Neo’s photo reminded me of the Central Farmers’ Market in my home town. Memories of Amish-made apple butter, apple pies, and apple schnitz (dried apple slices that can be eaten as a snack) as well as fresh apples in season. There’s an old anecdote/joke about the teacher in an Amish schoolhouse teaching the younger kids about fractions. “If I cut an apple in two, what do I have?” The kids all call out, “Halves.” “If I cut each half in two, what do I have?” The kids say, “Fourths.” “And if I cut each fourth in two, what do I have?” The kids all yell, “Schnitz!”
Yes, I’m homesick– for a lot of things besides apples.
PA+Cat,
My mom’s home was in Pa about 2 miles north of Hancock MD.Her sister lived there and had a small orchard. Every year when the apples were picked, all my aunts would come and make apple butter outside in a huge cast iron pot over a wood fire. it’s one of my best childhood memories. We we weren’t Amish or even Mennonites, but we loved apple butter. I think it’s the German heritage in the area. We even made our own sauerkraut at home.
You can look up McCutcheons in Frederick; MD. They sell all sorts of local things online, and their apple butter tastes like the real thing in comparison to what you get in supermarkets
expat–
I know the Frederick area– there were always some kids from around there who went to my church camp (located near Gettysburg) every summer. As for the German heritage– tell me about it. Both sides of my family are ethnic German, though not Amish. I have often had to explain to Ausländer (all furriners from outside SE PA) that “Pennsylvania Dutch” means Pennsylvania German, an ethnic group that includes “church people” (Lutheran and Reformed) as well as “plain people” (Amish and Mennonites).
I evidently retained the Germanic drawl that you can still hear around Lancaster. The professor who taught the English lit course I took my freshman year of college asked me one day whether I was from Lancaster; I was startled and asked him how he knew. Turned out he had gone to Swarthmore as an undergrad– he said, “I can tell a Lancaster County accent anywhere.” Small world.
My mother grew up Pennsylvania Dutch country, in the mountains north of Allentown. I still have a little wooden-backed cookbook. Expat, PA Cat, did you have Shoo-Fly Pie when you were young?
Kate–
Did I have shoo-fly pie! My dad would bring one home from the Farmers’ Market about once a month on average, and it never lasted long. We used to joke that shoo-fly pie was one of the reasons (along with pork sausage) why nobody ever got out of Lancaster County thin.
As for Allentown, one of my uncles on my mother’s side of the family was a high school principal there before he was transferred to the high school in Catasauqua.
Where I live North of Denver the apple trees in our neighborhood are just loaded this year. I also have Pears, Peaches, Plums. As I drive by on my riding lawnmower (tractor) I pick a Plum and eat it. In the past I have tried to get someone or group to glean the apples and pears. No such luck. We can eat and freeze just so many. All my neighbors are in the same boat.
Mmmmmmmm. It’s almost that time of year isn’t it? Fall foliage, sunny days, chilly nights and gastrointestinal regularity.
We had a sweet variety of Crab Apple tree here in our desert home. It received a lot of shade from 2 Elms trees so the hot sun didn’t burn the fruit. It didn’t produce a lot of fruit, but what it did was great to eat.
Kate,
No shoo-fly pie. My mom’s family were Scots Irish, and her father had his pig butchering day on Thanksgiving every year. We did more with ham and lard, and self canned vegies. Pies were apple and pumpkin.
SHIREHOME —
I live in a part of Seattle that was orchards before it was platted. I had to cut down a pear tree in the middle of my back yard because it would drop approximately a thousand pears every year, and while they were nice once according to a family member of the owner in the ’40s, they were inedible now and made the yard smell like a brewery.
I also have an Italian plum tree/bush. I gave away nine paper shopping bags full to the top of plums last year, and canned about a dozen quarts myself. I don’t like plums that much; I think I need to prune the tree back to a stick and let it start over.
The photo reminds me of an exercise from one of those old Walter Foster “How to Paint…” books, which I attempted diligently to reproduce without much success.
