Swatting Gnats

The U.S. could yet emerge victorious in the current world scenario, if our people proved worthy, which remains to be seen. The odds are in our favor. The U.S. is fantastically powerful in every way. North Korea barks about its nukes, but through science, we could neutralize nukes, even ICBMs, from North Korea, Russia, China, Iran and all comers.

I doubt, however, whether our people are ready to devote resources to complicated, hard to understand science and scientific research, instead of the usual, par for the course: bombing ragheads in the Middle East.

The problem with bombing ragheads is they just reproduce like rabbits and make more ragheads. What's the point? The fanatic, despotic Muslims never were a realistic threat to the U.S., just a distraction and an annoyance. They are miserable savages, yes. They should be sealed off from North and South America, Europe and Australia and contained in the miserable Third World region with the other savages. Instead, our myopic leaders squandered the nation's treasure bombing places that were probably improved by the bombing and never were anything special to begin with. Meanwhile, Asia and the real threat, China, crept around and surprised us with a nuclear-armed NK.

North Korea is just a sock-puppet for China, yet another distraction while China wages economic warfare, seizing all manufacturing, and the U.S. transforms into a service economy unfit and unprepared for any serious endeavor, useless and dependent.

The United States, twenty trillion in debt and lagging in scientific research and development, with Trump wanting to spend money, not on science--goodness no!--but on military hardware, bullets and bombs and gadgets, in order to enrich his crony friends, and possibly wage war against the next annoyance, the outlook for the U.S. does not appear all that great. China's long-term strategy, meanwhile, is apparent to those who watch and listen. China's strategy must succeed, if the U.S. does not change course and focus on what is real, rather than swatting gnats.

The proud old lion gasps in the jungle as the bold hyena comes to claim dinner.

Trump's Right about USPS. USPS Sucks.

Trump's right here. Even a stopped clock will be right twice a day.

The USPS is managed by morons, who should be placed in a facility. It operates at a loss, because the management does not know what to do, other than play with their thumbs. Management wants the USPS to be privatized, so they are doing everything in their power to destroy the USPS.

The USPS gives money to Amazon for no apparent reason, charging half what UPS and FedEx charge to deliver packages. Meanwhile, they pay the drivers $15 an hour, with no benefits at all, and no full-time hours. They use part-time, disposable temp workers. Very few drivers are full-time, with benefits. The USPS does not provide good jobs to most of its employees. Instead, it is far worse than Wal-Mart. The driver jobs are noisy, dusty, long hours for little pay, and the vehicles are unheated, uncooled, violent, and liable to cause severe, permanent hearing loss in drivers. For $15 an hour, a driver can expect to lose 25% of his hearing for life, suffer injury to joints, bones and tissue, and possibly lose a limb, because the little jalopies the drivers run around in on dirt roads for twelve hours at a time are unsafe, antiquated WW2-style jeeps.

Lawsuits are Good for Apple

I'm glad Crapple is finally facing the music over their Iphone batteries. The problem with Iphones is simple. How do you replace the battery? Yeah, it is complicated, and that's Crapple's fault, for putting users in a pickle. Either pay to replace the user's battery every 3 years, for eternity, or else design the Iphone to be easily serviced by the user, as all devices used to be, just ten years ago. This planned obsolescence bit is tricky and tiresome.

Apple is a tax dodger anyway for hiding all their profits overseas and refusing to pay much of anything in taxes to anybody, even poor old Ireland. They have no goodwill as far as I am concerned. Microsoft is a better corporate citizen than Apple, any day of the week, and that's saying something.

While I'm on Crapple's case, why did they move all the jobs to China? They should stop calling themselves American. List Apple in the Chinese stock exchange and just call themselves a Chinese company. They don't need U.S. protection. Their executive types need to move over to Beijing and learn all about the tender mercies of Chinese law and attend all those Communist Party meetings.

I don't give a hoot about new Iphone models, because they have zero features that interest me. There is one feature that would interest me: a replaceable battery. Will Apple ever design such a phone? No, because they're greedy, irresponsible idiots.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

It is a law of the Universe that no good deed goes unpunished. People fear change of any kind, whether it is for good or not. By doing good, one disrupts the status quo, and it is the familiar that is preferred and trusted, whether the familiar be good or ill, while change of any kind arouses suspicion, because many cannot understand the desire to do good, and instead brood over imaginary deeper plots and schemes.

Because Guns are Everywhere

One of the many problems with simple-minded folk is they see conspiracy and malice where there is none, as in police shootings such as this recent one. The actual problem in that case was caused by a fleeing felon and thief.

Guns are about as good as we've got at this stage, but they are brutal, klunky weapons, and we have to be willing to accept that accidents will happen--often. Police require the ability to exercise deadly force simply because deadly force is widely distributed amongst our criminal class. If our criminals were not armed with deadly weapons, then yes, the police could be kinder, gentler, and have fewer accidents. But that's not the case. We have to get used to reality. The reality is that yes, the police will off innocent folk by mistake from time to time, because it comes with the job, and there is always going to be a certain percentage of accidents and misjudgements, both due to the human factor and due to the fog of war. People casting blame blindly upon police do not grasp the challenges that the police are up against in today's heavily armed society.

