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Lost In Space was a TV show in the 1960’s that featured Robot B9, a companion robot of the Robinson family, that got itself lost while jetting from planet to planet somewhere out there in space. The robot was always flailing it’s arms and shouting “Danger, danger”. Robot B9 was all flexible tubes with a big, round transparent plastic body with lights and things moving around inside it. Very technical looking for the time.

Things have changed just a little since then.

Only a few weeks ago I asked Google about the progress of companion robots, ones that can read for you, do household chores, things like that, and Google said that the best one, Elon Musk’s Optimus, was a few years away yet. That was a few weeks ago.

Today I asked again and all sorts of Chinese companies are building them like crazy, I can buy one today that will do all those things, for about $20,000 and others are either coming into the market or being sold now for $9000 and less. Their capabilities vary all over the road, but think about what’s down that road.

I’m hoping my one good eye will still be at least marginally functional in two more years, good enough for me to select a companion robot by then. If not, then they better make them sooner, because I’m going to want one that will sit in this chair and type for me, read my email to me, order from Amazon for me, and hopefully be able to drive my car for me.

Right now, different robot makers are developing different abilities and the best of these abilities are well above human capabilities. Over time it’s inevitable that these companies are going to combine to produce superior robots. Marketplace competition will rule and a robot that can carry on a decent conversation, read and type, do chores, be a really good companion and Drive Your Car, that robot will be the top seller.

Google said it would be two years before a robot could do all those things and drive a car too. It’s the car driving that’s the hardest part and requires the best AI, and the sudden rapid advances in both computer chips and AI may make it possible in a year or less. The competition in this field is massive.

The competition in personal robots right now far outpaces the competition in self-driving cars, though that’s also pretty fierce. It’s just that a self-driving new car costs a lot more than a personal robot and isn’t subject to all the regulations, state and federal licensing and safety scrutiny that retards progress, and most people aren’t going blind, they’re just growing old, and there’s a far greater market for companion robots.

Ultimately I may have to buy both a companion robot and a self-driving car, as my uncooperative eyeballs are in control of the time limits here. We will see. Yes, that’s a pun.

Been cooking all morning, it’s nearly 2 PM now and nearly done, just took the stewed tomatoes off the range top to let the pot cool, then I’ll save some in the refrigerator and bag  up the rest in freezer bags and pack them away to freeze, for meals when the tomatoes don’t grow no mo.

Earlier today I cranked out four loaves of zucchini bread, which are now in the freezer. The zucchini plant may be getting about done, it’s beginning to look that way, I started it early because it gets so hot here in the middle of summer and some veggies shut down when it’s too hot. Likewise the big tomatoes, they turn white on top with too much sun, and the tops start cracking. Now is the time to cook and preserve for winter.

One zucchini plant in a 20 gallon planter pot will produce all the zucchini squash that one person is ever likely to want.

You know, effing tomatoes run up to $3 a pound for good ones, the big fat ones, and they don’t have even half the flavor that the ones I grow in my back yard garden do.  There’s not much that grows well here unless you eat acorns and bark, you have to create your own soil, make raised beds and so forth. But what does grow well once you’ve done the work is hard to beat for nutrition and taste.

Elon Musk just quietly bought a $billion mobile energy company. It has ” a large fleet of rapidly deployable gas turbines” that are intended for use as power sources for his AI data centers.

Our government is knowingly engaging in a Middle East war with Iran that is expanding to include surrounding nations.

Headline at barenakedislam.com: “30,000 Trojan Horses (mosques) and 50 million Muslims across Britain and Western Europe”. It may be accurate, or not, Google claims about 20 million, but that’s Google. No bias there… That’s still too many Muslims. Islam is taking over much of the world.

So is Socialism, which is steadily gaining ground here in the USA.

Trump is feuding with everyone that’s going Socialist including our neighbor Canada, and that’s most of Europe now.

A man most of us never heard of until after he died, was killed under very suspicious circumstances, with no one agreeing on how he died, in a circus still going on that’s reminiscent of the shooting of Pres. Kennedy. Charlie Kirk had the flag at the White House flown at half staff over his death, an honor reserved for great heads of state.

Adding it all up: Our government is behaving in very anomalous ways.

Socialism is winning, which means Communism is winning, so basically China is winning, Elon and other billionaires are spending tons of money building AI, humanoid robots and moon rockets, China just did what Elon’s done and landed a rocket back on it’s gantry.

True Communism steals everything including the means of production and makes a mess out of what was once successful. Yet China is Communist and they’re thriving, there’s billionaire Chinese businessmen.

So is this the new model and the reason the billionaires with Elon at the head of the pack are apparently oblivious to what should be an existential threat to their fortunes? Capitalism is encouraged while total control of the people is enforced?

