Since “race issues” are all the rage these days, it’s interesting to see how other cultures do it. Yes, yes, I know, only white people can be racist… or so say people who, based on the prejudiced race-based opinions they spout, you’d *swear* were racist. But it sure seems like something very like racism seems to exist pretty universally across all cultures and ethnicities.
Take, for example, the Japanese. They are so efficient at it they’re racist against *themselves.* If you watch this and come away pondering “say, that kinda reminds me of big city elitist white liberals and white rednecks,” then, well, I guess that’s on you.
President Barack Obama was the best salesman the AR-15 ever saw. Gun owners were justifiably afraid that he and his fellow travelers, the likes of Pelosi and Boxer and the rest of the civilian disarmament fetishists, would pass laws banning the purchase or even ownership of a perfectly good rifle. Fortunately, reason for once prevailed.
A few weeks ago I went to a gun show south of Salt Lake city. It has been a year or more since i went to the last one, and at the time the chances seemed fair that the Obama years would be followed by the Hillary years. The gun show *then* was busy, packed with both sellers and buyers. The one a few weeks ago? Much smaller, about 2/3 the number of sellers, far fewer buyers. The panic is over.
So it seems that for at least the next few years, AR-15s should be had for reasonable prices, calmly, and without any fuss.
But now there’s a new item of political relevance: anything with MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) printed on it. This Trump campaign motto has become a new boogeyman for the Left, with people losing their fargin; minds when they see someone daring to wear such a thing. Behold:
Pretty much what the title says. Rather astonishingly, though, the school administration has come down on the side of the *two* students that the math teacher freaked out at, and not only allowed the students to wear their shirts, but gave the teacher an undefined talkin’-to.
INSANE!!
High school teacher calls Trump shirt a "swastika" and makes him take it off in class!
Me, I was never all that impressed with MAGA. But it’s things like this that make me *want* to pick up a MAGA hat. The difficulty for that little fantasy of mine is that people around *here* are generally pretty reasonable, and even though many might not like Trump and may not have voted for him (as I didn’t), they’re unlikely to go all Antifa-crap on anyone wearing a MAGA hat or shirt.
Still, I have high hopes and actual expectations that when the teacher in this story returned to her classroom the next day, or tomorrow perhaps, that she’ll be met with a sea of MAGA shirts.
Such as here:
I don’t know the background here, but the teacher here gives *every* indication of being the actual source of the problem.
Neutronium is a common substance in science fiction. It is a real substance of incredible density, so a lot of authors have decided that it would make a neato structural element. The problem: it would explode.
Neutronium is, as the name suggests, a substance made out of pure neutrons. It exists in neutron stars… but really nowhere else. It *can’t* really exist anywhere else. Neutrons exists in close proximity in the nuclei of atoms, but there they are held in place with the strong nuclear force; eliminate the protons, and the neutrons will go flying apart. In neutron stars, the neutrons are held together solely by gravity. If you were to somehow teleport a chunk of neutronium off a neutron star, it would promptly explode.
Here’s an old video from Thunderf00t explaining another problem with neutronium: outside of the gravitational field of neutron stars and the strong force of nuclei, neutrons decay with a half life of about 10 minutes. And the results of that are pretty energetic.
So if you want to use neutronium in your sci-fi story, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.
North Korea set off their sixth nuclear explosion a little while ago. They *claim* that is was not only an H-bomb but also miniaturized for installation on an ICBM.
No information on the yield of the bomb, though a magnitude 6.3 quake was generated. The previous test, about 10 kilotons, created a 5.3 quake. Which might mean this blast would be on the order of 100 kilotons, safely in the H-bomb range.
Scientists gave water containing carbon nanotubes to spiders,the spiders drank it and incorporated the nanotubes into their silk, producing webs five times stronger than usual.
One the one hand: neato. All kinds of interesting potential applications there, including cranking out kilotons of fibers equal to or surpassing kevlar in strength.
On the other hand: yeeeeeeeesh.
Below: artists concept for future manufacturing facility for baby hammocks.
Last few days the local news has been blowing up over the release of body cam footage showing a cop arresting a nurse. In the end, who’s in trouble here? The cop. Oh, boy howdy, the cop. Every bus the governor, mayor and chief of police can find, they’re preparing to throw him under… and for good reason. Here’s the short form:
1: On July 26, there was a high speed pursuit. The idjit being chased managed to hit a semi truck near Wellsville, resulting in an impressive explosion; idjit was killed, truck driver – who *everyone* acknowledges was doing nothing wrong – was injured.
2: Injured truck driver was taken to University Hospital in Salt Lake City.
3: For some reason, detective Jeff Payne decided that he needed to have a blood sample from the unconscious truck driver, and he needed it Right Now. Presumably this was to test for booze or drugs or some such in the truck driver… reason able enough, I suppose, under the circumstances, but his need fr it seems to have been excessive.
4: On-duty nurse Alex Wubbels knew the law and Hospital policy: they’re not allowed to draw blood from a patient for the cops unless:
A: The patient consents – which he couldn’t, being unconscious.
B: The patient was under arrest, which he wasn’t.
C: The police have a valid search warrant calling for a blood sample… which they didn’t have (but could have obtained easily enough)
5: Detective Payne was having none of it, and threatened the nurse with arrest for obstruction of justice.
6: Nurse contacts her supervisor via cell phone with a speakerphone
7: Supervisor tells the detective that the nurse is right, and that he’s making a mistake in threatening the nurse.
8: Detective goes ape and aggressively arrests the nurse.
9: In the end no charges are filed because, duh, nurse broke no laws
10: And then in late August the bodycam footage is released to the public and the detectives career hits a bit of a speedbump.
The truck driver patient is reportedly a reserve police officer in Rigby, Idaho; the going assumption is that detective Payne wanted that blood sample Right Friggen’ Now in order to absolutely clear the reserve police officer of any taint of guilt in the incident (even though, again, there’s no suspicion that anyone but the original idjit was responsible for the crash). The truck river is still in the hospital in serious condition.
This is kinda long (for 21st century short attention span definitions of “long”), but it’s also really, really good. If you want a vision of the future loaded with unthinking left-wing violence… here ya go: Antifa and allies physically assaulting (and Dem politicians slandering) non-white folks for being Nazis.
There are two bits that stood out to me in particular.
Tiny, you might have guessed, is named ironically. He’s a 6′6″, 345-lb. Samoan. His favorite food, he says, “is food.” Grabbing a bear-paw’s worth of his own flesh, he says, “I ain’t fat, I’m stab-resistant.”
That’s funny, right there. This is less funny, but much more important:
“We can’t just shut up, just be quiet, and let this evil continue. The darkness continues to get bigger and bigger in our country, and it will be gone. The country will burn, I’m telling you, if we don’t do things to stand up against it. We all take it for granted. We take for granted everything that we have. That’s why we have to wake up and understand. Goddamn, we have too much to lose.” His eyes well as he takes a long pause, looking out on the shimmering San Francisco Bay. “We can’t stand by, we’ve gotta stand up. And we’ve got to do it together, or it’s gonna be gone.”
Any liberals, Democrats, leftists and such reading this blog: if you ever want to be intellectually honest, give this piece a read, and some serious thought. You want to lay the Nazis on the doorstep of right wingers? Fine. These people are *your* problem. And there’s a hell of a lot more of them than there are Nazilarpers.
