117 Comments

The best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”

Expand full comment

Same holds true for Fascism. The only difference is the former is still of government of sorts, while the latter is run by corporations. Either way, we end up in the same quagmire.

Expand full comment

Modern fascism is a politically incestuous system where corporations and governments work together to steal from everyone else.

Expand full comment

Since socialism is present in every political persuasion on the left-right political spectrum, one has to wonder why some can only see it in liberalism.

Expand full comment

A good maxim by which to live is 'moderation in all' and that includes government as well as all 'isms'.

Expand full comment

The Golden Mean is echoed by the wise throughout the ages.

Expand full comment

The problems begin when one is unwilling or unable to moderate oneself.

Expand full comment

Having been born a highly (make that hyper) sensitive person, excess has never been an option for me.

Expand full comment

Having been born a Texan of Irish descent, moderation has always been an unobtainable goal for me. I daresay, though, that it is the extremes that prove the centrist maxim. I have managed to squeeze 63 years out of my proclivities, so at least I have the good sense to duck.

Expand full comment

It depends on how narrow your hypersensitivity is.

Expand full comment

Broad

Expand full comment

Gwyneth: Socialism is a war against private property. Karl Marx put the elimination of private property as #1 in his Communist Manifesto.

Expand full comment

Karl also stated the purpose of Socialism is to get to Communism.

Expand full comment

As I remember, that is correct. He envisioned the process as a series of stages, evolving from capitalism, thought socialism and communism, arriving at a "natural' state of pure equality.

Expand full comment

Kindly cite the specific place where he did so.

Expand full comment

https://www.history.com/news/socialism-communism-differences. This is not the direct quote. I don't have it at hand. However the 'Communist Manifesto' states that Communism will be the result of Capitalisms collapse and Socialism in time.

Expand full comment

Remember that the Communist Manifesto, like the bible, was not written in English and is subject to an unknown translator's take.

Expand full comment

I suggest the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Karl Marx. Modern ideas of Communism are not quite in line with Marx stated ideology. However German to English translation isn't as difficult as translating an oral tradition that was not written down untill a couple hundred years after the supposed events. Such is the problem with most religions.

Expand full comment

Did I miss anything?

YES you did... The master is (was?!) an Ukrainian!

https://postimg.cc/vgrmSgVm

https://postimg.cc/JG2k9FnH

Expand full comment

There seems to be some question about that. It seems the Ukrainian master left the ship in 2019, though I (as yet) have no way to prove that, just scuttlebutt picked up on the interwebs. I think this was latched onto in the effort to deflect blame away from cascading bumbledickery for the whole rotten mess.

Expand full comment

If that were to be a fact (ukrainian master) it would be quite the funny shit show!

Expand full comment

Indeed it would, and I did laugh when I first heard it. Unlike the master of the Exxon Valdez, though, they aren't trotting these folks out in front of the cameras. Wonder why?

Expand full comment

Love this article. History, Present and Future. Brains, Heart, and Humor. Anger, Sympathy, and Reason.

Expand full comment

I say to you what Alan Sheppard said to me when I told him he was my hero, "You look like an intelligent young man."

Expand full comment

Thanks! Not when I was young. I'm 76 now. I write for www.vermontindependent.net about War, Banking, History.

Expand full comment

You may have a decade on me, but your words are just as fresh and rosy as the day they were born.

I've been reading the VI since the Vermont Commons days. Always good exercise for the old grey matter. I recognize your by-line, now that you mention it. Honored to have you haunting these parts, my good sir. Cheers!

Expand full comment

I thought I should mention that the salvage crew is now saying that there is a natural gas pipeline that crosses the harbour under the place where that motor vessel Dali hit the bridge. Its presence will further complicate the salvage operation. No word yet on whether the Bumbledick team that was responsible for blowing up the natural gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, Nordstream, are even aware at this point that the bridge collapse involves an underwater natural gas pipeline. But the levels of irony here do reach unto heaven. God provides. Some days, God provides hilarity. Amen.

Expand full comment

Why did the Dali change course directly toward the pylon before it lost power?

Expand full comment

Currents!

Expand full comment

In a closed harbor?

Expand full comment

Does it have a tide?!

Also... Don't forget the WIND!

Expand full comment

The tides are driven by the moon, not the winds, which are driven by the sun's electrical currents.

Expand full comment

Tides (CURRENTS!) and Wind easily shift the course of a ship like that!

Or maybe it was the upset Ukrainian Master of the ship that did it on purpose...

Expand full comment

Tides and currents are entirely different things with different causes.

It isn't a sailboat, it is a ocean freighter. It isn't easily affected by wind.

Expand full comment

Two possible reasons: one, the Harbor Pilot dropped the starboard anchor, but it didn't bite/ and two, when the ship lost power, the fly-by-wire rudder swung hard to port in a pre-programmed mode to steam in a circle. I'm just spit-ballin' but that's what comes to mind. Timeline is everything here. Even with the rudder hard over, that amount of tonnage wasn't turning on a half-dollar, much less a dime.

