If he Loses, it’s Robbery

Hate telemarketers? Of course you do. A guy in Texas (I assume from his area code) has come up with an amazing way to get revenge. You can forward their calls to his bots, and they will waste the telemarketers’ time.

The enterprise is called “The Jolly Roger Telephone Company.” It has a Youtube channel. Here’s an example of a call, for your listening pleasure.

Media Floundering Reaches new and Exciting Lows

I don’t watch the news any more, but I’m making an exception today. Donald Trump is having a press conference which will basically be a victory dance over the prone body of the mainstream media.

In 2016, someone put out a ridiculous “dossier” claiming Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on a mattress on which Barack and Michelle Obama had slept. Major media outlets have published the story. Some have merely referred to it. CNN’s take on the story is so benign it almost amounts to an endorsement. Now the entire world knows the story is a hoax, and I want to see what Trump says.

Hmm…he was blunt, but he didn’t obsess on the story. He said it might have come from our intelligence agencies, and that this would be a major “blot” on their records.

That was pretty restrained, considering the speaker.

Journalists are not smart people. We can’t seem to absorb that fact. In college, they major in makeup, plastic surgery, diction, and wardrobe. That’s about all they know. Among journalists, people like Megyn Kelly seem like geniuses simply because they went to law school. Why do we trust journalists?

Let me refer to my new buddy Michel Seigneur de Montaigne. He astutely pointed out that people credit things they see in print more than things they hear, and he questioned that mindset. He was right. Put someone’s words in a newspaper, and suddenly they seem like the voice of God. Put a dimwit on TV, and suddenly he seems like the oracle of Delphi.

I think we all remember how Wolf Blitzer did on Jeopardy.

Trump looks pretty good. He is relatively sedate, he is serious, and he seems to be taking his responsibilities seriously. I hope that continues, but even if he spends his whole presidency making childish tweets and calling people names, it will be worth it to have the sane federal judges he appoints.

You have to wonder what the press will try next. Prank phone calls? Toilet-papering the Rose Garden? Sending pizzas to the White House? The childishness and gullibility boggle the mind.

It’s going to be an entertaining four years.

In the Future, not all Robots Will be Helpful

My Arduino studies are still progressing.

As I wrote in earlier posts, I got myself an Arduino UNO, and I started learning to program it. I went to a website belonging to a person known as Ladyada, and I began working my way through her tutorials. I’ve run into a few snags, so while I haven’t stopped, I’m not moving as fast as I would like.

To program an Arduino, you have to write in a language which is either C or C++. If you’re wondering which it is, so am I. The Arduino website says, “the Arduino language is merely a set of C/C++ functions that can be called from your code.” They don’t know, either.

I guess they do know, but I don’t. I have no idea what the difference is, except that C++ came later.

Arduino comes with its own programming editor or “IDE” (Integrated Development Environment), which is a program like a word processor. You write the programs in it, and it can compile them (turning them into software that actually works) and help you debug them. It also helps you lay your programs out in a way that makes them easier to understand. Supposedly.

I say “supposedly” because it doesn’t really do that. At least it doesn’t seem like it. When you write computer programs, you make long lists of procedures and statements, and they tell the computer what to do. You’ll say things like, “If this, then that, but if this, if this, if this, then that, or else this.” You have to keep track of which “if” goes with which statements and so on. It’s very helpful if the program turns things different colors and indents them so things are clearly identified and so blobs of text that go together are clumped together visually. Arduino doesn’t seem to do this very well.

While I was using it (and getting confused), I remembered my ten minutes of college programming experience. I programmed in a language called Pascal (so named because computer science students are always under pressure – I kid), and I used a program called Borland Turbo Pascal. My dim and unreliable recollection is that Turbo Pascal did a very good job of coloring and clumping. I figured there had to be something similar out there (free) for C/C++, because the human mind’s ability to keep lines of code straight hasn’t improved since I took that course.

I found Turbo C++, which is apparently Borland’s C++ equivalent of Turbo Pascal. Sadly, when you run it, it takes up the entire screen, so you can’t move stuff to Arduino and upload it to your board.

I started looking for other stuff. I already have something called Dev C++, but it didn’t make me happy. I found Visual Studio, which is a free Microsoft program (free for hobbyists), and I decided to try that.

Visual Studio takes about a month to install. I believe that’s because it’s a huge program you can use to create your own version of AutoCAD or just about anything else. I was planning to use it to make three LED’s flash on an Arduino board, so maybe it was overkill. It took quite a while to figure out how to make it run, and when I did, it didn’t look too promising. People swear by it, though, so I plan to keep trying a while longer.

The tutorials themselves turned out to have a major flaw. The instructor asked students to write a program, and then way down the page, after it was all over with, she said the program wouldn’t work.

I learned this after trying to make it work. For several hours.

This is not the best way to present a course. When a problem has no solution, you really want to tell people up front.

It’s not surprising that a STEM instructor would do this. When I was in school, they did it all the time. They would give us integrals that diverged or problems the professors couldn’t solve, and they wouldn’t tell us until we had pulled all-nighters failing to find the answers.

The lesson I learned from this is to read the whole page before starting to write anything.

I’m starting to realize I need to think a lot about C (or C++) itself as I learn this. It’s not enough to take the little bits Ladyada provides and extrapolate. You have to know more than that. What’s the correct punctuation (or whatever) for an if statement? Can you read the state of a pin powering an LED to tell whether the LED is on? Things like that. If you start guessing, you end up with problems.

Arduino uses integers to label pins on the board. I don’t get that at all. If “int SwitchPin = 2” means the second pin is named “SwitchPin,” then doesn’t any integer you set equal to 2 become tied to that pin? I have no clue. Very confusing.

I’m going to have to go back and forth from C++ to Arduino to figure everything out, and I guess I should join the Arduino forum. I really hope it’s not full of snotty nerds.

I’m trying to come up with a strategy for writing programs. I think it’s best to start by writing a plain-language version of every program first. “This program turns an LED on if it’s off and off if it’s on.” Stuff like that. Then I can break it down into necessary steps, and then I can think up ways to say it in C++. Maybe that will be helpful.

Every mission needs a statement.

I still want to build a self-balancing robot, because they’re cool. I started looking into ways to build a robot that balances on one wheel or ball, and that got me to gyroscopes. Thanks to Arduino, I now know how gyroscopes are used to make rockets fly straight. You can go to Youtube and see the actual gyroscopes that made V2 rockets fly straight on the way to England.

I’m kind of hung up now, because I can’t decide between a kit and buiding a robot from scratch. A kit would get me past the relatively boring tasks of choosing parts and making components by hand, but it might push me into an area where I mainly turn the robot on and off instead of learning how it works.

It would be neat to make a robot that goes from one room to another and bothers people. You record a message into it, and then you send it across the house to your wife to say, “Bring your man a beer, pronto!” I’d need a really brave volunteer to try it out, though.

On a more serious note, though, I am disturbed when I think about the power machines will have in the very near future. As I check out the things very ordinary people with little training are doing with Arduino, as well as the crazy things well-financed organizations are doing with sophisticated electronics, I realize we are on the cusp between two ages: the age in which men were more capable than machines, and the age when machines will be more capable than men.

Some people worry that machines will become self-aware and then try to exterminate us. That’s silly. There is no reason to think electronics will ever be self-aware. The fact that something reacts to external stimuli doesn’t mean its aware, unless a TV is aware when you push a button on your remote. Machines won’t be aware. But they will act as though they were, so the future still looks pretty scary.

Right now, I get calls from robots that argue with me. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, get ready, because it will. They call and ask you something which is obviously intended to smoke you out as a sales prospect, and something tells you you’re not dealing with a human being. You ask, “Are you a human being?” The robot pauses, laughs, and says, “I’m a real human being.” It has been programmed to say that. Then you say, “Can you say ‘God Bless America’ for me?” Then the robot is stumped. They don’t program them to do things like that.

I offended a legitimate caller the other day. She happened to have a voice that sounded too perfect, and I thought she was trying to sell me something. I started telling her I didn’t talk to robots. She argued with me, so I asked her to say ‘Gerald Ford.'” I like tormenting robots. To my amazement, she said it. Then I had to apologize. Unfortunately, she had never received a call from a robot, so she assumed I was crazy when I told her what was going on.

