
And again, I’m hoping that since he’s using the same kind of legal, practical and hardnosed approach that got him this far, he can still win without stepping over the line.
Regarding being Samwise Gamgee, five out of six ain’t bad, right? I don’t think anybody wants me to trust my instincts. Anybody sane, that is.
Regarding the reason men getting sacrificed in the woods, I must dispute. There’s at least as many idiots getting nom nommed by bears as that, and besides, that girl that looks suspiciously like an ex of mine from about fifteen years ago is more into sewing, books, and aggressive chess matches than sacrifices, from what I recall.
Regarding locally sourced natural skeletons, they ain’t actually all that ethical. The body farm has issues with all sorts of improbable things happening around Halloween, y’know.
-Is the life-sized ankylosaur available? If so, how much is shipping, and can I do an installment payment plan?
-Me and the first cool day of fall, pretty much, because it is usually grey, and misty, and good for stalking through remote places where wise men seldom venture.
-I wish “think and book appears” worked! I’d get so many more words on the screen per day.
-Nah, this elder Goth won’t sacrifice any young guys. Probably fuss at them for not carrying enough water, and for not wearing a hat and getting badly sunburned, and help them get back on the trail (the correct trail), but not sacrifice. Have you seen the forms for doing religious rituals on state or federal land? So not worth the mental pain and anguish. Seriously not worth it. Summoning Elder Spirits, calling Cthulu, anything like that requires so many forms and signatures. Ugh.
If “think and book appears” worked we’d have SO MANY more out…..
Oh yes, you need private property to do those kinds of rituals. After all, the state and federal governments want to be the only eldritch horrors around!
My favorite day of the week. Some good ones to steal, again.
I’m just catching up, but I thought Mary Roberts Rhinehart was considered the origin of “the butler did it” concept, even though she didn’t use those explicit words. I think she started publishing in the early 1900s.
The Minister shall have the power to ban anyone they so desire from the Interwez, and it shall be a secret as well, for their ISP may not reveal that they have been banned. They’ll just disappear, and you’ll never hear what happened.
This is a real bill in real Parliament, my friends.
A gunman attacked an LDS congregation in Michigan, and set the church building on fire. And there have been enough “Well ackshually, Mormons aren’t Christian” responses on social media that a number of people (including John Ringo) have taken note of it and called people out for it.
If people aren’t careful, they turn into robots, unable to deliver more than pre-scripted responses even after a tragedy like this.
Not at all. The trouble is that the LDS are broadly “Christian” in the same sense that every Catholic, Protestant, JW, Quaker, Shaker, Christian-Scientist, Seventh-Day Adventist, and about a third of your Unitarians are Christians: they refer to Jesus Christ as God and preach from some rendition of the Bible (Old and New Testaments). The doctrinal distinctives of the LDS that exclude them from most Protestant delineations of “Christianity” are not even considered in the broader definition, let alone denounced as heresies (JWs have a different set, but are also called heretics). To most Protestants, the title of “Christian” only applies to those who adhere to certain primary doctrines (Apostles’ and Nicean Creeds, incapacity of works to save vs sufficiency of God’s grace via faith, et c) and who “Get Saved.” Most of those, however, are far from the “antisemites” you suppose. They count synagogue Judaism as “a false religion,” theologically, but on the political side most of them are downright Zionist.
I am not trying to argue pro or contra either position here, so I will split no further hairs on that, but we all must recognize that we’re using different definitions of the word. When it does come up, let us avoid chaos by asking whether the other means the broad or the narrow usage, and whichever is meant, have each other’s backs! Neither the psychotic Left nor the zealous Jihadis care how strictly you define it, and this is no time to let your squadmates meet their Maker.
According To Hoyt 
Somehow I doubt Erika Kirk would even run for POTUS, but swap her picture for SecWar Pete’s and I have to ask “How far in advance can I cast my ballot?”
LikeLiked by 1 person
That Kirk meme beats a sack of blue pills.
LikeLike
Who is Bigfoot? What is Bigfoot? When is Bigfoot? Why is Bigfoot?
LikeLike
Zathras would ask. But nobody listens to Zathras.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Very sad life. Probably have very sad death. But, at least, there is symmetry.
