Nope, no terrorism here. No Islamic extremism, either. Nothing to worry about; go on about your business. All is well.

A man with a knife attacked a train station in Germany. One man dead (alas, not the attacker) and three others wounded. The attacker has been captured. While he was attacking he shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and "You infidels must die!".

German authorities are perplexed about his motive (it definitely is a mystery, isn't it?), but one thing they're absolutely certain of is that it had nothing to do with Islamic extremism. Nope, nothing like that here.

This always happens. The only thing the authorities seem to be concerned about is preventing backlash. I guess it's a bit more understandable for Germany right now, given that it's occupied by a huge Muslim invasion. If there was actual backlash it could escalate massively, leading to war in the streets.

That would obviously be a tragedy, but it would also be a major source of schadenfreude...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Back in the 1970's, during the ill-fated push for the Equal Rights Amendment, a running joke in some circles was that "ERA" stood for "Earned Run Average".

I'm running into something like that now. Every time I see "BLM" I think "Bureau of Land Management" instead of "Black Lives Matter".

Here in Oregon the Bureau of Land Management is a pretty big deal because it owns about a quarter of the state. The Feds own about half the state total, and the part that BLM doesn't own mostly belongs to the Forest Service. (There's also one moderate size National Park, and a rather large reservation under the nominal control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.)

Now most of what BLM operates could accurately be called "God-forsaken wasteland"; it's basically the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin Desert and a bunch of other deserts. Letting the Feds own it is not a real burden because no one else would want that land. (Not even the Indians, because there's no water there, or not very damned much.)

But BLM has been around for decades and in the western part of the US it's a big deal nearly everywhere. Wikipedia says that BLM controls 1/8 of the landmass of the US, fully a million square kilometers and nearly all of that is in the western states. So it bugs me a bit when eastern know-it-alls usurp that acronym for a transient political movement which will be consigned to the history books within ten years.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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"White Swedish Girl Tells College Students She's Japanese—Lunacy Ensues As They Try To Tell Her That's Ok".

I guess that means it's OK for all of us to pretend we're Japanese.

Pretend? Pretend? We are Japanese, by damn!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:44 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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Just got a hit from "ask.com" looking for:

most affectionate anime girls

Well, there's always Kaede from Shuffle...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:00 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Pete doesn't like Bakuon; he thinks it's a ripoff of K-On. Of course, there's nothing new under the sun and in a field of entertainment as long and rich as anime it's nearly impossible to come up with something really new that isn't reminiscent of something else that came before. (It does happen, of course, but shows like Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei are really rare and even a show like Puella Magi Madoka Magica is arguably at least somewhat derivative.)

So in this case the claim is that Bakuon is K-on with motorcycles instead of electric guitars. Could be. I can't say. I tried watching K-on and couldn't make it through the first episode because all the characters were too stupid to tolerate. Pete refers to this as "retard moe" and from his point of view Bakuon is even worse.

Somehow it doesn't feel that way to me. The characters don't feel retarded to me; they feel young and inexperienced. And that's not the same thing.

Ignorance can be cured, but stupid is for life.

The girls in Bakuon come across to me as ignorant and immature, for the most part. And in any case I can forgive some of that kind of thing in a show which is deliberate farce like Bakuon. (And not K-on, which was supposed to be somewhat serious.)

Hijiri (the rich girl) really does seem to be an idiot. I'll give Pete that one. But I don't think Hane is an idiot; she's just accepting, non-judgemental. She goes with the flow. She's unfailingly nice and that kind of character is unusual in anime. There's a reason she was the one who had an encounter with Kami-sama; Onsa and Rin passed him right by without looking back.

Rin isn't a "dumb blonde" character, despite being the best purveyor of fan service. Her thing as a character is about punctured pretensions. She's built up her self-identity about riding a Suzuki Katana, but it turns out her particular bike came from Onsa's store, so it isn't what she thought it was. And Rin has a Suzuki logo burn mark on her butt, left over from an accident when she was younger. (The explanation for it is contrived, but you can get away with that kind of contrivance in a farce.)

I am really enjoying Bakuon, which is surprising me immensely. When I first read the description in the previews I was sure it was going to be horrible, but I find it to be witty and clever -- and a lot more ecchi than I expected. Pete watched 4 episodes and has decided to bag it. It's a pity; he missed the "motorcycle cleaning" fan service scene at the end of episode 5 (time 19:07).

Ep 6 should be out today but isn't yet as I write this at 5 AM and it begins a new plot arc. I'm not sure it will maintain the series the way it has been, but I have my hopes. If it continues to follow the manga, then we won't be getting any more massive fan service scenes for a long time. We're back to motorcycle-service instead.

