Miscellany

Duke, a largely white team, won the NCAA basketball championship. Does this mean blacks aren't better than whites at basketball? Not really. A better measure of basketball skill comes from the professional league than the amateur league, after all. And in the NBA, the vast majority of basketball players are black. But wait, an even better measure of skill would come from the Olympics, which pits the best athletes from all over the world against each other. The problem is team USA, largely composed of blacks, also dominates there. Ignoring the individual data point of Duke's win in order to see the larger picture of black dominance in basketball is precisely the kind of thinking racialists need in order to counter the 'argument by example' or 'argument by anecdote' of anti-racists. It's nice to see Duke, and whites in general, win a basketball championship, but it doesn't overturn reality.

Meanwhile Eugene Terra'blanche was murdered in South Africa. There isn't much good to say about this man -- either he went too far in becoming a criminal, or he didn't go far enough and pissed away a 100,000 man organization/army when he could have used it to stage a revolt or coup or secession at the crucial time of 1994. Either way you look at it he was just a failure. The fact that the man was most likely assassinated for his political leanings is rather humorous, given he no longer posed any threat to anybody. Trust blacks to be incompetent even at tyranny. This trend of white nationalist leaders dying mysteriously is part of a larger picture where figures like George Lincoln Rockwell, Huey Long, Jorg Haider, Pim Fortuyn, General Patton, Lindbergh's baby, and a host of other political figures all have met untimely ends. It could be that most of these people died honest deaths, and it's all just a giant coincidence. But the sheer numbers of white nationalist political figures who end up dying mysteriously makes such an explanation hard to believe. Most likely, our governments, who all pretend to have laws against assassination, the right to due process, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and all the rest are simply eliminating anyone they view as a threat and trusting the demonization of the press to make sure people don't care what happens to 'racists' and 'nazis.' If this is the case, all we can do is continue speaking out and hope that even the public at large would start objecting if too many white nationalists started dying in too obvious a fashion for it to be concealed as 'random' any longer. Our strength is in our numbers. They can't snuff all of us. Whoever they do snuff, is just another martyr, and another grievance, against our tyrannical rulers. This kind of activity does not go unpunished forever. No matter how ruthless the Tzars, or Peron, or any of these dictators and secret police are, rebellions eventually overthrow them and the truth outs.

The large hadron collider set a new record energy collision, but it will probably take months or years to analyze the data and turn it into any useful knowledge. Even so, it's good to see the project in working order after so many delays and setbacks.

When polled, 84% of British are opposed to mass immigration. Even so, mass immigration continues without any major party doing anything to stop it. How is this democracy in action? If the people rule, they should be allowed to vote on individual issues, not representatives or politicians who refuse to follow the people's wishes. Direct democracy could have stopped mass immigration all throughout the west at any point -- but because we are ruled by representatives, who are in turn bought and paid for by special interests, the people have no say in their own country's fate. The vast majority of people agree with white nationalists and want to put a full stop to immigration, but we are treated like a 'lunatic fringe.' The press is creating an artificial consensus so that anyone who watches TV is led to believe that 'everyone but a few crazies' support mass immigration. In fact, everyone but a few crazies are against mass immigration -- the problem is those crazies all tend to own TV stations and movie studios. Or they happen to be super-rich business executives seeking cheap labor, or minorities with a vendetta against their white majority hosts, or something else, or a combination of the above. The point is democracies as they currently exist do not, and can not, reflect the will of the people, by their very nature and structure. They will never reflect the will of the people, and the people can never win an election no matter what party they vote for. All political parties have been suborned long ago by the powers that be. A direct democracy could not be corrupted or suborned, because it is too loose a structure to infiltrate or lead. If people simply must have the right to vote on issues concerning the public weal, can't we at least switch to a direct democracy where issues, not people, are voted up or down?

3D movies are a good idea. 'Information density' is an important concept that hasn't been addressed with art or storytelling before. The denser we can pack our information, the more people can be entertained. A silent movie has less information density because it cannot depict both sight and sound. A black and white movie has less information because it cannot depict red or green. And a 2d movie/tv show has less information because it cannot depict near or far. The human senses are extremely powerful organs of understanding. People see in three dimensions, not two. There is no point leaving such a powerful asset on the cutting board and feeding us a sort of visual gruel far weaker than we are built to consume. Until all of our senses are exerted to maximum efficiency, we will always feel cheated by media which falls short of the realness of reality. Hopefully 3d technology will become less cumbersome (who wants to wear glasses all the time? especially over their normal eyeglasses?), less glitchy (no headaches allowed), and cheaper (who wants to pay $20 for a movie ticket?) as time goes by. For the same reason, HD tv is an enormous improvement over standard definition television. With higher definition, information density is improved, and our senses can consume a thicker porridge per second of entertaining colors, motions, and forms. No one enjoys watching an event through a 'glass darkly,' or as though everything happened behind a fog. HD tv continues to get higher definitions, more gigahertz of refresh speeds, and wider screens, which gets us ever closer to virtual reality.

Virtually all improvements in storytelling are in fact technical improvements in information density. As our ability to pack more information into a story per second improves, the entertainment value of our art has improved in perfect synchrony. It's no use sitting still with old generation video consoles, standard definition television, or 2d movie screens. Entertainers must continuously push the envelope if they want to keep their audience engaged. When the nintendo 64 refused to switch to cd-content that could show full motion videos, it lost market share to Sony's Playstation that could. When the Wii came out with a motion sensing controller, it gained market share over rivals X-box and PS3 that couldn't. Now X-box and PS3 are building motion controlling sensors, and no doubt the Wii will find some way to improve its graphics, and thus the dance goes on -- in the end the consumer benefits and virtual reality, the perfect entertainment device, comes one step closer to completion.