LikeLiked by 2 people
….aaaaand ISS just vanished.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Reminds me of the guy who started a foot massage business in Washington State. He was doing fine until Bigfoot found out about him. Business went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
LikeLike
I like the Trump Vance Vance Kirk Kirk Trump Trump meme but I suspect we may need to slide Rubio Rubio in there somewhere. From the Meme to the Author’s ear…
As for the Enterprise Kirk meme, although Enterprise CVN-65 has been decommissioned and is headed for the breakers, a new Ford class CVN (CVN-80) has been commissioned with the name Enterprise. CVN-80 has 20 tons of steel recycled from CVN-65 and 4 portholes repurposed from the WWII CV-6 Enterprise. CVN-80 will be moving out of dry docks soon (late November was the last date I saw), but will be fitting out and then on sea trials well into 2029 before she is officially in service.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Not only Rubio/Rubio, but there is Trump/Trump (Don Jr. or Lara), before Baron Trump.
I doubt Erika Kirk wants to be POTUS.
LikeLiked by 2 people
What? No DeSantis?
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Reader prefers double DeSantis to double Rubio. Rubio’s support of amnesty over more than a decade in the Senate would keep the Reader from voting for him to get the nomination.
LikeLike
As do I but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t act as a female Cincinnatus if required. Honestly if she can deal with TPUSA’s frantic growth and keep her sanity after what she has been throw it will be far more than enough.
LikeLiked by 2 people
LikeLike
More likely that the Democrats will be taken over by primarying the party.
LikeLike
My “End Of The World Veteran” patch goes all the way down to the cuff. May need to start on the other shoulder. ~:D “I was alive for the Bay of Pigs, you whippersnappers!”
If we did “Moral Panic Veteran” it would be both arms and a leg.
Now get off my lawn.
LikeLiked by 2 people
If you did ‘Climate Catastrophe! Veteran’ there wouldn’t be enough surface area on the entire uniform. If you did ‘crises made up to promote left-wing politics’ you would suffocate under the weight. 😮
LikeLiked by 2 people
“If you did ‘crises made up to promote left-wing politics’”
Trailer. 18 wheeler.
LikeLike
Me too, though I was 6 or 7 for the Bay of Pigs.
Let’s not forget the Savings and Loan collapse, the dot comm bust or the Great Recession.
(Seeing suggestions a great AI bust is probably on the way).
LikeLiked by 2 people
“I was 6 or 7 for the Bay of Pigs.”
I was 5 or so, and don’t remember. But I -do- remember the Cuban Missile Crisis because my dad was sick for two days, because it was the literal end of the world. This was a guy who -never- missed work. Finally recovered when Khrushchev turned the ships around.
And I remember the JFK shooting. I was at school, out for recess when the word came that Kennedy had been assassinated.
It’s a different world now. Imagine my grandfather, born in the 1890s when Victoria was still queen. From no cars and no aircraft to the moon landing.
“…a great AI bust is probably on the way…”
Oh yeah. There’s no question. AI is the biggest hype bubble since the Internet was going to end the world in the 90s. Remember how that turned out?
Somebody wake me when AI can cut my lawn for less than the price of a Ferrari.
LikeLike
Same with my grandparents. Spanned from late 1890s to early 1910’s for the 4 of them. Went from horse and buggy to witnessing landing on the moon.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It was sixty-five years, seven months, and three days from takeoff at Kitty Hawk to touchdown at the Sea of Tranquility. My great-grandmother was age seven for the former, and when the latter happened still had twenty-five birthdays left to celebrate. The 20th century was an utterly amazing time.
(And I was around for Apollo 11. I was in my crib, but I was around.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I was 11 for bay of Pigs.
I was on an Air Force Base in Florida for the Cuban Missile Crisis – MacDill, a SAC base – can you say ‘short range target from Cuba,’ boys and girls?
That’s when we took a bus fro school, and when we were coming home the APs had set up sandbagged machinegun positions at the gate.
Don’t recall if anyone boarded the bus to look us over; should have done.
LikeLike
I remember going past the road leading to MacDill, back in the days when we were still doing Tampa Bay Comic Con (before its current promoter kept raising booth rates while attendee spending kept going down, at which point we called it quits).
LikeLike
I was 2 for Bay of Pigs and 3 for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every time someone brigns them up it always reminds me of the book, “Alas Babylon.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
I was 4 1/2 for Bay of Pigs.