Zaphod:
Your warning about Taiwan Semiconductor sent me down the rabbit hole of considering my next desktop. My old one is going on five years, so I’ve got no choice, right?
Technolust is always an option.
Sadly, in terms of power boosts, next-gen machines aren’t what they used to be. Five years later and I’m not going to double/triple anything.
I’ll probably get another Shuttle Barebone (I’ve built five already), trick it out with a high i7, maybe i9, get some decent mem and SSD, and call it a day.
These days I find I’m buying for compatibility and fresh components.
@huxley:
Wasn’t familiar with Shuttle so had a look. Their kit looks kind of analogous to the Intel NUCs I use for the Sit-at-home Day Job. If you’re not a 3D gamer, then your PC building strategy is the appropriate one.
Could happily live without a new desktop for 5+ years I think. Desktop machines and business laptops seem unlikely to have any more great leaps for people who just need to get stuff done and don’t produce video content. But still prefer stay not too far behind the curve because am thinking what will happen to supply/demand in that market segment if mobile devices don’t get made in significant quantities for several years in case of TSMC knockout — all kinds of knock-on effects.
I remember when Lead-free Soldering became mandatory there were gloom and doom predictions for reduced longevity of logic boards. But I don’t really recall ever having heard much about that afterwards. Has it ever affected you or anyone you know?
Zaphod:
I was just writing a comment on the NUCs.
They are attractive but I like being able to load in extra hard drives, whatevs. Plus I can replace components myself, rather than find someone to ship it off to for repairs.
I’m not a gamer, but I am a programmer and I do appreciate a boost to compile times. Plus I do some video ripping and I’ve got my sight set on machine learning soon.
I missed the Lead-free Soldering mandate, so failed to notice any decline on that score.
I still have my old soldering irons and solder sucker. I was Not Good at that stuff.
@Huxley:
Well there you go. TSMC is another big bottleneck for high end graphics card silicon, so best hop to it!
Again it’s the knock-on effects which might get you even if you’re mainly interested in low- to mid-range graphics cards: the very tight production bottlenecks for the latest and greatest last year drove up prices of even quite old second hand cards. Not hard to imagine that happening again in a war or blockade scenario.
As I was saying to Zaphod…
For regular people looking to replace a desktop setup, i.e. you’ve already got a keyboard, mouse and screen you’re happy with, I suggest the Intel NUCs.
NUC stands for “Next Unit of Computing” and it’s a line of small, integrated boxes with good power but not a lot of options. It’s got the Intel name behind it and the margins are cut close to the bone.
Try a kit which has already been configured with OS, memory and disk. Such as:
Unless you’re a Mac User. In which case you already know what to do: Just give them your moneyyyyy!
As for Windows Laptops, I just don’t have any recent experience beyond Lenovo ThinkPad X and T series machines. With these ThinkPad models it’s still possible to unscrew the back and replace some components if they go bad or need upgrades. Many have built-in webcam privacy covers — not a bad thing to have.
Plus you can always find a willing buyer for these models if you decide to replace them later. Known quantities.
Zaphod:
I’ve noticed the graphics cards run-up. I’ve only bought graphics cards in the bad old days when they were required to support extra monitors.
Sometimes I imagine myself getting cranked with the latest and greatest games, but so far that’s not happening.
I am curious about 4K video but I don’t have a monitor which supports that resolution…yet.
I’m also curious about CUDA programming to graphics cards. You run into that at all?
@huxley:
Can’t remember how many 4K monitors my NUC 10 i7 can drive out of the box, but think it’s 2. Of course that’s just for browsing, etc. Forget gaming. I run dual QHD (more Ubuntu-friendly than 4K IMHO) no problem.
Almost got into gaming last year just for the hell of it and because it’s where our eventual saviors or murderers congregate, socialize and are being socialized. Graphics card shortage shut down that idea and have not revisited since.
I bashed together a bonkers dimensioned Kalman Filter on CUDA in a mix of C/C++ ca. 2010. Noticeable speed up as you might imagine.
