I have been on the Ketogenic W.O.E. (way of eating), then full Carnivore, for about eighteen months now. They both work, period. Low-carb eating delivers on its many promises, period. I am losing weight very nicely, I am more alert yet sleeping better, blood pressure is in the middle of the safe zone, my skin is clearing up, my mild psoriasis has disappeared, my esophageal ulcer has gone entirely away, and even my vision has improved significantly. There are countless other advantages, but low-carb delivers what every other way of eating only promises. Consider me 100% sold.
The rampant success of the low-carb (or no carb) way of eating is beginning to penetrate the public weltanshaung significantly, and its adherent numbers are expanding rapidly. No surprise really since it delivers what it promises metabolically, in spades. I believe participation in this way of eating will continue to increase until a tipping point is reached where the bulk of the population will realize its many benefits. That would be extremely good for the overall health of the country, but it could be very bad for the overall economy.
If, say, fifty percent of the people in the country went low-carb, we could be facing an economic gotterdammerung. The farming of grain, the need for drugs, and the need for medical care would all plummet as demand shrank. A major commercial food processing paradigm shift would certainly occur, affecting tens of millions of employed people. The farming population would shrink but the percentage of farm workers is at an all time low already so the impact there would be less catastrophic. The drug industry would shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, at a minimum, and many billions in revenue. The overall medical establishment would contract significantly, endangering the jobs of millions.
Drug and grocery stores would see a very large realignment of their business plans, and product sales shifts affecting many hundreds of thousands of jobs, if not millions. Yank out all the crap carbs and vegetable oils out of a modern grocery store and it would have to shrink in size ninety percent. Of course the meat departments, and others such as the green vegetable and cheese departments, would increase in size and employees, but hardly enough to make up the difference.
Industries such as farm equipment manufacturing and food transport would undergo significant shifts in resources, and likely large decreases in output, but livestock raising and processing would ratchet smartly upward, possibly offsetting some of those losses. Nursing homes and dentistry would shed customers and employees.
The sugar manufacturing industry, including factory synthesized sugars, would, and rightly so, be savaged. Agricultural land use would shift significantly, a fair percentage of crop acreage would disappear, but pasturage would expand to replace at least some of that. The dairy industry, with the exception of cheese and butter production, and industrial uses, would shrink significantly. The fruit growing industries would collapse. The list goes on and on.
The GNP might well plummet for decades, and all affected parties would take several decades or longer to adjust to changed demand, and government revenues could drastically shrink. A mitigating factor would be much lower government expenditures on health care. There is no question in my mind that high levels of carbohydrate and sugar consumption world-wide result in trillions of dollars yearly in unnecessary medical expenditures.
A large chunk of the population free of most chronic disease would be a wonderful, and terrible, thing to behold. We could end up in the perverse situation of a much much healthier populace confronted by a far sicker economy. Or as least the economy would be much sicker until all parties adjusted to the new reality, or technological change engendered greater employment prospects. That may well happen, but it might take a long time, possibly as much as a century for the full shakeout. The widespread adoption of the almost absurdly healthy low-carb high-fat way of eating would result in the reaping of an economic whirlwind, sown by the wind of the catastrophic high-carb low-fat nutritional paradigm of the last sixty years. It would not be pretty.
There is no question that the overall health of the U.S. would improve dramatically, so the economic turmoil would be worth it in the long run. In the short run things could get ugly for a good while. Perhaps this revelatory* nutritional regimen will only slowly percolate through the populace, thereby delaying or minimizing economic dislocations. Unfortunately, the slow and incremental way means a lot more people will be suffering and dying early. A lot more, many millions over a century. Or it might not be so measured and slow. Public awareness of the incredible power of low-carb eating could reach an unpredictable tipping point beyond which it gains millions of adherents in a relatively short time. If so then buckle up people. It may well be a very bumpy, if far healthier, ride.
*Revelatory this way of eating may well be to most, but it is in no way new. The first book on the benefits of low-carb eating appeared in the 1850s.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
The Empty Ocean
This is a revised edition of The Empty Ocean, which is a continuation of my previous novelistic effort titled To Sail The Purest Sea. It is not a stand alone piece. It will make no sense without you have read Purest Sea. Not only is it quite different in tone, it smartly expands the stage, cast, and action of Sea, including actual aliens this time. While its plotting is somewhat more along conventional lines, including space warfare, it is nevertheless even more frank about matters of love and libido than the first book. Indeed there is substantial adult material, however it is still a very long way from pornographic. And yes, the cover image will eventually make sense. Available, again, on Amazon.
Monday, October 1, 2018
Sneer Tactics
It is instructive to note that Senate Democrats are outraged at the assertion that Ms. C.B Ford might have a political agenda informing her sundry accusations against Judge Kavanaugh. How DARE you doubt her noble un-selfish veracity you toxic white male sexist fascist cis-het patriarchal Rethuglican pond scum!
Perhaps they have a point. Ms. Ford is a female academic and life-long progressive, of whom approximately 99.999875% fervently loathe any and all conservatives. But progressives purport to be scandalized that many don't believe she is among the saintly un-biased .000125% who do not. Consequently they noisily proclaim that her accusations must be taken at complete un-questioned face value without any taint of political agenda.
And speaking of faces I swear the woman looks fifteen years older than her actual age of 55. With today's gratuitous ad-hominem slur out of the way, let us consider the increasingly apparent fact that all women progressives absolutely must credit her accusations, regardless of the fact that exactly none of those accusations is anything but dodgy hearsay consisting of the vague memories of a drunken attendee at a third of a century old frat party.