A good sales robot can get through several sentences without giving you conclusive proof it’s a machine. That’s remarkable. If they can do that in 2017, think what they’ll be able to do in 2025. It won’t be too long before it will be impossible to tell a robot from a person, without considerable effort. Eventually, it won’t be possible at all. Then we’ll end up in a Blade Runner scenario, where an average person will never be sure what he’s dealing with.

Robots already have superhuman processing speed, and in the future, we will be able to give them superhuman physical speed and agility. They’ll be able to move around. They’ll be stronger and faster than we are. They’ll be able to predict what we do. They’ll do our jobs–even complex ones–better than we do. They won’t hate us, because they won’t really have awareness, but they can certainly be programmed to react as though they hate us. From outside, a being that mimics awareness perfectly might as well be aware. We could find ourselves dominated and abused by machines we don’t have the brains or strength to fight.

In the movies, we get around this with ridiculous bits of code saying things like, “Never harm a human being.” That’s beyond stupid. If we have to rely on code–and we do–we’re in trouble. Look how much malicious code there is right now. Do you think things will be different when machines become autonomous? Why would they?

If the human race lasts long enough, we will eventually see people sentenced for programming robots to hurt or kill their owners. It’s inevitable.

There are a lot of malicious people in the tech arena. Right now, they program machines to do evil. In the future, they’ll be able to program machines to program machines to do evil. When that happens, we will be removed from the loop and the problem will be self-sustaining and self-augmenting.

Nikola Tesla predicted that wars would one day be fought by unmanned machines. He was right, just as he was right about so many other things. But it’s going to be worse than that. It won’t be just war, which takes place between nations. It will be intramural conflict, within cities and nations, between human beings and nationless machines. Won’t that be something?

We will have to delay things by putting restrictions on machines. We always say guns don’t kill people, and that’s true. Computerized machines, however, will kill people. Unlike guns, they’ll do violence without our input. They’ll be like super-powerful pit bulls that have to be penned and detuned. Wait and see. It will happen. But we can’t stay in control forever.

Autonomous machines will be able to shoot people extremely accurately and quickly. They’ll be able to dispense deadly chemicals. They’ll be able to blind us with lasers. They’ll act so fast the cops won’t be able to react. They’ll be like the big nasty drones in the Robocop movies, only much faster. They’ll be able to use weapons that exist today, with skill and speed we can’t match, and they won’t feel pain or have fear. They won’t feel regret or mercy. They won’t be concerned about jail.

I wonder if anyone is even thinking about defensive measures yet. I suppose they are. I guess they’ll be a lot like the machines they’ll have to battle. I would imagine you would need a robot to fight a robot.

I won’t worry about this stuff. I don’t know if the world will last long enough for rebellious machines to become problematic. I’m a Christian, so I expect this age to end pretty soon. In any case, making a primitive Arduino robot that wanders around the house won’t speed up our doom.

Arthur Koestler compared the development of the thinking parts of the human brain, in our species, to the development of a tumor in an individual human being. We have greater reasoning abilities than animals, but our emotions are just like theirs, and our ability to control them is also undeveloped. We develop technology, and then we invariably misuse it because we lack love and mercy. We should not have been surprised when we read about drones shooting video through bathroom windows, and we should not be surprised the first time a robot kills a person.

I never expected life to get this weird. But predicting the future should not be hard for those who can see the obvious.

I Want Out

I am not quite done reading the essays of Montaigne. I call him “Montaigne” instead of using his full name because it’s confusing, deciding what to write. “Michel Montaigne”? “Michel de Montaigne”? “Michel Seigneur de Montaigne”? I can’t deal with decisions like that. Anyway, I am working on the last part of the Montaigne assignments in Columbia University’s Lit. Hum. syllabus.

As you might have predicted after reading my other commentaries on this course, I am not terribly impressed by Montaigne. He seems like a fairly typical worldly liberal. He enjoys trolling people who believe in God, decency, and the obvious superiority of western civilization. I don’t need to open a moldy old book to hear that. I can turn on MSNBC.

One of the passages I was required to read is titled “On Cannibals.” In this essay, Montaigne writes about a Brazilian native he met. Predictably, Montaigne thinks savages like the Brazilian are not backward at all. Indeed, he suggests, we are the backward and uncivilized ones. Because, you know, we wear shoes and use soap and read.

Notice I didn’t put “savage” in quotation marks (not the first time I typed it). It’s a perfectly valid term. It’s not something to sniff at. Savages are savages. Their cultures are inferior. They don’t learn anything. They don’t accumulate knowledge or pass it on. A savage’s great-great-great-grandchildren can be expected to have lives just as hard and pointless as his own. When you’re a savage, you don’t solve problems and pass the solutions on. You pass the problems on. Your gift to your descendants is that they have to reinvent the wheel every time life gives them a challenge, and often, they will fail.

I don’t think Montaigne knew much about American Indians, because he died in 1592, a hundred years after Columbus landed in the Americas. Nonetheless, he felt qualified to say a lot about them.

Modern apologists for backward people like to pretend that only civilized people make war. That’s idiotic. Open an old National Geographic and look at the spears and shields. Primitive people are more warlike than the rest of us, because they have nothing better to do, because they are too stupid to write down history and be reminded how bad war is, and because they have less to lose. We worry about having our magnificent cities destroyed and our wealth consumed. That’s not a big concern when rebuilding your largest town takes three hours.

Read up on the Indians, and you will learn that they were heavily into war, slavery, and torture. People love to say the Indians could not be enslaved. All I can say is, “Read a book.” They were all about slavery.

Montaigne doesn’t fall into the trap of claiming Indians are sweet, gentle souls who spend their days dancing with unicorns. He admits they’re violent. He celebrates it.

Montaigne claims Indians ate their defeated enemies. He says they would take prisoners, feed and care for them, and then torture them as much as possible before eating their bodies. I don’t know if that’s true. He says the victims would sneer at their captors and taunt them, saying that when they were eaten, the victors would only be tasting their own ancestors, whom the defeated had eaten in years past.

He admires this behavior. I am not kidding.

It goes without saying that a life without elective war, torture, and cannibalism is superior. I don’t know how to prove it. It’s like proving good is better than bad. Some things are just obvious. I can tell Montaigne secretly felt the same way, because he made no effort to move to South America and get himself captured. He just liked posturing and trolling.

If he lived in America, right now he would be backpedaling on his promise to move to Canada.

Throughout history, swarms of human beings have done their best to escape crude societies and move to sophisticated ones. This was already true in the Sixteenth Century. That ought to tell Montaigne something.

You may say Montaigne was highly original in his views concerning savages. I doubt that. I’m willing to bet that two thousand years before he existed, there were educated Greeks spouting the same nonsense. The grass is always greener, and because that’s a fact based on immutable human nature, the grass has always BEEN greener. I don’t think originality is a good defense.

One of the things I’ve learned from reading the classics is that ideas we think were conceived recently are almost invariably ancient. You will see this in Montaigne’s own work. He cites the Greeks and Romans over and over.

Here’s something revealing. When westerners talk about their own history, they don’t hesitate to label their forebears as losers. We love putting them down. We say life used to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Here is the exact quote, from Thomas Hobbes:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

If our ancestors, who were a lot like Montaigne’s Indians, can be criticized as underdeveloped, why are primitive non-western people who live in our time exempt? If anything, they deserve more criticism, because they have been around as long as we have, and we have moved forward, and they haven’t.

I don’t buy into the “noble savage” myth. Give me peace, air conditioning, modern medicine, and the internal combustion engine, any time. Montaigne’s romantic notion was just as silly and untenable in his time as it is now.

People love to defend savages, saying they live in balance with nature and don’t harm the earth. I have a couple of responses to that.

1. The reason they don’t harm the earth is that their infant mortality rate is gargantuan. They don’t multiply fast enough to harm the earth.

2. Not harming the earth is not a legitimate measure of a person’s virtue. Who said it was?

Primitive people don’t harm the earth because it defeats them. Their babies die and fertilize it. The rest of us increase our numbers and make the earth fruitful, and a certain amount of pollution is an inevitable side effect. I like pollution more than I would like living in a society where a typical woman has five kids and raises one.

