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Several days ago, while I was out at my local Sonic picking up a gigantic Oreo Cheesecake Master Shake, my home was invaded by SJW stealth units who sabotaged my computer such that the drive hosting my encrypted /home partition started spitting errors into the syslog that look for all the world like the controller is going out on the drive.

After much panicked backing up of important shat interspersed with downtime to let the drive cool when I started getting errors, I checked my records and found out it was only eight months old. Still under warranty then, even with today's cocktastic two-year manufacturer warranties. Then I thought, you know, the first sata cable I tried when I installed this drive was bad... I should swap cables. And since I'm swapping cables, I might as well switch to an unused sata port on the motherboard. Much less of a pain in the ass than jumping through RMA hoops. That let me finish up all my backing up and twelve hours in still no errors. If it stays copacetic until tomorrow, I'm going to call it good and go back to my regularly scheduled hurting of butts.

Anyway, that's where I've been and why that climate data I promised hasn't been gathered up and posted here yet. Tomorrow will be somewhat busy around Casa de Buzzard with all the standard shat plus some real estate doings but I should be able to get to it by Wednesday at the latest.

A recent (off-topic?) discussion touching on Sci-Fi revealed to me that some people see hope and promise in science fiction stories. Those people don't see the warnings, it would seem. To me, science fiction has always been filled with dire warnings.

We recently discussed Ms. Le Guin, when she passed away. https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/25/011250
More about her here: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html

I must admit that I wasn't a "fan" - that is, I didn't read everything she wrote, and wait impatiently for her to write more. But, yes, I did read some of her work. I've been reading a little more of her work, since her death. And, that work is filled with dire warnings!

The Diary of the Rose tells about a psychiatric doctor (Rosa), with access to some really marvelous technology, which helps her to see into the minds of her patients. Rosa spends her early career working with children, and people with truly disabling problems. Rosa is engrossed in psychiatric problems, diagnosis, and prognosis. She is the doctor's doctor - everything is about making people healthy, or at least as healthy as possible.

Then, Rosa is brought her first political prisoner. Of course, Rosa isn't aware that he IS a political prisoner. She is only told that he has to be "fixed". Unaware that the diagnosis and prognosis has already been determined, Rosa gets into Sorde's (the patient) head. She is shocked to learn that there is really nothing wrong with Sorde. But, as she learns more, both she and Sorde know exactly where "therapy" will lead, and where it will end. The patient's mind must be destroyed!

The story is scary, in that, it doesn't so much "predict" real life in some future dystopia, as it reports on real life in the modern world. In much of the world in the past few hundred years, it would be political suicide to imprison, then execute a political dissident. But, having that same dissident "hospitalized" for some form of "insanity" can be expedient.

Oh, there is indeed some "science" in this fiction. The tools that Rosa has to work with are amazing. But, the story would be much the same with or without those tools. The psychiatric doctor is being used to effectively euthanize a potential political dissident.

I do invite people to get acquainted with Le Guin. Further, I invite those people to extrapolate some of today's technology into her stories. 24/7 surveillance? Genetic mapping? Digital mapping of the brain? The deeper we dig into who and what we are, as people, the closer Rosa's diagnostic tools come to reality.

I haven't been a Le Guin fan in the past, but I am becoming one.

For those who might search for this story - it is part of Volume 1 of the 'Where on Earth' collection of short stories. It may or may not be published in other anthologies, but this is where I found it.

Enjoy!

I bought a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U CPU incorporating a Vega 10 GPU, an Acer Swift 3. It has 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Unfortunately the RAM is not upgradable but when the SSD breaks I will be able to remove it and replace it with spinning rust.

I've got Slackware-current running on it with kernel 4.17.14. It came with Windows 10 but that has been removed. In fact I managed to set it up without ever booting into Windows. When you power it up, you must press F2 to get into the BIOS. Obviously, you can avoid ever starting Windows if you press F2 quickly enough on first power up.

I made a USB boot stick for installing Slackware-current, It's actually not that hard. I began by using Alien Bob's local Slackware mirror script on my main PC to get the latest Slackware-current and to create the installation DVD .iso image. It downloaded many gigabytes of data, so took quite a while even on my reasonable (80Mbit) Internet connection.