It's entirely about the feeeeelz now. Since Ms. Ford has been anointed as a "survivor" she must be believed unto the last desperate extremity. The long established courtroom strictures of English common law are discredited oppressive concepts in the court of evidence-free public opinion, better known as a kangaroo court. I am however skeptical we could locate an actual kangaroo dumb enough to sneer at the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", even on Roo-Tweet and Roo-Book. Sneers and Roo-Book? Unlikely.
Perhaps they have a point. Ms. Ford is a female academic and life-long progressive, of whom approximately 99.999875% fervently loathe any and all conservatives. But progressives purport to be scandalized that many don't believe she is among the saintly un-biased .000125% who do not. Consequently they noisily proclaim that her accusations must be taken at complete un-questioned face value without any taint of political agenda.
And speaking of faces I swear the woman looks fifteen years older than her actual age of 55. With today's gratuitous ad-hominem slur out of the way, let us consider the increasingly apparent fact that all women progressives absolutely must credit her accusations, regardless of the fact that exactly none of those accusations is anything but dodgy hearsay consisting of the vague memories of a drunken attendee at a third of a century old frat party.
It's entirely about the feeeeelz now. Since Ms. Ford has been anointed as a "survivor" she must be believed unto the last desperate extremity. The long established courtroom strictures of English common law are discredited oppressive concepts in the court of evidence-free public opinion, better known as a kangaroo court. I am however skeptical we could locate an actual kangaroo dumb enough to sneer at the concept of "innocent until proven guilty", even on Roo-Tweet and Roo-Book. Sneers and Roo-Book? Unlikely.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Presenting Diane Feinstein and the Supremes! Live from Washington D.C.!
The inestimable Joe Bob Briggs over at Taki's Magazine offered a resounding cri de coeur wishing heartily that supreme court judges were drawn more widely than from the Ivy League. He also wishes the partisan nature of the court could somehow be minimized. I sympathize, I really do. The trouble is that even if judges of towering Olympian integrity actually exist, they would nevertheless be slashed by a thousand cuts of partisan ferocity during the confirmation process.
That's just how it works now, and attempts to roll back partisanship in the process are, I'm afraid, doomed to failure. For the major parties to attempt this would be seen as unilateral disarmament in the boiling culture war of the present moment, and rightly so. Predictably I view Democrats as being far more venal and vicious in their integrity free blistering panic to prevent a largely conservative court than Republicans would conversely be, but they are not immune to the tendency either.
That said, I'm entirely confident that it simply does not matter who the jurist in question is if he was nominated by Trump, even if the nominee was a transgender card carrying member of the Socialist Worker's Party and wore a pussy hat to the hearings. By the same token if Obama had nominated, say, Ben Shapiro, Republicans would likely take a dim view of the move. They wouldn't have Borked him into oblivion like Democrats would, but they wouldn't have been thrilled simply because Obama nominated him. Democrats might have been aghast, but would have publicly joined the NRA before they dared stymie the will of Saint Obama of Kenwood.
In any case we are well and truly stuck with rampant partisanship in the nominating process. We can bemoan it all we like, but we can't simply cash out and go home in high dudgeon because the game will continue without us. The stakes are much too high for us to decline to play. What does worry me is that after this particular confirmation auto-da-fé it may be hard to find anyone worth more than a pitcher of warm spit to volunteer for the savagely corrosive and disheartening process.
That's just how it works now, and attempts to roll back partisanship in the process are, I'm afraid, doomed to failure. For the major parties to attempt this would be seen as unilateral disarmament in the boiling culture war of the present moment, and rightly so. Predictably I view Democrats as being far more venal and vicious in their integrity free blistering panic to prevent a largely conservative court than Republicans would conversely be, but they are not immune to the tendency either.
That said, I'm entirely confident that it simply does not matter who the jurist in question is if he was nominated by Trump, even if the nominee was a transgender card carrying member of the Socialist Worker's Party and wore a pussy hat to the hearings. By the same token if Obama had nominated, say, Ben Shapiro, Republicans would likely take a dim view of the move. They wouldn't have Borked him into oblivion like Democrats would, but they wouldn't have been thrilled simply because Obama nominated him. Democrats might have been aghast, but would have publicly joined the NRA before they dared stymie the will of Saint Obama of Kenwood.
In any case we are well and truly stuck with rampant partisanship in the nominating process. We can bemoan it all we like, but we can't simply cash out and go home in high dudgeon because the game will continue without us. The stakes are much too high for us to decline to play. What does worry me is that after this particular confirmation auto-da-fé it may be hard to find anyone worth more than a pitcher of warm spit to volunteer for the savagely corrosive and disheartening process.
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Day...Oh...
Well here it is again. 9/11 is supposed to be our rear view now, but it sneaks up on you. You're going along more or less just fine then you realize it's that day, and once more a sickening pall descends on your soul. There should be a statute of limitations on feeling this way, but for many of us that limit is not on the horizon. Perhaps if I lived another fifty years the anguish might be diluted to a level similar to, for instance, indirect memories of Pearl Harbor for my generation, but probably not.
That memorial anguish is still strong in those who were alive at the time, but that direct memory of the fear, anger, disgust, and rage engendered by Pearl Harbor is rapidly passing into the mist along with the so-called Greatest Generation. Will those of us who consider the appalling events of 9/11 to be the signature event of our lives carry the feelings of that day to our graves? For myself most assuredly.
