Desolation Called Peace is great. It's the whole "courtly manners" schtick that Martine does so well combined with a first contact story.

I feel like I tried NK Jemesin at some point and she bugged me. I think it was a follow-up from Nnede Okorafor, who I also didn't care for.

I have added Ancillary Justice to my waitlist.

except the nineties sucked

We knew we were fucked the minute Smells Like Teen Spirit hit. It's like "okay, the jocks are going to take Soundgarden from us" but it was worse than that, we got fucking Creed instead.

Look. The 60s were inventive. All new forms of music were created. The 70s were reactive. Government was bullshit, America had lost its first war, time to put on a leisure suit and do some lines. The 80s were nihilist. Fuckin' Reagan was going to kill us all if the ozone layer and acid rain didn't do it first. But the 90s were straight bullshit and I will fight you on this.

70s nostalgia: Eagles, "Hotel California"

80s nostalgia: Bryan Addams, "Boys of Summer"

90s nostalgia: Smashing Fucking Pumpkins, "1969"

Jaron Lanier made the point that musical innovation stopped fucking cold with rap and the '90s brought us the fucking Fugees, the least innovative R&B act to ever win a grammy, which paved the way for NSync and Britney Spears. Music was a mutherfucking wasteland from like '92 to like the first P!nk album and you know it.

Lanier isn't entirely right - I'd argue that Trap and Witch House are innovative enough to warrant their own rankings but look into my eyes:

Taylor Swift IS nineties/zeroes nostalgia

And you wonder why people look longingly at vaporwave.

Oddly enough, never even heard of it, despite my love for Cornell Wilde.

Here's what's funny. I read all the John Christopher I could find when I was a kid. Which meant The Tripods, Empty World and Fireball because the school library was run by a devout Mormon who hid all sci fi and fantasy as aggressively as she could. For some reason she disallowed me to do a report on Joan of Arc, despite the book being in her library, and forced me to do one on Brigham Young instead (this was not beneficial to my attitude towards the LDS Church in general or Mormons in particular). So I was this many years old when I not only found out about Death of Grass but that Fireball is the first in a trilogy.

I wouldn't have even known about The Tripods if they hadn't been serialized in comic form in Boy's Life.

I finally read Starship Troopers and hated it. Heinlein was basically god to my family but I think he's got one, maybe two good books in him. He's just such a fascist. i reread The Forever War for the nth time to wash the taste of it out of my mouth and it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. I think I've read all three versions over the years but the first one is best and I don't think that one's available anymore.

Jim Butcher has this weird-ass series with airships and castles and talking cats'n'shit. There's two books in it. I have now read both. The first one was weird and okay. The second one was weird and okay.

There's also this weird-ass book about castles and airships(?!) where everyone is an elf or a goblin for some reason. The first one is weird and okay. The second one is weird and okay. the first one was basically "King Ralph, if everyone was a goblin or an elf" and the second one is basically "Sherlock Holmes, if everyone was a goblin or an elf." There's no reason for them to be goblins or elves, they just are.

There's this other weird-ass book that's basically "Sherlock Holmes, if all technology was replaced by magic, except that magic was genetic engineering, and autism was a superpower, and everyone is gay." It is better than the other weird-ass books mentioned here. I will also mention that going from that milieu to "Starship Troopers" is some whiplash.

I tried SPQR. It's fucking dogshit. There's this assumption among western historians that you must learn the Romans because they're the Romans and why wouldn't you learn the Romans and Fuck The Romans. If you can't tell me why I should give a shit, I won't. The nice thing about the Durants is they were objective about the Romans. Fuckin' nobody else is. Fuck the Romans.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is rough. The Origins of Totalitarianism is rougher.

Battle Cry Freedom is also shit. See: SPQR except for the American Civil War.

Gary Stevenson's "The Trading Game" is fucking spectacular. It's all about inequality. It's all about dragging rich people for being rich. It's all about the hollow pursuit of wealth as a hollow pursuit. And it really fucked me up that I made more money in less time than he did just buying and holding. Crypto is like a Game Genie for finance.

Johnathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" is shit. I think Haidt is a one-trick pony and he's started fluffing the conservatives.

A Memory Called Empire and a Desolation Called Peace are great fuckin' books. I like my space operas written by lesbians. They have so much more color. Also, let me just say that this new flavor of sci fi and fantasy where they aren't written by privileged white men? Fuckin' rules.

I read The Communist Manifesto. It takes no time at all, also jesus christ who worships this shit

The two that broke me were Red Plenty and Secondhand Time. Red Plenty sets you up for the bleakness, Secondhand Time rubs your fucking nose in it until it's ground down to the bone. Secondhand Time followed by the Biden debate followed by the Trump assassination attempt was just too goddamn much. It's one thing to watch stupid fucking Republicans cheering for totalitarianism and stupid fucking Independents willing to throw away the future on principle, it's another thing doing it while reading an oral history of people longing for Stalin while also describing all of their relatives murdered by Stalin.