Today Python numerical libraries like Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, are able to farm stuff out to your GPU pretty much transparently and no need to think in terms of CUDA primitives.
Back in late 80s and 90s I always had a copy of Numerical Recipes in C on my shelf. But the days of roll your own numerical code are gone and should stay gone.
These days for ML you’re looking at PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc. I like PyTorch. I dabble to keep in touch re who we need to hire and what should be begged, borrowed, and repurposed from where. For this kind of work we use a mix of machines we own in office server rooms, data centers, and AWS instances. You’re basically talking to them via JupyterLab in your browser(*). We used to have dedicated machines for our several ML Big Brains but turned out that they preferred do their work in the cloud as services and provisioning options skyrocketed.
Start out small. Pick PyTorch or TensorFlow/Keras and have at it in Python with some free gpu resources online. GIYF for this.
(*)JetBrains have a product called DataSpell in Early Access Program which slaps their UI goodness onto Jupyter notebooks (local or remote). Pretty good!
Not sure if you can read this. Depends on what if any cookies you have from that site already, and when last accessed, I guess.
But basically nobody from India has been permitted to enter Hong Kong for some months now because of the Delta wave there earlier this year plus the large number of cases of Indians with pristine vaccination and test paperwork entering Hong Kong and immediately or soon testing positive.
They’re Indians. You might think Chinese like to fake everything. You ain’t seen nothing concerning rivers of BS until you’ve dealt with the Subcontinent.
The Chinese don’t do Political Correctness and Intersectionality and Grievance stuff (except when complaining about Japan or Opium Wars). They especially don’t tolerate it coming from the one race in Asia which is noted for being capable of hoodwinking and defrauding even the most rapacious Chinese traders. They know damn well that (a) Indian documentation is BS and (b) even if it’s not, if legions of them are arriving at the airport here with Covid then something is up and they have to be stopped until things improve.
Article is full of bleating about personal tragedies and injustices caused by this policy. In the West, everyone would start tearing their hair out and make exceptions. Here, they are very inscrutably polite and nod and smile and refer you back to Paragraph 3 Subsection 2 and ignore you.
And that is Reason Number 267 why there isn’t huge wave of Delta in Hong Kong or China. Yet(?). The West is systemically incapable of saying ‘OK, no arrivals from India until further notice.’ China is.
‘… This is not a psychosis exclusive to America. Boris Johnson has announced that Britain will take in Afghans. Apparently, Rotherham needs a topping-up. French president Emmanuel Macron also wants Afghan refugees. If you are wondering what everyone will be getting for Christmas this year, there is the answer. Europeans will wake up to find an Afghan family under their tree.
Notice there is no debate about whether these people should be rescued from the new rulers of Afghanistan. It is just assumed that because they were willing to work with the invaders that they are good people. The people with a fondness for throwing open the gates for the enemy feel a kinship with the Afghans who were happy to collaborate with the empire against their own people. It says a lot about our rulers.
Of course, the fact that they feel no duty to make their case to the people they supposedly represent tells us all we need to know about our rulers. They feel no duty to explain how they created this mess. Every day they roll out a new wave of lies to explain yesterday’s lies. One can be forgiven for wondering if they actually hate the people they claim to represent. After all, if they hated us, what would they do different?
What the events of the last week are bringing home is that the managerial elites running the American empire see themselves as a distinct class with its own morality. The rest of us, the people they are supposed to represent, are just the rabble they have to shelter inside the castle walls from time to time. If the rabble speaks Pashtun, English, or a Mayan dialect, it does not matter. We all look the same to them.
This is why they have no shame over this debacle. In order for one to feel shame, one must have a sense of moral duty. The moral posturing over these Afghan traitors is not for our benefit. It is just a positional good inside the ruling class. These theoxenian customs and rituals are about the elites signaling their piety to one another. It is a way for our betters to remind themselves that they are our betters.”
Zaphod:
Z-man’s great brilliance (in the Taki article you linked and quoted at length) is somehow lost on me. I guess I’m insufficiently cynical to appreciate the depth of his profundity. But it seems as though cynicism is his identifying characteristic – much like you, actually.