Yet for many it will not. A lack of disgust and fear characterizes the non-feelings of, at a rough guess, nearly half the country. You may guess which half I mean. This can only be described as denial, a word that has unfortunately been devalued nearly into uselessness, but nevertheless it is a denial of what 9/11 meant. And what it still means is the realization that hatred of western civilization continues unabated to this day.
Many of the deniers contend that the events subsequent to 9/11 have caused all the trouble in the middle-east, but they conveniently forget that 9/11 was the apex of civilizational hatred, not its beginning. If the last seventeen years had never happened they would still hate us. Before 9/11 they hated us not because of what we had done, but because of what we are, and they still do. Memory deniers realize this and have spent the last seventeen years attempting to rearrange our civilization more to the liking of bad actors of the radical Islamist persuasion. It's not working, because it can't work.
The western world will never be able to sufficiently abase itself to please Islamist militancy. I could qualify that statement but I refuse to do so. Make no mistake, many in our governing classes have given this abasement their best shot, but it will never work until western civilization retreats from its consensual republican roots so much that even the most committed radical leftist western civ. hater would quail before the prospect of living in such a degenerate polity. In other words, never.
So feel the pain of 9/11 as ye will, and endeavor to keep gimlet eyes in the watchtowers. There is a lot riding on our civilization confidence. In other words, everything.
That memorial anguish is still strong in those who were alive at the time, but that direct memory of the fear, anger, disgust, and rage engendered by Pearl Harbor is rapidly passing into the mist along with the so-called Greatest Generation. Will those of us who consider the appalling events of 9/11 to be the signature event of our lives carry the feelings of that day to our graves? For myself most assuredly.
Yet for many it will not. A lack of disgust and fear characterizes the non-feelings of, at a rough guess, nearly half the country. You may guess which half I mean. This can only be described as denial, a word that has unfortunately been devalued nearly into uselessness, but nevertheless it is a denial of what 9/11 meant. And what it still means is the realization that hatred of western civilization continues unabated to this day.
Many of the deniers contend that the events subsequent to 9/11 have caused all the trouble in the middle-east, but they conveniently forget that 9/11 was the apex of civilizational hatred, not its beginning. If the last seventeen years had never happened they would still hate us. Before 9/11 they hated us not because of what we had done, but because of what we are, and they still do. Memory deniers realize this and have spent the last seventeen years attempting to rearrange our civilization more to the liking of bad actors of the radical Islamist persuasion. It's not working, because it can't work.
The western world will never be able to sufficiently abase itself to please Islamist militancy. I could qualify that statement but I refuse to do so. Make no mistake, many in our governing classes have given this abasement their best shot, but it will never work until western civilization retreats from its consensual republican roots so much that even the most committed radical leftist western civ. hater would quail before the prospect of living in such a degenerate polity. In other words, never.
So feel the pain of 9/11 as ye will, and endeavor to keep gimlet eyes in the watchtowers. There is a lot riding on our civilization confidence. In other words, everything.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Senate Scotus Hocus Potus
Supreme Court justice nominee approval hearings have become an utter farce. There are no minds to be changed, no deals to be made, and the answers to any questions asked by the Democrats are completely irrelevant to the pre-ordained proceedings. It is one hundred percent pure and pointless political theater. The whole affair has sunk so low that the Democrats are importing screeching protesters intended to disrupt the proceedings.
These days if a nominee has not plainly evidenced political leanings well to the left of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Democrats automatically rise in full-throated opposition and will attempt to smear the nominee by any and all means possible. This baleful situation precedes the Democrats' rampaging Trump Derangement Syndrome, but the putrid intensity of their Trump hatred does serve to amplify their keening high dudgeon.
In truth I suspect that, even if Trump had nominated someone that makes Ginsburg look like Oliver Wendel Holmes, they would be mercilessly savaged simply because they were Trump's choice. That Judge Kavanaugh is a mildly conservative constitutionalist is completely beyond the pale, and thus must be opposed with every fiber of the Democrats' being, regardless of his qualifications and strong approval by the ABA. Very sad, but hardly unexpected. As Uncle Walter might have said forty years ago, "That's the way it is. September fifth, 2018.
These days if a nominee has not plainly evidenced political leanings well to the left of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Democrats automatically rise in full-throated opposition and will attempt to smear the nominee by any and all means possible. This baleful situation precedes the Democrats' rampaging Trump Derangement Syndrome, but the putrid intensity of their Trump hatred does serve to amplify their keening high dudgeon.
In truth I suspect that, even if Trump had nominated someone that makes Ginsburg look like Oliver Wendel Holmes, they would be mercilessly savaged simply because they were Trump's choice. That Judge Kavanaugh is a mildly conservative constitutionalist is completely beyond the pale, and thus must be opposed with every fiber of the Democrats' being, regardless of his qualifications and strong approval by the ABA. Very sad, but hardly unexpected. As Uncle Walter might have said forty years ago, "That's the way it is. September fifth, 2018.
Monday, August 6, 2018
To Sail The Purest Sea
Appended here is a link my novel To Sail the Purest Sea. It is nominally a science fiction novel, but in it I attempt to invert or outright sabotage many of the tropes of conventional SF. There are no great space battles with buckets of human blood spilled. Unlike much SF it does not brutally eliminate potentially beloved characters. It has strong intelligent women characters who nevertheless are not ashamed of their femininity. It has time travel, that isn't. It has aliens, that aren't.