Today I’ve been reading “On Experience.” It’s a fun read, but it serves to discredit Montaigne to some extent. Much of the essay concerns Montaigne’s views on health and longevity. He advises people to give in to disease, in order to let it take its course and be over quickly. He says we would should yield to evil.

Montaigne had kidney stones all his life, and he died at the age of 59, from complications from tonsillitis. When someone gives you advice about health, you have to consider their track record. He didn’t do too well.

A long time ago, my mother used to read books by a lady named Adelle Davis. This woman held herself out as a health expert. She told people to eat certain foods in order to protect themselves. She said a person should eat three almonds every day, to ward off cancer.

Cancer is what killed Adelle Davis. I don’t read her books.

Montaigne wrote an essay about the Western custom of wearing clothes. I haven’t read it, but I feel like I can write an outline just by guessing. My bet: he’s against it. Why? Because he’s a troll, and because no one would bother taking the time to write an essay in favor of wearing clothes. People are already in favor of it.

Yes, I just took a look. He thinks wearing clothing is a nutty custom imposed on us by people who lack faith in our bodies’ natural ability to protect us from the elements.

How predictable can you be?

I have to wonder if modern educators like Montaigne simply because he agrees with a lot of their quaint, discredited notions. No. That could never happen.

People say Montaigne was humble, but I would say the opposite. I think he was conceited, because he had no regard for the wisdom of people who preceded him. Well, I suppose he would have had wisdom for the brilliant savages way upstream in his ancestral line. The naked ones who tortured unarmed captives to death and ate them, I mean. But he didn’t have much respect for the ones who built the western world.

Montaigne made himself out to be humble, but so did Socrates, and he had an ego the size of a planet. It’s sort of like Obama saying he’s not a socialist; obviously, he’s a socialist. He believes in forced redistribution of wealth. What you say you are doesn’t determine to what you are. It’s not great evidence.

The book isn’t too boring, and it provides an interesting look at sixteenth-century life. It shows you how educated people of Montaigne’s time thought, and it shows how familiar they were with the works of earlier thinkers. It’s worth reading (bits of it), but I wouldn’t go out and start a Montaigne cult after reading it. He’s not particularly wise.

After this comes Cervantes. Thankfully, the syllabus doesn’t require me to read the whole book. I think Cervantes was overrated, and I suspect he was included simply because Spanish literature isn’t as good as literature from other countries. I think he was a diversity pick. I don’t look forward to plodding through hundreds of pages of work by a man who may have been chosen not because of merit, but through affirmative action.

Could be worse. I could be going to an oncologist who got affirmative action. Or riding a space shuttle built by affirmative-action engineers.

Not what I would ever ride a space shuttle. To get me on your airline, you have to get your death risk down below 1%. That’s a rule I have.

I suppose I should have done all the reading for Lit. Hum. back when I was 19, but I see that I spared myself a lot of suffering, and I didn’t cheat myself out of a ton of useful learning. I don’t feel motivated to read a lot more of this stuff. I might read a few things, but not a whole lot.

I’m not a savage. That’s sufficient.

Plus it’s Elvis’s Birthday

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the way God is helping me to get his love to flow through me. I thought I should provide an update.

I’ve learned a few things about love. the most surprising thing is that it’s connected to power. A lack of love will constrict the flow of whatever the Holy Spirit is trying to get to move through you. That includes faith, and faith brings power.

I suppose this makes sense. As I wrote in my earlier post, last year God gave me this sentence: “You created the universe for love.” Love is the whole point of our existence. God created us to love and be loved. He didn’t need servants to help with his projects. He wanted the universe to be filled with love. If love is the reason for everything, then surely God will give more power to people through whom his love flows. God allots resources to those who are aligned with him.

I live in a country where malice is considered cute. I have been influenced by my surroundings. Instead of listening to God, I decided to be part of the problem. I loved criticism and verbal cruelty. I loved it when these things came from me. I loved seeing these things on TV, in the movies, and in things I read. People I interacted with saw nothing wrong with my mindset. They thought it was hilarious. They rewarded me for it.

Now I have habits that obstruct God’s work in me. Every day, I’m presented with tempting opportunities to make nasty jokes to myself, for no productive reason at all. In the past, that was okay with me, because I enjoyed giving in to that temptation. I thought it was harmless, as long as I was good to people when it mattered. I didn’t realize I was cutting myself off from my supply of strength.

I’ve gotten a lot better. God has improved me to the point where often I am often disturbed by remarks I’m tempted to make. I wonder why I ever thought saying or thinking such things was a good idea.

TV and the movies are messed up. They’re loaded with malice. In the Fifties, the American sense of humor was relatively harmless. Over the decades we changed, and now it seems like we can’t be funny without being cruel. We are presented with a continuous parade of snotty role models, and they have had a tremendous impact.

The end result of this is that we have come to think malice is a good thing. We literally call good evil and evil good. As the Bible says, this is a curse. It brings problems to those it affects. They sow misery into their own futures.

Now I’m getting better, and my society is getting worse. That is not an optimal situation, but on this planet, an optimal situation is not on the menu. It’s the best situation available here. It’s better to be surrounded by malicious people than it is to be one of them.

Modern humorists seem to feel that humor can’t exist without malice, but that’s not true. There are a lot of funny movies that aren’t malicious. You just have to decide to write that way. Malice, like obscenity and shock, is a shortcut to a laugh. It’s a crutch. In our competitive world, people generally go for the easy solution in order to get ahead, so malicious humor is everywhere.

If you want to see what malice does to people, watch a few minutes of Chelsea Handler. She managed to become a success, but her eyes are dead, and she is obviously a very miserable person. That’s where I would have ended up, had I continued down the path I chose.

People also use causes as an excuse for malice. No news there. If you’re maladjusted and hateful, but you don’t have a good excuse for hurting people, all you need is a cause. That’s an ancient cop out. People join Anonymous, Greenpeace, Black Lives Matter, the Westboro Baptist Church, or PETA, and after that, they feel free to unleash their cruelty at will.

We see this principle at work on the Internet all the time. Comment avengers go to news sites and say astoundingly vile things to each other, thinking it’s justified because they’re standing up for Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, or God knows what else. Sometimes I look at the comments on news stories, and I get so disturbed I close the window and look at something else. I can’t believe how cruel we’ve gotten.

The world is full of Satanic safeguards intended to deter people who are trying to escape the tar pit of malice. When you try to get out, you will be presented with tremendous temptation to return. Satan knows love is power. He wants to keep it from spreading.

We need to get God’s help in eradicating the habit of malice, and we need to get the Holy Spirit’s love to flow through us. You can only do this through the methods God has provided. You can’t force it through willpower. You have to pray in tongues. You have to do communion often. You have to confess freely to God and repent. These days, liberals are the angriest people on earth, even though they talk about love all the time. They don’t know what love is. They say filthy things and follow them up with, “Love trumps hate.” They call the persecution of Christians “love.” Shutting down a family bakery over a cake you don’t really want has nothing to do with love. These people prove that trying to love without God’s help is futile.

Christians who reject the Holy Spirit are malicious, too. Think of all the kids who have been turned against God by beatings and verbal abuse they received at Catholic schools.

Religious people had Jesus murdered. You can’t get rid of malice by following rules. You have to have God living inside you.

America is going to get worse and worse. You need God’s help to seal yourself off from the corrupting influence. If you don’t have it, you and your pride will sink with the rest of the country. That’s just how it is.

I wish churches taught the truth instead of fables and lies. I have never seen a single church that taught enough of the truth to bring people real help. You have to go directly to the Holy Spirit, and it seems like most churches are dedicated to preventing you from listening to him.

Keep building up your prayer life. Keep asking for correction. Listening to your pastor isn’t going to help you, so go to the one who knows everything and never makes a mistake. The point of the crucifixion wasn’t to help you get to know your pastor; it was to help you get to know the Holy Spirit. If you’re still counting on your pastor after a year, something is seriously wrong. He’s just a matchmaker. He’s not the groom.

Hope this is helpful.

Comments Stolen by WordPress Quirk

For some reason, this site trashed a few comments without asking my permission. If you wondered why your comment did not appear, now you know. I have restored the deleted comments.