That he writes, of the Afghan people who assisted the US and other allies, that they “collaborate with the empire against their own people,” is one of the most stupidly cynical things I’ve ever read. Ah, the empire, the US! Empire bad, Taliban good. When the Taliban were in charge, no doubt all good Afghans loved them and ought to have remained loyal to them, perhaps because the Taliban were Afghans, too? Actually, they’re Pashtuns (one ethnic group) as well as religious fundamentalists trained in Pakistan – or at least they were originally (for the most part), when the Americans came into Afghanistan. They’ve branched out a bit ethnically since then.
Ah, but we know – according to Z-man – that anyone allied with the Americans against the Taliban was an enemy of the Afghan people and a collaborator against their own people. I’m sure there’s no way that someone working with the Americans against the Taliban and against the Taliban’s return to power might be interested in combating the following things, for the sake of the Afghan people (from Wiki’s entry on the Taliban, but it’s just general well-known information about them):
The Taliban have been condemned internationally for the harsh enforcement of their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law, which has resulted in the brutal treatment of many Afghans. During their rule from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban and their allies committed massacres against Afghan civilians, denied UN food supplies to 160,000 starving civilians, and conducted a policy of scorched earth, burning vast areas of fertile land and destroying tens of thousands of homes. While the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, they banned activities and media including paintings, photography, and movies that depicted people or other living things. They also prohibited music using instruments, with the exception of the daf, a type of frame drum. The Taliban prevented girls and young women from attending school, banned women from working jobs outside of healthcare (male doctors were prohibited from treating women), and required that women be accompanied by a male relative and wear a burqa at all times when in public. If women broke certain rules, they were publicly whipped or executed. Religious and ethnic minorities were heavily discriminated against during Taliban rule. According to the United Nations, the Taliban and their allies were responsible for 76% of Afghan civilian casualties in 2010, and 80% in 2011 and 2012. The Taliban also engaged in cultural genocide, destroying numerous monuments including the famous 1500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan.
@ Zaphod “I’m having an Irving Finkel Bingefest today”
“The Ark Before Noah” – I had just finished watching that one before coming over to Neo’s place to catch up!
I had to stop with that one, or I would be up all night,
Irv is hilarious – and brilliant.
Maybe we should start a fan club.
One for the Afghan Refugee Welcome Mat People:
“I’ve Worked with Refugees for Decades. Europe’s Afghan Crime Wave Is Mind-Boggling.”
Written by some kind of Feminist who is only really interested in the fact that they love to rape women and girls… I guess could prey on men, boys, assorted other fauna and she might not mind so much… but the details should still interest you all since these people are coming soon to your neighbourhoods, be you in USA, UK, Australia in particular and doubtless other countries will also be stupid and let more in.
Mind you, I can think of one nation which will not and will remain totally Pashtunrein. We all should learn from them.
Zaphod:
Another strawman argument, I see.
No one here is advocating doing what Europe did – bringing in tons of generic Afghan refugees. It is the US left that is advocating that. What people here are advocating is very specific: to bring in the people who have helped us and worked alongside us (translators, for the most part) for many years. That’s it.
Now, I get the distinct impression that you think that even those people are all criminals and terrorists and that they’ll kill “whitey” (if I recall the way you put it) in the suburbs if they come here. And also that you appear to believe they are turncoat enemies who were insufficiently loyal to “their own people,” who ran the Taliban government (at least, that’s what that Taki article by Z-man that you linked to and quoted at great length said). I already answered that in a previous comment.
Oh, and no doubt there’s some example of a translator who came to a Western country and did something bad. Just as there are homegrown people who do bad stuff. But I very much doubt it’s ex-translators who are responsible for the Afghan crime wave in Europe.
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New England. Looks a little like the loading dock floor at Cold Spring Orchard in Belchertown, MA:
https://coldspringorchard.com/
Nice change, wherever it is.
