Bill Arnold

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• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Until today I still thought we had some hope for the future. Read the full West Virginia v EPA opinion a few hours ago. The Kagan dissent is good. The RWers are a-holes. Even a few words gratuitously wrapped with...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  I see that Het mentioned "CINO" as I was comment-editing, for "Catholic/Christian In Name Only". The similarity to RINO could make it useful in US political discourse. (It is also occasionally used for Communist in Name Only, but that would...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Back on the billionaires for the moment, this article on the BBC describes the work of the "K-Cell" in the National Crime Agency. The "K" stands for "Kleptocracy". Also in the US: Task Force KleptoCapture is a United States Department...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Re the top post, Mr Elon Musk has something to say: Use of the word “billionaire” as a pejorative is morally wrong & dumb 😛— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2022 If the reason for it is building products that...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Some noodlings here[2] (from one with a male body) about some rarely-seen groups of arguments that could be used in Roe v Wade v US SCOTUS. I see some overlap some of the comments in this thread; sorry. (Was intended...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  But the worst part is I don't know what I can do to oppose the evil I see growing in the world. Well, consider this. That Wikipedia article was itself a minor influence operation. If you look at the edit...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  The article has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Russia_should_do_with_Ukraine "What Russia should do with Ukraine" (Russian: Что Россия должна сделать с Украиной, Chto Rossiya dolzhna sdelat' s Ukrainoy), is an article written by Timofey Sergeytsev [uk] and published by the Russian...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  I repudiate this allegation! Oooops, sorry about that....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Oooops. Sorry about that....
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Nojay's bottom line is that he's trolling this for whatever reason, by not engaging in a true debate of ideas, but rather slathering on statements that range from dog-whistle to BS. I am fairly sure that Nojay has not read...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  nice Mister Putin Mister Putin. Is. A. Fossil. Fuel. Billionaire. He is one of the wealthiest on the planet. (He controls that wealth, which means it is his by modern standards.) MSB is a fossil fuel billionaire. These men and...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Last time it was directed at me my son was a secret agent of Israel. If you're curious, remember that other David L that appeared in a book thread months back that you were wondering about? I know him (well,...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Here's an approach that stashes the vowels with enough metadata to recreate the text: I'd also forgotten about rot13. echo "I'd also forgotten about rot13." | rot13 V'q nyfb sbetbggra nobhg ebg13. Reversible: echo "I'd also forgotten about rot13." |...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  I'm sure Bill would appreciate such a facility, and I would also. I would appreciate not having to stay up (on the US east coast) until Het's California sleep time to catch potential deletions, yeah. After seeing three inoffensive and...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  Ivan Ilyin has been getting some buzz recently, with references to this 2018 Timothy Snyder piece, which is paywalled: Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism (Timothy Snyder, March 16, 2018) Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  1365 was a reply to #1362...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  That is an extremely thin argument. There is post-Sagan academic work, which is easily found with google scholar. The modeling work has gone back and forth. E.g. recent work suggesting that a limited exchange in South Asia could kill massively...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  This is a wild story: So, here comes my naval analyses :)This is what I can say about cruiser Moskva - and its linkage to yellow skirts of Muhu island. A thread:— Kadri Liik (@KadriLiik) April 16, 2022 ... When...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Gadfly petrel @ 1201/1204/1207 (Thanks much for not burning your nym the last few days; it's appreciated.)[1] All we're saying is: you got lucky. I saw the "It has been Written...Just so you know what they just asked for." in...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Τελχινες @ various last night, all deleted. (Not clear why; reviewing my captures today, nothing I captured was particularly offensive. I'm already cranky, and now additionally have to suppress anger at moderator, sigh.) Mariupol mayor says 10,000 killed... Probably more...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Hint, kids: RU isn't going to bomb an area under its proxy control, ffs. You do not give your enemies this kind of ammunition unless you are fucking muppets. Or Sociopaths. Well. That town appears to not be under Russian...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  perhaps atrocity stories are being used to pump up Russian troops with hatred of the enemy. There is no "perhaps" about it. The Save the Children From the Ukrainian Nazis line of internal Russian propaganda goes back to 2014....
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Yeah, but China is alleged to have ... involuntary organ donation. (DNA samples of prisoners, even, allegedly, to match donors.) One and maybe both of the authors has an anti-CCP agenda, but seems OK (methodology weak) on a skim and...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  yes, so? He's off his head, remember? Like in the US, the Russian head of state cannot directly launch such attacks; he would issue orders, to be carried out, or not, by the military. Putin, like the US president, has...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Since their more fractal-adjacent math tends to focus on using doubling and halving for calculations, there are some obvious problems with dealing with odd numbers, especially five. When an undergraduate, I knew a math major, Japanese American, who did arithmetic...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Russia is essentially saying, What are you going to do if we fire a tactical nuclear weapon at a military airport in Poland? How do the Russians know that the answer is definitely not a 2X airburst at a Russian...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  base 16 math, counting the spaces between hands and toes rather than the digits themselves. Interesting. Not many people have sufficient control to use even just their their fingers (esp on both hands), but it's easily learned. (Toes are harder.)...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Termination Shock by Neal Stepenson Haven't read it, but perhaps similar. Basically, for the past month a bunch of techies have been thinking about various ways to do very low cost air defense. This has been in that mindspace. Probably-similar...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Here's a hobby project, that uses a free vision (ML) model(/TensorFlow), on a Raspberry Pi. Autonomous Drone with AI Object Detection Follow project (TomStewart, 31 May 2021) (The one presented there is uncomfortably close to a murderbot.) Raspberry Pi might...
• Commented on Hugos, 2022
  Copying from the previous thread, re Chicago/September and pub crawling, visitors from elsewhere may be teased/tested with this drink: Jeppson's Malört In a similar vein, Tremaine Atkinson, founder of CH Distillery, was introduced to Malört when he first moved to...