I found some useful instructions and some boot files for making a Slackware UEFI USB boot stick. Short story: use gdisk to partition the stick with two partitions, the first being 100M in size, the second being the rest of the stick. The first has to has a type of 0xEF00 and the second 0x8300. Then you put a vfat filesystem on the first. It tells you to put an ext4 FS on the second but I'm not sure that's necessary. You need to create a directory in the first partition called EFI and under it a subdirectory called something like Slackware. Copy the files as directed at the above link into the EFI/Slackware subdir and sync the disks. You can also have a subdir called Boot which the firmware recognises specially as a default, and there is a naming convention for the files that go in there. Google is your friend.

When making a USB boot stick for a pre-UEFI system you need to run isohybrid on the .iso installation image. I did that here too. (Is this necessary for UEFI? It didn't do any harm.) dd the slackware-current .iso into the second partition of the USB stick.

Plug the stick into the laptop and power cycle, pressing F2 quickly to avoid booting any existing OS.

The firmware (BIOS) is UEFI and has Secure Boot. Before you can tell it to boot something other than Windows, you have to set a master password in the firmware. When you have done that you can change the priority of the boot devices and add the new boot loaders to the menu, after deleting the existing Windows ones.

Make sure that the USB stick is the first preference of boot device in the UEFI menus and remove the hard disk if possible so you can't accidentally boot Windows.

Reboot the machine, and hit F12 for a boot menu. Hopefully, the USB stick should be there. Select it and the familiar Slackware installation should start.

At this point you can make a backup of your Windows image in case you ever need to take the machine back for a warranty repair or sell it on to someone who needs Windows. I backed up my pristine uninstalled Windows image using dd from the command line and dumping the data onto an external USB hard disk. Piped through gzip the 256GB disk image compressed down to about 12GB. (There was a stuck pixel on the screen and I was glad I did this since I had to take it back to the store for a replacement).

Installing Slackware-current was very simple. I partitioned the SSD with gdisk to have three partitions, a 100MB UEFI boot partition (vfat), a Linux swap partition (8GB) and a Linux partition (the rest of the disk ext4). The installer said "Slackware 14.1" but that's because of the root disk image on the boot disk. I installed the complete distribution and rebooted. It worked, with eight penguins at the top of the screen.

When I say "it worked" it did, keyboard, touchpad and built-in WiFi. The kernel (4.14.56) that came with Slackware-current wasn't new enough to see the Vega GPU, so X would not run.

I downloaded the latest (at the time) stable kernel (4.17.8) and did a "make oldconfig" using the kernel configuration file from the slackware-current that I had installed. There were hundreds of new options and most of them were mysterious or irrelevant, so I just selected things as modules where I was unsure. I selected the support for the new AMD GPUs. Through poking around in /sys I noted that the touchpad was an Elan something and the WiFi chip was an Atheros 10k (driver ath10k_pci). I rebuilt the kernel and modules, but the new bzImage in /boot/EFI/Slackware and put a new entry in /boot/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf for it and did a make modules_install. On rebooting the machine, I hit TAB to get the elilo menu and selected my new kernel. I was then able to get X up and running with a UK keyboard and the touchpad.

It turns out that to do a middle button click on the touchpad you have to put the tips of three fingers down and then push down to click. It takes a bit of practise...

By the way, I've been using it for three weeks and it's never swapped yet. It also has a fingerprint reader. I believe they are useless and will not even try to get it working.

There are a couple of problems, though. It intermittently hangs on boot when the kernel tries to switch from UEFI VGA to the AMD GPU driver (the open source one) and the machine locked up hard when watching a video in Palemoon. It wasn't on the network so I couldn't try to ssh. I had to power cycle it.

Next we shall see how SETI@Home runs on it.

Right, so I was in a mood tonight and considering how idiotic it is for white folks to think I should venerate the cultures and traditions of my ancestors from hundreds of years ago when they don't even venerate the cultures and traditions of their still living ancestors. Being the smartass I am, I went outside and did a rain dance (Okay, so it bore a strong resemblance to the Thriller dance. Fuck you. I'm an indian and if I say it's a rain dance, it's a rain dance.) while I was having a smoke.