Neo’s photo reminded me of the Central Farmers’ Market in my home town. Memories of Amish-made apple butter, apple pies, and apple schnitz (dried apple slices that can be eaten as a snack) as well as fresh apples in season. There’s an old anecdote/joke about the teacher in an Amish schoolhouse teaching the younger kids about fractions. “If I cut an apple in two, what do I have?” The kids all call out, “Halves.” “If I cut each half in two, what do I have?” The kids say, “Fourths.” “And if I cut each fourth in two, what do I have?” The kids all yell, “Schnitz!”
Anyway, here is a link to photos of the Central Market:
https://lancasterpa.com/shopping/central-market/
Yes, I’m homesick– for a lot of things besides apples.
PA+Cat,
My mom’s home was in Pa about 2 miles north of Hancock MD.Her sister lived there and had a small orchard. Every year when the apples were picked, all my aunts would come and make apple butter outside in a huge cast iron pot over a wood fire. it’s one of my best childhood memories. We we weren’t Amish or even Mennonites, but we loved apple butter. I think it’s the German heritage in the area. We even made our own sauerkraut at home.
You can look up McCutcheons in Frederick; MD. They sell all sorts of local things online, and their apple butter tastes like the real thing in comparison to what you get in supermarkets
expat–
I know the Frederick area– there were always some kids from around there who went to my church camp (located near Gettysburg) every summer. As for the German heritage– tell me about it. Both sides of my family are ethnic German, though not Amish. I have often had to explain to Ausländer (all furriners from outside SE PA) that “Pennsylvania Dutch” means Pennsylvania German, an ethnic group that includes “church people” (Lutheran and Reformed) as well as “plain people” (Amish and Mennonites).
I evidently retained the Germanic drawl that you can still hear around Lancaster. The professor who taught the English lit course I took my freshman year of college asked me one day whether I was from Lancaster; I was startled and asked him how he knew. Turned out he had gone to Swarthmore as an undergrad– he said, “I can tell a Lancaster County accent anywhere.” Small world.
My mother grew up Pennsylvania Dutch country, in the mountains north of Allentown. I still have a little wooden-backed cookbook. Expat, PA Cat, did you have Shoo-Fly Pie when you were young?
Kate–
Did I have shoo-fly pie! My dad would bring one home from the Farmers’ Market about once a month on average, and it never lasted long. We used to joke that shoo-fly pie was one of the reasons (along with pork sausage) why nobody ever got out of Lancaster County thin.
As for Allentown, one of my uncles on my mother’s side of the family was a high school principal there before he was transferred to the high school in Catasauqua.
Where I live North of Denver the apple trees in our neighborhood are just loaded this year. I also have Pears, Peaches, Plums. As I drive by on my riding lawnmower (tractor) I pick a Plum and eat it. In the past I have tried to get someone or group to glean the apples and pears. No such luck. We can eat and freeze just so many. All my neighbors are in the same boat.
A Rum Cove from Brum:
https://youtu.be/dCaDjvcaWpo
I think you’ll like him.
Apples.
Apple Cider.
Apple Cider Donuts.
Mmmmmmmm. It’s almost that time of year isn’t it? Fall foliage, sunny days, chilly nights and gastrointestinal regularity.
We had a sweet variety of Crab Apple tree here in our desert home. It received a lot of shade from 2 Elms trees so the hot sun didn’t burn the fruit. It didn’t produce a lot of fruit, but what it did was great to eat.
Kate,
No shoo-fly pie. My mom’s family were Scots Irish, and her father had his pig butchering day on Thanksgiving every year. We did more with ham and lard, and self canned vegies. Pies were apple and pumpkin.
SHIREHOME —
I live in a part of Seattle that was orchards before it was platted. I had to cut down a pear tree in the middle of my back yard because it would drop approximately a thousand pears every year, and while they were nice once according to a family member of the owner in the ’40s, they were inedible now and made the yard smell like a brewery.
I also have an Italian plum tree/bush. I gave away nine paper shopping bags full to the top of plums last year, and canned about a dozen quarts myself. I don’t like plums that much; I think I need to prune the tree back to a stick and let it start over.