Expand full comment

It wasn't very far from being on course to the pylon before the power went off.

The pylon was effectively unprotected.

Expand full comment

Yes, there were no abutments around the pylons, curiously. Not that it would have made a lot of difference, I suspect. As for the ship's course, I blame a lot of that on the company for not paying tugs (or was a "green" issue?) to guide the ship out. The wheel house is dead astern and the bow is a thousand feet ahead, and the deck is stacked with containers, and it's night. Ship's radar likely could not look down directly ahead of the bow, so dead reckoning would be out of the question, and sensors limited. I've been on much smaller vessels where visibility ahead is obstructed by such conditions.

Expand full comment

Tugs might have made it harder for the hacking of the ship's computers to accomplish the hacker's goal.

Expand full comment

I'm still not convinced it was hacked, but that conclusion will have to wait for a full forensic report, should that ever come to pass. In any case, we can ask did the power outage cause the navigation equipment to cycle and reboot? If so, it seems there's plenty of room for error at that point, especially if they are still using Windoze products. Come to think of it, that would have been a perfect time for Windoze to update, since Microsoft seems keen to interrupt any critical need situation with their endless patches.

Expand full comment

Why would South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries have used Windoze products?

Expand full comment

Wow. That is a brain teasing list of inter connectivity. Of course it's all just random no conspiracies, plans or designs what so ever. I think the DEI crowd should follow language convention and use DIE . It has a certain fitting intonation to it. April 15th Taxes due , April 19th is the anniversary of the Concord Bridge battle of Revolutionary war, and the Waco Texas massacre of Religious freedoms by the BATFE and FBI.

Expand full comment

April 15 is also when Lincoln sent his hordes to invade the South, and ironically the day he died three years later. April 19 is when Apollo 12 landed on the Moon (?). Oh, and April 20 is Hitler's birthday, get your party hats ready.

Most importantly, April 21 is San Jacinto Day, when 2,000 Texians whipped 20,000 Mexicans in 19 minutes, and won independence, which the traitor Sam Houston gave over to the US nine years later.

Expand full comment

Rufus: SOP for a ship that loses power in a shipping channel is to put the engine in neutral and drop the anchors. This will slow the ship and steering control is maintained. The ship may well hit the shore or something on the shore but the bridge will not be hit. The ship was put into emergency reverse (plume of black smoke). This causes the ship to lose steering control and veer off course.

The ship was named after Salvador Dali the surrealist painter.

Baltimore is a shithole of crime and DEI. The Inner Harbor was a vibrant rebuilt business area but thanks to Covid edicts and high crime, only one or two business remain in the Inner Harbor. One of these businesses is Hooters. The gangs must have declared that Hooters was a safety zone. All the gang bangers like their buffalo wings and young girls with cute asses and tits.

Personally, I hope Washington DC suffers from the closing of Baltimore's port. The whole East Coast can go to Hell as far as I'm concerned.

PS: I still can't pay for a subscription on RadioFarSide.

Expand full comment

There seems to be some fog around the actions of the Pilot and the Apprentice. More to come on this point.

Baltimore is a shining example of Bumbledickery at its finest.

I am at war with Substack/Stripe. Apparently, Substack only pays out to Stripe, and Stripe doesn't pay out to Indonesia, so there seems to be a bait-and-switch issue here. I am trying very hard to get pat the AI answer bots and get to a human level in both organizations. O what tangled web we weave, and all that.

Expand full comment

Rufus: I've read that the Dali captain was Ukrainian and the crew Indonesian. That's an odd combo. That's crazy about using bio-fuel on a ship that size. People are nuts.

Good luck with Substack/Stripe.

Expand full comment

Not all that unusual, since many Singpore-flagged vessels use Indo or Thai crews, especially Grace. The Ukraine apparently produces a lot of top-rated ship's masters. The Russian navy at one time was full of them. I'm not sure why that is, but just another data point to play with.

Expand full comment

Rufus: When I was 18 and graduating from high school in Nebraska my grades were high enough and SAT scores high enough, that I received a lovely brochure in the mail from the San Diego Maritime Academy asking me to go to school there.

I've often wondered what my life would have been like I'd gone to the Maritime Academy and worked my way up to ship's captain.

Expand full comment

Everyone might be better off if the bridge was replaced with a tunnel.

Expand full comment

Vonu: It would take four tunnels all of them one way. 2 for trucks and hazardous material, and two for cars and buses. Two tunnels going east and two tunnels going west. It is a better solution than a bridge but expensive and time consuming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube

Above is a link to the building of the Transbay Tube for BART in San Francisco. It took four years and was only one tunnel and just for a light rail train. It was also built in the 1960s.

Expand full comment

The Big Dig in Boston is another fine example.

Expand full comment

Rufus: LOL. Yes, the Big Dig is a fine example of city graft and incompetence. I remember when a piece of the tunnel roof fell on a car. Killed the poor woman driver.