I finish my smoke and come back in, quite amused with myself and do a #weather on IRC to get the forecast and fuck me if it didn't work.

So, I'm sitting here greatly amused with myself and then I remember I was going to take my boat out for half a day of jug fishing tomorrow.

Fucking stupid ancestral magic powers.

When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

While nosing around, I came across this article by Bjorn Lomborg (a notable economist who has come out against most climate change mitigation):

Looking into the future, it’s likely that hurricanes will indeed become somewhat stronger by the end of the century. They will also likely become less frequent, and societies will definitely become more robust. A respected Nature review shows that hurricane damage currently costs 0.04% of global gross domestic product. Accounting for an increase in prosperity, this would drop fourfold to 0.01% by 2100. But the global warming factor making hurricanes fewer but stronger will mean total damage will end around 0.02%.

This shows that global warming is a problem, but it also shows us that even accounting for this, damages will decline.

[...]

Research shows that the Kyoto Protocol, the first major global deal to cut carbon and rein in temperatures (and, it would follow, help prevent hurricanes) failed to achieve a thing. The Paris climate treaty is on track to cost the globe about $1 trillion to $2 trillion per year for the rest of the century. The U.N. body responsible for the treaty estimates that the cuts promised until 2030 will achieve 1% of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2 Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit.

What this suggests is that spending 1%-2% of GDP on climate policies could, at best, help avoid much, much less than 0.01% of GDP lost to hurricanes. That is an infuriatingly bad investment.

In other words, this sort of incredibly terrible economic trade-offs is why current climate change mitigation isn't going to happen on a large scale in the majority of the world that isn't wealthy and can't afford that sort of virtue signalling. There's obviously more harm to climate change than just a slight increase in sea level, but all of the costs of it have been exaggerated while the costs of mitigation have been ignored.

Finally, I think it's worth reinvestigating the key dynamic that kills climate change mitigation. Poverty is the leading cause of climate change and other environmental harm not wealth. Extremely poor people can't afford to care about climate change. Here's a 2013 story that illustrates that. A Willis Eschenbach talks about several examples of where poverty destroys the environment (such as the notable different in tree coverage between deforested and more impoverished Haiti and neighboring, better forested San Domingo), a key one was a story about some shenanigans in the Solomon Islands where local people sold out for pennies on the dollar to logging companies.

So that inexpensive purchase of the island councilors, I heard it was ten grand US$ per man, gave the logging company the right to negotiate a contract with the locals if they wanted to sign. One afternoon, some of the young Vella Lavella guys made the trip over to the island where I lived to ask if I would help them. I bought the beers, and we talked about the logging company. They said that they’d been agitating to convince the people to keep the company out and take care of their own forests. But the sentiment among the people was against them. They wanted the easy money, just sit back and let the company do the work.

So Mr. Eschenbach tries to help with predictable results.

So I went over the whole document and marked it up. Then I met up with the guys again, and we went over the whole thing, clause by clause. I’d re-written about two-thirds of the clauses, and I’d worked with my friend the Public Solicitor, and we’d put together a document that would be a good deal for the locals. The loggers would still make out, but like businessmen, not like highway robbers.

[...]

So the big night came for the meeting. Everyone showed up, loggers and islanders. I played the genial host, and left them to discuss the fate of the forest.

And in the morning? They all came out, shamefaced. I took one look, and my heart sank. I asked one of the old guys, one of the big men, what had happened. “Oh, the logger men were very nice! Can you imagine, they gave us a whole case of Black Label whiskey. They explained the contract, and it sounded wonderful, so we signed it” … oh, man, my blood was angrified mightily and I was in grave danger of waxing wroth … but I knew the old man, and he wasn’t a bad guy, just weak. So I curbed my tongue and shook my head, and I said that his sons might approve, but his grand children would wonder why he sold their birthright for pennies … then I went and talked to the young guys. They said they couldn’t stop it, once the big men were drunk they got combative and wouldn’t listen to anyone and they would have signed anything.

After some rhetorical soul-searching

And at the end of the day, I realized that I was on a fool’s errand. Oh, I’d fight the fight again, in a minute, but I’d lose again. It’s what happens when big money hits a poor country—the environment gets screwed, whether it’s logging, fishing, or mining. Until the country is wealthy enough to feed its citizens and to protect itself, its resources are always on sale to the lowest bidder … by which I mean the bidder with the lowest morals.