One of the worst costs of divorce and low birth rates isn't in the nuclear family, but the extended family. Not only do people lose access to brothers, sisters, and fathers, they lose access to uncles and aunts, grandparents, cousins, nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and an entire web of people who would normally take care of you both economically and emotionally. Whether the extended family doesn't exist simply due to not being born, or is torn apart by internal frictions, taking half of the extended family one way and half of the extended family the other, the result is the same. People who used to come into this world with a whole army of friends, playmates, allies, employers, inheritance givers, babysitters, etc are now truly born alone and naked into this world. Quality of life could easily be in favor of poor peoples and cultures that still maintain the tradition of large extended families over rich people and cultures that haven't. After all, what can possibly substitute for love?

Proponents of the citizen's dividend, like Milton Friedman, have already run studies on the cost of lowered workforce participation due to the lack of incentive to work when people are given money for free. It generally costs the economy $2,000 per person in lost labor. Compared to the cost of around $5,000 per person in administration costs of dishing out welfare under all the various guidelines and restrictions, and it turns out the economy would save money via a universal handout like the citizen's dividend rather than lose it. In this manner, we could give everyone in America a minimum standard of living, instead of only helping a select few, and pay lower taxes to fund this benefit too. There is no drawback to the citizen's dividend. It eases suffering, lowers inequality, compensates for injustice, ameliorates the unemployment aspects of globalization, provides for the elderly, empowers adults with a chance at affordable family formation, reduces taxes, increases efficiency, eliminates special interests, and slices bread.

If every other policy suggestion were ignored but people adopted the citizen's dividend, half if not more of modernity's problems would disappear overnight. I have not yet seen any rational objection to the citizen's dividend. We already pay more in taxes and provide more in benefits than the citizen's dividend does, so it cannot be that we object to the fact that no one has 'earned' it. It should appeal to liberals because it's a sustainable way to help others. It should appeal to conservatives because it reduces government interference in our daily lives and lowers taxes. It should appeal to employers because they can ditch the minimum wage, health care benefits, tariffs, unemployment compensation, pensions, and all the rest of the business costs that keep them down. It should appeal to employees because they are no longer beholden to employers for their most essential needs like a roof over their head and bread on the table, and unemployment or sickness is no longer an insurmountable catastrophe. It should appeal to couples who can pool their dividends even if the woman stays at home to care for her children. It should appeal to singles who can concentrate on college without having to get a part time job or go into debt. It should appeal to all classes, creeds, colors, ages, sexual orientations, and lifestyles. I don't understand who is against it, or why the citizen's dividend can't happen.

Instead of a stuffy art museum, someone should build a museum devoted to anime. As people walked through the various halls, widescreen tv's embedded in the walls could display looping opening and ending sequences to all the most popular or beloved anime of the past. Headphones would be available for people who wanted sound, and small booths with vast databases would be available for individuals to look up the most obscure and esoteric series to view on their own. There could also be areas for karaoke, cosplay, and perhaps invitations to famous anime directors and voice actors to give speeches to an assembly room. A movie theatre could be included that aired on the 'big screen' various out-of-date anime movies on a rotating schedule with ticket sales of perhaps a few dollars to enter. Alternatively, the first screening or premier of a new anime movie could be shown in the museum to kick off the experience with high prices, or perhaps a lottery of all museum goers who went to the museum that month, as a method to draw crowds to the rest of the building's features. A play room for kids could include anime related video games or gundam toys or magical girl dolls/clothes to dress up in/dress the doll up in. A food court featuring commonly mentioned food in anime -- nabe, takoyaki, curry, onagiri, taiyaki, okonomayaki, etc could finally give the curious fan a taste of what the anime is talking about. The architecture of the building, the decorations for the walls and ceiling, the garden outside the structure, could all have cute anime themes. The souvenir shop could be bursting full of otaku figurines, music, dvd's, wall scrolls, models and the like. When compared to the museums devoted to modern art "Look, a red square hung upside down, that's deep," how could this not be an improvement? I'm sure the kids would love it, if no one else.

Anime often has the drawback of overleaping its source material. This results in various 'filler' episodes that have nothing to do with the manga, or light novel, or whatever inspiration that created the story. Invariably, the product suffers and the end result is the anime, which should be superior to its source due to the added value of voice acting, animation, music, color, etc ends up inferior due to bad storytelling instead. Since it seems uneconomical to simply end the anime whenever it reaches the end of its source material and wait a few years before restarting it again when more source material has been released, how about this instead:

Let the original anime series run, and include as much filler, as it likes. When the source material ends, however long afterwards -- ten, twenty years down the line -- do a customer poll, consumer research, or what have you to ask if the public would be interested in a new anime that retells the story, this time without any filler and with perfect adherence to the source material. If public reaction is strong and people still feel fondly for the series, go ahead and retell the story, this time the 'right' way, and leave that as the definitive version for all future generations to refer back to and enjoy. This way a company can milk the same series for twice the viewing, it can overrun its original source material and make all the filler it wants while the fad is popular and 'the iron is hot,' AND it can make the highest quality and satisfactorily completed stories it can without compromising the quality of the experience for the sake of profits. Currently, Dragonball Kai is doing just this, re-releasing the Dragonball Z series without all the unnecessary filler and boring nonsense that plagued the original series. It is great to see a seminal work like Dragonball Z receive this kind of overhaul. Fullmetal Alchemist has also been redone, replacing the original zany storyline of the 2003 anime with the manga-based storyline of the 2009 release. But other series could benefit from this just as much, like Sailor Moon, Naruto, One Piece, or Ranma 1/2. Why bother creating 20 new anime productions a season of dubious value when we haven't even told the known 'greatest hits' of the past the way they were meant to be? A well done Sailor Moon would be worth ten of anything else.