Lying

Today I spent a little while reading about Chinese TIG welders. A commenter suggested getting a used Miller instead of looking at Chinese, and out of boredom, I went to see what other people thought. Man, it’s disappointing to see unprincipled old geezers bashing China on the forums. What a waste of bandwidth. Talk about “fake news.”

You can’t trust anything these guys say. They lost their cushy union jobs because American workers refused to accept a competitive wage. With the help of bad management, they killed the companies they worked for. Now they sit around lying about Chinese products on the Internet, like that’s going to bring Packard and AMC back. It will never happen. Not even Donald Trump can make us THAT great again.

I have lots of Chinese stuff. Some of it is real junk. No doubt about that. But all of it works, and a lot of it is excellent. The prices are fantastic.

Ridgid tools are very good. They come from China. Dewalt manufactures in Asia. I have no idea where Bosch makes its tools, but I guarantee you, it’s not in Europe or the US. I just got an Chinese oscilloscope which is built extremely well. My lathe is a very nice Taiwan job, and my mill, which works great, was made in Taiwan and assembled in China. My vertical band saw is Taiwanese. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

The other day I bought a Shars indexable end mill. I paid about $30. Shars sells mostly Chinese stuff. The end mill is magnificent. An American equivalent costs three or more times as much. Am I going to buy that? Are you nuts? Just so some guy in the Rust Belt can be overpaid? That’s charity.

I tried to find some honest comments on the AHP AlphaTIG 200X welder. It was not easy. Creaky retirees who hate China said a lot of nasty things about it. Had they ever used one? Of course not.

I get it. Old American tool companies make better stuff. SOME old American tool companes. But often they’re no better than Asian, and look what they charge. The welder I mentioned can be had for under $850, with a three-year warranty. If it blows up, the seller pays for return shipping, and then they ship you a new one. A comparable Lincoln or Miller will run you over three times as much. It will do exactly the same thing, no better. It will probably last a lifetime. That’s a plus. No one seems to know how long an AlphaTIG will last. But with the Chinese welder, you save two thousand dollars, and you get into TIG several years earlier because of the price.

At worst, you pay about $280 per year for the fun of three years of top-notch TIG and stick welding. That’s assuming the machine craps out in three years.

People always say, “Wait for a deal.” That’s a great idea. When you’re 25. When you get older, waiting five years for something may mean never getting it. You may die first. Or you may lose years of use you can never get back. If you’re 50, you probably have 35 years left (tops) to use your tools. If you lose five years sitting around waiting for a gift from Craigslist, you’ve lost a seventh of them time you could have spent enjoying yourself. If you’re sixty, it’s a fifth of the time. If you’re retired, you may be losing considerably more.

Here’s how it looks:

1. AlphaTIG 200X: $838, delivered.
2. Miller Synchrowave 215: $2735, delivered.
3. Miller Synchrowave 215, used, from a dubious no-name seller, with no warranty: maybe $1600.

Lincoln prices are right up there with Miller.

If I had to rely on a welder to make a living, I would buy American. No doubt about it. I wouldn’t want to worry about having two months of down time while an importer waits for a part or a welder for me. That could kill a business. But to goof around in my garage, Chinese is fine.

If I had to rely on machine tools or ordinary power tools to make a living, would I buy American? No way. Absolutely no way. American mills and lathes are no better than Asian. I’m not sure American power tools even exist. Where would I find them? I know we still make a few big things, like table saws. I think you can still buy American air tools. I don’t know about drills and grinders and so on.

It would be neat to have a shop full of beautiful American tools from the golden age, but people like me never, in the history of the country, had the opportunity to buy those items new.

I remember looking up the Clausing lathe I bought used, to find out what it had cost new. It was tens of thousands of dollars. No normal American had one of those in his garage in 1965. It cost several times what an average worker made in a year. If I spent that much for a lathe, I would have nothing else.

Aside from that, the Clausing was not that great.

Look at the American tools hobbyists were able to afford back when the big American companies were still manufacturing. Atlas and Craftsman lathes. Flimsy garbage, with tiny capacities. Nobody had a new 15″ LeBlond in his home shop. The closest you could get was WWII surplus.

There are a lot of people who buy old US junk and “restore” it. They’re proud of what they’ve done, and they put pictures and videos on the web. About 95% of the time, when it comes to machine tools, they’ve just repainted tools without returning them to new condition. For example a guy will buy a lathe with worn ways, and he’ll strip it, paint it, and make the feeds work. That’s not a restoration. It’s still junk.

Some kinds of machines can be restored without spending too much. Woodworking tools aren’t very precise, so they don’t have to be scraped and ground when they get old. I have a beaten-up table saw which works as well as it did when it was new in the 1990’s. But lathes and mills lose accuracy with time, and you can’t get it back with a can of spray paint.

I considered buying a “restored” mill from an outfit that scrapes them. I found out it was a bad deal. They scraped a few things, yes, but they kept the old screws, the motor, the bearings…everything you would want to have replaced. The paint looked nice, though. That’s important. You could do it yourself for $15, but never mind.

Human beings love to blame others for their problems. China-bashing is just another manifestation of the inclination. What if American union workers hadn’t demanded unrealistic wages and hadn’t refused to work full days? What if the people who ran companies had been more responsible? Maybe we’d still be selling tools instead of buying them.

The most revered American lathe company is Monarch. They still sell their coveted 10EE lathe. This is a small machine that does extremely precise work. Guess what it costs? Over $100,000. And it’s not even new. They sell refurbs. They buy used Monarchs and put new parts in them. Even the manufacturers can’t afford new American products.

I’m surrounded by China, and so are the old guys who lie on the forums. They use Chinese phones and computers to bash China. Chinese goods are all around us. Why should we delude ourselves and pretend these things aren’t there? If your shoes, your computer, your desk, your TV, your flooring, your wallpaper, your appliances, and half of your American car are from China, why not buy Chinese tools, too? Come on.

Here’s something really funny: Harley riders bash the Asians from dawn till dusk, but Harleys are full of Asian parts. Americans don’t make motorcycle forks! We definitely don’t make the electronics in the bikes.

I may get a welder this year. I don’t know. I do know the China-bashers will make it harder to get solid information.

Free Swill; Must have Green Card

I feel like I’m reaching a turning point in my evolution from white collar sissy to metalworking technonerd. I’m finally starting to feel like I have almost enough crap.

Back in around 2007, when I started buying tools, I would go out in the garage, hoping to do something, and I would see a big void. No table saw. No welder. No band saw. No nothing! Then I started accumulating stuff, bit by bit. This week, I knew I had made progress, because the 2017 Grizzly catalog arrived, and I didn’t even open it. There is nothing I absolutely have to have, right now, in order to keep from going crazy.

Mmm…Chinese TIG welders…mmm…credit card points…

Sorry.

Today I was working on Ladyada’s Arduino tutorials again, and I opened a new page. It listed a bunch of junk I had to have in order to do the next tutorial. Listed: a tiny push-button switch which can be inserted in a solderless breadboard.

I groaned. My local Radio Shack went Tango Uniform a while back, so if I want electronic parts, I have to drive across town to the electronics supermarket (where I will definitely spend over $75 regardless of what I “need”), or I have to wait for Ebay. Or I guess I could drive to the nearest Radio Shack, but dang, I love that electronics supermarket.

Anyway, I decided to check my stuff just to be sure I didn’t have what I needed. I went to the garage, and in the little drawer cabinet on the wall, I saw a drawer labeled “SWITCHES.”

Yes, I already have maybe thirty switches, not counting the ones I have left over from making guitar amps.

I’m living the high life. I should be in a beer commercial.

Rachel Marsden Must Have Turned Fox Down

I’ve been saying Megyn Kelly’s departure from Fox News would be good for the network, provided they chose her replacement well. It’s very easy to do what she does. There are millions of people who could do it if given a chance.

This morning I saw that they had given the job to Tucker Carlson. I now see Kelly’s departure as a disaster.

This is exactly the kind of move I used to complain about when I was trying to achieve some level of fame as a conservative blogger: conservatives have an inner circle of mediocre people they protect and promote, and if you’re outside the circle, it doesn’t matter if you’re Albert Einstein crossed with Winston Churchill crossed with P.J. O’Rourke. You are not going to get a chance.