Now, I started this sad tale for a reason, to give substance to the damage that poverty does to the environment. When you can buy an island council for ten grand a man and there are literally millions of dollars at stake, that council will get bought no matter how hard I fight against it. Per capita GDP in the Solomons is about $600 annually, it’s classed as an “LDC”, a Least Developed Country … and in a country where ten thousand dollars is almost twenty years wages, you can buy many people for ten large …

And concludes:

So this is where I came in, explaining about how people fighting against CO2 hurt the environment. Let me repeat the links in the chain:

1. Led in part by the environmental NGOs, many people and governments have declared war on CO2.

2. Their preferred method of warfare is to raise energy prices, through subsidies, bans, taxes, renewable energy requirements, pipeline refusals, and the like.

3. The rise in energy prices both impoverishes the poor and prevents the development of poor countries.

4. As Obama pointed out, even wealthy people with economic worries tend to ignore the environment … so stomping on the development possibilities of poor countries by raising energy prices is a guarantee of years of environmental damage and destruction.

I'll note also that poor people tend to be fertile people.

In other words, the attempts to fix climate and environmental problems makes the conditions which created the problems even worse. This is self-defeating. One doesn't need to be blocked by Big Oil propaganda when doing more harm than good and people figure that out.

And that brings me back to the fundamental tragedy of the earlier journal article. There, the author repeatedly describes all the harms that supposedly will accrue from climate change (pathologically reproducing the behavior that discredited him in the first place) while completely ignoring the harm that comes from his destructive fixes for climate change. Why should we listen and agree with this one-sided argument?

Editor’s Note: This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

But one merely needs to read the preface to the article to see the very overt motive:

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

What is remarkable about this is that it's completely pulled out of the author's ass without support from actual research (and no, I don't consider extrapolations from computer models that have little to do with reality as actual research). I get that a 5C increase in global temperature probably will result in significant problems for mankind. But there's no consideration here of what actually will happen or how adaptable humanity will be to it (protip: humanity turns out to be quite adaptable to such things). What could have been an interesting study of that period of climatology has turned into yet more preaching.

What I see here is one sad person's acknowledgement that the con is over. They will never again have a population as gullible as we were in 1989. Here's a telling two paragraphs:

The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, a member of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in the 1970s that the most appropriate remedy was a global carbon tax. But that required an international agreement, which Nordhaus didn’t think was likely. Michael Glantz, a political scientist who was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time, argued in 1979 that democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem. The competition for resources means that no single crisis can ever command the public interest for long, yet climate change requires sustained, disciplined efforts over decades. And the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich argued that any global agreement would inevitably favor the most minimal action. Adaptation, Meyer-Abich concluded, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

This last bit in a nutshell is why they lost. It wasn't that people didn't care about the climate or near future convenience (excuses which conveniently allowed these theorists to ignore that important things are done with the burning of fossil fuels). It's that climate change mitigation required huge sacrifices for little gain in the present and future. Thus, while politicians could afford the pretense of caring about climate change, they couldn't actually afford to plunge their countries into greater poverty for this green ideology.

I think we're seeing a glimpse of the end game for the current bout of climate change ideology, namely, that the Chicken Littles of the world spin grand and nostalgic tales of how we could have prevented global disaster, if only we had remained as gullible as we used to be.

I think however there is a more important lesson to learn for those who wish to. Credibility is important here. When one lies and hides evidence for the good of the world [edit: in particular, exaggerating both the harm expected and degree of confidence in the science, both which the author above does], they lose credibility and the public trust. That happened over the past two decades. They may still get what they want, but it becomes an uphill battle with every victory dearly won and defeat possible even at the hands of opponents with minuscule resources.

Sad to say, this author didn't learn that lesson and instead doubles-down, making all sorts of claims of impending disaster with that peculiar lack of evidence. This is why we're where we are now.