The photo reminds me of an exercise from one of those old Walter Foster “How to Paint…” books, which I attempted diligently to reproduce without much success.
Zaphod:
Your warning about Taiwan Semiconductor sent me down the rabbit hole of considering my next desktop. My old one is going on five years, so I’ve got no choice, right?
Technolust is always an option.
Sadly, in terms of power boosts, next-gen machines aren’t what they used to be. Five years later and I’m not going to double/triple anything.
I’ll probably get another Shuttle Barebone (I’ve built five already), trick it out with a high i7, maybe i9, get some decent mem and SSD, and call it a day.
These days I find I’m buying for compatibility and fresh components.
@huxley:
Wasn’t familiar with Shuttle so had a look. Their kit looks kind of analogous to the Intel NUCs I use for the Sit-at-home Day Job. If you’re not a 3D gamer, then your PC building strategy is the appropriate one.
Could happily live without a new desktop for 5+ years I think. Desktop machines and business laptops seem unlikely to have any more great leaps for people who just need to get stuff done and don’t produce video content. But still prefer stay not too far behind the curve because am thinking what will happen to supply/demand in that market segment if mobile devices don’t get made in significant quantities for several years in case of TSMC knockout — all kinds of knock-on effects.
I remember when Lead-free Soldering became mandatory there were gloom and doom predictions for reduced longevity of logic boards. But I don’t really recall ever having heard much about that afterwards. Has it ever affected you or anyone you know?
Zaphod:
I was just writing a comment on the NUCs.
They are attractive but I like being able to load in extra hard drives, whatevs. Plus I can replace components myself, rather than find someone to ship it off to for repairs.
I’m not a gamer, but I am a programmer and I do appreciate a boost to compile times. Plus I do some video ripping and I’ve got my sight set on machine learning soon.
I missed the Lead-free Soldering mandate, so failed to notice any decline on that score.
I still have my old soldering irons and solder sucker. I was Not Good at that stuff.
@Huxley:
Well there you go. TSMC is another big bottleneck for high end graphics card silicon, so best hop to it!
Again it’s the knock-on effects which might get you even if you’re mainly interested in low- to mid-range graphics cards: the very tight production bottlenecks for the latest and greatest last year drove up prices of even quite old second hand cards. Not hard to imagine that happening again in a war or blockade scenario.
As I was saying to Zaphod…
For regular people looking to replace a desktop setup, i.e. you’ve already got a keyboard, mouse and screen you’re happy with, I suggest the Intel NUCs.
NUC stands for “Next Unit of Computing” and it’s a line of small, integrated boxes with good power but not a lot of options. It’s got the Intel name behind it and the margins are cut close to the bone.
Try a kit which has already been configured with OS, memory and disk. Such as:
https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Mainstream-NUC8i5BEHS-Quad-Core-Thunderbolt/dp/B08Q7D65W1/ref=sr_1_2
What Huxley says.
Unless you’re a Mac User. In which case you already know what to do: Just give them your moneyyyyy!
As for Windows Laptops, I just don’t have any recent experience beyond Lenovo ThinkPad X and T series machines. With these ThinkPad models it’s still possible to unscrew the back and replace some components if they go bad or need upgrades. Many have built-in webcam privacy covers — not a bad thing to have.
Plus you can always find a willing buyer for these models if you decide to replace them later. Known quantities.
Zaphod:
I’ve noticed the graphics cards run-up. I’ve only bought graphics cards in the bad old days when they were required to support extra monitors.
Sometimes I imagine myself getting cranked with the latest and greatest games, but so far that’s not happening.
I am curious about 4K video but I don’t have a monitor which supports that resolution…yet.
I’m also curious about CUDA programming to graphics cards. You run into that at all?
@huxley:
Can’t remember how many 4K monitors my NUC 10 i7 can drive out of the box, but think it’s 2. Of course that’s just for browsing, etc. Forget gaming. I run dual QHD (more Ubuntu-friendly than 4K IMHO) no problem.
