Doomsday Books and survivalism

No Third Party, Watch Big Brother!

The real Coronavirus… government-controlled teevee

Now that the communist dictatorship on mainland China has polluted the planet with yet another plague, people huddled in shelters have time for reading–as opposed to the screechings of kleptocracy teevee. One of the most apropos and entertaining novels for the times is The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.(link) In it you will learn the intimate details of the bubonic plague the Far East exported to Europe and the British Isles back in the good old days before global warming hysteria replaced burning at the stake. The books downloads to any cellphone, tablet or Kindle device without your having to open the door. Due perhaps to this diabolical form of miraculous delivery, the novel lacks the Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat of the Vatican, but it could nevertheless save your life. Herbal Antivirals by Stephen Buhner is also practically relevant to the current crisis.(link)

A scientist-publisher I worked for back in 1982 had me ship out boxloads of Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny.(link) Saboteurs stole the heavy boxes of Golem Press books from the postal system, so I had to fill out insurance claim forms for replacement shipments.(link) Cresson Kearny developed his survival skills during war, famine and pestilence in China, and except for blast waves and fallout, many of the survival skills needed to shelter without the added aggravation of starvation, disease or vitamin deficiency are clearly explained with pictures and arrows. 

Pat Frank was the pen name of Harry Hart Frank, author of Alas Babylon, a tale of Eisenhower-Nixon-era nuclear war, when cities were the smallest things bombers could reliably target.(link) Yet much of the aftermath is complicated less by fallout than to the very anarchy communist infiltrators assure us is desirable–just not for them. The rebuilding of civilization without hindrance by a central government is the backdrop for this most interesting and topically relevant story. 

A mathematician and an engineer joined forces to write Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.(link) Here the same natural disaster that has befallen Earth many times in the past returns in the form of a comet impact unleashing all four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Survival without supermarkets amid cannibalistic collectivism is a test of human ingenuity that rewards preparedness and familiarity with the facts of scientific reality. 

Most of these books were written in an age in which altruist collectivism in its communo-fascist variants–complete with known slavery, famine, death camps, institutionalized torture and disappearance and the initiation of deadly force–was considered preferable to the prevailing mercantilist mixed economy by many organizations and individuals. Among these we still see the Union of Concerned “Scientists,” Physicians for Social “Responsibility” and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War through Preemptive Surrender to totalitarianism. These vectors, now joined by real-life versions of the State Science Institute in Atlas Shrugged, remain a stench in the nostrils of humankind.(link)

Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn is a book about these myrmidons of messianic martyrdom who even today still seek to ban electricity and appease the gods of Carbon Tax Collectivism by demanding that “we” grovel at the altar of parasitical Pseudoscience.(link) Most of these books are also available in audiobook format. Last but not least…

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog

Bad PDF Converter: ABBYY 14

Anyone thrilled with ABBYY 12 for converting pdf documents to Word processor format may wonder why Amazon does not sell version 14. Version 12 is all sold out, and you have to go to the company website to even order 14. For specific information be prepared to paw through some inelegantly translated descriptions.  It turns out that ABBYY 14 is to ABBYY 12 as Windows Vista is to Windows 2000. See for yourself.

Here is how a chunk of Brazilian legalese converted with ABBYY 12 loads into memoQ (a standard translation-assistant tool):

Here is how that same section imports after conversion with ABBYY 14:

The reason I converted again with ver. 12 was that it would take ten times longer to unmangle the ver. 14 output document and make it translatable. The mess of formatting codes you see was left over after I polished up the fonts for consistency, leaving no font stretching, shrinkage or mixing of sorts. ABBYY 14 produces conversions that are absolutely useless for translation and nearly impossible to clean up using the current version of Winword. Small wonder nobody but ABBYY wants to sell it! But there is hope.

While I was struggling to find a way to buy the program (after exhausting all possibilities of purchasing another ABBYY 12) I asked about the possibility of converting without MS Office installed. Nobody at ABBYY had a clue whether their new product would work with Apache Open Office. Omega-T, a free, open-source translation tool, works fine with Microsoft’s competitors. As soon as I installed ABBYY 14 on a clean machine, I tested it with Apache Open Office and no MS Office installed. The conversion worked! The resulting word processor file looked presentable, needing only the usual touch-ups

Once I get caught up I’ll reopen the ABBYY 14 file and save it using the Apache open source program to see if it makes any improvement. Some pdf converters litter the output with “text boxes” that move unpredictably and mess up translations. Opening and saving the resulting Word file with Microsoft’s simple Wordpad gets rid of those, and the resulting file is often salvageable for translation with professional warez. Stay tuned. In the meantime, Caveat Emptor! One sweet solution could be for ABBYY to rename ver. 12 as ver. 14 and forget all about the hideous v.14 miscarriage–kind of the way Microsoft did after releasing Windows Vista.

UPDATE: ABBYY techs suggested using the formatted text option to export converted files. That “solved” the most distressing problem. The interface, however remains user-hostile and even with that work-around all progress is much slower than in ver. 12

2+2=4

Orwellian quality translations

If in need of translations involving oil, dams, power plants or contracts, look us up.
Visit the immigration-related blog too…

My book on the Crash and Depression is out in Portuguese and English on Amazon.com