UPDATE: I downloaded all of the manga volumes untranslated, just to get some idea of what's coming. This series is fantasy, not too surprisingly, but I mean in the classic sense.

Kami-sama shows up again. A biker shows up wearing a helmet decorated like a skull; he might be Death. Rin gets visited by a talking cat and ends up doing cosplay (?) as a magical girl. That one goes on for several chapters, with Onsa, Rin, and Raimu being opponents and Hane showing up with her own cute talking animal sidekick, in the shape of a rabbit.

There's a new member of the club named Chisame and she has an episode with adult men that all look like puppets. And I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Raimu is a kami.

They visit an onsen in chapter 36 and they do (fully clothed) sumo in chapter 42. Another onsen in chapter 50. At the rate they're burning through chapters (3-4 per anime episode) we might reach chapter 36 before it's all over.

And there are a lot of people running around who wear helmets and never take them off. Raimu isn't the only one.

Rin's 3 numbers are B91/W56/H81 (36/22/32).
Hijiri: B81/W61/H86 (32/24/34).
Chisame: B75/W60/H80 (30/24/32).
Hane: B82/W58/H87 (32/23/34).
Onsa: B76/W55/H83 (30/22/33).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:32 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Today we combine two search terms, "phone mirror" and we get a lot of girls taking their own pictures in the mirror! Selfies FTW!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 05:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Today's search term is "Impossible shirt" and it touches a sore spot I've been brooding about for years. JGreely has a link on his side bar to a blog called "Boobs don't work that way" and this, in turn, is "cloth doesn't work that way."

There are two major issues here. We can call the first one the "Sternum problem". It's about the way that shirts on girls are drawn so that the cloth follows the skin all the way into the middle of the cleavage:

That's not cloth; that's paint. (Or heat-shrink plastic, ouch!) No way anything woven would do that. Even worse is when they do this with plate mail, such as Cecily Cambell in "The Sacred Blacksmith":

The purpose of a chestplate like that is to distribute the force of a blow. But with that shape, if she gets hit all the force is going to be transferred to her sternum, and it will probably be crushed -- leading to all kinds of physical problems such as bleeding in her lungs.

Fairy Tail gets this right. Erza Scarlet wears a chestplate a lot of the time, but hers is not only plausible for manufacture, it's also plausible defense:

It doesn't try to form fit her breasts; it tries to spread the force of blows. Exactly right.

The other problem with a lot of this art we can call the "Hourglass problem", dealing with extreme ranges in the "three numbers".

How can there be such a difference in diameter between the level of the breasts and the level of the waist? If it is like most T-shirts it's going to be a constant cylinder and if it's wide enough to hold that chest, it's going to hang like a sack at the waist.

Fairy Tail usually gets this one right, too. Nearly all the women in Fairy Tail have huge boobs and narrow waists, but they usually wear halter-tops or, as in this case, clothing which is obviously custom tailored. There are plausible seams in this to expand the top part without being loose around the waist.

So these two girls have both problems:

This is a particularly egregious example. The cloth not only follows the cleavage exactly, it goes under the boobs as well. There's no way that's cloth; it's another paint job.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 01:06 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Well, not in this post. Sorry. It's really depressing.

Obama's real goal in his presidency was to end the "American Century". The goal was to reduce the United States from being "the last remaining super power" to being just one nation among many, no more important or influential (or rich!) than any other. His foreign policy has been to damage our allies and build up our enemies, to try to level the playing field, and let the world know they cannot rely on us for anything from now on. His domestic policy has been to weaken our economy so that we are no longer the 600 pound canary in world trade.

And though he hasn't totally succeeded at this, he's left behind a huge time bomb that's going to finish the job in one year or ten or twenty: a $20 trillion national debt.

Debt service is no joke. Right now it's affordable but only because the Fed is keeping interest rates at 0%. If interest rates return to something like historical norms, say about 5%, the US Government will owe a trillion dollars a year just on debt service, before it does anything else.

That isn't economically possible on a balanced budget without ridiculous tax hikes beyond even the dreams of the most avaricious socialist, so it means that immense budget deficits will never end, which itself is a cascading failure since increasing the total debt in turn increases each year's debt service payments. And there will come a time when that is also no longer possible because no one will bid at the T-bill auctions. So the Fed will have to run the printing presses -- which in fact they're already doing, calling it "quantitative easing".

