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They knew enough that people are going to be asking very pointed questions - this was three years after CASTLE BRAVO, after all. Even if we handwave away the very real environmental and political issues with using hydrogen bombs for this - and the political issues are even worse than they at...

Was that the cult that built the ancient aliens-themed theme park in, I think, Alabama? I think they were called the Nuwaubians? And their leader ended up being arrested when the police discovered that he was committing child molestation on a truly massive scale? ETA: I checked, it was Georgia...

One dude does not an ideology make. Or, if it does, I should do the Christian Technocracy guy before I do Sol Invictus.

Hmm... Good question. Some of them, sort of, but they're more social/philosophical/religious.

Pretty please cover David Myatt and the Order of the Nine Angles? :) Actually, that makes me think I should maybe do something on real-world Satanism...

Could? Sure. Would? I doubt it. There's no way to know if that can actually be achieved without making the experiment - but I am personally extremely skeptical. It's really easy to make promises about how well your system of governance will work when you don't actually have power. Watch, I'll...

So, in the context I'd heard this in, it was referring to claims that optimal resource allocation is an exponentially hard problem, i.e. you'd need a computer the size of the solar system to do it. Doing some more research to respond to your post, I found there's also a claim that it can't be...

So, I'm a mathematician in real life, and the whole issue with whether economic planning is NP is just silly. An optimal solution to the resource allocation problem may well be NP, but that's not relevant to anything, because you only need a "good enough" solution. There was a rather...

It's not online, but if you PM me your e-mail I'll send you a copy (I have a scanned pdf).

Interestingly, with a few notable exceptions, the scientists and engineers never liked it much either - they were generally doing just fine under capitalism, thank-you-very-much, and saw no reason to change. The people who it appealed to seem to have been primarily the lower-middle-class...

I really wish I had come up with that line. We need to distinguish between technocracy, as a class of ideologies or approach to governance - which is how most people use the term - and Technocracy, Inc., the political movement of the 1930s led by Howard Scott. The former is such a broad...

Truman's proposal was taken seriously. It wasn't separate from the Baruch Plan - the Baruch Plan was supposed to be how Truman's proposal would be implemented. This was countered by the Soviet proposal that, basically, the US should give up its nukes and then we'll talk about inspection. The US...

At one point I looked into a technology called phytoremediation, which is planting plants that preferentially absorb elements found in fallout, to remove it from the soil. Not sure how effective it actually is, but it's something you could do with 80s tech. I suspect, though, that if nuclear...

Sure, it's obviously going to be different. But just because we're running out of tanks and men, doesn't mean the war is going to stop. It more likely means the character of the war is going to change, towards something that looks less like the wars planned by modern, professional militaries...

You know, I see this all over the place, but I'm not sure I believe it. Oh, no, we're running low on ammo! So's the other guy. Why is that a reason to stop? It reminds me a lot of all the people who said WW1 would be over by Christmas. Of course, I'm also one of those killjoys who thinks it...

That sounds basically accurate.

I don't think he could handle the business side of things. Something like an art gallery magazine or a trade journal, he wouldn't care much about that and would probably be more willing to do stuff for the sake of commerce, especially if he's only an assistant editor and not handling business...

He may have been offered the job - the historical record isn't entirely clear - but it would have entailed moving to Chicago, which he wasn't willing to do, and I kind of think he would have been terrible at that position.

The book doesn't say, but I believe the Anderson Galleries were an art gallery. That's not the only possible position, though - he apparently also came close to getting an assistant editorship at The Haberdasher, which was a trade magazine, and a few other posts.

He came from a well-to-do family - his writing never made much money. Unfortunately, the bottom fell out of the family fortune when he was a teenager, when his grandfather died shortly after losing a lot of money in a failed dam project in Ohio. The death of his grandfather left HPL as the sole...