Paranoid Professor

Almost 50 years ago there was the infamous break in at the Watergate hotel. It was a tremendous scandal then and has not lost any seriousness despite having occurred so long ago. Yet this scandal has touched any and all issues since then which is intended to magnify the importance of the scandal at hand. Due to the frequency of its use as well as some of the unimportant scandals it has been associated with seems to actually diminish both the reported scandal as well as the Watergate scandal itself.

One of the most recent and quite laughable scandal is Italygate. In a nutshell, this conspiracy theory, is that votes in the US 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Trump. This general talking point is not so unusual considering all the similar talk since president Trump lost in 2020 but what is interesting is how this was supposedly achieved.

The claim goes that people working for the Italian defense contractor are working with senior CIA officials and using military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden to bring about a swing away from President Trump for Presidential candidate Biden.

This does sound a bit far fetched especially considering that not all voting is done with computerized voting machines but more importantly because they are not connected to the internet specifically to prevent these types of security problems.

Now if you are a true believer then somehow this might sound a bit plausible but there are a few observable reasons why this is not true. I don’t ever remember hearing about space programs, as it relates to satellites, being described in connection with Italy. A quick look into Wikipedia, which despite being a volunteer effort is right quite often, actually shows that the Italians do not have a space footprint at all. The closest you can get is the European Space Agency and their space program.

If the fact that the Italians do not send up satellites is not enough, what about the fact that connecting computers together is difficult. Apple is getting much better but that is connecting its own hardware together. The task of different machines, which again are not actually reachable by internet or satellite, made in different years and perhaps running different operating systems would be huge.

If you don’t believe me, ask my wife. She still has problems with Windows 10 connecting to a HP printer – and the printer was purchased in the same year as the laptop. Networking is hard, connecting computers without generating noticeable errors (in certain situations) is hard and having a good international conspiracy is also hard.

I actually would like to be wrong. I might be – just ask my wife about my track record. Yet this time it is different. In the United States at the moment there is a pretty large political divide, shoot, if the news is to be believed they are set for another civil war.

One of the few things that has been a constant is over the last year quite a few American citizens have been taking it on faith that Covid is not all that deadly, and when it is the casualty numbers are about 1%. I don’t think that is true, perhaps I am a weak minded person who believes just anything that the medical community is willing to say. Quite a few of the southern states are full of Republicans and quite a few Republicans – approximate 50% – will not be getting vaccinated.

The most common reasons why people are refusing a Covid 19 vaccination

• They don’t believe they are safe
• They don’t believe they are necessary.

Not only that quite a few of these deniers can do math, well, know what a number is. One percent is smallish number. I don’t have any data that suggests Democrats are also not deniers but based on quite a few news stories they tend to be more likely to get vaccinated.

The nature of viruses is to spread and they can more easily spread where conditions are right and there is a an available host. If there are lots of unvaccinated people there will be more who will catch Covid and in the worse case die. If the set of unvaccinated people is mainly from one political group there will be a larger concentration of deaths in that group.

Lets hope I am wrong and the Covid variants that are spreading in 6 months are more benign.

If you live in glass houses you shouldn’t throw stones. I have to admit that if you looked in the corner of my room you might find an electronic gadget that no longer works that I am planning on fixing or incorporating into a project.

Long story on the fire truck, but perhaps someday …

But one of the things that I have not yet parted with is an old laptop. Is it as fully functioning laptop? Well, not quite. The reason I had to purchase a new one is that the keyboard stopped working. Well, that is an exaggeration – some of the keys stopped working.

This is indeed a problem if any of your sentences contain either a letter “o” or the letter “t” as well as half of the function keys. I got a new laptop and I am really quite happy but I haven’t recycled the old one yet.

Today I took it out as I wanted to test out an old keyboard that also has some history which can best be summed up as glass of water meets mechanical keyboard. The water won the first battle. But now that the keyboard has been dried out and cleaned I wanted to test it and my old laptop seemed like a good idea after all what if the keyboard fries the USB port ?

While looking for a few mechanical keyboard parts I thought what about a new laptop keyboard. I am fairly handy with a screwdriver. The new keyboard can be purchased for between 20 and 70 dollars depending on where is comes from and what layout it has. I would have done it but the repair video looked a bit more than daunting. What about a used Asus N76V laptop? Perhaps I could get one with a broken screen and that repair looked easier.

The good news is that you can find one of these antiques and in working order if you are willing to spend more than 398 dollars. One appeared to be an exact duplicate of my old laptop. Well, i was not prepared to spend so much considering that my laptop is perhaps 7 or more years old. Why would I when I can purchase a brand new Asus for 599 which has better specs, is brand new and will have a warranty.

Within a few minutes I found a used mechanical keyboard that has a problem with a loose connection. If you place the keyboard in a certain way it will work. The keyboard was a brand name but it was also a few years old and had no led lighting. I can actually buy a brand new mechanical keyboard but with led lighting for just a few dollars more than the ebay listing.

I guess there is a lot of people’s old or broken stuff that is as pricey as brand new items – who knew that broken keyboard would be worth so much.

It is really not an overstatement when I say that Youtube did change my life. I wish I could say it was the videos on how to fold your potato chip bag so it could stand up by itself when opened. It could have been some of the tips that could be used when moving out of an apartment where you want to get your deposit back but actually this didn’t change my life.

The video that I saw as actually about a device similar to the nut cutter that my wife already owns. All you need to do is take this device and you can turn big food into small food.

