Mar 242016
 

Seems a feller wants to replicate Evel Kneival’s Snake River Canyon jump, but in Texas (and presumably without the parachute screwup):

Man Plans to Launch Himself Over Palo Duro Canyon in a Rocket

This will apparently happen April 2.

Videos showing test launches of the steam rocket .

And in this view, you can see that the parachute got *tore* *up.* One hopes they’ve fixed that problem.

 Posted by at 10:00 am
Mar 242016
 

This is some hilarious high-quality unintended consequence right here:

Professors’ Group Says Efforts to Halt Sexual Harassment Have Stifled Speech

So who are these professors? Are they a bunch of Brofessors looking to nail the co-eds? Are they that rarest of breeds, conservative professors? Are they engineering professors just trying to do their jobs? Actually… no. The trouble seems to be for “female professors in areas like gender studies” because “A heightened focus on speech, the report said, has led to episodes like one in which students demanded trigger warnings before being exposed to graphic lesbian sex in “Fun Home,” the memoir by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel.”

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Ahem.

 Posted by at 9:30 am
Mar 242016
 

Polish Muslim leader says death penalty should be reinstated for terrorists

Chief Mufti of Poland Tomasz Miśkiewicz has said that EU countries should reintroduce the death penalty for terrorists, in the wake of Tuesday’s fatal attacks in Brussels.

Ummm…

Since most terrorists wind up dead once they begin to enact their schemes – often enough dead at their own hands, intentionally, on purpose and gleefully – this doesn’t seem like it’d actually change things much. The only thing it would seem to accomplish is to make the guy proposing it seem like he’s taking a stronger stance than he actually is.

Now, to give the guy credit he suggests using the death penalty not only for perpetrators, “but also anyone who is against freedom, who propagates terrorism.” On the one hand… no, that ain’t gonna happen. But on the other hand… that there would be an amazing can of worms. “You publicly read the Koran out loud? Guess what…”

 Posted by at 9:19 am
Mar 242016
 

From merry old Englandistan:

Cambridgeshire A&E ‘not for hiccups and broken nails’, clinicians warn

In short: English hospitals Emergency Room getting swamped with nonsense like broken fake fingernails, taking up time, funds, space, resources, time.

Well… duh.

Exciting personal anecdote: a few months ago I found myself in possession of a minor physical malady. The pain it produced was remarkable. Sadly, my regular doctor was fully booked and couldn’t see me that day. They suggested I walk a few hundred feet down the hallway to the ER. So… I waited in the waiting room for about two hours, then another hour in the ER proper. And then I walked out, without being treated. Why? Well, I asked: “So, what is this likely to cost me?”

“$600.”

“Byeeeeee…”

And I got a doctors appointment for the next day and the problem was resolved. One night of buggo-drivin’ pain was not worth $600.

Even before I found out what the cost was going to be, I was on the edge of bolting. The whole time I was there in pain, I knew that it was not medically serious; certainly not life threatening. But the patient on the other side of the curtain? Slow, ragged machine-assisted breaths that I’m pretty sure were about that persons last, coupled with weeping family members. *That* is a dandy way to make you realize “I can live with this for another 18 hours, no sweat.”

And so Britainland has universal (I gather essentially “free”) health care, which means people aren’t charged an arm and a leg for visiting the ER. So if it is actually free…. why *not* take advantage of it?

There’s no such thing as free health care. *Somebody* has to bear the burden of the cost of labor for the doctors and nurses if nothing else. Is there some good reason why the person actually consuming that service shouldn’t have to bear at least some of the cost? How much would an ER visit have to cost to dissuade morons from coming in complaining of hiccups and the like? If it was fifty bucks, I would imagine most people with stupid complaints would think twice… but it’s a cheap price for a broken leg or a stab wound.

 Posted by at 12:29 am
Mar 222016
 

Ah, university kids…

Emory Students Express Discontent With Administrative Response to Trump Chalkings

In short, someone at Emory University did something dastardly… wrote pro-Trump slogans (such as “Trump 2016”) on the sidewalk with chalk. So rather than doing something radical like writing “Somebody Other Than Trump 2016” on the sidewalk, or doing something truly revolutionary like ignoring the messages, the whiny Junior Fascists on campus have gone crying to the university, demanding that political opinions they don’t agree with be banned.

Nothing especially new here; same ridiculous gibberish was going on when I was in college, a quarter century ago. But it never ceases to amaze me just how fragile some people openly claim to be… and how loud they are in demanding that the world be made into Nerf for them… and how willing so many people who should know better are to accommodate these nattering nincompoops.

If there are any students with a full set of nards on that campus, they’d be liberally plastering the joint with pro-Trump slogans. And I say this as someone who thinks Trump is reprehensible.

 Posted by at 8:32 pm
Mar 222016
 

So I was flipping between news channels a few moments ago. Everyone seemed to be headlining some variation on “Terror In Belgium” or some such. But then I landed on Al Jazeera, which was going on about “Islamophobia in America.”Because, sure, some people being unfriendly is certainly more newsworthy than nail bombs.

Anchor Joie Chen ramped up the hilarity by pointing out that Islam is a faith practiced by more people than any other.

 Posted by at 7:08 pm
Mar 222016
 

The Third Reich was jam-packed full of ridiculous notions. Genocide. Invading Russia. Declaring war on the US. Superstitious claptrap. Dreams of world domination. Government programs that favor one ethnic group over another. Collective economics. But perhaps the *goofiest* idea was one of Hitler’s favorites: the P1000 “Ratte,” a 1000-ton *tank* packing the turret from a battleship, with two 280mm cannon and diesel engines from U-boats. There is zero chance that it would have worked worth a damn,and had one popped up on a battlefield every tactical bomber in a 500 mile radius would have competed to bob it into oblivion.

I’ve often thought that what the world needed was a good scale model of the Ratte, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But it seems someone else has; TAKom Models has recently released a 1/144 kit of the P1000. It includes two “Maus” tanks for scale. I would have preferred 1/72 scale, but I imagine that would have been a bit spendy.

The box art is fairly epic. Not only does it showcase the ridiculous scale of the Ratte… it also includes Nazi flying saucers because, hey, why not.

The Ratte kit is available on Amazon.

 

 Posted by at 6:44 pm