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Nation’s oldest Civil War pensioner collects $73 a month from VA

In short: one Moses Triplett was born in 1846, joined the Confederate Army, deserted just before Gettysburg, married one Elida Hall in 1924 and died in 1938. They two had a daughter, Irene, who is current 87 years old and, as a daughter of a veteran, draws $73.13 a month from the Veterans Administration.

I’m not a professional truck driver. Never driven a dump truck. I assume there are some intricacies to the task that ‘m unaware of. Still… you’d imagine that “don’t drive with the damn thing raised” would be like number two or three on the checklist. But that wasn’t the case in Houston recently (note: colorful metaphors are deployed):

This sort of thing apparently happens more than you might wish… here it is in Saudi Arabia:

And here’s a collection of ’em (note: a pedestrian bridge is hit in one of the vids, and you can bet there were injuries and/or death):

What *must* have happened is that the bed of the dump truck for some reason deploys while going down the road. But whether that’s due to a mechanical failure or the driver hitting the wrong button… dunno. This might be the sort of thing that could be fixed with proper design… the truck having a built-in governor that won’t let it move faster than, say, 10 miles per hour if the bed is raised, or will automatically lower it if the truck’s going faster than 10 mph… something like that. Or a least a friggen’ LOUD beeping when the bed is raised and a flashing red light. *Something.*

Gilmer: We Should View The Permian Basin As A Permanent Resource

Short form: an expert believes that the Permian Basin formation in west Texas may have between 500 billion and two trillion barrels of economically recoverable oil. The US currently consumes about 7.2 billion barrels of oil per year, so this formation would provide between 97 and 389 years of petroleum for the US. This makes it a “permanent” resource because it’s safe to assume that the US will be largely weaned off petroleum for most fuel applications before that first 100 years is up, so the formation might never be drained.

From a strategic standpoint, it might be best if the US developed the infrastructure to tap that oil deposit… and then leaves it more or less alone, pump out no more than we’re doing now. Instead, buy our oil from elsewhere. Run ’em all dry. Then, when the whole world goes into oil shock as the foreign supplies dry up and the prices shoot through the roof, the US starts tapping the Permian Basin as a strategic reserve. Make it illegal to export the oil. The rest of the world grinds to a halt, the US forges ahead. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!!

3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths – and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry

In short, the small clay tablet is a trigonometric table. The claim is that Babylonian trigonometry is superior to modern trigbecause the Babylonians used base-60, while we use base-10. I’d argue that modern trigonometry is superior because we used base-gimme-the-damn-calculator.

Also, the title of the article seems not entirely accurate. It may well be that the Babylonians were using trigonometry tables a thousand years before Hipparchus came on the scene, but that doesn’t mean the Greeks didn’t develop trigonometry: they may well have simply developed it *separately.* Various areas of mathematics have been independently developed over the millenia by widely separated groups.

The existence of trig 3,700 years ago s both cool… and a bit depressing. One does not need to go into the whackadoodle Ancient Aliens & Atlantis territory to realize that there were some surprisingly advanced areas of mathematics, science and technology long ago… the Antikythera mechanism being perhaps the most famous. At least *technically,* humanity *could* have embarked on an industrial revolution more than 2,000 years ago, rather than only within the last 300 years, meaning that today mankind could have wholly colonized the solar system and be well on out way out among the stars. But while the pieces were there, it was to big of task to put them all together.

One if left to wonder what we might have floating around today in widely separated and apparently irrelevant chunks that a few thousand years from now people will see as the obvious parts to their cultural machines. Maybe the proper merging of Little Caesar’s pizza baking technology to the Hall–Héroult process with Hello Kitty, Ginsu Knives, televangelism and tentacle porn will produce a practical low-cost interstellar propulsion system.

But I ain’t learnin’ no base-60 math.

Been away from Ye Olde Internet for much of the day… hey, I’ve got other stuff to do. When I checked email there were a few notifications of comments on this here blog; I normally give them a quick glance and reply… or don’t. As I hope seems fair and accurate, I generally let people say whatever they want, whether I agree or not, so long as they don’t go bonkers.

One of the notifications was from a commenter I didn’t recognize, commenting on the recent ANTIFA issues. The comment was one of those Tolstoy-esque wall-o-texts that usually go by almost utterly unread, because, really, who has the time. But I scanned through it and promptly decided that it needed to be countered. I opened up the relevant post, but the comment was gone. I assume the commenter deleted his own post. Shrug.

What the commenters point was, I’m not entirely clear… remember, wall-o-text. But it ended off with the sort of thing that makes me go “oy,” sigh, and shake my head. In short… all the troubles in society today are the result of DA JOOOOZ. Apparently they are deviously working at eliminating the white race and installing a multicultural dystopia via the forces of ANTIFA and similar left-wing fascist organizations.

Ummm… yeah, no.

Sigh.

As startled as some have been by the existence of a few hundred neo-Nazis out in Virginia, I’d like to say I’m as startled by the existence of a *lot* more anti-semites still spouting really, really wacky late 19th century conspiracy theories. Sadly, I can’t honestly say I’m that startled; I’ve seen this sort of nonsense for *decades.* If you believe these loons, an astonishingly small cabal of Jews control the whole world.

You’d think that if Da Jooz were that good at that sort of thing, there’d be more of them, and they wouldn’t be under perpetual assault by idiots and savages. Conversely, if they were this good at controlling the world while leaving no actual evidence whatsoever, maybe we should let them. Because they must be pretty damn good at it…

What gets me is just how all-purpose the Blame-The-Jews conspiracy is. At the same time that the Jews are blamed for killing Christ, they are also blamed for *creating* Christianity as a way to trash the native European religions. Way to cover all those bases, guys.

Also of head-scratching interest is just how much overlap there seems to be in anti-semitic conspiracy theories and Russian interests. Basically, Russian Nazis. This is, of course, not new; I’ve yammered about Russian pro-Hitler neo-Nazis before. And whole it’s not new, it remains utterly perplexing.

Russian Nazis. RUSSIAN NAZIS. At the same time Russia was invading, occupying and annexing chunks of Ukraine because the Russian government was supposedly concerned about supposed fascists in the Ukrainian government, the Russian government was loading up with fascists. Weird.

There are lots of problems in the world, and a lot of problems in American culture and society. But the Jews? Sorry, no. Jewish theology impresses me as little as most other religious theologies, but you know what? Unlike some religions I can name, the era when the Jews were a threat to outsiders is *long* over. A few hundred years of getting smacked around by the Babylonians and the Egyptians and the Romans pretty much put an end to that nonsense, and for the last few millenia they’ve not been troublesome. Why the hell the Jews continue to get the blame for things that are clearly not their fault is confounding. It’s a bug in the human operating system, the same bug that results in people screeching about 9/11 being either a hoax or an inside job, school shootings like Newtown being carried out by “crisis actors,” aliens being responsible for everything that the Jews weren’t (and, I suppose, often enough responsible for everything that the Jews are also responsible for), Apollo being a hoax, Fukishima dumping so much radiation into the environment that California was doomed, AIDS was created in a CIA lab, that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that the Earth is the center of the universe. We are a buggy damn species.

I suppose that’s the Jews fault too.

Sigh.

So I suppose the short form is: if you come here to blame DA JOOZ for the problems of the world, or for your own damn failings… bugger off.