Whatever anyone thinks it might have, it probably doesn't. It is very un-woke, yet it freely explores the roots of human fear, joy, love, sexuality, and the preservation of sapience. Be advised that the book contains a good deal of adult material, but it is lovingly sensual and not the least bit pornographic. It is not intended to offend anyone, but of course that is very difficult to avoid now. So be it.
Originally published in 2019, it is now available again in a revised edition.
Originally published in 2019, it is now available again in a revised edition.
Addendum: This image is what I proposed that the American ship looks like. Click to enlarge.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Challenging
The new Dodge Challenger SRT Wide Body model is now available with a manual transmission. It is perfect for those who think wretched excess is a good starting point. It weighs two and quarter tons and is the polar opposite of dainty. It has 707 horsepower. It has one foot wide rear tires. It has a six-speed by god manual transmission. It does a 12 second quarter mile and has a top speed of 200 mph. At full throttle it sounds like an artillery barrage. It handles and stops about a thousand times better than its sixties forebear. It gets 12 miles per gallon. It is pure undiluted raging testosterone and glorious social irresponsibility. Mostest bestest of all, it is a great and grand seventy kilobuck Stooges style poke in both joyless dead eyes of the greenie left. Priceless just about covers it.
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Whiteness
Here is a short random list of nasty terrible horrible and just plain awful white people who have through the centuries contributed nothing to our civilization.
Plato
Charles Dickens
John Lennon
Johannes Brahms
Alan Turing
Archimedes
Galileo Galilei
Christopher Wren
William Shakespeare
Albert Einstein
Frank Sinatra
John Steinbeck
Mozart
Cole Porter
Charles Darwin
Peter Tchaikovsky
Robert Heinlein
Isaac Newton
Glenn Gould
Leo Tolstoy
Francis Crick
Marie Curie
Samuel Clemens
Miguel de Cervantes
Dorothy Parker
Tycho Brahe
Humphrey Bogart
Jane Goodall
Hippocrates
Percy Shelley
Thomas Mann
Leonardo da Vinci
John Keats
Blaise Pascal
Johannes Gutenberg
Rudyard Kipling
Claude Debussy
Edgar Allan Poe
Nikola Tesla
Michael Faraday
John Phillip Sousa
Benjamin Franklin
Tom Paine
Benny Goodman
John Dunne
Andrew Carnegie
Richard Wagner
Franz Liszt
Oscar Wilde
Arthur C. Clarke
Yip Harburg
Omar Bradley
Giacamo Puccini
Edna Ferber
Nicolaus Copernicus
Daniel Bernoulli
Homer
Philo Farnsworth
Jules Verne
John Cleese
Edward Jenner
Dante Alighieri
James Watt
J.S. Bach
Herman Melville
Antoine Bequerel
Grant Wood
Giuseppe Verdi
Louis Pasteur
Jack London
Ernst Leitz
Antonio Vivaldi
Arthur Rubinstein
Luther Burbank
Alexander Graham Bell
Agatha Christie
Dr. Seuss
Thomas Edison
Orville/Wilbur Wright
Dwight D. Eisenhower
E.B. White
Thomas Jefferson
Dmitri Mendeleev
Stevie Ray Vaughn
John Kennedy Toole
Anne Frank
Jonas Salk
Frederic Chopin
Hans Geiger
Alexandre Dumas
Adam Smith
Neil Armstrong
Stephen Hawking
William Boeing
Enzo Ferrari
Beverly Sills
Pythagoras
Richard Strauss
Georges Bizet
Edwin Armstrong
Gottlieb Daimler
J.R.R. Tolkien
Jane Austen
Luciano Pavarroti
Charles Babbage
Cicero
Henry Ford
Vincent van Gogh
Karl Benz
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Edith Wharton
Martin Luther
Lucille Ball
Artie Shaw
Edmund Burke
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Samuel Morse
George Frederic Handel
Barbara Stanwyck
Alexander Fleming
Damon Runyon
Charles Schultz
Will Rogers
Bette Davis
Charlotte Bronte
Geoffrey Chaucer
Francis Bacon
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Joseph Priestly
John Huston
Laurence Olivier
George Orwell
Alfred Hitchcock
Willa Cather
Tom Lehrer
James Cagney
Walt Whitman
Virginia Woolf
Frank Lloyd Wright
Carlos Montoya
Al Capp
John Adams
Glenn Miller
Doris Day
Charles Darwin
Fred Astaire
John LeCarre
Harry Truman
Leslie Caron
Clark Gable
F.A. Hayek
Jack Benny
Sir Walter Scott
St. Francis of Assisi
Groucho Marx
Henry Fonda
Aristotle
Noah Webster
Julie Andrews
Enrico Fermi
Jean Sibelius
Antoine Lavoisier
Gary Cooper
Orson Welles
Tennessee Williams
Ayn Rand
Louis Leakey
Carl Linnaeus
James Clerk Maxwell
Gene Kelly
John Locke
Elvis Presley
Robert Boyle
Richard Rogers
Stephen Crane
Max Planck
Katherine Hepburn
Ernest Rutherford
Alessandro Volta
Johnny Mercer
Greer Garson
Guglielmo Marconi
Joseph Lister
Harry James
Charlie Chaplin
Alfred North Whitehead
Victor Hugo
Georg Ohm
Judy Garland
Jules Verne
Sam Rayburn
Alfred Wegener
Lewis Carrol
Helen Forrest
Anaxagoras
George Eastman
David Lean
Emily Dickenson
J.J. Thompson
Voltaire
Robert Mitchum
Joseph Conrad
Charleton Heston
Hans Christian Ørsted
Claudette Colbert
William Gilbert
Aldous Huxley
Cyrus McCormack
John Milton
Abraham Lincoln
Errol Flynn
Gene Krupa
Fanny Brice
Jimmy Stewart
J.D. Salinger
Robert Frost
William Herschel
T.S. Eliot
Christian Huygens
Euclid
Eric Idle
Gene Roddenberry
Thornton Wilder
Wolfgang Pauli
Burgess Meredith
Maurice Ravel
Edward Teller
Aaron Copeland
Gregor Mendel
Jascha Heifetz
Pearl S. Buck
René Déscartes
Bedrick Smetana
Lucretius
