eat the rich

 Click image to enlarge

The Wall Street Journal
business-oriented daily USA broadsheet
Murdoch-owned
Monday 27 January 2014

Letters

Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

438 Comments

Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

Mr. Perkins is a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
 

R. Crumb: The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick (Weirdo comix No. 17)

Click each page to enlarge.

Crumb's account of Philip K. Dick's mystical transformative experience was shown on the Dick episode of the recent TV series "Prophets of Science Fiction," produced and narrated by Ridley Scott, who turned Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" into "Blade Runner."

Scott used another underground comic giant, Ron Cobb, as the designer of the space freighter Nostromo in "Alien."

Dick died shortly after selling "Androids" to Scott, and I don't think he ever saw "Blade Runner."

Of all the things that frighten us -- particularly Westerners -- the scariest thing of all is a profound mystical, visionary or religious experience. Dick and Crumb (and Timothy Leary, John C. Lilly and a few others) understood that mystical ecstacy is a central experience necessary for the full spectrum of human life.

It's BAD for you!

Click candy wrapper to enlarge.

Why do we love things (and sex companions) we know are bad for us? The USA artist (now resident in France) Robert Crumb captures this Mystery sizzlingly.

Devil Girl Choco-Bar used to be a real candy bar, and it was fairly inexpensive, and tasted great. You could buy it in underground comic book stores, where Crumb was / is a major deity.

Crumb's most recognized work is the album cover for Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin).

The bio-documentary "Crumb" won an Oscar, deservedly. Crumb specialized in everything the USA tried to hide or prohibit or forget. He was also a champion of forgotten 1920s blues music, and has the distinction of recording the world's last 78 rpm phonograph record, which by that time could be played on very very few turntables.

Slightly tarted up V.2 t-shirt & (someone else's) explanation of solution to 4CC = 4CP

Click t-shirt to enlarge,

view vid in Fullscreen

A neighbor seems to sincerely enjoy my whack t-shirts, so for Christmas i cranked him out the 4CC / postage meter t-shirt after i made the red brighter on the metered postage from the math department of the University of Illinois / Champaign-Urbana. Haken and Appel stole about 2 years of time off the federal supercomputer on campus to analyze a huge number of distinct geopolitical map cases.

FOUR COLORS
....SUFFICE

The math department featured the postage ad when they published their proof in 1976. (The faint PB is for Pitney-Bowes, the Ruler of Earth with hand-cranked and electromechanical business postage meters.)

With some help from their Big Silicon Friend (an IBM), they put UI C-A on the math map and on the Big List of Platonic Objects.

One tiny aspect of this perfectly legitimate proof wafts up the nostrils of many mathematicians like the 5-day-old sidewalk harring in my hotel minibar fridge.

Only a digital computer can assemble this proof.

And having claimed to have proven it, only another digital computer can verify the work of the first computer.

4CC is the first Proof humans have encountered or cobbled together which is too vast to reside in a single human brain. Thus the stale harring aroma to the nostrils of many carbon-based sentients.

In the video, a very nice nerdo Italiano (YouTube courtesy PatfromCH) gives a vidboard demonstration proving a famous aspect of the 4CC = 4CP.

Since this idiot-easy child-grokable question

For any conceivable geopolitical map, what is the most distinct colors needed so no contiguous regions (regions sharing a border of non-zero length) are colored alike?
 
... was first asked (by Francis Guthrie) in 1852, it took Earth's brainiest mathematicians 124 years to prove (or help the supercomputer prove) the answer.

Minkowski told his graduate students that the reason no one had proved 4CC was that only third-rate mathematicians had studied the problem. Some months later he announced: "Heaven is angry at my arrogance. My proof is defective."

Worse than idiot-simple ... print shops had been printing such geopolitical maps for centuries, and THEY always knew they'd never, ever have to print a map that needed 5 colors. In centuries of printing screwy, arbitrary-shaped maps -- Guthrie used the counties of England, other examples are the countries of Eurasia or the "lower 48" USA states -- they'd never found a map that couldn't be printed in 4 colors. (Most only require 3 colors.)

But of course it's not a commercial printer's job to prove fundamental platonic object conjectures in topology. They just print maps.

***********

Maybe more later. I'm hungry. And the Polar Vortex has trapped us and the cats in the cabin. If we go outside for longer than 15 minutes we will get frostbite and have to have body parts amputated.