Life During Wartime

It's not often Rez feels the urge to rant, but when it happens, this is where you'll find it.

The ZDoom Rant is now ensconsed on its own page.

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12.11.22 Observing an argument about the U.S. Constitution. One side says it's fine and the remedy for governmental bad behavior is in the Declaration (how does this square with not descending to a Boogaloo??); the other says it's corrupted, witness the excesses of government.

Neither seems to notice that the real problem is... the Constitution has no teeth. There is no punishment mandated for violating its provisions.

Protection of rights (that is, enforcement of the government's good behavior) has been Constitutionally left to the government... whose violations of rights the Constutition is supposed to prohibit.

You think otherwise? Tell me what you'll do if, say, soldiers are quartered in your house. Spending the next ten years trying to get heard by the Supreme Court doesn't punish violations, nor remedy your loss of rights. Spending the next ten years in jail for escorting them out at gunpoint, assuming they don't shoot back first, is also not a remedy.

Fox, henhouse, where did all our rights go??

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07.22.22 Same person:

"Question Everything!"
"Trust me on this."

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07.22.22 Trick question #2: which produces more CO2, growing beef or growing bugs?

Here's a hint: C6H12O6(aq) + 6O2(g) = 6CO2(g) + 6H2O(g)
24g of carbohydrate yields 38g of CO2
therefore each gram of edible beef produces about 31g of CO2
but each gram of edible bug produces about 400g of CO2

Wait, how about humans?
Er... eat more carbs (ie. plant-based diet), exhale more CO2.

Math is hard!!

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07.09.22 To make communism work, everyone who has more than you needs to be killed.

Consider that this also means you can never have more than you do at the moment all those with more than you die.

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06.09.22 Math time! So, we're going to substitute bugs for beef to save the world from the damage done by cows. Since bugs don't spring fullgrown from the brow of Zeus, what shall we feed those bugs? Grasshoppers are perhaps one of the most efficient edible insects. A 17 gram grasshopper eats its own body weight every day (and more under ideal growing conditions). It takes about a year to grow them up. That means each grasshopper consumes around 10 pounds of plant material (all of which needs to be harvested first) to achieve the mass of a single mouthful. That's about 266 grams of feed per gram of edible bug. (And gods help you if your 'livestock' gets loose in your other crops.)

For comparison, a steer eats about 10000 pounds of grass and other plant material, mostly doing its own harvesting, to make around 500 pounds of edible beef (plus several useful byproducts, but we'll ignore those for this calculation), or about 20 pounds of feed per pound of beef... or about 20 grams of feed per gram of edible beef.

Trick question: which one is more ecologically efficient??

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04.07.22 I find it ...enlightening... how the very people who most decried the Covidicy as a psy-op are now swallowing the Ukraine psy-op without a trace of critical skepticism, as if mainstream reporting (totally at odds with independent reports), itself a long-running psy-op, had somehow magically become truth. Likewise, the same people who first twigged to "Russia Russia Russia" being a hoax (or rather, another psy-op) now are firmly in the camp of "Russia Russia Russia" as the whole and only cause of the current crisis.

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09.11.19 Teddy Kennedy killed more people than all my guns combined. The solution, obviously, is Kennedy control.

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06.05.18 The modern liberal shrieks, "The apprenticeship system was slavery! why, sometimes you even had to pay to learn a trade from the masters!" ....then pays some university $40,000 a year for a degree in Useless Studies.

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10.30.16 I've long harbored doubts about the Libertarian Party, and more recently, some Libertarian media, especially in light of its recent fanatic support for "open borders". Lauren Southern's revelation (from about 45 minutes onward) therefore comes as no surprise, but a sad confirmation of what I'd come to suspect: that the Libertarian Party is being wielded by the Democratic Party to deliberately dilute the conservative vote.

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10.01.16 Cue Lee Greenwood:

I'm proud to be a Deplorable
Cuz at least my speech is free
My country is a basket case
From tax and spending sprees
But I'll gladly stand up next to Trump
And vote for him today
We're gonna help him build the wall
And save the U.S.A.!

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05.30.15 Platypus girl: State socialism is an oxymoron. Care to explain how you can have true socialism without it being imposed by the state??

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05.29.15 It's been pointed out that the main reason women hold social power is their ability to offer or withhold sex, and that the "sexual revolution" negated that power by making sex freely available to males without any effort or value given on their part. This, contrary to feminism's claims, greatly reduced women's social power.