LikeLike
I was -19 months. does it count?
I still think the cuban missile crisis prompted my premature birth.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Great AI Bust pretty much has to be on the way, unless we’re on the very threshold of a new Age of Miracles. (One of the advantages of an X account, even a borrowed non-posting one, is as a listening post onto the still-revving Mad AI Hype Machine; and even Elon Musk’s own posts and retweets are off the chain. Intelligence will be a product, at near-zero cost! Mathematicians will be obsolete! By next year AI will be making new original discoveries..!)
2025 turns out to be the 60th anniversary of I. J. “Jack” Good’s original paper on “ultraintelligence” and an “intelligence explosion” (it’s suprisingly difficult to find when the real publication date was). And the very first sentence of his paper turns out to be…
“The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultraintelligent machine.”
Technocratic centralist cybersalvationism, anyone? Ptui.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, sufficiently bizarre sampling implies that we can predict that mathematicians are already obsolete.
In general, if you select your examples carefully and make strange assumptions, it is possible to show that mathematics is completely useless.
In practice, this may have the problem that it requires us to make valid value statements on behalf of a very large group of other people.
Technically speaking, computers have previously made mathematicians essentially obsolete for a narrow subset of human computer tasks.
There are a couple of applied mathematics tasks that I am not sure of being able to automate. One is telling good from evil. A second is sorting through the available mathematics automation, and understanding how well it can solve the problems I am interested in.
Of course, if I am deranged enough, I could be very poor at these tasks, and a machine would be able to do better.
LikeLike
I personally think that the current craze of the “Large Language Model” AI is a turn in the wrong direction, but eventually AI will be developed that will revolutionize a whole lot more things than even the current hype machine can think of.
As for mathematicians, well, it’s been more than 20 years, but fewer than 40 years since I read an article where a specialized AI program was set to investigating mathematics, starting from set theory. Before they declared their experiment a success and shut it down, it had progressed to developing a theorem for paired prime numbers. Not mentioned in the article, but I consider t be a likely reason that the experiment was shut down: The program was probably slowing down too much to be useful due to the size of the subject matter it was having to search in order to come up with new theorems.
LikeLike
I’m one of the people calling the AI hype a bubble and predicting it’ll pop, but I have no idea when. The dot-com bubble lasted about 1-2 years longer than I thought it would back in 2000, so “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” is perfectly true (or rather, in my case, “longer than you think it can” is more relevant because I’m not going to invest in AI, no sirree).
And I’ll note that I was still a college student studying computer science in 2000, but even then I was aware that the dot-com hype was overblown. Sure there was plenty of potential in the Internet — I wouldn’t have been much of a computer science student if I couldn’t see that — but I also knew that there was no business model at all behind some of those companies. What I did NOT see coming at the time was how profitable Internet advertising would become, which is why some of the same “you have no business model” startups that failed in 2000 have since succeeded. E.g., I bet Spotify would have failed had they been started in 2000, but starting in 2006 let them hit the sweet spot when Internet advertising was starting to become more profitable as companies saw its potential and were willing to pay more for it.
LikeLike
I’m investing deeply in AI, for a contentious definition of AI.
The less contentious definition is that the CS people commonly use it for the methods based in the neural net stuffs.
I don’t want to deal with the neural net stuffs, partly because I think I am not clever enough, and partly because I think the amount of training data is expensive for what it does.
My bet is that there is a fairly broad category of programs which adjust their outputs in an adaptive way, and that I can study the simple stuff, and still make money off of it, no matter what happens in the neural net space. (The outputs are a filter based on weights, and the weights are adjusted automatically based on training data and or what data came in during the last so long.)
There are problems with the assumptions in this betting strategy. Including the possibilities that I am too stupid, too disorganized, or too crazy.
Yesterday on wikipedia I heard about graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) (graphSLAM). I am wondering if I want to ask a dude about that.
LikeLike
Neural networks are the complex, data-intensive, and powerful end of a whole spectrum of Machine Learning techniques. (LLMs and vision/image models even more so.) The less flashy stuff still works perfectly fine and isn’t as costly in terms of data and compute.
Check out Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, or decision trees for some common classification techniques. (Kalman filters sound like a great project too.) If you’re feeling more comprehensive, Russell and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is a solid intro textbook.