The Fed has actually been doing some of this for decades. When the board of governors think they need to increase the money supply, the way they do it is to create new money out of thin air, and use it to buy T-bills on the open market. But starting with the Great Recession, the rate at which they've been doing this has drastically increased. Part of the reason they did that was that they were trying to prevent Deflation, and they mostly succeeded. But now they can't stop or even crank back on doing this, and it's going to backfire eventually.

In the long run what this means is that the US dollar will collapse. The only question is how long it's going to take. And when it happens, it will complete the job Obama has begun, no matter who is president or which party is in power or what they think their foreign and domestic policy should be. America will suffer runaway inflation, and nothing can prevent it.

After which, the dollar will no longer be a "reserve currency" anywhere in the world, and international trade will no longer be done primarily in dollars, and there will be a lot of other consequences like capital flight, a total disruption of American foreign trade (both selling and buying), and, probably, political unrest. I'm not sure it leads to a revolution but stranger things have happened. It's not impossible it could lead to one or more wars.

The only thing I'm sure about is that it won't be pleasant, and for most of the population it will be more painful than the Great Depression was. The majority of Americans will go through a substantial decline in living standard.

By the way, the US government can't repudiate its debt. The 14th Amendment includes this:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

The US has to keep paying interest on the debt, and in the long run the only way that will be possible is with massively inflated dollars.

Anyway, this catastrophe pretty much can't be prevented. And sad to say, this is part of why I think this year's election isn't really as important as a lot of people do. We're already past the point of no return, no matter who gets elected.

UPDATE: So what should individuals do? Buying gold isn't any answer; that won't be liquid enough, for one thing. If we reach the "wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread" stage, there is one thing that will be liquid enough to be used as an alternative to cash.

Everyone should buy one or more guns, and in particular stock up on ammunition, and keep stocking up, faster than you are using it. When we reach the point where no one will accept $billion dollar notes for anything, they'll still accept a handful of 9 mm cartridges in barter. Because the utility and value of cartridges will be obvious to everyone in an environment where traditional law and order are breaking down.

I can see a time when that becomes the only useful currency in this country and the more boxes of it you have in your closet, the better off you'll be.

And if I'm wrong, you'll still be able to use that ammunition yourself or sell it to friends for whatever we will be using for money by that point.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Today's search term is "yandere", because everyone needs a bit of excitement in their life.

"You sent for me, sensei?"

"You sent for me, admiral?"

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 03:34 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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I have to admit I'm having fun reading all the weeping and gnashing of teeth by conservatives about the fact that Cruz and Kasich just dropped out of the race, leaving Trump unopposed.

Me, I can't say I ever supported Trump. Actually, the candidate I wanted was Walker, but he dropped out last summer. But I don't think Trump is quite the full-scale disaster a lot of other people think. His bad aspects are legion and obvious and I won't bother talking about them because lots of other people will be doing so. But there are good things here, too. Let's take a look.

1. He can beat Hillary. Hillary is an astoundingly weak and vulnerable candidate and Trump hasn't let loose with the big cannons on her yet. He's saving his ammunition (and there is plenty of it) for the general election campaign. Her problems start with the FBI investigation but they don't stop there.

2. If Trump wins, he won't be in thrall to big contributors.

3. Trump is willing to fire people if he thinks they aren't performing well. Don't underestimate how important this is.

4. Trump doesn't care about bad press. He's been getting wall-to-wall negative press coverage since the campaign began and if anything it seems he loves it.

5. If Trump is elected, heads all over Europe will explode.

6. Trump is a capitalist. Yeah, he's said things about raising taxes on the rich and so on; that's the zeitgeist. But unlike someone like Sanders, Trump works for a living and has spent his whole life in the business world. Maybe he's not the best businessman on the planet (he's gone bankrupt twice, isn't it?) When it really comes down to it though, that's where his mind is.

7. Unlike Obama, Trump wants America to be strong. Obama's foreign and domestic policy during his presidency was to end the "American Century", to reduce America to being just another nation in the world. Obama wanted to strengthen enemies, weaken friends, and bring about a level playing field in the world. Trump won't do that; he likes winning and sees nothing wrong with that.

8. Trump is totally politically incorrect. He doesn't care about safe spaces or micro-aggressions; he thinks that political correctness is stupid. He says what he thinks even if it offends someone. He's willing to insult people. SJW heads will be exploding, too. I think 4 years of Trump will kill off that movement.

9. The Republican establishment is about to take it in the teeth. The voters are pissed at them and Trump is going to deliver the message to them. This was as much a vote against RINOs as it was a vote for Trump.

10. And finally: they say you can know a man by his enemies. Trump has the right enemies, as far as a lot of voters are concerned.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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