But today's feminists have found a way to get it back -- by declaring every interaction with a male "sexual harrassment" and by defining every sexual encounter (real or imagined) as "rape". Feminists created "rape culture" as a way of reclaiming sex as a valuable female resource. But by accusing every male in sight of rape, feminazis have mistaken "costly" for "valuable". And then they wonder why so many good men are making themselves unavailable. Feminazis won't be happy until actual rapists (who don't care about "availability" or "value" or "costs") are the only men left in the gene pool.

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4.4.15 All this hoo-rah about trigger warnings, and rape culture, and the Hugo awards, are fundamentally not about fairness, or justice, or safety, but rather about silencing anyone perceived as opposition. I can't say it better than Brad Torgersen did in his blog article, Speech and Punishment:

"...you cannot have “safe” speech at the same time you have free speech. You cannot punish a writer or an artist or an intellectual content creator of any stripe, for any reason, without basically admitting that you’re willing to make things unsafe for people you disagree with, in an effort to protect and coddle your own side of the argument. Which means you’re not really in favor of the freedom to speak. You are in favor of your freedom to dispense your thoughts and ideas, just as long as people you don’t like (or who create things that make you angry) don’t get to have the same right.... banning people from work, kicking them off jobs, or out of magazines and papers, or even inciting or seeking their deaths, is cowardice. It is an admission that you believe your ideas are too fragile to stand on their own in a raucous, polyglot environment. That you believe you have the moral right to decide for others what they can and cannot see, or hear, or buy."

Enough duct tape silences anyone.

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4.2.15 What do you call it when you're forced to serve someone else? We used to call it slavery. Nowadays it's called 'equality', as witness the hoo-rah over Indiana's 'religious freedom law' (number 18 in a series of 50), which merely states that you cannot be forced to serve anyone against your beliefs.

Apparently it's okay to enslave anyone who's not a favored son (er, I mean daughter) of a social justice class.

The SJWs forget that every law and every prejudice has an inverse: Imagine you're a gay atheist, and are forced to serve straight religious people, against your strong beliefs. How do you like it now?

[For the liberals about to proclaim me a right-wing shill, I'm non-straight, non-religious, and small-L libertarian. Maybe you should be forced to serve me.]

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12.20.14 A couple of writing samples from the 1970s: He spidered along a narrow ledge and the glass panel grated inward. -- Instead of this strong and efficient wording, today's writers would produce: He carefully placed his hands and feet on the narrow ledge, moving his arms and legs like a spider and the panel made of glass moved inward with a grating noise. Why this wordy, weak, and inefficient prose? Thanks to hanging out on writers' forums, I've been enlightened: today's writers are not only writing for an audience with generally poor reading skills; they are too often poor readers themselves, unable to process compact prose, who need everything explained lest they miss something.

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03.11.14 An article in Archeology speculates, "Having burial practices suggests that Neanderthals possessed spiritual beliefs".

Or maybe they'd just discovered that if you bury a corpse, it doesn't stink up your cave.

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02.09.13 A study in contradictions:

"Courage consists of hanging on... just one... minute... longer." -- 1950s childen's story

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -- attrib. Albert Einstein

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10.25.12 Social media: the modern equivalent of gossiping over the back fence, while surreptitiously eyeing your neighbor's laundry, hoping to see a stranger's underwear.

The real reason for its popularity? Everyone believes their own underwear is invisible.

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02.23.12 A quick guide for those who don't grok the difference:

Equality is when everyone has the same chance to jump over the bar. Some may not wish to jump, others may not make it, but everyone can try.

Egalitarianism (also called equity) is when the bar is placed flat on the ground and everyone is forcibly marched over it.

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02.22.12 Anyone who says "We want revolution" or "The revolution is coming" doesn't know what they're talking about, and is too immature of outlook to be trusted with any authority:   The "American Revolution" (from the American point of view, better named the War for Independence) was an insurrection, not a revolution. "Revolution" as envisioned by these political juveniles is the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, a bloody upheaval in the name of egalitarianism, from which the afflicted society never recovers.

Every such 'revolution' has its roots in a socialist or welfare state. What engenders revolution is not capitalism nor inequity nor even poverty, but rather, socialism and a state-sponsored economy, where none can advance beyond the mandated muck, save those doing the mandating -- and where none can advance by their own honest efforts. Thus an inequity is mandated by egalitarian dictate: that those who work can advance no further than those who don't.

The revolution simply inverts who does the mandating.