LikeLike
I’ll probably still have a computer, and I may actually be able to write a Kalman filter in a couple months.
(My personal future of skills aquisition is looking a little uncertain, I stayed up too late last night. Because I was tired.)
So the hardware is still going to be available, and it is not like we are gonna have a mass murder of the programmers.
I am pretty sure that there are severe market distortions that will expensively correct, but it is probably not as simple as a bubble. I feel politics, finance, and university inspired insanity might be coupled in a way where we will not fully understand how to classify until well after the surprise.
LikeLike
The Reader’s take is that no two bubbles are alike, but they rhyme. The investment in computing hardware and infrastructure is a bubble. Some twenty something is going to do to the massive data centers full of NVIDIA chips what hundreds of PC motherboards and ethernet cables did to Cray Computer and its Japanese clones. Hopefully we get some good nuclear power plants out of it.
LikeLike
New Ice Age. alar. acid rain. destruction of the Amazon will suffocate us all…..
LikeLiked by 2 people
Fallout. Silent Spring. The Marching Morons (though the story is pretty good SF)…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Y2K
LikeLiked by 2 people
With Y2K, we had a rural neighbor who was certain modern civilization was going to end when year 2000 began and had prepped accordingly. A friend and I fantasized about sneaking into his farmyard and pulling the main breakers on his yard power pole right at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I noticed that “Y2K” was missing. But that’s okay: I got THAT one engraved on my HS ring. It’s still a nice stack of EOTWAWKI bling.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is it time to declare the Democrat party a terrorist organization, or should we wait until they purge more of the ones that are not completely batshit crazy?
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Reader thinks the trigger should be when Fetterman decides he is a Republican.
LikeLiked by 2 people
And if you see two or more, are they Bigfeet?¿
LikeLike
Yes. but Older Son doesn’t like being called that. (Depending on cut of shoe, either 15 1/2 wide or 17 1/2 wide.) His brother with the size 13 has the dainty feet in the family.
LikeLike
lol
Hobbit on USA diet.
LikeLike
“… very large, very hairy, and both were on the table.”
~ JRRT on the topic of Odo Proudfoot’s feet
LikeLike
Bilbo: “and Proudfoots.”
“ProudFEET!”
LikeLike
Don’t be too upset about those Kackling Kamela books; you’re just lucky it’s not zucchini season. 😄
LikeLike
Two minds with but a single thought,,and we don’t get random drive-by zucchini down here.
LikeLike
Shopping bags full of zucchini with Kammy’s book in every bag, wantonly distributed to porches early one morning.
The horror, the horror.
LikeLiked by 2 people
On Halloween!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, I was really pissed about those Kamala Harris books because they didn’t pay me $10 each to take them.
LikeLike
SFBS!
LikeLike
I’d say good morning but I’m not sure it is good. [Crazy Grin]
LikeLike
Guys, it is not the ‘left’ radicalizing people into violent terrorist politics, it is the universities.
There are like three ways to learn ideas involving violence.
One can involve some body to body contact. This is your actual sports or combat art training. Highschool wrestling, or that stuff in kung fu that is called qi but which might just be how internal muscles are used.
Two is cultural.
These first two groups are the normal things that make sense to ordinary human perception, except maybe the rampant magical thinking in some types of martial art.
Almost everything else is some combination of abstraction and aggregation. The influence of those ideas runs through the universities, and the universities are objectively having a harmful and incorrect effect there that is implicated in the various crimes.
The university ideas are just awful, and it can be shown that they imply that the university bros should be murdered.
American culture is much better, and basically the outcomes are sure to be better for the university bros.
(Also, the NSDAP has not been issuing valid membership cards for around eighty years, there are virtually no actual Nazis young enough to be personally carrying out acts of violence. )
LikeLike
I do in fact call the Dual Monarchy analogue in my current series of novels Noricum. Don’t tell Pannonia or West Dacia. ;)
LikeLike
Also, the Megatron chick sounds reasonable to me on that one point.
It isn’t like it is a really bad name like Starscream, Galvatron, or Hillary.
Presumably one just gives the kiddo other given names as well, more broadly socially acceptable ones like Martin of Tours, Bibi, and Tecumseh Sherman.