Tucker Carlson seems like a nice boy, but he has almost no talent. He’s bad at what he does. He’s not unusually smart. He’s not witty or funny. He’s not perceptive. He has never said anything quotable, and that’s a real problem for a would-be pundit. He’s like Mary Katharine Ham in a suit.

I wonder if the Fox brass bothered to check Carlson’s resume. He has failed twice, and he has never succeeded. His show Crossfire was cancelled, and he had an MSNBC show which failed. Why would you hire someone who already had two swings at the ball? Investing is all about momentum. You don’t invest in something that isn’t succeeding already. Carlson, who is approaching 50, has a very long track record which proves people don’t want to watch him. Didn’t anyone notice?

I guess they really wanted to save 25 million dollars.

The sad thing is that he’s not bad enough to kill a program, so he’ll probably last on Fox, like the orange car at a dealership no one wants to buy. Too good to fire; too weak to succeed. Greta van Susteren was not very good at what she did, but she was good enough to survive, so her time spot remained clogged and wasted for years. Carlson will end up in the same boat.

I’m trying to think of an insider they could have promoted. Greg Gutfeld is smart and talented, but he’s immature and gets on people’s nerves. He doesn’t have gravitas. People can’t respect him.

Now I’m stuck. I can’t think of anyone but Gutfeld.

They need someone with Ann Coulter’s intelligence and Bill O’Reilly’s ability to handle guests. There is probably a blogger or Youtuber out there who could do it, but we will never get to see that person, because if anything happens to Carlson, Fox will go through its entire Christmas party invitation list before talking to anyone new.

Laura Ingraham is smart, but people don’t like her.

I had a weird experience this week, and it dovetails nicely with this subject. I watched a far-left Youtube vlogger, and I enjoyed it. I don’t know how that happened. His name is Jimmy Dore. He’s a comedian who appeared with a group of vloggers who call themselves the Young Turks. Their vlog is as boring as death, but he’s entertaining and smart. I don’t know how he ended up on the left. Childhood trauma, I guess. He’s Irish. Maybe he’s another casualty of cruel Catholic school nuns.

He has been hammering liberals for buying and promoting the “Russians hacked the election” story with no proof. It’s very pleasant to watch. Anyway, he’s really good, and like Conan O’Brien, he shows there is untapped talent out there, if you’re willing to look outside of your ten best friends.

Remember how O’Brien got his job? Everyone said NBC was nuts, hiring a writer who had never worked on-camera. Look how that panned out. If O’Brien had worked for Fox, he would still be in the mailroom, waiting for his gold watch. “Conan…Mr. Carlson says you forgot to use soy milk in his cappuccino! We won’t be needing you in the studio any more. Here’s your old toilet brush.”

The left has people like Colbert and Stewart–real talents–and the right gets Tucker Carlson. And we had plenty of alternatives. It’s a self-inflicted wound. Thank God Neil Cavuto doesn’t have a bipolar son who needs a job, or we wouldn’t even have Carlson.

I checked to see who’s on CNN at 9 p.m., and it’s Anderson Cooper. He starts at 8 p.m. I don’t know how anyone can stand two hours of that, but it’s true. I wonder how Carlson will do against him. I don’t know how Megyn Kelly has done. Well. I know she has done well. I just don’t know how well. I am too lazy to look. My guess is that O’Reilly will feed Carlson enough viewers to keep him on the air.

I don’t care much about this story, but I do find it interesting. I don’t watch Fox or any other TV news station. I see little bits of the news from time to time. Just enough to be disappointed!

Yeah, I’m being not a team player again. Once again, my tiny blog will be responsible for a Fox failure. They should send someone to assassinate me. If they had done that a few years ago, their comedy show would have been a huge hit. Because quality isn’t the problem. The problem is people like me, pointing out the obvious. My power is intoxicating. Behold my blog and tremble!

On the up side, Bill O’Reilly must be the happiest man alive today. Whatever he was worth to Fox last week, it has doubled now.

Maybe they’ll fire him and hire Jiminy Glick.

More

Here’s a great question. If they absolutely had to hire from within, why didn’t they consider Andy Levy? He’s as good as Gutfeld, plus he has the ability to be taken seriously.

Is he dead? I don’t keep up.

Want Their Career Strategies Back

I just read that Megyn Kelly is leaving Fox News. Actually, I’ve been reading about it for months, in the captions of clickbait ads. But now it comes from a slightly more reliable source: The New York Times.

It’s interesting. I think it’s a very bad move for her.

Megyn Kelly didn’t make Fox big. Fox made her big. Her political views are more in line with the Fox ethos than they are with the liberal culture at other networks, so she had an environment in which she could thrive. They gave her a lot of promotion, and she had viewers handed to her by inertia. People who watched the shows before and after her were likely to have the TV on when she came on the screen.

She’s good at what she does, and she’s a lot smarter than the communications majors and former models on the other networks, but she’s no Bill O’Reilly. People won’t tune in just to see her.

She has another problem: while she’s a little too liberal for Fox, she’s much too conservative for NBC. The organization will try to reject her like a transplanted arm. A lot of people there will want her to fail. Many will see her as a threat to NBC’s imaginary liberal moral superiority.

Other people have departed from Fox with big dreams or simply because they weren’t welcome any more. They don’t tend to do well. Kiran Chetry and Alisyn Camerota pretty much vanished. Andrea Tantaros is MIA. So is Gretchen Carlson. Generally, leaving Fox has been a lateral or downward move, from a career standpoint.

I think she will be considerably less prominent in January of 2018. No one can predict the future, but I think this is what will happen.

I believe this will be good for O’Reilly and Hannity. It will also be good for Shepard Smith, although he will probably leave Fox eventually. There is one less competitor in the pie-eating contest, so the rest will get more pie.

Is this good for Fox? Probably. Kelly had become a thorn in their sides, and she offended a lot of viewers. There is an unlimited reservoir of potential hosts out there, so if the Fox bigwigs choose well, they will be able to fill her slot in a way that improves the bottom line. Of course, these are the people who hired Rachel Marsden, so…

I don’t think much of the way she dealt with the Ailes kerfuffle. Sexual harassment is very bad, but the time to complain about it is before you praise the perpetrator to the skies and let him make you rich. Kelly gushed about Ailes after he allegedly harassed her, and then once he was on the canvas, she piled on with the rest. After that, her credibility is severely damaged.

My feeling is that her only hope of continued success is to pull a Huffington and pretend to have an overnight conversion to leftism. Liberals will support that; to them, honesty is a an outmoded, patriarchal, Eurocentric concept. They support Huffington even though she is clearly a tremendous, shameless liar. Kelly might be able to style herself as a heterosexual, attractive Rachel Maddow. I don’t think she’ll do well without some kind of repackaging.

I don’t watch the news any more, so maybe I shouldn’t comment. For all I know, for the last year, Kermit the Frog has been newsreading for Fox.

Interesting stuff, though.

Anyway, my prediction: bad for Kelly. Good for Fox. Good for other Fox heads.

Check back with me on January 3, 2018, to gloat or kiss my ring.

Bot of Course

I’m glad I got started with Arduino, because it helped me get back to learning C. It’s moderately enjoyable to learn C without any external apparatus, but somehow it’s more fulfilling when you add a second device (after your PC) at the end of a USB cable.

I’m still going through Ladyada’s tutorials. She can really teach. They say those who can’t, teach, so if you turn that logic around and twist it, maybe it makes sense that she’s an exceptional teacher, because she’s not one of those who can’t. She’s the owner of Adafruit Industries, which is a well-known supply house for tech hobbyists. Her PR blurb descibes her as an “MIT hacker and engineer.” I suppose she is overqualified to teach.

I have learned how to make the Uno print things out and do simple math. Naturally, I find it almost impossible to use the code she provides. I can’t take that kind of boredom. I have to make changes. I suppose that’s a good thing, because if you just copy and paste, all you learn is copying and pasting.

I’m thinking it may be time to build a robot. I guess that seems like a surprising jump, given that I can’t do much of anything with the Uno. But it turns out building and programming a robot is really easy, mostly because thousands of other people have already done the work and published the important parts online. Programming robots is one of the main ways people get good at Arduino.