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Wendy Hiller
Winston Churchill
Arthur Miller
George Gershwin
James Watson
George Gershwin
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Jeff Beck
Hans Bethe
P.G. Wodehouse
R.J. Mitchell
Mary Shelley
Larry McMurtry
Neils Bohr
William Blake
Alec Guiness
Francis Poulenc
Hans Christian Anderson
George Bernard Shaw
Gustav Mahler
Wilhelm Roentgen
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Walter Reed
Buddy Holly
Simone de Beauvoir
Amedeo Avogadro
Camille Saint-Saëns
Jonathon Swift
Pete Fountain
B.F. Skinner
Gaetano Donizetti
Erwin Schrödinger
Billy Wilder
Benny Goodman
Dante Alighieri
Bix Beiderbecke
Sir Walter Scott
John Deere
Ernst Mach
Stan Getz
Richard Feynman
Joseph Haydn
Dylan Thomas
Charles Lyell
Theodore Roosevelt
John Stewart Bell
Emily Brontë
Benjamin Disraeli
Edward Drinker Cope
John Muir
Spike Jones
Walter Alvarez
Arthur Fiedler
Joan Plowright
H.L. Mencken
Vladimir Horowitz
Daniel Defoe
Louis Agassiz
Nathanial Hawthorne
Hugh Falconer
J.M. Barrie
Karl Popper
Judi Dench
EB White
Bob Newhart
Raymond Chandler
Peter Lorre
Karl Ferdinand Braun
Lee DeForest
Ole Evinrude
Milan Kundera
Grace Hopper
Robert Watson-Watt
William Shockley
Sophia Loren
Jack S. Kilby
Evangelista Torricelli
Henry James
Adolph Sax
Larry McMurtrty
Golda Meir
Alessandro Volta
Isaac Stern
Florence Nightingale
Andre Marie Ampere
The above is a tiny sampling of the evil white people who trashed and impeded the artistic, literary, social, and scientific progress of western civilization.
Obviously this is not true, but current attempts to tar figures from the past as insufficiently woke for modern sensibilities are not only pointlessly counterproductive, but entirely deranged.
Saturday, June 9, 2018
Props
Just watched a little
Youtube doco about early aircraft engines. The presenter makes a
serious mistake. He pointed to the three bladed prop assembly on a
mid-thirties airliner and described them as controllable pitch props.
Which is true, but he went on to define them as being able to control the
pitch of the prop depending on the speed of the engine. This is not
only wrong but it's the exact opposite of what actually happens.
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Sophia
On the redoubtable Kim Dutoit's website Splendid Isolation today were pics of various female stars in relaxed legs akimbo poses. The first one was of Sophia Loren. This put me in mind of my salad days back in the early seventies when I worked in the lab for the portraitists to the rich and famous, Gittings Photography in Houston, Texas. An unlikely location for the firm perhaps, but the R&F from around the world sat for them.
This was an absolutely top-notch outfit that literally spared no expense in creating the richest and most finely detailed large portraits ever made. They also did society weddings and portraits all over the U.S. and the world, but their high end signature portraits were flat out incredible, the finest in the land, and probably the world. For the "big game" the images were captured on 8X10 inch negative film shot on Linhof view cameras with Zeiss lenses. As many as fifty negatives were shot, the sittings alone cost several thousand dollars, 8X10 full color contact "proofs" were made, and the images destined for printing were selected by the customer.
The largest prints, aptly named the Imperial line, were huge 40X60 inch dye-transfer prints. Dye-transfer prints were extraordinarily difficult to make, in that size especially, and cost $1600 each at the time, within shouting distance of ten grand today. It was not reality, it was very much heightened reality. A weak comparison would be the difference between ordinary color movie film and the three strip Technicolor process, with which the dye-transfer print process shares some optical and chemical similarities. Nothing available today is remotely as rich, detailed, and utterly lifelike.
For years a full length portrait of Sophia Loren was on display at the Gittings storefront in a local very tony mall. One could not simply walk past it. It captured her at the apex of her mature glory. It glowed, it demanded, it absolutely required that one stand mute and transfixed by her stupefying beauty and keen intelligence. The English language is simply not capable of describing the impact of that image. The Bard his own self would struggle with the words.
Sadly, high end dye-transfer portraits are no longer being done, commercially at least. They are a casualty of the decline of formal portraiture in general. A great pity.
This was an absolutely top-notch outfit that literally spared no expense in creating the richest and most finely detailed large portraits ever made. They also did society weddings and portraits all over the U.S. and the world, but their high end signature portraits were flat out incredible, the finest in the land, and probably the world. For the "big game" the images were captured on 8X10 inch negative film shot on Linhof view cameras with Zeiss lenses. As many as fifty negatives were shot, the sittings alone cost several thousand dollars, 8X10 full color contact "proofs" were made, and the images destined for printing were selected by the customer.