Almost got into gaming last year just for the hell of it and because it’s where our eventual saviors or murderers congregate, socialize and are being socialized. Graphics card shortage shut down that idea and have not revisited since.
I bashed together a bonkers dimensioned Kalman Filter on CUDA in a mix of C/C++ ca. 2010. Noticeable speed up as you might imagine.
Today Python numerical libraries like Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, are able to farm stuff out to your GPU pretty much transparently and no need to think in terms of CUDA primitives.
Back in late 80s and 90s I always had a copy of Numerical Recipes in C on my shelf. But the days of roll your own numerical code are gone and should stay gone.
These days for ML you’re looking at PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc. I like PyTorch. I dabble to keep in touch re who we need to hire and what should be begged, borrowed, and repurposed from where. For this kind of work we use a mix of machines we own in office server rooms, data centers, and AWS instances. You’re basically talking to them via JupyterLab in your browser(*). We used to have dedicated machines for our several ML Big Brains but turned out that they preferred do their work in the cloud as services and provisioning options skyrocketed.
You could do worse than look here for some ideas:
https://lambdalabs.com/
Start out small. Pick PyTorch or TensorFlow/Keras and have at it in Python with some free gpu resources online. GIYF for this.
(*)JetBrains have a product called DataSpell in Early Access Program which slaps their UI goodness onto Jupyter notebooks (local or remote). Pretty good!
How to pass the time after the EMP Apocalypse:
The Royal Game of Ur:
https://youtu.be/WZskjLq040I
@ Zaphod “The Royal Game of Ur:”
That was delightful!
Nearly 30 minutes watching 2 people play a board game, and the most fun I’ve had in months.
Thanks for the link!
@AesopFan:
Welcome! I’m having an Irving Finkel Bingefest today. Here’s another one:
https://youtu.be/s_fkpZSnz2I
Zaphod:
Thanks. Will check lambdalabs and dl PyTorch. I’ve written a fair amount of Python already.
@Huxley:
Another China Covid Datapoint. Well this one is Hong Kong, but PRC Proper is likely even more stringent.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3145942/hong-kongs-tough-stand-indias-vaccine-records
Not sure if you can read this. Depends on what if any cookies you have from that site already, and when last accessed, I guess.
But basically nobody from India has been permitted to enter Hong Kong for some months now because of the Delta wave there earlier this year plus the large number of cases of Indians with pristine vaccination and test paperwork entering Hong Kong and immediately or soon testing positive.
They’re Indians. You might think Chinese like to fake everything. You ain’t seen nothing concerning rivers of BS until you’ve dealt with the Subcontinent.
The Chinese don’t do Political Correctness and Intersectionality and Grievance stuff (except when complaining about Japan or Opium Wars). They especially don’t tolerate it coming from the one race in Asia which is noted for being capable of hoodwinking and defrauding even the most rapacious Chinese traders. They know damn well that (a) Indian documentation is BS and (b) even if it’s not, if legions of them are arriving at the airport here with Covid then something is up and they have to be stopped until things improve.
Article is full of bleating about personal tragedies and injustices caused by this policy. In the West, everyone would start tearing their hair out and make exceptions. Here, they are very inscrutably polite and nod and smile and refer you back to Paragraph 3 Subsection 2 and ignore you.
And that is Reason Number 267 why there isn’t huge wave of Delta in Hong Kong or China. Yet(?). The West is systemically incapable of saying ‘OK, no arrivals from India until further notice.’ China is.
Invade the World. Invite the World
https://www.takimag.com/article/protector-of-strangers/
‘… This is not a psychosis exclusive to America. Boris Johnson has announced that Britain will take in Afghans. Apparently, Rotherham needs a topping-up. French president Emmanuel Macron also wants Afghan refugees. If you are wondering what everyone will be getting for Christmas this year, there is the answer. Europeans will wake up to find an Afghan family under their tree.
Notice there is no debate about whether these people should be rescued from the new rulers of Afghanistan. It is just assumed that because they were willing to work with the invaders that they are good people. The people with a fondness for throwing open the gates for the enemy feel a kinship with the Afghans who were happy to collaborate with the empire against their own people. It says a lot about our rulers.