- The Mercy of Gods by James S A Corey.

Appreciate the recommendation. It struck me as "The Expanse meets The Tripods."

this entire album rules

I would argue that the Clock of the Long Now is the antithesis of the TESCREALists - it supposes both a collapse of the civilization we know and a continuity of a humanity we don't.

What amuses me is the narrative everyone tries to wrap around it. I've never seen Brian Eno not mentioned when the fact of the matter is, the chimes are a random number generator but sure, get Brian Eno in there. I've only ever seen Ludwig Oechslin mentioned once - but he's the guy who actually did the calcs to make it a clock.

And really - there's no aspect of it that couldn't have been done 100 years ago. Great, it's got a giant torsion pendulum, those date to 1880 (and suck). Great it's got temperature-based reload, that's been around for 400 years. Nitinol compensator? Yeah that's a little slick but also, 60 years old and 100 years ago we just used electricity because nobody back then was going "we'll still need a regulator working when the morlocks and eloi are walking around."

I think the thing that annoys me is civilizations used to build these cool things to impress each other, and now richfux hide their shit in the desert.

I'm ready to print up Pelican Brief t-shirts

To clarify, this is the scenario I think they envision:

1) president crimes

2) Congress whines about said crime

3) Complications ensue; case goes before the Supreme Court

4) Supreme Court decides whether the President is Republican

When I say they "aren't setting precedent" I mean that they do not intend to create any case law that stands on its own. They absolutely want to cement their powers as the ultimate arbiters of all law and jurisprudence. Which means your ability to slow walk, obfuscate and delay will absolutely be dependent on the political makeup of congress and the courts.

Populist regimes around the world are doing a banner job of demonstrating why that "appointed for life" bullshit associated with the courts is a terrible fucking idea. I suspect it will go away a piece at a time. Fundamentally, the more parliamentarian our courts become the less sense it makes for them to be political appointees. Fuckin' run for election like every other choad.

The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent. They aren't. They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost. What was noteworthy about Bush V. Gore was the amount of dancing the Rehnquist Court did around the precedent they were setting - they made great pains to write out any possible future outcomes because really, all they wanted was for Bush to win.

Logic-based political parties suffer from the requirement that their moves make sense and are a part of historical continuity. Allegiance-based political parties suffer from the fact that their only cohesion comes from affinity and opportunism. The Democratic Party is and has been a logic-based political party. The Republican Party started transitioning to allegiance-based after Eisenhower but really nose-dived into pure fealty with Trump. The move for the Democrats is to do Democrat things in order to maintain their Democratic base; the move for Republicans is to amp up the passion for their base.

The problem, of course, is that their base has peeled away from the middle. They end up in a doom spiral that has a very real chance of sucking us all down with them.

I'm making my way through Second Hand Time. It's fucking rough. The through-lines, though, are crystal clear:

1) There is no Russia only Moscow

2) Every republic except Russia hated the USSR

3) Muscovites prefer to dominate others - even if they suffer - over actually knowing their place in the world pecking order

I see a lot of Republicanism in it. The Republicans have cooked up this imaginary past when everything was great and the Blacks and Mexicans knew their place and if we just own the libs hard enough we can return to 1952. When a Trump administration with both wings of government fails to get any traction? It's because the libs aren't being owned hard enough. If they just believe harder they'll be able to return to a utopia that never existed, when they didn't have to deal with the fact that other people have feelings and that there is no "away" in "throw stuff away."

"Trump is king" is the logical end result. There is not a speculative fiction writer out there whose basis of government was anything other than "we'll have a one-world government run dispassionately by people we agree with." The complications of actually running a country aren't interesting to that line of thinking. (1) Make Trump King (2) Whatever Trump wants is good for the country (3) If you don't like it learn to suck up better.

The USSR was corrupt. The people who ran it were the ones who most benefited from the corruption. Then Gorbachev tried to root out the corruption and the USSR collapsed. The people who came out on top were the opportunists, the people who lost were the idealists, the people who were crushed was everyone else.

The Roberts court is at "theocracies are simpler." Your soldier? Needs to carry out his illegal orders in hopes he does it well enough to get a pardon so he'd best please the King. That's simple strongman logic, which is exactly what the Republicans want.

After a 22 year absence, Bel Canto decided to put out an album. It's become a go-to.

Yeah it's all Eugene Levy in Splash until someone finds a mermaid, and then it's suddenly the Sackler Chair of the Department of Astroarchaeology at Columbia.

I wanna say no because I WANT TO BELIEVE but I'm going to say yes because if there's a legit use case for platinum-manganese wire I'm really curious as to what it is.