It’s too strange for me to fully grasp. However, this is pretty  much what it looks like. Islam is sort of a religious form of Communism. Islam is the government and it can demand total control of every thought. The Saudis own Mecca, the heart and soul of Islam. Might they be joining hands with this new Socialism-Communism?

They openly came up against Iran’s regime, there are two main factions of Islam that have been at war with each other for centuries, Sunni and Shia. Iran is Shia. Defeat Shia, side with both the East and the West, in a Socialistic way? Unite all Islam? Sort of a Global Caliphate, sort of? Hmm?

A caliphate they’d have to share with China and North America but the way things are going that should be no problem.

When I was born, in Long Beach, California, on Jan. 6, 1939, the population of the United States was precisely 130,879,718 people. Plus me.

Today the population of the United States is uncertain, but demographic sources like Worldometer put the total at about 349,000,000.

That’s how many people are capable of turning every habitable surface of a land area the size of the USA into houses and concrete. This country was really beautiful once.

I feel like Rutger Hauer’s character in Blade Runner. “All those memories will be lost, like tears in rain.” Only it’s not memories that are lost. I remember how it was. How it was, is what’s lost.

I feel sorry for Mars. That planet has no idea what’s coming for it.

On Monday, Trump declared that he was going to take over the Hormuz Strait and charge 20% of cargo value for passage through it. Several OPEC states immediately took the hint and attacked Iran, finally, so today, Wednesday morning, he’s rescinded his strait takeover plans and announced new trade deals with the OPEC nations instead, one of which has already denied agreeing to one. Meanwhile, he’s threatened Iran with the destruction of their power sources and bridges by this weekend if they don’t come to the table and make a deal.

So of course, they’ll delay until Friday and then agree to talk again. As usual, nothing will be agreed  on or if it is, it will only be to gain some time and no agreement will actually be acted upon by the Iranians.

What this will accomplish is a further delay in the opening of the strait. Ships keep trickling through, but not many, just enough for Trump to point at them and crow “Look, look, the Strait is open”, before another ship gets hit by Iran, ship passage stops again and more bombs and rockets strike Iran and Iran strikes back at anything they want to.

That strait will stay semi-shut down until Trump decides to act decisively.  Since he just told Congress that this is a Brand New 60 day war period before Congress can demand that a war be declared or get the hell out, it’s hard to say if this is the last 60 day re-start or if there will be more before he’s done playing with Iran. I’m thinking that he may want Venezuela’s oil production to be a serious challenge to Middle East production before letting the strait finally open for good, which of course means seeing a different form of government in Iran. Considering the permanent damage to a significant portion of M.E. oil production that’s the result of all this, already, that shortens the Venezuelan timeline and the longer this goes on, the greater the damage.

Seriously, I just woke up from a nap where I was having a happy dream. This is a big deal to me because my dreams are always violent, because I’ve carried suppressed rage all my life. If I wasn’t so stubbornly sane I would have made a damn good serial killer or hit man. Things happened in my past that pissed me off so badly that even when I learned to stop thinking about them in daily life they’ve always been there in dreams.

Having a really happy dream is a big deal. This is the first one I’ve had that I can remember, it’s been so long. Not just years, decades, too long. I think I might be finally letting go of all that shit. I sure hope so, I want more happy dreams.

See, this is why I’m willing to pay the expenses of maintaining this blog. Only two people in the world even read it, instead of everyone including the CIA and The Yellow Peril, so I can say what I want without it coming back to me in some way I didn’t anticipate, like the people getting thrown in prison for speaking out on Facebook. I can even blither on blissfully about my happy dream.

Yeh, of course it’s old age. So what?

People who come here from Bumfuck or wherever, speaking some pigeon form of Ainglaish that they think is great and no one here can comprehend, always get jobs that have them directly interfacing with the public. God only knows why and if there is one, it’s laughing it’s ephemeral ass off about it. Yes, the title is THE TOWER OF BABEL, as pronounced unintelligibly by virtually all migrants.

Went to one of our two gas stations in town this morning to get some gas for my chain saw and to top off the tank in my car. The pump locked my credit card in place and did nothing, I waited and waited, finally went into the gas station to get someone to deal with this and no one was behind the counter.

Then this tall, young very foreign looking woman came out from somewhere and said something I couldn’t understand and I told her that the pump won’t let go of my card. She said a bunch more totally unintelligible words, really fast, I said “I can’t understand you”, so she said a bunch more of them, also rapid fire.

Deciding not to respond, I followed her out to the pump where she pushed buttons to make the pump release my card and using mostly body english and sign language, indicated that the far pump was the one to use, grabbed up my empty fuel can, stuffed my card into the far pump and started filling the can. Since I only wanted enough for the chain saw because the rest will go bad if it sits in the summer heat, I beeped my horn at her and waved at her to stop. At least that worked.

