John Birch Was Right

This is the new word they've been using behind closed doors now for at least ten years. That's right. It would be hilarious in a Monty Python skit. Except it's really happening. They changed a few syllables and now toss the word around freely all the time. It's really a more accurate translation of Karl Marx's original word.

"How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism; that's not the openness I see in Iowa," Hillary Clinton told the newspaper then—a remark that prompted immediate criticism from Mississippi Republicans.

Missile Defense : A Hoax To Cover Missile Offense

Missile defense was never going to protect the sheeple. It was designed to serve as a cover story for the militarization of space, against the advice of all our ancestors in the 1950's. Modern people think they are edjumificated.

The worst possible thing that could happen in the worst of all possible worlds is to move the arena of nuclear war from land-based ICBMs into orbital platform environments. That's exactly what they did while their agents in the media told the sheeple that a benevolent umbrella of safety would result. All they did was ramp up the second Cold War into the wild-eyed stuff of Sunday Supplements in 1955.

Trust me, you got no idea what they have waiting for us all up there. Ugly machines that will rain hell on Earth during WW3. Even I would probably crap my pants if I knew the truth. It can't protect anybody from anything, it's all offensive hardware. It's not about shielding civilians, it's about killing the enemy when the time comes. There is no substitute for civil defense, never was and never will be.

Read the comic book subtitle above. The war that will never happen if America remains strong and alert. Says it all right there.

ECONOMIC ARMAGEDDON FOR AMERICA

The problem is, this guy is sugar coating the truth. :)

"Nears recession." You have to be kidding me.

Winter U.S. 2009 : Babies, the other white meat.

China Says It Is Imperative To Get Ready For WW3

Seems like the Chinese military announces a 20% hike in the military budget every six months nowadays.

These communists ain't gettin' ready to march in smart parades. Trust me. This frantic buildup is about getting ready to wage war. Let's hope they cool their heels this year, at least until the Beijing Olympics finish up.

Let's hope.

Have you ever heard of the "Black Rust?"

If you haven't, you will soon enough.

It's spreading on the winds. Nobody can stop it. It is destroying wheat harvests wherever it lands without distinction. Is this one of the seven vials mentioned in Revelations? I don't pretend to know for certain. I know it's pretty apocalyptic stuff.

This rocket ride in food prices caught me at a weird juncture. I was phasing out the food stocks I put up mainly in 1998, about ten years worth of food. I was starting to replace these stocks with what I hoped would be at least twenty years of food for four people, which would be packed better, managed better, tracked better and stored better. I am trying to buy new stocks faster than the prices can rise but I'm having trouble keeping up with it. Even rice is climbing from one week to the next.

Meanwhile, demand rises exponentially. As long as you don't pay in U.S. dollars, the food is going to the highest bidder.

It's really scary when you hear these agribusiness lunatics talking the same line that the oil companies started up with in 1999 ... "The days of cheap food are over. People got spoiled." As if food was a luxury you could just skip like champagne and cigars. I thought the whole purpose of globalism was the best market rates for everything. Looks to me like it's turning into a freakin' conspiracy nut's worst nightmare.

When does it stop being a market shift and turn into a panic? I don't pretend to know that, either.

PACK YOUR RICE. Itz coming. I mean it now as much as I meant it ten years ago.

Telling the difference between reaction and hysteria

This was a topic covered in NBC training when I was in the Army.

The biggest problem with any major trauma is that human beings in a state of intense shock or fearfulness have a very powerful compulsion to imitate the behaviour of others around them. So when you are triaging victims of a nerve gas attack you have to be alert for the subtle variations of soldiers simply acting like those around them by trembling violently and gasping and troops actually exposed to nerve agent.

This is also a big part of the necessary psychology of shelter captains. If you are ever in a leadership role, you have to understand the grave responsibility of staying ice cool at all times. Never allow yourself to be swept up in the natural hysterics that follow in human beings when they have undergone a terribly traumatic experience. People coming into the shelter will try to draw you into their emotional state, screaming and babbling about imagined as opposed to genuine ills they fear. Many people will enter the shelter mimicking radiation sickness when in fact they are fit as fiddles. Others will not feel secure even once they sit down and are settled. It is extraordinarily important for the shelter leader to always be a combination of Clint Eastwood and Spencer Tracy. Firm and understanding but resolute and as calm as an unrippled pond. If the shelter captain loses it, that gives carte blanche to the most manic characters to go right off the deep end, usually in situations that don't warrant it in the least. The initial few hours are the toughest period to get acclimated. That's why you should have comfort food, distractions and soothing music or quiet environments for them to settle down in. Giving somebody a job works wonders for them when they are frightened, it often takes their mind right off their ambiguous worries and allows them to focus on something close at hand.

Ron Paul Gives Up A Little Too Easy

I think you should finish what you start.

Given the money donated to his campaign, technically Ron Paul never had the option of just dropping out the way he did. Shades of Ross Perot.

You have to wonder if he got taken aside and talked to by some very scary people. It was over in the blink of an eye and Paul just seemed to concede defeat before he actually lost.