But she really needs a man who has the discipline not to verbally abuse the kid by quoting stuff like “It’s over now, Megatron!”
LikeLiked by 3 people
”Huh, that’s a coincidence. I lost a bet in third grade and am required to name my second child Optimus.”
”Sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found yooooooou!”
LikeLiked by 4 people
My wife wanted to name our first child Optometrist, but I couldn’t see it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Reader bets you see the incoming carp.
LikeLike
Hubby wanted Calvin (Calvin & Hobes)
LikeLike
We did not name the kid Calvin.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wanted to name my son Aragorn and daughter Eowyn, but was forbidden. If I had met a woman who was honor bound to name her firstborn Megatron, oh, how history would have changed…
But the woman I DID find was happy with a name out of the Knights of the Round Table and one that’s prominently featured in a couple of Shakespeare plays (both of which are also not unusual to modern ears, thus saving my children some probable angst), so I think we all came out ahead in that deal. :)
LikeLike
There was a fella in the maker space I used to frequent named Kyle Reese Johnson.
LikeLike
Christopher Robin would suggest an expedition to find the North Pole and Calvin would love it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And yet not a gawd-damned one resigned and went public, and the common element of their defense, from their sinecures in FBI offices country wide, was a mass chorus of “sternly-worded letters” claiming they “vere only folloving orders from the High Command in ze Vashington Field Office.”
https://twitchy.com/samj/2025/09/26/fbi-j6-solomon-n2419548
Good Guys my ass.
For some reason, I’m understanding why it’s not a hard stretch for the Left to get people, who only pay attention occasionally and to “official sources”, to believe the comparison of the ICE / FBI / etc. who are actually working hard on cleaning up the corruption under the new management to Nazi stormtroopers: that’s the behavioral template they’ve seen out of actual mass coverage events since Waco.
“But Steve, why don’t you still distrust them; they’re in the same uniforms…..” Two reasons, either of which would be sufficient:
And again, I’m hoping that since he’s using the same kind of legal, practical and hardnosed approach that got him this far, he can still win without stepping over the line.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is that huge shell casing today’s version of a/the Eargesplittenloudenboomer?
LikeLike
6.5 PMH (Pretty Much Hypersonic)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Tiger on the street?
I’d call Larry Niven to come get his short-furred Kzin.
I don’t remember what I used to dream about for myself as a kid. But I did have it good, when I had it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I had one dream for a while of being Bruce Lee beating the snot out of a pack of Kzinti, and not looking like I was from Jinx.
LikeLike
Regarding being Samwise Gamgee, five out of six ain’t bad, right? I don’t think anybody wants me to trust my instincts. Anybody sane, that is.
Regarding the reason men getting sacrificed in the woods, I must dispute. There’s at least as many idiots getting nom nommed by bears as that, and besides, that girl that looks suspiciously like an ex of mine from about fifteen years ago is more into sewing, books, and aggressive chess matches than sacrifices, from what I recall.
Regarding locally sourced natural skeletons, they ain’t actually all that ethical. The body farm has issues with all sorts of improbable things happening around Halloween, y’know.
LikeLike
If, Mr. Sowell? If? I don’t think there’s any ‘if’ about it. ☹️
LikeLike
These were very funny except for the Larry Correia one. Unfortunately that wasn’t funny.
LikeLiked by 1 person
-Is the life-sized ankylosaur available? If so, how much is shipping, and can I do an installment payment plan?
-Me and the first cool day of fall, pretty much, because it is usually grey, and misty, and good for stalking through remote places where wise men seldom venture.
-I wish “think and book appears” worked! I’d get so many more words on the screen per day.
-Nah, this elder Goth won’t sacrifice any young guys. Probably fuss at them for not carrying enough water, and for not wearing a hat and getting badly sunburned, and help them get back on the trail (the correct trail), but not sacrifice. Have you seen the forms for doing religious rituals on state or federal land? So not worth the mental pain and anguish. Seriously not worth it. Summoning Elder Spirits, calling Cthulu, anything like that requires so many forms and signatures. Ugh.
LikeLiked by 2 people
If “think and book appears” worked we’d have SO MANY more out…..
Oh yes, you need private property to do those kinds of rituals. After all, the state and federal governments want to be the only eldritch horrors around!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hey, that quip! Have I mentioned recently that I <3 your wit?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Puns are essential to life!