I started looking at robots, and most of them were horrible. There is an Arduino-brand robot, and it looks like motorized ashtray. It’s a circular PCB with two wheels. I’m sorry; I don’t care how great it is as a teaching tool. I’m not going to be happy teaching an ashtray how to navigate the floor of my office, especially now that I don’t smoke cigars.

I still can’t believe I put dozens of Cubans by the side of the road for the garbage people. Those were some fine smokes. I just looked up the statute of limitations, and I’m safe, so yeah, I bought a lot of Cuban cigars. Take that, coppers. Not that the government cares. I’ll bet no one has ever been so much as fined.

There’s a robot called the “BOE bot,” and “BOE” stands for “Board of Education.” I guess that means it’s overpaid, can’t be fired for incompetence, and teaches kids they should consider being gay. The bot looks pretty boring. It’s sort of a little cart that putts around dodging things and following lines painted on the floor.

Here’s what caught my interest: self-balancing robots. These are robots that exist in unstable equilibria. They balance on two wheels or some other inadequate type of support. Cut the power, and they fall over. They’re much neater than four-wheeled robots because every time you turn them on, they demonstrate the possibilities of modern hobby electronics. Simply balancing and moving around are impressive tasks for unstable robots.

I looked at a bunch of these robots on Youtube. Most involve three flat platforms arranged like a two-story building. Wheels and motors go under the lowest platform. Batteries go on top. Each wheel has its own motor. To do it right, you should use steppers, but people use crappy Chinese hobby motors too.

Determining what kind of robot was best was not easy, because people have posted videos of bad robots during the last year, while others posted videos of superior robots as long as six years ago. My natural tendency was to look at robots which had been built recently, but then I would dig up older videos and learn that better designs had been around for quite some time.

I don’t know why people continue making bad robots. Everyone has Google.

Some of the robots are really awful. They fall down, or they can’t maneuver. Some have wires attaching them to computers. Come on! That’s insane. Who wants a robot that can only walk three feet?

One of the neatest robots is a kit job, and it’s called the “B-robot.” The name alone justifies the purchase. Many self-balancing robots wobble and don’t maneuver well, but the B-robot is nimble and sure of itself. It has an arm, too, so if it falls, it can use the arm to boost itself while it rights itself. Unfortunately, it costs $125, which is like $121 more than I want to spend.

I guess the next version will be the Dude-b-robot.

Why get a kit? Because every robot you didn’t design yourself is really a kit. Even if you make the parts, you’re using someone else’s design, so buying a kit is not cheating in any important way.

When I first learned it was possible to build two-wheeled balancing robots, I was surprised. After I got used to the idea, I started to wonder why I couldn’t built a one-wheeled robot. It could change direction faster. If you can balance with regard to one axis, you should be able to balance with regard to another at the same time. That’s what I thought. Then I checked. Sure enough, it has been done.

In my uneducated opinion, the best type of “one-wheeled” robot doesn’t have wheels. It uses a ball instead. It’s unclear who invented it. Various people seem to be trying to take credit. You put three or four steppers in the base of a robot, and you arrange them so they turn a ball trapped under them. The robot balances on the ball, and it can move in any direction by turning it.

A nut genius in England spent an incredible amount of time designing his own copy of BB-8, the small robot in the new Star Wars movies. A ball bot may have a ball which is mostly contained in the robot’s body, but you can also make a small robot which rests high on the upper hemisphere of a ball.

I guess I should be satisfied with a two-wheeled robot to start, because it has been done a million times, and there is an appreciable chance that I’ll be able to make it work. Ball bots are intimidating.

Once you get your robot on its feet, so to speak, you can start doing mods. You can put sensors on a little “head” at the top so it tracks objects. You can put a laser on top of it and shoot at things. You can put a camera on it. You can add a cup holder. You can add various types of displays. You could send the robot to your wife with a display reading, “Help. Out of toilet paper.”

Is it useful? Not in the slightest. At least I don’t think so. But it would teach me a lot without boring me too much.

I hesitate to put this in print, because some idiot may think it’s a great idea, but I believe you could use something like this for home defense. It’s possible to blind people with lasers. It works so well, it’s considered a war crime. You could send a robot out into your yard to shoot lasers at the faces of violent intruders.

I’m not suggesting you do that, because it’s vicious idea, but I suppose it would work. I don’t know how easy it is to get a laser strong enough, or whether it could be carried on a robot a person could reasonably be expected to build at home.

On the whole, I still prefer sharks. Call me a throwback.

It would be neat to make a robot that tracks balloons and shoots them with a laser. That’s actually possible.

I don’t know. There must be some use for these things.

Perhaps for now I would be smart to learn simpler things. I’m having delusions of grandeur.

I may have to trim my expectations, but there is no reason why I can’t build some sort of reasonably interesting robot. If I succeed, you will know all about it.

Good Books Can be Produced Without TPS Reports

A reader sent me a link to a story in which one writer “Fisks” another. If you’re not familiar with Fisking, it means tearing someone’s work apart, line by line. The Fiskee is one Laurie Gough, who has been published somewhere or other and takes the position that self-publishers are losers and hacks. The Fisker is the host of Monsterhunternation.com. I do not know anything about this person. It’s probably not Laurie Gough’s boyfriend.

The Fisking itself is very, very long, so I didn’t read the whole thing, but I did read a lot of it, and I read Gough’s entire piece. I have to agree with the Fisker. There is nothing wrong with self-publishing, and a self-publisher imprint doesn’t mean a book is bad. On the other hand, it’s likely that most self-published work is even worse than most publisher-published work, simply because there is no one to hold the bad stuff back.

Not all self-publishers are inept. I think Ms. Gough forgets that there was a time when all authors were self-published. Moses didn’t have to deal with rejection slips. Neither did Homer. Many of the greatest works in history never went through the publication process during their author’s lives. Obviously, a publisher is not an absolute necessity when you want to create a work of real merit.

I don’t know for a fact, but I would be willing to bet a large pizza (cooked by someone else, because that phase of my life is over) that once the publishing industry was established, many of the authors we now revere got in the door by paying publishers.

She also forgets that we have modern authors who started out in post-Internet-creation self-publishing. I don’t know too much about The Martian, but it’s my understanding that it started out on the Internet. The movie version was very good. The author is stinking, filthy, reeking rich. The book and movie would not exist had he waited for a publisher to notice him.

We also have modern authors who did wonderful work without intending to be published at all. Anne Frank comes to mind. Highly reliable Internet rumors say that when her diary was submitted for publication after her death, it was rejected many times by editors. They almost protected us from that hack, Anne Frank!

I can’t agree with the snobby, elitist notion that self-publishing is only for losers. It’s not just wrong; it’s facially absurd. It’s like standing in an orange grove and denying the existence of fruit. It almost sounds like Ms. Hough is trying to set herself apart as a member of a distinct and superior class, simply because she has a publisher. That’s certainly easier than producing quality work and letting it speak for itself.

That being said, there is one very bad thing about self-publishing, and here it is: it’s harder to promote a self-published book. If you want your book to make money, you will almost certainly have to do radio and TV interviews, and to get those interviews, you want to be able to say you have a real publisher.

There are very, very good things about self-publishing. For one thing, if you self-publish, your book will exist. Existence is one of the main qualities a book needs. The book no one can buy anywhere is not a successful book in any meaningful way.

Another nice thing is that you can force your book into existence without help. You have control. You don’t have to beg anyone. You want to have a published book? Fine. Upload it now. Done.

If all you care about is expressing yourself, self-publishing is a great idea. You can write and publish fifty books a year if you’re up to it. The public won’t have to wait through a year-long process before each book appears. You can say anything you want. You won’t have to worry about editors killing your jokes by rewriting them or cutting out the parts of your work that are most important to you. Really, the only solid reason to insist on having a conventional publisher is a desire to make money.

The commenter said he would buy my work if I self-published again, but I think I’m self-publishing right now, so save your money! Anything made available to the public is published.

It’s very ugly for a person who got in the door to lob poop-bombs at all the people who haven’t made it yet, and given that Ms. Hough is not a highly admired author, it also creates opportunities for people to knock her off her high horse. If you really have to insult someone else’s work, you should be able to come up with names and specifics instead of issuing a mindless blanket condemnation of an entire class of writers.