The largest prints, aptly named the Imperial line, were huge 40X60 inch dye-transfer prints. Dye-transfer prints were extraordinarily difficult to make, in that size especially, and cost $1600 each at the time, within shouting distance of ten grand today. It was not reality, it was very much heightened reality. A weak comparison would be the difference between ordinary color movie film and the three strip Technicolor process, with which the dye-transfer print process shares some optical and chemical similarities. Nothing available today is remotely as rich, detailed, and utterly lifelike.
For years a full length portrait of Sophia Loren was on display at the Gittings storefront in a local very tony mall. One could not simply walk past it. It captured her at the apex of her mature glory. It glowed, it demanded, it absolutely required that one stand mute and transfixed by her stupefying beauty and keen intelligence. The English language is simply not capable of describing the impact of that image. The Bard his own self would struggle with the words.
Sadly, high end dye-transfer portraits are no longer being done, commercially at least. They are a casualty of the decline of formal portraiture in general. A great pity.
Friday, May 25, 2018
Christina
At the moment TMC is playing Queen Christina, a biopic of the historical Queen Christina of Sweden. All Hollywood bios are essentially fiction entire, but in this case it is particularly egregious. Casting Greta Garbo as Christina was about as appropriate as casting Jerry Lewis as Othello. Naturally in almost all cases the actress chosen to play a historical figure is much better looking than the actual person being portrayed. No one expects anything different but, perversely, Jerry Lewis would have been a better choice to portray the real Christina's looks.
Christina was, by all accounts, a seriously ugly woman. On the far side of bonkers as well, which was unfortunate, but all too common among European royalty. She may have been a lesbian, she was certainly mannish enough, but she also might have been entirely asexual. Vasty speculations have explored the issue, inconclusively, but she was most definitely was a nut, a real royal whackjob, fruity as a nutcake. She converted to Catholicism, moved to Rome and oversaw a boundary stretching solon. She became rather influential, but she was still nuttier than a barrel of Skippy.
It is fair to say that most children of major European royalty harbor bats in the belfry, if not now then historically. Simply being an inbred child of a monarch back then was a reasonably effective method of boarding the train to crazy town. Under different circumstances however....
Different circumstances for Christina are explored most thoroughly in writer Eric Flint's 1632 alt-history series. Do not laugh or sneer. The series is one thoroughly researched, lengthy, and wonderful history lesson. I can not recommend it highly enough. In this complex and far ranging series, Christina's circumstances change radically, as does everyone's, and she is guided along a drastically different path than the one taken by the actual Christina. The same can be said for the character of her father King Gustavus Adolphus. All quite entertaining and endlessly informative. Start with the first book, 1632, and go from there. You will thank me.
Christina was, by all accounts, a seriously ugly woman. On the far side of bonkers as well, which was unfortunate, but all too common among European royalty. She may have been a lesbian, she was certainly mannish enough, but she also might have been entirely asexual. Vasty speculations have explored the issue, inconclusively, but she was most definitely was a nut, a real royal whackjob, fruity as a nutcake. She converted to Catholicism, moved to Rome and oversaw a boundary stretching solon. She became rather influential, but she was still nuttier than a barrel of Skippy.
It is fair to say that most children of major European royalty harbor bats in the belfry, if not now then historically. Simply being an inbred child of a monarch back then was a reasonably effective method of boarding the train to crazy town. Under different circumstances however....
Different circumstances for Christina are explored most thoroughly in writer Eric Flint's 1632 alt-history series. Do not laugh or sneer. The series is one thoroughly researched, lengthy, and wonderful history lesson. I can not recommend it highly enough. In this complex and far ranging series, Christina's circumstances change radically, as does everyone's, and she is guided along a drastically different path than the one taken by the actual Christina. The same can be said for the character of her father King Gustavus Adolphus. All quite entertaining and endlessly informative. Start with the first book, 1632, and go from there. You will thank me.
Friday, March 16, 2018
Hard A'Starboard.
In the wake of the PA 18 district race any number of the talking head punditry are asserting that a viable strategy for Democrats in working class venues is that they must be seen as running to the right of the larger Democratic establishment. This may have worked, just friggin' barely, in the PA 18 race but I have to wonder how well this will work in even the short run. Currently the vanishingly few pro-gun, pro-life, and not reflexively anti-business Democrats are swimming hard upstream against the increasingly turbulent flow of a Democratic party which has, very plainly, decided to throw in with much of the hard left's SJW whack-jobbery and sneering debasement of the half of the electorate that did not vote for Hillary.
Something about this smacks of Hamas tactics. Not in the particulars, well not entirely, but more along the lines that Hamas, and others in the middle-east, says one thing in English or European languages for foreign consumption, and something entirely contradictory in Arabic for local consumption. There is of course a tendency to try to pull off this hustle in less perfervid polities, but it doesn't work very well when the same language is used for both local and national consumption. The differences between, say, Minnesota and Tennessee may be fairly robust, but in neither case can citizens of those states use a form of English that will not be understood by all.
So it seems to me that the Hamas Hustle will be virtually impossible to employ with any hope of success. Lamb had to run so far to the right of the national party that he had to paint himself as a Democrat In Name Only to close the deal, and for all that running he was rewarded with an absurdly thin margin of "victory". Some "Wise Men" aver that when these newly minted DINOs, however many they may be, make it to the Hill they will be given pats on the head by the party elite and will be expected to rubber-stamp the party's increasingly hard left politics.