I beeped at her because I had to drive to the other pump if I wanted to top off my tank, while she assumed I only wanted to fill the can, after I told her I wanted to top off my tank. I was finally able to chase her off, get my gas and go home after paying $6 a gallon for it. This may be an average or even low price in other countries but we’re the largest oil producer in the world. We shouldn’t be paying more than $2.50 a gallon, Trump keeps telling us that the price of gas is back down to about that and I’m wondering if he seriously believes this or is just blowing more smoke up our asses.

Life is so much better now that our population has gone from the 149 million it was when I was born to the almost 450 million it is now. Oh, so very much better now that the USA is the third most populated country in the world.

 

First I want to say that the rise of an absolutely worthless class of self-adoring people in social media like Facebook and Twitter, who call themselves “influencers”, is a symptom of the sickness of social media addicts. These people present themselves as being special and living special lives, and their universal message is “You can be more special if you do what I do”. You have to be a loser to let any of these parasites be a guide in your life.

This particular “influencer” was a Brazilian model with the usual puffy injected lips and sculpted facial appearance who “fell” from the 27th floor of an apartment building in Dubai where she’d been living for two years. With more than 20,000 Instagram followers, she was probably raking in more than enough money to support living the high life. “Her social media pages showed photos of luxury travel, designer fashion, and life in the United Arab Emirates.”

Therein lies the key to solving this not so mysterious mystery. She was living in the heart of Muslim land and “One of her final posts celebrated her engagement to her partner, Barbara Abrantes. The couple had recently shared the happy news with their followers before tragedy struck.”

She was a lesbian and openly announced that she was marrying a woman. In an Islamic country and very shortly afterward fell from a high building. With assistance, no doubt.

She forgot she wasn’t in Brazil any longer. Looks like those 20,000 followers are going to have to find a new role model. How tragic.

That didn’t last long. This was supposed to be a 60 day cease-fire between us and Iran, which Iran kept violating. All it really was, was a break so both sides could re-arm, anyway. We’d used up much of our munitions inventory over there and the Israelis were probably getting low on stuff too.

Meanwhile the Iranians could be counted on to keep pushing limits and violating agreements because we all knew that’s what they’d do, because it’s what they’ve always done.

So now it’s back to war but still a limited war, where Iran attacks someone or something and then we blast them, probably Israel does too, but not as hard as they need to be hit, Iran hits back, we hit them, they hit back, blah blah blah. The story line here is that we’re not invading because we don’t want to get into another endless M.E. war, so instead of invading we do all our fighting from the air, endlessly repeating. Right.

As long as this “limited engagement” continues, the Strait of Hormuz will see only limited ship passage. It sure looks to me like this is being deliberately regulated and orchestrated to maintain an oil shortage that keeps the price up, because if the free flow of shipping through that strait was the main issue, then we’d see an all-out attack to end this problem.

We won’t. What we’ll maybe see is a US takeover of Iran’s Kharg Island, which is pretty critical to their ability to process oil and load it into tankers to sell. Take that away from them and keep it away and this will crash their economy completely and put an end to their ability to purchase materials to build weapons. Meanwhile the people will be starving, which might finally force them to take their government back. Meanwhile, “Iran is estimated to have between 2,000 and 6,000 naval mines, and upward of 80-90 percent of its small boats and mine layers, making it possible to lay hundreds of mines in the waterway.” Or even a few thousand, and the IRGC is intractable, there is no surrender, meaning only a small number of ships will be passing through the Strait each day, just as it is now, for the foreseeable future.

Kharg Island or not, while the Strait is closed, the rebuilding of Venezuela’s oil production is proceeding apace under the management once again of US oil producers. You get it? As the US continues to block Middle East oil from reaching the market, at the same time we’re developing those Venezuelan oil fields that our people hold leases to that were abrogated by dictator Maduro, whom we first conveniently removed from power and then scared the living shit out of the next in line for power to get in line with us as the first step in this plan.

The goal of all this is to strip the Middle East nations of their long held clout over the rest of the world because of their oil, reduce their incomes and the influence of their treasuries, and bring all that back into the Western hemisphere with the USA controlling it all.

So I have an obvious prediction, that by the time the Strait of Hormuz is safe and open to shipping again, if it ever is, the USA and Venezuela will have cornered the oil market, the vast majority of oil tankers will have abandoned the M.E. trade route and will be running the Western trade route and the reign of the M.E. oil sheiks will be history. This has already started as US and Venezuelan oil production ramps up.

There is only one thing I can think of that could change everything, and that’s if Iran is able to drop a nuke on Israel. This is why Trump kept insisting that regime change in Iran wasn’t a goal. It wasn’t. The goal is the end of Middle Eastern oil hegemony and preventing Iran from starting a nuclear war was vital in achieving this goal and still is.