A book is a book; published, not published, published by a publishing house, self-published…whatever. It doesn’t have to be publisher-published to be as legitimate as anything Ms. Hough will ever write. If you print one copy of your book and hide it under your bed, it’s still a real book, and its quality doesn’t depend on the opinions of publishers. Catch-22 was still a monumental achievement before Joseph Heller submitted it to publishers, and it was a monumental achievement while it was winning nothing but rejection slips.

If you feel like writing, write. If you feel like publishing, but you don’t care about fame and money, self-publish. What the hell. No one cares. Enjoy yourself.

Welcome to Cortlandt Homes

I had an interesting experience last night. Someone complimented my work and asked why I wasn’t writing for The New York Times. I thought that was nice, and I explained, basically, that I had never been a team player. I have a certain amount of ability, and I produce on demand, but the world of the arts is no meritocracy. You have to have cronies and benefactors if you want to do well. That means you have to say what they want to hear. If I can’t say what I want to say, I don’t see the point in writing.

On a more fundamental level, the reason I didn’t get anywhere is that God held me back. If he had let me succeed, I would have been wealthy and full of myself (more than I am), and I would not have felt any need to turn back to him.

Anyway, in my response to the comment I mentioned something that happened to me many years ago. I was working in a bar, and I had written and produced some funny radio ads for the owner. I applied to various radio stations and ad agencies in the state, trying to get a copywriting job. I sent out a funny letter with a funny photo. A guy who worked at a radio station called me and gushed over my work. He called me in for an interview. He introduced me to people throughout the station. They had been very impressed by my application, and they wanted to meet me. They treated me like a celebrity.

The interview went great. They hired someone else. And that person turned out to be…drum roll…absolutely nobody. No, they didn’t hire a genius who later became famous. They probably promoted a guy who swept the floor and went for sandwiches.

After that, the man who interviewed me made a horrible sample commercial for the bar, using the same concept I had used for my ads. It could have been described as a cure for laughter. He asked if I could get the bar owner to buy ads from him.

Yes, you read that correctly. He hired someone else, wrote ads that copied mine, and then tried to get me to help him get my boss to dump me and hire him.

I had other experiences like that. Eventually someone told me that when you try to get work in that kind of job, they give the hiring task to someone low on the totem pole, and that person knows that if he hires someone talented, he will put his own job in danger. He will be hiring his own replacement. So it’s standard procedure to torpedo anyone who could pose a threat.

Writing is a strange business, because it draws people who are incapable of doing it, and somehow, they find employment. I would estimate that over 95% of writers have no talent whatsoever and nothing to say. In order for them to survive, they have to do whatever they can to sabotage the rest of us. They should give up and become car salesmen or something, but for some reason, they doggedly cling to jobs they can’t really do, at the expense of the qualified.

I don’t know why they do it. For untalented people, writing is not pleasant. It drains them to write short pieces. A 500-word job makes their knees shake; I can write 500 words while standing in line at the grocery. Untalented people don’t actually enjoy writing. But the world is full of people who want to be called “writer” so badly, they are willing to devote their lives to a job they hate doing.

Most writers, even good ones, hate to write. If you hate to do something, maybe it’s not for you.

If football was like writing, you would turn the TV on every Sunday and see fat little bald guys on the field, with bifocals under their helmets. Whenever a real athlete showed up, they would put laxatives and roofies in his Gatorade.

I’ve had a few books published. I’ve introduced people to an agent. I’ve worked with people on books. So far, no one but me has actually written anything. No one I hooked up produced a book. I have never seen a book I co-authored reach completion.

When I got opportunities, I produced tons of material. No problem. No excuses. No extensions needed. It’s what I was designed to do. When I dealt with other people, even if their intentions were good, they generated almost nothing. The only exceptions to this were a couple of group-authored websites (in other words, pointless hobby time sinks) I ran. Even then, I produced a disproportionate amount of material.

Most writers don’t write.

It’s fascinating the way the world works. Law practice is the closest thing to a meritocracy I have ever seen. Most jobs are not like that. People are hired and fired for every reason except competence.

The reason it’s easy for a good lawyer to get a job is that most lawyers aren’t very good. They’re afraid to trust their own work, so they look for people to take the anxiety off of them. An old lawyer who isn’t good will hire smart young lawyers, make them do his work, pay them a fifth of what he gets for it, and sign his name to it. This is what Supreme Court justices do, except for the pay part. Clerks who die in obscurity write their opinions.

Out of curiosity, I Googled the guy who tried to steal my ad concept. He’s still out there. He has a small-time talent agency that supplies speakers. The home page has photos of two people I have never heard of, plus Jay Leno. Somehow I doubt this guy represents Jay Leno. Maybe Leno appeared somewhere, and he was allowed to carry his luggage. My guess is that if Leno’s people saw the photo, they would send a letter and demand it be taken down.

“A sampling of our clients: Jay Leno! Randall Pulaski! Dolores M. Weinstein!”

The thing that really struck me was the phrase that appeared on the tab of the Firefox page. It said, “Team Player.” No kidding. How spooky is that? Ellsworth Toohey would approve!

Look him up. Ellsworth Toohey, I mean. If you don’t know who he is.

I have come to accept the fact that I am not going to be a professional writer. I write for fun, and because I think my testimony is helpful to some people. That’s about it. I can write a pretty good book in six weeks, and I can do it over and over. I can write a good column every day. Doesn’t matter. The fact that you have a gift doesn’t mean you’re supposed to do anything big with it.

Gifts aren’t that big a deal. God doesn’t need gifted people. His ability to use you is completely unrelated to your gifts. Everyone in heaven is more gifted than Leonardo Da Vinci. Ho hum. While you’re on earth, it’s better to be steady, responsible, and honest than gifted.

I’m not sure what talents are for. Sometimes I think God gave me mine just for my amusement. That would be a pretty good deal. Low stress. As soon as you use a gift for something bigger than that, someone will show up and try to turn you into a slave or a milk cow.

Don’t be surprised that I’m not getting paid. I’m not surprised at all.

Latest Arrival From Acme

The new oscilloscope arrived, and I have had several major triumphs.

1. I managed to turn it on and make it work.

2. I figured out how to get a bunch of downloaded Arduino sketches into the Arduino program.

3. I managed to edit the downloaded files to work with the version of Arduino I have.

4. I succeeded in building a breadboarded adaptor that allows me to put the Arduino’s output on my scope screen.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Tektronix distributes a set of Arduino files that turn an Uno into a signal generator. I found the files and downloaded them, and I figured out how to get them into the machine. Problem: the first one I chose would not compile.

I got an error complaining about a C type called “prog_uchar.” I got “prog_uchar’ does not name a type.”

I thought I was missing a library, but after Googling around, I learned that prog_uchar comes from an earlier version of Arduino, and it doesn’t work in later versions. I had to replace it with “const char.” Okay, fine. It worked. I’m pretty impressed with myself, since I don’t really know C.

I love the scope. I thought it would look cheap, but it’s very nice. Solid and businesslike. The screen is gorgeous. I love the way it just tells me frequencies and voltages instead of making me do math. The fan is a little loud, but as you would expect, there are online guides to installing better fans.

I have felt conflicted about hacking it. When I ordered the scope, I didn’t realize the hack would essential turn the scope into a more expensive model. I have been thinking it over. On the one hand, it seems a little shady. On the other, they sold me this thing, and I feel like I should be able to extract whatever potential it has. People hack car computers all the time to make them run better.

Anyway, for now it’s great. It’s nice to get one toe into the 21st century.

After using my balky old Hitachi, which weighs maybe 25 pounds, it’s a real luxury to us a 10-pound scope which does what you tell it to. The probes are easy to attach. They’re already adjusted. It’s like going from a Heathkit computer to a Fat Mac.

I got to use my super-cheap bulk resistors and capacitors on the breadboard between the Arduino and the scope, and that was nice. I found out the skinny leads on the cheap resistors work for breadboarding. That was a relief. They’re not ideal, but they serve their intended purpose, which is to allow me to do things requiring resistors when I don’t have top-quality versions of the values I need.

I will try to get through the exercises now. It will be neat to know what a few of my new buttons do.

