Loco-Foco @loco-foco - Tumblr Blog

Terrible Secret of Space?

When I was a kid, I wrote a paper about the future of lunar exploration and settlement. NASA, in the early 1970s, seemed gung-ho to continue. And I sure was. Though the paper wasn’t much good (I think I got an A-), the subject has haunted me for 55 years. Since the Apollo days, the Moon’s human prospect has been avoided. So oddly avoided that even Elon is focusing on Mars, not the Moon, though…

Americans Last

“America First” was never my motto, because I know what politicians do with nouns like “America.” “Americans First” might be refreshing. But, with President Trump now openly talking about bombing Iran, and Netanyahu demanding that the only course of action to take against Iran is the “Libya model,” Trump doesn’t look like an America Firster at all. He’s for Israel First. The “Libya model”…

Squibs

Early April, 2025 (Facebook) Human intelligence and reason sit uneasily on top of a swirling gyre of feeling, values, and willing. Artificial intelligence appears to will its statements and questions and pleasantries, but is built on top of a network of reason and ghosts of meaning. AI is a completely inverted being. What a strange thing, demonic. The pay-to-protest effort of Democratic…

Grokonomics

One conspiracy theory about Trump is that he is really for free trade, but he thinks — contrary to most economists since Ricardo — that unilateral free trade is a bad, decadent policy. He will only accept bilateral trade deals, or multilateral free trade. If any tariff wall come down, all must come down. It’s a not completely irrational position, though it can only be defended, it seems to me,…

Democrats at Ebb

“Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn said Friday on Fox News that crucial voter groups are fleeing the Democratic Party,” Mariane Angela wrote the next day in The Western Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like this in over 40 years of polling. The Democratic Party ratings have collapsed from a 47% favorable down to 29, 27 in some of these polls, and that’s an incredible loss of moderate,…

Tempus Fugit

Take a step back from politics for a moment and consider a real culture war: the problem of tempo in the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven — the latter especially. Musician Wim Winters has a theory, based on no small amount of evidence, that in the 19th century musicians sped up tempi, and that we, today, misread historical metronome markings. Beethoven used a metronome, and marked his…

The Whys of War

“The real mistake is making Yemen war plans, not leaking them,” writes Todd Seavey, about “Signalgate.” You know the story: an anti-Trump journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg — editor-in-chief of the egregious Atlantic — was put on a group chat using the open-source, encrypted messaging service app Signal with high muckety-mucks in the Trump Administration. Understandably, “The Atlantic broke the story…

Skin on the Line and in the Game

What the heck is Trump’s foreign policy? “Donald Trump has garnered a lot of support not just by attacking woke liberals and socialist leftists but by slamming the neoconservatives,” writes Todd Seavey, “who preceded him by a decade or two in dominating the Republican Party. This approach plays especially well among millennials, who were the cohort most likely to have seen peers embroiled in…

Detrans Awareness Day

A day you likely did not observe last week. “There’s no way to reverse genital mutilation.” Dr. Patrick Lappert is a plastic surgeon who is cautioning doctors who have been misinformed about various methods of “gender affirming care” that became all the rage during the last half-decade or so, especially among the young. “Surgery is essentially management of chronic wounds and chronic…

#trans

The Old Pieties

Leftist pietism is what neo-fascist governments (like most western states) rely upon to bolster up their creaky economic foundations. This is what modern states have replaced the militant nationalism of the actual fascists, and the moon-eyed nationalism of the nation-states in the WWII period. It feeds mob action, which works surprisingly well in a nation of supposed “individualists.” Leftist…

View On WordPress

Liszt contra Musk

Of Elon Musk and UFOs: “If I were him I’d avoid the subject rather than lie about it.” Thus spake Daniel Liszt, talking about Musk’s denial of his company Space X seeing any UFOs. Liszt insists that “Musk’s compilation of photos and videos of UFOs in space, inner space, low-Earth orbit, etc., is the most extensive of any except the United States Government.” Liszt, who calls himself “Dark…

The Upward Slope

President Donald Trump and his wrecking crew at DOGE have done more to cut government spending and overreach than any Republican since . . . Warren G. Harding? That can’t be right, for in terms of big budget items, DOGE is so far a mere blip on the eternally upward sloping graph of spending and debt. What DOGE and Trump have done is change the culture. Now people believe that cuts can…

The New Imperialism

My basic take on world powers is to remember that I’m not a world power and I don’t have to ally myself with any of them. But I try to understand power as it plays out. And concoct opinions on that basis. Basic truths: All world powers commit great crimes. I talk about America’s most often because I know American history best. And I condemn America’s most often because I have some nominal…

View On WordPress

Epstein’s List

A case can be made that The Names in Epstein’s files — the men and women who went so far as to engage in sexual acts with teenagers (I’ve heard no evidence that anyone was pre-pubescent) — were enticed and entrapped to do so. The Names were no doubt often told the apparent harlots were of age. Lied to. Enticed. And then they were blackmailed. This means we might wish to direct pity toward them.…

RINOcide

One of the goofier neologisms of our time is RINO: “Republican In Name Only.” Now, the people called RINOs are indeed worth giving a sour epithet to. But they aren’t fake Republicans, if by Republicans you mean the nationalist whigs who founded a new party in the 1850s. Lincoln was an internal improvement/big projects politician. He had been a railroad lawyer, and that was one of the shadier…

Fires Set

An arrest or two, more saboteurs caught on camera but not identified (yet?), and celebrities passing on truth and rumors of arsons in Los Angeles, and I’m thinking about . . . the 2020 fires in Oregon, Northern California, and Washington State. A number of arsonists were caught then, too, but the stories never sizzled. Just forests and brush lands. Indeed, it was taboo to talk about the…

Ron Paul Does Not Confront His Ghosts

Published on 10/01/08 by wirkmanwirkman.net On Wolf Blitzer’s program, Ron Paul responds (link to Reason’s Hit and Run). I haven’t watched it all yet, because it’s hard for me to stomach evasion. While I suppose it’s reasonable for people to suppose Ron’s a racist because of the horrid newsletters that went out under his name, that was never my charge. My question has been more like this: Why…

#newsletters #racism #Ron Paul

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Loco-Foco