Maybe this will occur with Lamb, probably even, but it will not go un-noticed by his constituents. This is the age of the internet after all and newbie conservative Dem. pols, however few they may be, elected in an anti-Trump fever may well find that their constituents revile the harder than hard left programmatics of the Dems more than they despise The Donald.
PA 18 is just a first test case, but there is ample opportunity for Lamb to prove, or disprove, his maverick bona-fides in the months leading up to the fall elections. I seriously doubt that Lamb will survive more than one term if he turns into a Dem. good boi.
I've also heard some nattering about the return of that extinct creature, the Blue Dog Democrat, with Lamb as the first example of a trend. Uh, no. Far too much of the Democratic party's store of political capital is tied up in, and tied to, the radical woke left for a nascent pack of Blue Dogs to be anything but a brief flicker of sanity.
Something about this smacks of Hamas tactics. Not in the particulars, well not entirely, but more along the lines that Hamas, and others in the middle-east, says one thing in English or European languages for foreign consumption, and something entirely contradictory in Arabic for local consumption. There is of course a tendency to try to pull off this hustle in less perfervid polities, but it doesn't work very well when the same language is used for both local and national consumption. The differences between, say, Minnesota and Tennessee may be fairly robust, but in neither case can citizens of those states use a form of English that will not be understood by all.
So it seems to me that the Hamas Hustle will be virtually impossible to employ with any hope of success. Lamb had to run so far to the right of the national party that he had to paint himself as a Democrat In Name Only to close the deal, and for all that running he was rewarded with an absurdly thin margin of "victory". Some "Wise Men" aver that when these newly minted DINOs, however many they may be, make it to the Hill they will be given pats on the head by the party elite and will be expected to rubber-stamp the party's increasingly hard left politics.
Maybe this will occur with Lamb, probably even, but it will not go un-noticed by his constituents. This is the age of the internet after all and newbie conservative Dem. pols, however few they may be, elected in an anti-Trump fever may well find that their constituents revile the harder than hard left programmatics of the Dems more than they despise The Donald.
PA 18 is just a first test case, but there is ample opportunity for Lamb to prove, or disprove, his maverick bona-fides in the months leading up to the fall elections. I seriously doubt that Lamb will survive more than one term if he turns into a Dem. good boi.
I've also heard some nattering about the return of that extinct creature, the Blue Dog Democrat, with Lamb as the first example of a trend. Uh, no. Far too much of the Democratic party's store of political capital is tied up in, and tied to, the radical woke left for a nascent pack of Blue Dogs to be anything but a brief flicker of sanity.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
NO VA
This week's edition of NOVA recounts the story of the solar powered flight around the world of the Solar Impulse aircraft. There's no question it was an impressive technical feat that had to successfully exploit the bare ragged bleeding edge of technological possibility. What it was not was a significant milestone in solar powered vehicles.
It was a stunt, pure and simple. A stunt which has no bearing on the world of either general or commercial aviation. There has been some progress in electrifying small general aviation aircraft, but it will be limited to just that category, in tiny numbers. What we will never ever see is solar powered aircraft, small or large, dotting the skies. We will see fusion powered airliners before we see solar powered versions of those workhorses. That is we won't unless engineers can contrive to build airliners with a square mile of wing that can travel at 500 miles per hour.
It is conceivable, barely, that electrical energy storage technology could advance to the level of powering airliners, but simple physics prevent this from being achieved with solar power, period, not going to happen. The founder of the Solar Impulse project has stated that it was not "necessarily about aviation" but rather about promoting the use of sustainable energy. A publicity stunt in other words, that cost donors tens of millions of dollars.
It did have a high techno-geeky cool factor, but that's what the crowds that showed up to gawk at the huge craft were interested in, not the sustainability boilerplate offered by the founder and pilots. It would have been a heck of a lot more meaningful if the project had not fixated on an area in which direct solar power has no future whatsoever.
Neither will it have an impact on ground transportation. Sure gigantic state sized solar installations might be able to provide electrical power for a large fleet, but direct mobile solar power will not. No amount of technological wizardry will be able to extract more solar energy per square inch than that provided naturally by the Sun.
The Solar Impulse required two thousand square feet of advanced solar panels to provide enough energy to fly no faster than about 40 m.p.h. and charge its onboard batteries for use at night. The top of an automobile covered with solar cells might provide enough power for a short drive once a week, and even if the efficiency of current cells increases dramatically that will not change. Electric cars--already done, electric small planes--in development but will largely remain novelties, electric airliners--not bloody likely unless battery capacities increase by three orders of magnitude, and doubtful even then. Directly solar powered transportation? If you invest in it you will have chosen poorly.
It was a stunt, pure and simple. A stunt which has no bearing on the world of either general or commercial aviation. There has been some progress in electrifying small general aviation aircraft, but it will be limited to just that category, in tiny numbers. What we will never ever see is solar powered aircraft, small or large, dotting the skies. We will see fusion powered airliners before we see solar powered versions of those workhorses. That is we won't unless engineers can contrive to build airliners with a square mile of wing that can travel at 500 miles per hour.
It is conceivable, barely, that electrical energy storage technology could advance to the level of powering airliners, but simple physics prevent this from being achieved with solar power, period, not going to happen. The founder of the Solar Impulse project has stated that it was not "necessarily about aviation" but rather about promoting the use of sustainable energy. A publicity stunt in other words, that cost donors tens of millions of dollars.
It did have a high techno-geeky cool factor, but that's what the crowds that showed up to gawk at the huge craft were interested in, not the sustainability boilerplate offered by the founder and pilots. It would have been a heck of a lot more meaningful if the project had not fixated on an area in which direct solar power has no future whatsoever.