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2.12.12 Rez's quick guide to relative political freedom:

A free state focuses on defending itself from enemies from without.

A totalitarian state focuses on defending itself from enemies from within.

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03.03.09 Being a left-wing liberal wacko isn't just a philosophical position; it's first and foremost a learning disability. If it weren't, why does every such person or organization repeat the same mistakes over and over, despite overwhelming evidence of how their methods fail?? (Okay, so the organizations have an ulterior motive... it sucks money out of the faithful... over and over with each new failure.)

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09.05.07  Martians, go home!

"Mexico does not end at the border. Wherever there is a Mexican, Mexico is there." -- Felipe Calderon

"Englishmen, who have no right in this kingdom of France, the King of Heaven sends you word and warning...depart into your own country." -- Joan of Arc

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04.15.07 I'm sick to death of stupid people. California has stupid people in quantities I'd never have believed possible if I hadn't lived here myself. (I've even met two grow'd-ups who didn't know beef comes from cows!!)

And it's reflected by the educational levels, courtesy of the U.S. Census:

For population 25 years and over in Lancaster, California:
* High school or higher: 78.3%
* Bachelor's degree or higher: 15.8%
* Graduate or professional degree: 5.6%
* Unemployed: 11.2%

For population 25 years and over in Bozeman, Montana:
* High school or higher: 94.3%
* Bachelor's degree or higher: 49.5%
* Graduate or professional degree: 15.6%
* Unemployed: 9.5%

Did I mention I'm sick of stupid people??!

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04.07.07  Stock market: glorified loansharking. You lend companies money in return for what you hope will be a usorious interest rate.

And that 'interest rate' is actually set by what other investors think of the stock.

Consider it an experiment in mob psychology, with your money riding on the outcome.

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04.14.05 Filing your government extortion income taxes online was supposed to be faster, easier, and hassle-free... right? Not when most of the sites are bloated up with annoying ads and useless graphics, and try to suck you into the paying section by the free section somehow failing to offer the one form you can't file without. But this year I found an exception: Complete Tax. The site is clean and relatively fast, it had all the forms, and if you're low-income, state and federal e-filing are100% free. Hopefully they'll keep up the good work. [2006/2007 addendum: Complete Tax no longer has all the forms. I've switched to TaxAct, as they now have all the forms and have turned into a nicely lean site.]

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12.04.02 Some anti-Semitic group dumped "the Holocaust is a lie" leaflets on the front lawns of a primarily-Jewish community. Predictably, this was condemned as "inciting hatred". Um... are the Jews whose lawns were littered upon supposed to be thereby incited to hate themselves?? How gullible do these litterers think they are?!

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7.29.02 There are no more Americans.

There are African-Americans, Arab-Americans, Armenian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Italian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and so forth.

But there are no longer any Americans.

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7.15.02 Paying our bills online was supposed to make our lives easier, by being simpler and faster, right? right??

I just spent two hours between the Verizon and SoCalEdison sites, attempting to pay this month's bills. Congrats, Verizon, that's the slowest commercial server I've seen in my nearly 6 years online, even allowing for the javascript errors and the stalled page problems (and I wasn't even loading images). As to SCE's site, it's not quite as deadly slow, but it can't find my account. Oh, and it doesn't matter which version of Netscape I used... judging by the error count, both sites were evidently tested only in Internet Exploiter.

I could have written checks, addressed envelopes, and driven the 40 miles round trip to the post office twice in the time I spent fucking around with trying to pay my bills online. And now I've still got to go to town tomorrow to deliver said bills to the P.O. Yep, online billing sure has made my life easier. Excuse me, I've got to go strangle a webmaster somewhere.

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6.18.01 Corpus Christi, Texas is now placing "DANGER" signs on the homes and vehicles of some "sex offenders" (with little regard for whether the offense was a genuinely predatory abuse or a chance encounter with a consenting but underage girl, or even just  being seen pissing in an alley). Does anyone else hear an echo of those signs warning "JEW" in Nazi Germany??

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2.10.01 Recently Anaheim (or one of its adjacent cities, I forget) invoked a little-known snippet of Federal law to allow local police to act as an arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for the purpose of arresting (and ultimately deporting) illegal aliens. Predictably, an outfit called something like "Coalition of Latin American Citizens" went ballistic, claiming this was "prejudicial" against Latinos. Excuse me? What part of "illegal" did you not understand?? And an advocacy group for Latin American (if you don't know, that means south of the United States/Mexico border) citizens? What's wrong with this picture??