‘Tis the Season to be Offended

What strange times we live in.

Today I went to check Drudge, and I saw a photo of a duck with the word “LAME” superimposed on it. It was a baby duck, I should add. Not a big, mature, adult duck. Drudge put it up in reference to a story about the Russian reaction to Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats.

Isn’t it strange that he’s quick to expel diplomats while he has no interest in keeping terrorists, murderers, thieves, and rapists out? Maybe the best way to get rid of illegal aliens is to have them get jobs at the Russian Embassy.

I figured Drudge was trying to be cute, but then I looked into the matter, and I found out the Russian Embassy posted the photo first, on its Twitter account. The Russian Embassy gets in Twitter battles! We need a good term for this activity. How about “Twitfights”?

I’ll bet other people are already using that term. How about “wars of attwition”?

Here is my understanding of the story:

1. Hillary Clinton lost the election.

2. Obama was mad, because the world owed the left all power and glory.

3. Obama blamed Wikileaks, which had leaked damaging info on Hillary.

4. Wikileaks claims the information came from American Democrats.

5. Obama blamed the Russians, for reasons we haven’t been told yet. Perhaps it’s above our pay grade.

6. Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the US.

The humorous part about all this is that Vladimir Putin came out looking like the adult in the room. He declined to expel anyone, and he had his people publicly invite the children of American diplomats to a Christmas (not “holiday”) celebration at the Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin says “Christmas,” and Obama doesn’t, because Obama thinks Christmas is the Confederate flag of holidays. Liberals hate Christmas even more than Obama loves the murder of the unborn, which is saying a lot. Obama voted against a law that would have required doctors to provide care for babies that survived abortion.

By the way, have you noticed that Bill O’Reilly turned out to be right about the War on Christmas? Remember how he was ridiculed for it? This season has been scrupulously sterilized of all Christmas references. Like no other before it. When I went to stores this season, I almost never heard anyone say, “Merry Christmas,” and when I did, they generally had a defiant air, just as I did when I returned the greeting.

I saw a ridiculous ad promoting a publicly funded celebration involved a “community holiday tree.” I’m not making that up. What holiday is decorated trees associated with? Tet? Walpurgisnacht? Beltane? Help me remember.

Actually, we did get the tree from a pagan holiday. But still.

Where is the “community holiday menorah”? Can I see that please?

It’s absurd. It expands the realm of absurdity, just like the bizarre claims that Bruce Jenner is a woman.

For the first time, Christmas was nearly 100% Jesus-free. It was just an opportunity to go to malls and riot over trinkets made in China. Presents! That’s what Christmas is about. We should call it “Present Day,” and we could call the second ghost Scrooge met “the Ghost of Present Day Past.”

I’ve quit giving really good Christmas presents. Except for my dad, I pretty much top out at $30, and for kids, it’s more like $25. I resent feeling obligated to spend four figures to support a disgraceful, godless orgy of materialism. You can be good to people in July if you want. You don’t have to save up and wait for an officially sanctioned mall stampede.

We don’t have Christmas any more. We just have a rootless, totally arbitrary celebration of giving each other things we can’t afford. Let’s call it Credit Day! The Bible says the borrower is slave to the lender. How about “Slavery Day”? Most of us go into debt at this time of year. The Bible’s warnings about borrowing are treated like quaint curiosities from an unenlightened past.

O’Reilly is annoying, but he got this one absolutely right, with no hope of credible refutation. Anyone who says there is no War on Christmas looks stupid and dishonest at this point.

They’re like the people who continue to say relations between Obama and Netanyahu are good.

The War on Christmas wasn’t truly lost until we decided men could marry each other. That’s no coincidence. There is a huge gay movement to eradicate Christianity, because people seriously believe their unusual sexual desires are that important. Gays are openly persecuting Christians now, and a lot of Americans are willing to go along with stifling Christianity simply to make the unpleasantness go away. A lot of us will accept just about anything as long as we can have our cocoa and avoid confrontation.

Sex is not that important to me. I wish I had a lower sex drive. It amazes me that people pay for drugs to increase their sex drive.

I do not understand people whose whole lives revolve around sex. It’s not that great, even when it’s good. An hour or two of fun, okay, but it’s not so great you should make it the reason you live. I don’t understand people who think it’s torture to do without it. We all want a certain amount of sex, but it’s not like food or air. It’s not essential.

Sometimes I think I don’t understand other people’s feelings about sex. I once had an unsuitable woman chase me in vain, and she kept talking about how long it had been since she had had sex. Last thing I wanted to hear. Gross. Her chances of having a romantic relationship with me were about like my chances of having a romantic relationship with Tim Tebow. There are some people you could never, ever even consider thinking of that way. When a person like that talks about sex, you cringe and wait for it to end.

It had been longer for me than for her, but I wasn’t jonesing like a junkie all day. I still do not understand what was wrong with her.

I’ve read all sorts of literary works featuring characters who seemed to tacitly agree that sex was the central feature of life, and that fornication was completely normal and acceptable. I don’t get it. How can anyone stand a life that shallow? It reduces us to the level of dogs and monkeys. Isn’t anything else important? Family? Leading a useful life? Hobbies? The arts? Are we just goats that can read?

I finished reading Boccaccio this week, and I started on Montaigne. Boccaccio wrote about sex as if every person who gets an opportunity to have it, at any time, was expected to go for it. Married, unmarried, rape, whatever. He wrote as if it were impossible to understand the inner workings of a person who would forgo any sexual opportunity.

I had been told Montaigne was a great thinker, but sure enough, he was obsessed with sex. So far in my studies, he has spent an inordinate amount of time writing about impotence, as if it were the worst possible thing that could happen to a man. I don’t want to know what he thinks about impotence! Who cares? And who cares about impotency, anyway? I mean, okay, if it’s permanent, it’s bad, but if someone has an occasional off day, how is it the end of the world? People aren’t machinery. We have ups and downs. Get over it. Seriously, how insecure can you be?

Maybe the problem is that men know that 95% of women tell every woman they know about every sexual failure their men experience. Another thing I don’t understand.

Somehow I got here, from writing about Obama and Putin.

The two big things that made an impression on me today were a) the Russian Embassy gets in Twitfights on a very low level, and b) the president of the United States and Vladimir Putin had a dispute, and Putin, not the president, took the high road. Okay, yes, the Russian Embassy people were childish, but Putin’s own handling of the situation was shrewd.

More and more, the world is coming to resemble Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, a movie in which everyone is stupid, and all discourse takes place on the Internet-comment level. Our discourse is nearly in that state. It’s obscene, hateful, and dumb. We used to confine that kind of thing to locker rooms, but now the situation is reversed. It’s like the whole world is a locker room, and to get away from it, you have to go into a special shelter.

Here’s a look at the near future. The language is horrible, so don’t click if you don’t want to hear it. Mike Judge was trying to be outrageous when he wrote this, but I think we’re about ten years away from this scenario.

It may turn out that some or all of the people Obama banished were spies. So what? Isn’t every embassy full of spies? I thought we all knew that. You create a system in which diplomats have freedom to travel and can’t be prosecuted for crimes, and suddenly, some of them turn out to be spies. Shocking! A leader who wasted an opportunity to make his spies immune to prosecution would be remiss.

It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump takes office. Apart from the predictable “protests” [riots], I mean. Will he bring us an age of profitable cooperation with Putin, or will Putin play him like he played Obama? I don’t know what to expect. As long as Trump appoints conservative judges, looks out for Christians and Jews, and protects Israel, I won’t have anything to complain about. In fact, I’ll feel like thanking God on my knees every day.

I can’t help wanting to root for Putin. I know how irrational that is. I don’t know if anyone but Obama could make me feel this way. The man is a disgrace.

I guess I’ll check Twitter from time to time, purely for entertainment purposes. It’s like watching a food fight in a mental ward. And our new culture of perpetual offense makes it even more lively. Steve Martin just got reamed out for calling Carrie Fisher “beautiful.” You have to wonder what kind of craziness is next.

If you want to rise above the insanity, get to know the Holy Spirit. Our “civilization” is on its last legs. You need to have something more solid to rely on.

That’s it for now. I need to go lie down in a dark room for about half an hour.