Expand full comment

Camels are horses designed by committee.

Expand full comment

Rufus: I've always been intrigued by the wild camels now wandering the Australian Outback.

Expand full comment

How many such bridges and tunnels have you been the chief engineer on the design and construction of? Having driven longhaul tractor-trailers through all of the lower 48, I've probably been over and through more of them than you have.

Expand full comment

I am not an engineer, but I have produced a number of forensic videos for lawsuits concerning bridges and tunnels, which required me to work closely with the engineers and gain a thorough understanding of the key concepts. I also worked in offshore construction for a decade, along side many marine engineers, also producing videos that required me to learn about the subject in order to write the scripts and associated documents. I am by no means an expert and I cower like a whipped dog around math, but a few things have rubbed off on me.

Expand full comment

Which industrial automation software types do you hold current certifications for?

Expand full comment

Lord, we'd be here all day making that list. The most recent certs are for stage automation systems, but I've worked on systems for broadcast studios, medical, aerospace, petroleum, navigation, and commercial brewing. I'd say 90% used Windoze platforms, while the others were Unix based.

Expand full comment

Vonu: I merely sent a link to one tunnel construction project. Every tunnel is different. The tunnel dug under Seattle hit a piece of old metal no one knew was there. The street downtown had to be dug up and the tunnel machine extracted. It was a costly mess.

Expand full comment

Either that was before ground penetrating radar or the general contractor was incompetent.

Expand full comment

Vonu: Here's the link if you want to go down the SR 99 Tunnel rabbit hole.

https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/search-projects/sr-99-tunnel

The big piece of steel the tunnel machine hit wasn't on any of the city utility schematics.

Expand full comment

Radar cannot penetrate steel, and GPR works by differential reflections off of layers with different composition. Radar is line-of-sight, so if the transceiver is mounted on top of the wheelhouse, and the beam propagates in a cone-shaped pattern, it cannot "see" straight down, and depending on the angle, will touch down somewhere in front of the ship's bow. If the ship is a thousand feet long and the beam is angled to hit the water as close to the bow as possible, you're still talking about a "shadow" of several hundred feet in front of the ship. It's fairly simple math and I used to do it all the time with live remote news trucks.

Expand full comment

A man of eternal practicality, though like the Chinese Bumbledicks, the tunnel would likely leak and someone would drop an anchor on top of it.

Expand full comment

Normal tunnels are built with sump pumps to take care of inevitable leaks. Unless the IDF is maintaining it, it should be fine.

Expand full comment

Chinese construction, as in most of Asia, looks good superficially, but don't dig too deep. If you find yourself in those climes, avoid elevators and escalators at all costs. That said, pumps would indeed be used in a conscientious construction, with good engineering, none of which can be found under the current regime in China. If China is taken as the ideal for where the rest of the world is being herded, then I'll take my chances more with a bridge than a tunnel. Might I also suggest flying cars as an alternative?

Expand full comment

If that were accurate, how did they build 5 high speed railroads in their country that can get them across it faster than we can fly across ours?

Expand full comment

Actually, if you dig into it, you'll find that ridership on those trains is far below expected levels because no one trusts them. The network has a lot of issues, as does the one the Chinese are building here in Jakarta. Some time back, I did a column on the Chinese-Indo LRT collaboration that is a complete joke. Corruption is off the scales in China, and it is reflected in the very poor quality of their infrastructure. Just this year, a half dozen dams have breached. in Shenzhen. A friend of mine bought a brand-new apartment (what we might call a condo) in Shanghai, and the plaster was falling off the walls within a month. He had to completely redo the interior and ended up selling it within a few months.

Expand full comment

"drifted into a support pylon..." So. Radio Far Side is a mouthpiece for the Government. propaganda. Good to know. I won't waste my time reading any additional bullshit under this title.

CORRECTION

I misread "you have heard...drifted into a pylon..." as RFS saying that. I'm backed up. My apologies.

Expand full comment

You couldn't be further off the mark, and apparently you missed the juicy bits where I blamed the entire globalist agenda for the event. But suit yourself.

Expand full comment

Kindly repeat that explanation for those of us who missed it.

Expand full comment

Essentially, decades of Bumbledickery have added up to a series of cascading failures that pointed the bow of the ship into a key (little pun there) support pylon. I didn't even mention the Frankenvaxxx -- that would have been too easy.

Expand full comment

I entered a correction edit. My apologies.

Expand full comment

You have great integrity and it is much appreciated. I am, as are we all, working with the data that we have. Occam's Razor says the solution with the fewest number of assumption is probably the correct one, but I am ALWAYS open to new information. Thank you, and welcome back!

Expand full comment

You're welcome. I haven't achieved that perfection thing yet ( but I do have really good hair) :)

Expand full comment

None of us have, brother. But I did stay at Holiday Inn Express the other night.

Expand full comment