Relocate Israel

The simmering problem of Israel and the Middle East could have been solved long ago, but radical solutions were not fully considered. Israel should relocate its citizens and materiel to an unused, sparsely inhabited land-mass five times its size in the Australian continent, and pay Australia for the land. If they don't want to move, due to sentimentality or religion, then the U.S. should withdraw all protection and all funding, and let the Israelis duke it out with the surrounding countries. I am willing to bet the Israelis would come around, faced with annihilation by their hostile Muslim neighbors. It is high time that Israel stop being a drain on the U.S. Treasury. One day, the U.S. may not even be able to help Israel. One country can't count on another one being there for it indefinitely. That's a bad long-term strategy.

There are very few people in Australia, with the consequence that much of Australia goes unused, being desert and scrub, and the Israelis have the knack of knowing what to do with that sort of land. Australia would benefit not only from the money down on the purchase, but by having an industrious, well-educated neighbor (possibly a quasi-independent state) which could join the Commonwealth. The smart Israelis would set a good example for the Australians and teach them a thing or two about military endeavors, as well. I bet a lot of Australians would eventually want to go live and work in their new neighbor. Israel can then focus on what it is good at, science and technology, without the distraction of fanatical, stupid, know-nothing Muslims blowing things up and killing people.

Meanwhile, all materiel currently in Israel must be dismantled and shipped to the new homeland or destroyed, leaving nothing behind but a wasteland, where the U.S. can dump nuclear waste and other highly hazardous materials, to deliver the Muslims a Pyrhhic Victory, a victory they won't want and won't be able to exploit for a thousand years. Any buildings, farms or equipment left behind should be destroyed by fire or bomb. The Muslim fanatics now spending billions of dollars on terrorism can learn about the virtue of work, and spend billions to rebuild roads, shacks and sewage systems. Nothing should be left behind for them, and they can spend the next couple centuries cleaning up nuclear and biological waste. They don't deserve to profit from the unhappy situation they created, and it will be a good lesson for them to farm on radioactive soil filled with viruses, bacteria and heavy metals.

Arguing the Case for Hanging

This insect certainly argues in favor of the restoration of hanging as the death penalty in the U.S. There ought to be a scaffold erected about every hundred mile radii where specimens such as this are hung from the neck until the crows get bold and peck at dainty little snacks.

Cold

To be a good operator in this world requires replacing stock H. Sapiens blood with ice water. Sang froid, I believe it is called. For we have many opinions, don't we, about the way things are, but opinions do get in the way, and after all, aren't we wrong some of the time? The superb operator listens to realpolitik, to the sense, not the appearance, of reality. Because reality is not as our opinions seek to make it, but rather is independent of us and our beliefs and preferences. The Universe is greater than any--or all--of us. These things I accept.

This was the reason I stayed fully invested in the United States stock market after Donald Trump became President. I sensed inflation would rise, but so would the stock market. Donald is simple, and it is not difficult to walk though his mind and lounge about on his mental furniture while deploring his atrocious taste in decor. He telegraphs everything he thinks the moment he thinks it, all the time, and is remarkably consistent, and even his many lies are transparent, for he is rather a buffoon. This makes investing easy, even with little knowledge of the market.

Just because I am making money does not mean I support Trump or the Republicans. Money is not everything to me, and I don't think it should be. Money does not equate to morality, as those right-wing Christians that adhere to the Prosperity Gospel seem to think. I know that, a hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller helped finance the whole theology that linked Christ to the Almighty Dollar. But this idolizing of the rich has a whiff of sulfur about it.

I don't think that removing all of the safety nets from the poor and the ignorant and the stupid is a very nice thing to do. I think that there is a danger that those millions may turn extreme, rather than passing into that good Night gently and quietly. The Opiod crisis, the meth epidemic and the alt-right are warning signals from the poor. There are many guns among the people, more than in the militaries of many nations, and the right to own them is enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

The simple, ultimate and universal answer to the problems of today are both philosophical and technological. We must control the production of our new humans and optimize this production to create the very best from birth. No more defects, no more sub-par, only the very best and the very brightest. This is a very radical concept, unpalatable to many, but will be adopted by other nations such as China even if we do not. This question will decide whether democracy survives, or whether totalitarian dictatorship is the only rational and effective system of government. The United States and its people will be overtaken and enslaved in brutal servitude if we do not adopt a system of Eugenics. This is not to say that the system cannot be humane, gentle and yet effective. There is no need for human suffering or for callous or insensitive treatment of existing humans. There is only a need, and an urgent one, to improve future generations, to be better than me, than you, and better than anyone we know. The brave new world is now, and let's not let China steal it away from us.