The Coming Of Kali Yuga

This is an interesting, thought provoking article on the cyclical nature of existence we have described here on Vault-Co. It is possible what we see reflected in these incredibly ancient religious traditions is some very solid truth that is being conveyed to us in allegories. If we accept these things as myths that served as vehicles for the communication of knowledge via oral routes they are very useful in forming a bigger picture of the world that fits the evidence.

One thing I derived strongly from reading a lot of english translations of the Vedic texts is the notion of the remnant - in all of these cycles there are always these mythical figures who seem marked by providence to survive. They seem timeless and strongly demarcated from the rest of their generation and are the very archetype of the "survivor" that Carl Jung spoke of.

Vault-OS : Update #2

All the assumptions I put in my initial architecture for Vault-OS were based on the assumption that TCP-IP programming in a multitasking realtime environment is really complicated and require a knowledge of the IEEE 802.3 protocol that I simply don't have. I have programmed a bit with TCP-IP sockets but I assumed that doing this in a multithreaded RTOS was beyond the grasp of somebody who had not spent their life in a toolshed surrounded by Ethernet manuals.

Like all adaptive programming, it is the act of actually experimenting that modifies everything. That's why corporate environments that insist you proceed with the original design no matter what you discover are almost incapable of ever producing anything really good from that approach. They refuse to "incorporate" new knowledge that changes everything, especially their mistaken assumptions about the problem.

So I compiled in WATTCP-32 with FreeRTOS and tried a couple of experiments using my test bed, which consists of an old Pentium 486 connected to a cruddy old 386 laptop with a network cable plugged into a PCMCIA card. This is with everything else compiled in okay under Open Watcom ... the little GUI library (which appears to be a super high tech real time windowing system), the Metakit database libs and even my licensed John Miles Sound System for DOS code. I tried starting two processes, each of them sending and receiving a 512 byte stream over the sockets at the same time.

All I can say is, wow. If I knew this stuff was this easy I would have written this thing ten years ago. It's a cinch. The thing is, this experiment proved to me that every machine can be both a server or a client. That's absolutely fantastic because that is the dream I have had for Vault OS for TEN YEARS while I have worked on several detours (CD Commander Versions 1, 2 and 3, etc, in Java, VB-DOS and C++ Builder 4.0) and I just was not happy with anything because it was like a crappy watered down version of the real vision I had for the application I really wanted.

The application I dreamed of would have these qualities:

1. It would have to be decentralized, the way the internet was engineered - to survive a nuclear war and EMP. There should be no "massive central brain" on which everything depended - if one terminal crashed, another terminal could be directed to mirror the former and take over for it altogether without skipping a byte. (Vault OS can be hardened enormously via opto-isolated Ethernet ports or even magnetic cable grounds, that can be added to a system later.)

2. Would be totally standalone terminals based on a proprietary comms protocol (in this case, TCP-IP) and work at the true performance levels that all 32 bit machines really have when they run in protected mode. Microsoft has convinced the world that it takes a 4 ghz supercomputer to run a system like this - and under Windows 98 or XP or Vista, it does.

3. Would be dirt cheap (somehow, in 1998 this didn't seem likely) and composed of junk that could be sourced anywhere and hooked up so easily that I would have no problem maintaining it, replacing parts and starting new terminals with salvaged junk after TEOTWAWKI.

4. Would somehow route completely around the entire Windows paradigm and later, I realized, the whole Linux paradigm as well! Can't any of these companies do anything with these machines with less than 100 megs and five million layers of proprietary software? When you look at www.menuetos.org, you get some idea of how badly we are all getting screwed in this "computer revolution." You have to take a second mortgage out on your house if you want to run a spreadsheet at the same speed as an XT in 1985! I wanted Vault OS to boot instantly, work directly to the metal at 32 bits and have only one abstraction to deal with at a time in the programming. There is no way that I want to have to install Service Pack SP3376347634_9A every 3 months after they drop the bomb. It's just not realistic.

For the layman ... you can have a machine that sits physically in your inventory room/silo/drum/shelter/shed/shack/tunnel and where the database for your inventory physically resides. That machine can serve up the same application ("Inventory Manager") to all the machines in your shelter from anywhere, as if they held the database themselves. You can have another machine that sits in the outdoor shed with say, your water supply. Now you can have an ethernet chip that transmits water levels independently to any other machine on your network all the time on request ... but ... because this is TCP-IP powered by sockets, you could also just run a simple serial cable from that machine to your water tank to some kind of serial device you have there and that machine can be both a server and a client, only it serves up reports on water levels. So you don't have to build a separate ethernet board for your sensors if you don't want to. You can hook up devices to your parallel or serial ports and transmit that data via Vault OS to any machine that asks for it, anywhere on the internet. Configuring that to make it as flexible as possible based on your installation will probably be through some kind of embedded scripting language like Angelscript, an excellent byte coded script that looks identical to C++ for the most part. I've already had success compiling this before for a game engine so I will likely include it.

I think I can do this correctly as a result of this useful feedback. Although the capacity to answer requests from browsers running on XTs with Lynx or Arachne will be supported, (as read-only pages served up) I think I am shifting the paradigm from HTTP to TCP-IP as the backbone of the client-server relationship for Vault-OS.