You'll be much more successful at your search than I was because you are not a golden retriever in goggles in this field.

That makes sense. I once asked "so what happens when I put gold foil on silver for enameling" and was told "you increase the gold content in your silver alloy" and silver is relatively benign as alloyants go.

The Edwardian Era/Belle Epoque is noteworthy for platinum because it allowed haute joilerrie houses to make light, lacy constructions that would be impossible in gold or silver. Of course it also wants to be worked in an oxygen-free environment so it was mostly cold-formed stuff pinned together rather than castings or soldered components.

So. Ever seen Pt/Mn? Any guesses what it would behave like? "manganese alloys" aren't really where I live. Only thing I know about alloying manganese with steel is it gets impressive and the only comparison I can draw between platinum and steel is neither likes oxygen and both can be made magnetic (which freaked me out when I first learned that).

So I've seen the math on what an 'Oumuamua flyby looks like. It's gnarly. I wholeheartedly invite you to run shit down yourself but when I glimpsed it here's the following:

Rate of closure: 17km/s

Target size: 0.1km

New horizon's LORRI imager had an angular resolution of 5 microrad/pixel or around 1 arcsec. If you were able to build a 1 gigapixel camera, which clears frames at 10 frames/second, you will get 100 pixels for 20 minutes, 1000 pixels for 2, and 120 frames at 10,000 pixels.

You're also out there at 207AU. New Horizons passed Pluto at 34 AU so you've got 1/6 the light.

Now here's the thing. I've worked with some weird fuckin' metals in my day. For attaching spark plugs to hearts we used an 80/20 platinum/iridium alloy cooked up special just for us. You don't alloy platinum for anything but jewelry and catalysts, that I know of. And yet ole Avi Loeb did some trawling out Australia way and turned up an 8mm curl of platinum-manganese wire.

I have spent some time trying to find a manufacturer of platinum manganese wire. Closest I've gotten is an outfit that will make it for you if you order it. I don't know what you'd use it for. It's probably a lot like steel but more corrosion-resistant. And when Dr. Loeb went "so we found this thing" everyone went "it's obviously natural, you crank."

Even though nobody else has ever found platinum-manganese wire in nature before.

You should read his book. His argument is basically "look, space garbage is far and away the easiest explanation for the data" and then he decided to dredge up some space garbage. Further, his argument is "in an infinite universe it makes sense to get the delta V of anything you jettison at cosmic rest so no one can track you down" and that's exactly what 'Oumuamua was at. Really, he's at "space garbage is probably boring AF but it's also the most likely sign we'll ever find that there are other intelligent species out there, so why not look" and I gotta say, he makes a compelling argument.

But 8mm hairs of platinum manganese aren't likely to slaughter cows so it's boring.

Apparently you missed this

Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" would be a great read for you. Humans suck at abstraction, full stop, and our impressions of risk are shaped very much by societal expectations. Ariely points out that the most dangerous thing in modern life is stairs, and has been for 5,000 years. But since we have no alternative to stairs, we accept the risk of stairs and assign it to zero.

We're 30 years into computers, which is nothing from an evolutionary perspective. We're 20 years into social media. Kids at the park by themselves? We're 30 years into America's Most Wanted and the ABC Sunday Night Movie. Both are more than 10 years gone, though, so the backlash is well-advanced. My kid stays home alone for hours at a time and when I mention this to fellow parents they're all at "whew, ours too" because while they know they'll be judged, they also know that fuckin' hell an eleven year old can manage on her own with an iPad for a couple hours fer chrissake. I think we're starting to see the turn on social media, too.

A dreary percentage of this country wants serfs. A much bigger percentage wants to be serfs. Turns out they're all white.

Two-class societies are stable and easily controlled. Doesn't have to be capitalist; communists on strike are dead communists just as much as capitalists on strike are dead capitalists.

Three-class societies with mobility are a threat to the upper class because they tend to lose their position. The average hang-time within wealth and privilege in an egalitarian, democratic society is three generations - Grandpa made it big, Pop spent it, Junior works for a living. The average hang-time within wealth and privilege in a two-class society is Rothschild.

I've discussed this at length in the past on here and I'm too lazy to dig it up. Here's the long and the short of it:

1) The Navy has been pushing an integrated sensor suite/fleet management system since the mid '90s which had the ability to put objects detected by AWACS or surface sensors on the HUDs of aircraft in flight

2) That suite generated artifacts

3) There's some research that needs to be done in order to eliminate spoofing/EW interference that can't be done in an entirely clandestine way

4) ALIENS

Whenever you see the government slinging weird shit into the spotlight it's because there's a bunch of shit in the shadows that they can't figure out without shining a light on it. Pretty much every bit of discussion, study, information or analysis around UAPs is some form of "our sensors are giving us funny data" and "sensors giving funny data" is just another way of saying "jamming."

