Daily Archives: June 6, 2014

Might as well face it: China isn’t a credible threat

Posted on June 6, 2014 by | Leave a comment

Hi readers:

Despite the fact the US military budget needs a second potential front we can fight wars on to justify being the war material overkill superpower we insist we are, China’s just not going to fill the bill.  Yeah, as Yahoo News reports, they’ve got a lot of military spending going on.  Whoopteedoo.

Fact is, China doesn’t win wars.  Maybe has never won a war in the entirety of Chinese history.  Didn’t win against the Japanese in WWII.  Didn’t win the Chinese Revolution thoroughly enough to take the Nationalists out of the picture.

Didn’t win the Korean War enough to make it all North Korea.  Didn’t even win in 1978-1979 against war-weary Vietnam.

Yeah, Washington and the threat-hungry news services would give a testicle if China could get out there and run someone off a piece of real estate they wanted.  But the Chinese have had their asses whipped so many times and in so many places they’re just hoping if they have to fight someone bigger than Tibet they can bluster enough to scare them off.

China ain’t going anywhere.  Might as well try to stir up some trouble with Mexico if we’re going to have a credible threat to justify a military budget capable of taking over all the banana republics and oil sheikdoms everywhere when the mood strikes us.  Even the Muslims are falling down on the job these days.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2014, Adventure, America

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Busted

Posted on June 6, 2014 by | 10 comments

Hi readers.  The cardiac physical therapy nurses gave me a little counselling today after they caught me cheating on their machines.  I haven’t been sticking with the piddling little times and settings they give me on a piece of paper each session.

So I was boosting my walking speeds up as much as I thought I could get by with, staying longer, and when I saw them approaching I’d quickly adjust the settings.  Same with the como se llama arm exercizing machine and the walking while sitting down one.

But today I saw them getting cagey, trying to use their animal cunning to outsmart me.  Spang caught me trying to spend 15 minutes making circular movements with my arms instead of 10, and at heavier loads and higher speeds.

They’ve got that thing attached to me all the time, shows I-don’t-know-what, and sometimes it twigs them to tell me to pause.  If it isn’t ratting me out I figure nobody else has any business being my governor.

Well heck.  Those little bitty pissant things they put on the paper for me to do just ain’t where I want to be.  Seems to me I ought to have some say in it.  But that isn’t going to happen.  “You shouldn’t even be walking around!”  She scowled at me.  Scowled!  “You are amazing with what you were doing before you even started coming to these sessions.  But you’re going to have to go slow or you’re going to be dead.”

Screw them.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 2014, America

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Real synthetic meat

Posted on June 6, 2014 by | 20 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Sitting around waiting rooms exposes a person to a lot of reading material he’d proabably never encounter otherwise.  Popular Science magazines are a favorite example for me.  They’ve always been great predictors of how our lives will be in the not-too-distant future.  As John Prine observed, “We’re all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds” here in this future we’re living in.

Anyway, the November, 2013 edition of Popular Science had a series of articles I found fascinating about some folks who are in the final phases of development of synthetic meats to replace those that came off living animals and poultry.  Indistinguishable from the real item.  Columbia University’s one of the places it’s happening, not because of better health, but because of the greenhouse gasses resulting from grazing livestock.

Evidently it’s so far along in getting it going they’re already producing real leather that never rode a cow for use on automobile upholstery, etc.  And they’re doing well with chicken, since almost everything tastes like chicken.

Naturally, if this doesn’t happen now it well be because the cow industry went in at night and destroyed everything they couldn’t buy up and squash.  It won’t be the fault of the lousy record Popular Science has in predicting the future.

Still, it’s nice to think of future generations being able to walk around in the woods without stepping on cow manure if they ever go outside.  And driving along rural highways in the west not having to see a yellow sign with a cow on it to warn there’s a rancher feeding his black cows on the pavement at dusk for the insurance.

Interesting stuff, and it ought to get more interesting.  Human beings ought to get a lot more violent in a world where there was no real meat that needed killing to take the edge off natural inclinations.  And thus far there’s been no mention of where Kosher fits into it all.  Synthetic pork might come from the factory Kosher and Jews and Muslims could start sitting down together to a nice ham instead of shooting one another.

Old Jules

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Posted in America, Animals

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