Neither will it have an impact on ground transportation. Sure gigantic state sized solar installations might be able to provide electrical power for a large fleet, but direct mobile solar power will not. No amount of technological wizardry will be able to extract more solar energy per square inch than that provided naturally by the Sun.
The Solar Impulse required two thousand square feet of advanced solar panels to provide enough energy to fly no faster than about 40 m.p.h. and charge its onboard batteries for use at night. The top of an automobile covered with solar cells might provide enough power for a short drive once a week, and even if the efficiency of current cells increases dramatically that will not change. Electric cars--already done, electric small planes--in development but will largely remain novelties, electric airliners--not bloody likely unless battery capacities increase by three orders of magnitude, and doubtful even then. Directly solar powered transportation? If you invest in it you will have chosen poorly.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Mariachi The Vote
I see where California has dropped the last pretense that unrestricted immigration is not a Democratic voter importation project. They will apparently issue voter registration cards along with driver's licenses to, well, whoever the hell shows up at the DMV. The registrant must avow that they are a legal immigrant, but no proof of such will be required. That would be racist, somehow. It seems that any advantage in actually being a citizen or legal immigrant in California is rapidly disappearing in the rear view.
Before scoffing that there is no importation project, consider for a moment that if it was generally known that immigrants from south of our borders were more likely than not to vote for conservative or Republican candidates, I am 100% certain that California would be one of the most immigrant hostile states in the nation. The same would go for Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and sundry other right coast urban enclaves.
However, the aforementioned polities know doggone good and well that immigrants are far more likely to vote Blue than Red. The need for this may seem a bit odd since those states could scarcely be any bluer than they are already. Leftists are almost certainly playing the long con, er, game because encouraging unlimited immigration in southern border states may well pay off by shifting some reds to blue in due course.
The reddish states are currently much less likely to roll over to get their tum-tums scritched by leftist activists so it may take a good while for them to cave in to relentless pressure. We should acknowledge that a flanking move is underway with the push for a country-wide amnesty in order to convert as many immigrants as possible into Democratic voters in an attempt to swing the electoral college more firmly in the blue direction. We hear continuous carping about how unfair the electoral college is. Odd, we heard no such kvetching when Obama buried his opponents in electoral votes.
Whatever the actual details of this process may be, most conservative voters are convinced the electoral motivation is the driving force behind amnesties because all of the egregious immigrant criminal coddling, open borders lunacy, and sanctuary city virtue signalling makes absolutely no sense otherwise. The "humanitarian" hustle in the sanctuary states applies nowhere other than on the leaky southern border. One sees no demonstrations loudly calling for unrestricted Canadian, Dutch, or French immigration. I don't know why really. Those immigrants would be even more inclined toward leftist programmatics than poor hispanics from old Mehico and points south. Despite the current strong push-back against those factors, I figure there's about an even chance the con will pay off in time.
If progressives manage to turn the whole country blue, the relevancy of being an actual legal citizen will melt away like ice cream on a Tijuana sidewalk in August. This conclusion might be dismissed as excessively conspiratorial, but California has now rather baldly given the real game away. You can be sure that plans are afoot to encourage illegals to obtain voter cards and then pursue grassroots efforts to get out the ersatz vote. As a result California is likely to have increasingly leftist chief executives and legislators until the last major employer, except the state government, decamps for less punitive environs.
Before scoffing that there is no importation project, consider for a moment that if it was generally known that immigrants from south of our borders were more likely than not to vote for conservative or Republican candidates, I am 100% certain that California would be one of the most immigrant hostile states in the nation. The same would go for Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and sundry other right coast urban enclaves.
However, the aforementioned polities know doggone good and well that immigrants are far more likely to vote Blue than Red. The need for this may seem a bit odd since those states could scarcely be any bluer than they are already. Leftists are almost certainly playing the long con, er, game because encouraging unlimited immigration in southern border states may well pay off by shifting some reds to blue in due course.
The reddish states are currently much less likely to roll over to get their tum-tums scritched by leftist activists so it may take a good while for them to cave in to relentless pressure. We should acknowledge that a flanking move is underway with the push for a country-wide amnesty in order to convert as many immigrants as possible into Democratic voters in an attempt to swing the electoral college more firmly in the blue direction. We hear continuous carping about how unfair the electoral college is. Odd, we heard no such kvetching when Obama buried his opponents in electoral votes.
Whatever the actual details of this process may be, most conservative voters are convinced the electoral motivation is the driving force behind amnesties because all of the egregious immigrant criminal coddling, open borders lunacy, and sanctuary city virtue signalling makes absolutely no sense otherwise. The "humanitarian" hustle in the sanctuary states applies nowhere other than on the leaky southern border. One sees no demonstrations loudly calling for unrestricted Canadian, Dutch, or French immigration. I don't know why really. Those immigrants would be even more inclined toward leftist programmatics than poor hispanics from old Mehico and points south. Despite the current strong push-back against those factors, I figure there's about an even chance the con will pay off in time.
If progressives manage to turn the whole country blue, the relevancy of being an actual legal citizen will melt away like ice cream on a Tijuana sidewalk in August. This conclusion might be dismissed as excessively conspiratorial, but California has now rather baldly given the real game away. You can be sure that plans are afoot to encourage illegals to obtain voter cards and then pursue grassroots efforts to get out the ersatz vote. As a result California is likely to have increasingly leftist chief executives and legislators until the last major employer, except the state government, decamps for less punitive environs.
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