deathmtn

OHAY GUYS 84

I got out of the pool three hours ago and still have water in my ear.

On the cold war between the US and China.

By far the most important single thing that liberal democracies did to prevail in the first cold war was to make our own societies prosperous, free, open and attractive. The same will be true this time.

Via John Naughton.

You know

Ai Weiwei on the laughable idea of sanctions against China. And ridiculous American hubris.

Americans generally assumed that these students would feel the appeal of liberal values, which they would then take back to China. What happened more often, though, was that Chinese students were quick to see the cultural differences between the two countries, and to draw the very logical conclusion that American values are fine for America but would never work in the Chinese system.
…
Washington bears much of the responsibility for what has happened. In the years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, administrations of both parties touted the absurd theory that the best plan was to let China get rich and then watch as freedom and democracy evolved as byproducts of capitalist development.
Business Today: sign up for a morning shot of financial news
Read more

But did capitalist competition, that ravenous machine that can chew up anything, change China? The regime’s politics did not change a whit. What did change was the US, whose business leaders now approached the Chinese dictatorship with obsequious smiles.

Anaal Nathrakh, who are usually drum machine black metal, are still that on their new single, Endarkenment. But there's this surprise operatic power metal vocal part in there, that works surprisingly well.

Just learned about the Sword Brothers from the In Our Time podcast.

Disappointingly, instead of being fun, amusing characters, they were a group of brutal thugs, more like Blackwater than the comical Round Table that I imagined. If you think about it, though, swords were dangerous serious shit back then. If you heard of some Assault Rifle Brothers, you'd probably imagine some fucked up militia idiots, and you'd probably be right.

You know, we live in a White-dominated world, here in the United States. We do what we can about that.

But a lot of my friends and acquaintances are disproportionately White. Once in a while, it's a bummer. Sometimes, after events like Charlottesville, it can make interaction demoralizing.

I have a lot of White friends partly because of profession and class, but a lot of it is that I don't really do the work to make friends and just have to pick from a pool that I don't manage. I have to admit, this is unlikely to change. I have to force myself to use energy to maintain existing friendships. Doing a "friendship campaign" in the middle of a pandemic seems unlikely.

On the other hand, the weather is extremely good today. Killer breeze.

Either 10-4-4-4-4-10 or 10-4-4-4-10. I can't remember exactly because a roofer visited in the middle.

We've been out of the Thomas the Tank Engine game for about two years now, but Release Radar is still in it and let me know about Roll Call Rap.

On working for a dictator:

In Rangoon, he was part of the powerful Section 6 of the intelligence
services: the administration department. This was the section that looked after the top brass and their families. The children of the generals often got into trouble, and any scandal had to be handled sensitively. There were also more mundane tasks. One day, Aung Min and his immediate superior were told to bring dinner for the then dictator Ne Win, who wanted Chinese takeout. They went to Chinatown, then to Ne Win’s residence on Ady Road, where they presented him with what the other officer said was Mandalay kung pao chicken. Ne Win seemed annoyed and brusquely asked, “Why do you have to say Mandalay kung pao chicken, why not just kung pao chicken?” The dictator’s anger froze the other officer. Aung Min stepped forward and said, “Mandalay kung pao chicken is the preferred type of kung pao chicken, eaten by rich Chinese. Rangoon kung pao chicken is an inferior dish, with mainly gristle.” From then on, Aung Min was in charge of all catering.

The Coronavirus Will Never Go Away. But viruses that survive a long time usually become less deadly. So, it may actually one day, years from now, be "just the flu".

12 pull-ups. All I could fit in. A bit of childcare this morning, then all work all the time. I didn’t get outside until just now when I went down to light the grill.

Well, I finally deleted one of my two VPS instances. Ol' Smidgeo Enterprise Cloud is decommissioned. I had to do quite a bit of work to move the stuff that was running there and stored there elsewhere, but I'm happier to have a simpler network to maintained. I want to downsize my one remaining cloud instance, but somehow I'm using 35 GB of storage on there, and I can't quite figure out why.

I'm getting the halos in Spinners to be much closer to what I had imagined. They're a bit chaotic now, but I'm still tuning them.

43(?)-minute run, 10 pull-ups. 85°F. I could not stop sweating for half an hour afterward, even after a shower. It helped with being agitated by the struggle to avoid working unpaid hours lately.