….Although it helps to be able to run and hide when the pun lands with some people….
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Kirk to Enterprise.” WIN.
Knob vs. Switch, yes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The answer to the Butler Did It is in the back of Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “Stage Land” published in 1889.
Very funny. Do recommend.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/858
LikeLike
The answer to the Butler Did It is in the back of Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “Stage Land” published in 1889.
Very funny. Do recommend.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/858
LikeLike
Needed cheer. Found it here. Love you folks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My favorite day of the week. Some good ones to steal, again.
I’m just catching up, but I thought Mary Roberts Rhinehart was considered the origin of “the butler did it” concept, even though she didn’t use those explicit words. I think she started publishing in the early 1900s.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Why is Bigfoot?
LikeLike
… it was a terrible genetic experimentation moment.
LikeLike
The man whose fortune posthumously funded Rice University was murdered in 1900 in an attempt to validate a forged will and thwart that desire.
In fact, the butler did it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Marsh_Rice
LikeLike
Oh by the way, in case Canada suddenly goes off the Interwebz:
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/09/28/wtf-4594/
The Minister shall have the power to ban anyone they so desire from the Interwez, and it shall be a secret as well, for their ISP may not reveal that they have been banned. They’ll just disappear, and you’ll never hear what happened.
This is a real bill in real Parliament, my friends.
LikeLike
We’re back to the Court of the Star Chamber. Secret court, secret evidence, secret tribunal, and the victim may not speak of what has transpired.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Double Secret Probation! 😄
…and <s>persecution</s> prosecution.
LikeLike
The problem is that they borrowed ALL of this from the Patriot Act. It’s been going on for 25 years, and it came to the US first.
LikeLike
Looking at today’s title brought this to mind:
Q: Why does the sun never set on the British Empire?
A: Because God can’t trust an Englishman in the dark!
LikeLike
Because its getting to be that time of year:
LikeLike
Non-meme related: PJ Media is running a 7 part series on publishing and how the left controls traditional publishing:
https://pjmedia.com/jamie-wilson/2025/09/27/dei-vs-story-how-publishing-lost-the-plot-part-1-of-7-the-gatekeepers-n4944184
Link to part 1 provided; Part 2 is up today.
LikeLike
Who is ‘FILAMENT’ and why is she/he/it locked up? 😄
LikeLike
Filament is 3-d printing material. And that van would get both my kids.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Was wondering which ones in your circle were the 3D printing nuts.
It’s like yarn…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep. Both of them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I know that, but it’s much funnier the other way. 😛
LikeLike
A gunman attacked an LDS congregation in Michigan, and set the church building on fire. And there have been enough “Well ackshually, Mormons aren’t Christian” responses on social media that a number of people (including John Ringo) have taken note of it and called people out for it.
If people aren’t careful, they turn into robots, unable to deliver more than pre-scripted responses even after a tragedy like this.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve seen that junk. Ptui. The Venn diagram with the antisemitic crowd is pretty much a circle.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It figures.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Not at all. The trouble is that the LDS are broadly “Christian” in the same sense that every Catholic, Protestant, JW, Quaker, Shaker, Christian-Scientist, Seventh-Day Adventist, and about a third of your Unitarians are Christians: they refer to Jesus Christ as God and preach from some rendition of the Bible (Old and New Testaments). The doctrinal distinctives of the LDS that exclude them from most Protestant delineations of “Christianity” are not even considered in the broader definition, let alone denounced as heresies (JWs have a different set, but are also called heretics). To most Protestants, the title of “Christian” only applies to those who adhere to certain primary doctrines (Apostles’ and Nicean Creeds, incapacity of works to save vs sufficiency of God’s grace via faith, et c) and who “Get Saved.” Most of those, however, are far from the “antisemites” you suppose. They count synagogue Judaism as “a false religion,” theologically, but on the political side most of them are downright Zionist.
I am not trying to argue pro or contra either position here, so I will split no further hairs on that, but we all must recognize that we’re using different definitions of the word. When it does come up, let us avoid chaos by asking whether the other means the broad or the narrow usage, and whichever is meant, have each other’s backs! Neither the psychotic Left nor the zealous Jihadis care how strictly you define it, and this is no time to let your squadmates meet their Maker.
LikeLike