Until now we have used this device for chopping up a few nuts for the occasional cake or cookie receipe but now we can use this for chopping up onions, from time to time I also chop up a few radishes or celery chunks.

Somewhat less fortunate is we never did purchase the “Slapchop” as we could use ours. Yet, I keep pointing this out to my wife.

I am not wasting time watching youtube … I am finding more time saving ideas.

The golden age of Arab science

Medicine just like any field had to start form somewhere. Despite all of the medical miracles we see in everyday life there was a golden time of medicine. It occurred between the 8th and 13th centuries in the middle east. During this time of discovery the works of Hippocrates and many others where expanded upon and ended up spreading through to Europe. Why was this the case. Well actually this was due to religion.

From the Quran

“The scholar’s ink is more sacred than the blood of martyrs”

“For every disease, Allah has given a cure.”

Yet, the atmosphere of learning did not continue forever because of differences between the different religions … and the crusades did not help either.

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1096/fj.06-0803ufm

Roman Empire

There were quite a few different factors leading to the fall of the Roman empire.

• Economic troubles and over reliance on slave labor
• Over expansion and military overspending
• Government corruption and political instability
• The loss of traditional values

This is quite a long list but all of these factors are fairly inter-related. The loss of traditional values could be seen as a major factor of government corruption. With that corruption should lead to instability as people have less faith in their institutions due to the abuse by their leaders.

The Roman empire was impressive as it included everything from Britain down thru Egypt and Spain over to Caspian sea. The larger the territory you have to defend, the greater the chances of incursion at the edges. This expansion worked while the empire was expanding as the some of the treasure that came back to Rome was in the form of slaves as craftsmen and to work the fields. When the empire could no longer expand and was spending to support the military this was an economic problem. One of the other economic problems was rich people fleeing to the countryside to escape taxes.

https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-why-rome-fell

There can be many different empires whether or not they are times of science, fashion or actual populations. It is the history of the world that empires rise and and eventually fall. This is not always to the direct invasion of conquering legions but can be due to other factors.

The United States Empire (1945 – )

All of the examples fallen empires through history tell the tale of why the United States might have a rough road ahead of it. Despite some of the material losses during the two world wars it was blessed by not having problems of trying to build up a shattered industrial base like most of Europe or even its Allies such as the UK. The United States industrial base along with its military might rocketed the USA to superpower status in both military might, economic powerhouse and market to the world after World War II.

In the light of the current pandemic, certain weaknesses are coming to light that foreshadows problems. One of these is waning belief in science. I think this is most visible with the “anti-vaccine” movement. Just as recently as a few decades ago, getting a vaccine was seen as must have almost rock star type of event. Today people are refusing to wear masks in enclosed environments, tell tales of how vaccines will sterilize you and disbelieve the science behind global warming. You do not need to believe mankind is warming the planet to believe the planet is getting warmer ever since the industrial revolution.

Fiscal prowess. Most, if not all normal people have a certain amount of fiscal prowess. This might be iron clad self levels of self control or it might be no savings and no credit card company will give you a credit card. The same cannot be said for most governments and the United States seems to have a problem with fiscal restraint. The United States is still in a privileged position as all of its debts are issue in its own currency but this alone cannot save them. It is difficult to judge whether or not the wide margin of spending on the military versus other countries is justified or not but the spending is occurring through the use of deficits not through taxes. This is worrisome itself but at the same time this money is not being used to maintain the ever expanding infrastructure required by its populace (roads, bridges, police, public works, etc). It is just not realistic to build a bridge and then not continue maintenance on it over the decades. Otherwise it can fall apart or fall down.

What might be the largest but perhaps more subtle factor of the fall of empires is corruption and loss of traditional values. It surely does not affect someone in South Africa if a car dealership in Iowa is evading taxes through various shady practices. But one of the critical positions that the United States has had is the moral superiority when talking about dictatorships and human rights violations. These bragging privileges are becoming harder and harder to justify.

• Gerrymandering
• Political Corruption
• Suppressing voters rights
• Packing the court
• Self dealing
• Human rights violations
• Prisoners

How would the USA of 1950 spoke about the country with these types of abuses? How can the USA convince the citizens of Russia about the rule of law and Democracy? How can the USA tell countries to clean up their act with this type of behavior. It is rather like the parent telling the child to do as I say not as I do.

I had intended to do a lot of research into a lesser known device of American democracy – the fillibuster. The fillibuster an action to delay some action by talking. Perhaps the most well known example of this comes not from the houses of congress but from the film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” where Jimmy Stuart spoke for 24 hours in an attempt to prevent the vote on an appropriations bill.

However, the current rules for a filibuster in the US senate are a bit difficult to understand. Under the current rules if a Senator does a filibuster he or she cannot be stopped unless 60 Senators vote to end the “debate”. The last time there such a super majority of in the US Senate was in 1965 which was actually in both the Senate and the House.

Having a half century of voting history to look at makes it somewhat obvious that it is seldom that a single party has this type of majority. Thus you will need to have members of the opposing party vote with to stop a filibuster. This is difficult if the filibuster is being done by one of the parties (e.g Democrats) in order to stop nah essentially kill a piece of legislation.

What this really means is that if one party can the minimum of 41 seats then they can be quite obstructive in the day to day workings in the Senate. This also means that it is possible that a party representing a minority of Americans can prevent the will of the majority.

This would be a odd type of democracy as it stands but even worse considering that each US state is assigned two senators which makes it possible for small states such as Rhode Island to have the same voting rights as a large state such as Texas. This makes is possible that a small group of small states might be having an over-sized importance on the issues voted on by the Senate.