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2.8.00 The Novell eOpportunity tour was a complete waste of time, all marketing hype and no hard info (tho it had been represented as All About Netware 5.1's cool new features). Anyway, it was one of those partnership tours with Lucent and IBM, and the presenter was doing the usual schtick of ask the audience an obvious question based on what she'd just said, and give a T-shirt to whoever pipes up with the answer first.

So she asks "What is IBM known for?" and someone produced the obligatory "Mainframes". Okay, how obvious can you get... So she asked again, with the "correct" answer supposed to be today's hyped product, IBM's NetFinity servers. And she got -- silence.

Into which I said, "Typewriters!"

I won a T-shirt. A really COOL T-shirt.

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1.29.00 "Easy" has become the latest broad-spectrum buzzword. First it was just AOL (this should be your first clue) claiming each new version was "even easier" than the one before. (If you go back far enough, would you discover a "hard" version of AOL?) Now easy is being applied the same way free and new have been abused by previous generations of advertising. Home mortgages, beating a traffic ticket, and now even doing your income taxes are "easier than ever!" What's next, an "easy to install" linux??!

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12.9.99 I bought a ham on Nov.20th. It's delicious. Only trouble is, there's lots of it, and only one of me. Now it's almost 3 weeks later and I'm still not rid of it. Come back in a week and we'll be having hambone soup.

This week I finally got Argo (the "new" P233) sealed up and hooked to the monitor switchbox, next to Dink (formerly the P90, later a PIII-550). What with one thing and another, and being used to test a couple Linux distys and Win2000, the poor thing had all but taken root on the workbench. Now if the price of memory would come back down to rational, we could plant those Tyan server boards (now that we've finally got 'em) and start another crop.

Win2000 Server (Beta3/Release Candidate 1) wins the Operating System Peeing Contest. It pissed away 128mb of RAM in one hour flat, doing nothing more strenuous than admiring itself. Now that's an amazing memory leak!

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6.30.99 I'm not downloading any more DOOM levels made by dedicated deathmatchers or high-end demo-makers. They all have the same problems for normal solo play: Too many monsters too much in-your-face, maps with a lack of variety in design or theme, boring (usually BROWN) appearance, too much emphasis on extremely tight timing jumps, overuse of triggered traps, too many sequences you have to get right the first time (implying a memorized route) or you're dead. Same old shit over and over and over. It's no wonder so many of these players got jaded and can't seem to find maps hard enough to suit their tastes -- they've bored themselves shitless with their own creations.

And I never want to see another brown DOOM level -- ever!

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6.5.99 Here we are on the trailing edge of technology! My work box is finally getting an upgrade -- from an increasingly flaky P90 (okay, a P75 with delusions of grandeur) to a P233MMX. I couldn't find the specific motherboard I really wanted, so I settled for a cheap one as a stopgap (well, it was a pretty good board in its day... about two years back :) No doubt since I bought that one, the object of my desires will be the first thing I see at the next swap meet. (Addendum from two weeks later: guess what :)

On the other hand, for the first time in recent memory I'll have enough disk space. Though somehow 17 gigs no longer sounds like very much... until you go to back it up on QIC80 tapes!!

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2.16.99 Oprah Winfrey has decided to hang up the talk show business when her contract runs out. Why? Quote: "I'm tired of talking to dysfunctional people."

I've dealt with a lot of dysfunctional people, both personally and professionally. Interacting with people who are controlled by childhood baggage, or driven by irrational fears, or addicted to rationalizing their own behaviour, or just aren't right in the head, takes a lot of energy and effort and patience. After a while it gets old.

As James Lamb Free said of dogs back in 1948, "It's just as easy to love a good one."

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12.29.98 I'm getting tired of all the infighting among what remains of the DOOM community. There aren't enough of us left for this. If someone wants to rave about their eating habits or their sex life or their religion, what the hell does that have to do with DOOM?  The human race hasn't come to a rational agreement about any of that shit in 5 million years, so what makes you think our online microcosm can do any better through verbal violence? Geesh...

A friend described it as "depressing". My own description is "childish".

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droplet icon re-enter  The Twilight Asylum
droplet icon tour Area 34
droplet icon experience Life During Wartime
droplet icon reboot with Randomly Accessed Memory
droplet icon listen to The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets
droplet icon view the Rogues Gallery
droplet icon visit The Devil's Advocate
droplet icon go to the Dogs
droplet icondare to send me email

updated  ... er, can't you read??

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