You know what sucks? Agreeing with conspiracy theorists.

Dead to rights: The CIA hid the entire clandestine overflight program of the 50s and 60s in "little green men" hysteria, and the whole of the stealth program in Hangar 18 bullshit. All this "UAP" bullshit flying around right now is clearly and obviously hiding something else because when you say "it's aliens" nobody pays any attention to what 'it' is.

Dead to rights: The KGB hid their entire chemical warfare program against Afghanistan in rumors that the CIA created AIDS. The word is disinformatsiya and it's been the number one go-to of Russia since the CheKa or before. The advantage of living in an unfree society is you can lie all you want since nobody believes you anyway. Live in a democracy? You lose your credibility you lose your authority you lose your government.

Dead to rights: the CIA and state department discredited Sinovax purely for purposes of geopolitics. We could have worked together. We didn't.

And ultimately, what this means is that everyone - including the US Government - was laboring like crazy to ensure that nobody would trust the US government when they needed trust the most.

A lot of that was foreign influence. But a lot of that was own-goals. I suspect that if we'd actually had that pandemic response team that the Trump administration dissolved on Day 1? We'd be in much better shape. But instead it was every agency for itself and the CIA will do dumb shit like use polio vaccination drives to hunt for bin Laden.

People have never been good at assessing risk. That's what rules are for. That's what governments are for. That's what police are for. I was out for a walk last week and a cop stopped me and said "careful walking there, buddy, that's a grounded high tension wire." And I looked to my left and huh! 15kV power line! Do I have familiarity with grounded power lines? Nope! But I was careful walking! Does the cop? nope! But he passed along his instructions! Had the power company been watching I'm sure they would have said HOLY SHIT WHY ARE YOU LETTING THIS ASSHOLE ON THE SIDEWALK" (because my other choice would have been to step out into 50mph traffic) but ultimately, the idea was communicated and I'm here to tell the tale.

The tragedy of Covid is everyone went "I'ma do my own research" which is exactly what Putin wants.*

And I fucking hate how tinfoil that makes me look.

You can't blame a dude for deaths because he met with someone that was an anti-vaxer.

You know it's more than that.

"Vaccines cause X" was a lunatic fringe argument until Andrew Wakefield blamed thimerosal for autism in a small study in the UK. That argument didn't go anywhere until RFK Jr penned a six thousand word article for Rolling Stone. It was never a good article; without the Kennedy name it never would have gained traction but traction it gained and the entire US anti-vax movement erupted around it. The dozens upon dozens of inconsistencies, false allegations and outright mistruths have never been acknowledged by RFKJr; he did apologize for saying the unvaccinated have less freedom than Anne Frank did but the fact that it came out of his mouth suggests that his whole "teach the controversy" standpoint is disingenuous.

As to the vaccine manufacturers, I'll say this: we had a family friend who worked in epidemiology. From 1983-1985 he was working on an AIDS vaccine that showed promise but the board opted to cease his department's research because the potential profit was outweighed by the potential liability. When they opted not to restart the research after the 1986 childhood vaccine injury act, he opted to return to academia. The entire department dissolved, not because of any direct company decision but because none of the researchers were interested in working at a place that put such a low premium on human life.

And here it is, 2024, and we have what appears to be an AIDS vaccine with 100% efficacy. We've been through a lot since then, obviously... but it's fallacious to argue that everyone should be able to sue over public health measures, particularly when there's an entire fund earmarked for vaccine injury and an entire other fund earmarked for non-vaccine public health injury. The argument "I should be able to sue whoever I want" is a very different one from "I should be taken care of if something bad happens due to a public health measure."

Your kids can get HepB from nail clippers, by the way. "Largely transmitted" is not the same as "uniquely transmitted." I had a discussion with a pediatrician about the chicken pox vaccine once. I mention I had dealt with chicken pox and it made sense for my kid to do the same. the pediatrician mentioned that there was a lot less flesh-eating bacteria when I had chicken pox and that the principle reason for vaccinating against varicella is the horrific secondary infections they now tend to see with pox.

But this is all basic, google-able shit. It's the difference between investigating why rather than investigating enough to justify your viewpoint.

I did a movie with John Asher, BTW. Nice guy. He blamed RFK's article for his divorce. Jenny McCarthy had been wheeling around months, looking for someone to blame for their kid's autism. That article gave her someone to hate so that she didn't have to come to terms with her kid's uniqueness. They split up over it and she launched a second career.

So I honestly have no fucking idea what the hell happened in Samoa and I don't care. What I do know is that RFK Jr is responsible for the whole of the American anti-vax movement and that he likes it that way. I'm not sure what "nuance" you're looking for here.