Of course, the fact that they feel no duty to make their case to the people they supposedly represent tells us all we need to know about our rulers. They feel no duty to explain how they created this mess. Every day they roll out a new wave of lies to explain yesterday’s lies. One can be forgiven for wondering if they actually hate the people they claim to represent. After all, if they hated us, what would they do different?
What the events of the last week are bringing home is that the managerial elites running the American empire see themselves as a distinct class with its own morality. The rest of us, the people they are supposed to represent, are just the rabble they have to shelter inside the castle walls from time to time. If the rabble speaks Pashtun, English, or a Mayan dialect, it does not matter. We all look the same to them.
This is why they have no shame over this debacle. In order for one to feel shame, one must have a sense of moral duty. The moral posturing over these Afghan traitors is not for our benefit. It is just a positional good inside the ruling class. These theoxenian customs and rituals are about the elites signaling their piety to one another. It is a way for our betters to remind themselves that they are our betters.”
Zaphod:
Z-man’s great brilliance (in the Taki article you linked and quoted at length) is somehow lost on me. I guess I’m insufficiently cynical to appreciate the depth of his profundity. But it seems as though cynicism is his identifying characteristic – much like you, actually.
That he writes, of the Afghan people who assisted the US and other allies, that they “collaborate with the empire against their own people,” is one of the most stupidly cynical things I’ve ever read. Ah, the empire, the US! Empire bad, Taliban good. When the Taliban were in charge, no doubt all good Afghans loved them and ought to have remained loyal to them, perhaps because the Taliban were Afghans, too? Actually, they’re Pashtuns (one ethnic group) as well as religious fundamentalists trained in Pakistan – or at least they were originally (for the most part), when the Americans came into Afghanistan. They’ve branched out a bit ethnically since then.
Ah, but we know – according to Z-man – that anyone allied with the Americans against the Taliban was an enemy of the Afghan people and a collaborator against their own people. I’m sure there’s no way that someone working with the Americans against the Taliban and against the Taliban’s return to power might be interested in combating the following things, for the sake of the Afghan people (from Wiki’s entry on the Taliban, but it’s just general well-known information about them):
@ Zaphod “I’m having an Irving Finkel Bingefest today”
“The Ark Before Noah” – I had just finished watching that one before coming over to Neo’s place to catch up!
I had to stop with that one, or I would be up all night,
Irv is hilarious – and brilliant.
Maybe we should start a fan club.
One for the Afghan Refugee Welcome Mat People:
“I’ve Worked with Refugees for Decades. Europe’s Afghan Crime Wave Is Mind-Boggling.”
https://nationalinterest.org/print/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
Written by some kind of Feminist who is only really interested in the fact that they love to rape women and girls… I guess could prey on men, boys, assorted other fauna and she might not mind so much… but the details should still interest you all since these people are coming soon to your neighbourhoods, be you in USA, UK, Australia in particular and doubtless other countries will also be stupid and let more in.
Mind you, I can think of one nation which will not and will remain totally Pashtunrein. We all should learn from them.
Zaphod:
Another strawman argument, I see.
No one here is advocating doing what Europe did – bringing in tons of generic Afghan refugees. It is the US left that is advocating that. What people here are advocating is very specific: to bring in the people who have helped us and worked alongside us (translators, for the most part) for many years. That’s it.
Now, I get the distinct impression that you think that even those people are all criminals and terrorists and that they’ll kill “whitey” (if I recall the way you put it) in the suburbs if they come here. And also that you appear to believe they are turncoat enemies who were insufficiently loyal to “their own people,” who ran the Taliban government (at least, that’s what that Taki article by Z-man that you linked to and quoted at great length said). I already answered that in a previous comment.
Oh, and no doubt there’s some example of a translator who came to a Western country and did something bad. Just as there are homegrown people who do bad stuff. But I very much doubt it’s ex-translators who are responsible for the Afghan crime wave in Europe.