So, TR and I were out smoking and drinking coffee this morning and he tells me about this British bird who was walking around where she used to live, looking at all the old landmarks, and comes across this US MAIL mailbox painted up like an American flag. She instagrams or tweets or some shit a picture with a caption of "What the hell is this?". She gets some joking responses back like "freedom rings, baby!" and responds tongue-in-cheek "I'm all for immigration but they need to assimilate". I get a chuckle out of this because I like to see people not taking themselves seriously all the time.

That got me to thinking. There are a whole lot of folks in the US who are of the opinion that immigrants should be able to wag their entire culture over here, making no efforts at assimilation whatsoever. It made me wonder if they would say the same thing if a couple million Texans moved over to Sweden, kept right on being Texans at everyone, and demanded legal changes to better fit their Texan sensibilities. I'm dead certain they wouldn't. This tells me what they say is a lie and their beef is very specifically with the US's dominant culture/laws/etc... but that they are too cowardly to say so openly.

When you guys hear of Desiato you most likely think of the dead rock star at the restaurant at the end of the universe. I think of an old online friend from a couple decades back, Tim Poesch. I got an email from him a couple weeks ago, unfortunately when all my equipment was screwing up.

        The March Win 7 update disaster hit both of my laptops. It just kept the big HP from seeing my other devices and vice versa, but the little Acer was crashing often. I reinstalled the Acer’s OS and apps, but for some reason I couldn’t get Thunderbird to get to my email account.

        My nearly decade old Kyocera phone was likewise acting up, telling me its storage was full when it was actually nearly empty, then its apps started crashing. I’d been checking email with the phone until I could get Thunderbird working right.

        I saw Tim’s email but couldn’t read it. I was finally able to read it a couple of days later. He said he’d run across Random Scribblings during a random Google search, and it made him nostalgic for the old days, so he ordered a copy from B&N.

        Tim was part of a small world-wide group of us with popular web sites. His was a realaudio/shoutcast/podcast (why do they keep changing the neme?). Others in our group were Yello There and his hilarious parody of Blue’s News, Dopey Smurf who got slashdotted after he posted an explanation of how rail guns work (his site was down for a month), Flamethrower, who was actually a bunch of British college students pretending to be one guy, with another podcast of hilarious British vulgarity. We all had a LOT of fun!

        As soon as I read Tim’s email and before I could reply the damned phone’s email crashed and it wouldn't come back up. A week later I discovered the stupid mistake that kept Thunderbird from connecting—I’d had Wi-Fi shut off.

        Duh!

        With Thunderbird working again I looked for Tim’s email so I could answer it; I’d gotten nostalgic myself putting Random Scribblings together.

        It was gone. Apparently the phone’s email client had eaten it.

        Tim, if you happen to run across this post, please email again!

I'm out of town for a couple weeks and taking no tech with me except my phone and a USB drive with a bunch of SG-1 and my ssh keys on it. I may have time occasionally to rhetorically bitch-slap someone but not to hold up a serious conversation or to unfuck the servers if you folks break them while I'm gone. Which is basically to say that if you guys set the place on fire and want it put out, I hope you drank plenty of water beforehand.

I'm in a pretty good mood this morning and you lot could very well make use of this, so I'm going to share with you the Old Indian Fire-Starting Trick as taught to me by my forefathers.

Setup: First you need a prepared fire ready to be set aflame. It can be your traditional fire of the tinder, kindling, wood type or it can even be charcoal doused in lighter fluid if you're in a bind. Next you need to announce that you'll be performing the "Old Indian Fire-starting Trick" to get it going.

Execution: Carefully inspect the prepared fire, making sure it is safely laid. Make visible note of any failed attempts to get it going. Wet a finger in your mouth and hold it up to test the wind. Affirm with a nod that conditions for the trick are suitable. Now pull a lighter* out of your pocket and use it to light the fire.

When called on your bullshit, recite the following, counting each off on a finger as you do: I tricked you, I started a fire, and I learned it from an old indian. Old indian. Fire-starting. Trick.

This trick is good for most any audience or occasion. Feel free to add any audience-appropriate cheese before you pull out the lighter. You're welcome.

* I advise a Bic for those of you not experienced in lighter selection. An overfilled Zippo will land you with a mild but annoying chemical burn on your leg and a Cricket will run out of fluid before it runs out of flint, leaving you looking at a lighter with fluid in it that can do nothing useful ever again.