China mulling ‘small scale military ops’ against India: Expert
Say, that’s neato.
In my fictional future history, the “Pan Asian Wars” were a little further along in the 21st century. But hey, whatever.
Say, that’s neato.
In my fictional future history, the “Pan Asian Wars” were a little further along in the 21st century. But hey, whatever.
Short form: cats and dogs eat a whole lot of meat, and meat requires water and carbon dioxide emissions to make. thus, kitties and puppies are destroying the planet and you should feel bad for enabling the horrible little monsters. Granted, the author of the study specifically says that he’s not advocating getting rid of pets… but you can bet that the environmental whackos *will.* Keep in mind, the Venn diagram covering “environmentalists” has a lot of overlap with “PETA people,” and there have been few organizations more enthusiastic about killing cats and dogs than PETA.
Something that confuses me a bit… yes, animals are turned into kibble, but it’s hardly like this is a wholly separate industry from human food-animal production. The pet food “environmental impact” should therefore be simply a fraction of the agricultural environmental impact that has no doubt already been calculated.
Also: yes, the current process for feeding cows and pigs and such is a major environmental issue. You have to grow corn (or wheat or whatever), which requires tractors and irrigation and the like. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t *need* to. Cows can eat *grass.* Yes, it takes a lot more grass than corn to fatten up a cow, but in many places grass grows for free, on its own. During the “Old West,” grillions of cows roamed the plains gnawing on wild plants. Before them, jillions of bison did the same. So except for the fact that the country is now divided up into itty bitty chunks, this process should still be feasible, and would seem to be reasonably carbon neutral.
So, if we are all agreed that the environment is in danger and we need to do whatever we can to reduce the carbon footprint, perhaps we should consider the use of eminent domain in order to buy up a lot of terrain to turn it over to natural grasslands and cow feeding ranges. The government can use its overwhelming force in this time of crisis to use eminent domain to take the bank accounts and property of environmental activists and pressure groups and use that money to buy land currently used to grow corn.
Hollywood goes back to the remake well for the billionth time, this time the 1974 “classic” Death Wish (a series of movies that I never care for because they were, well, just not at all good). This time, though, the remake has two things going for it:
1) Casting. Who better to play Paul Kersey than Bruce Willis?
2) The SJWs. They are already offended.
I have a challenge. Watch the trailer and explain to me how:
A) Bruce Willis killing a bunch of fellow white guys is “racist”
B) Depicting the police – and the rest of the government- as completely ineffectual is “fascist.”
As rumors persist of Star Trek Discovery circling the drain, new rumors arise about the mysterious second Star Trek project being worked on by “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” director Nicholas Meyer. Rumors have suggested that what he was working on was a new series to replace STD after its first – and only – season; perhaps trying to make STD into an “anthology” series, where each season is something entirely new. While certainly possible (“American Horror Story” does that), it has been assumed that this approach was simply a way for CBS to save face, a “we always meant to do that” after the disastrous decisions made for STD.
But in the fact-deficient article linked HERE, a new idea is proposed: what Meyer is working on is a miniseries featuring Khan Noonian Singh, the genetically enhanced super-jackwagon from the TOS episode “Space Seed” and Star Trek II. It is surmised that the miniseries takes place between those two while Khan & Co. are stranded on Ceti Alpha V.
On one hand… kinda meh (yet another Trek into its own past, rather than pushing into the future; a story about people the audience can’t really relate to dumped on a backwater planet with no technology). On the other hand, Nick Meyers. On the gripping hand, it’s *apparently* a miniseries, which means a beginning, middle and end.
In Star Trek Into Darkness, Khan was inexplicably played by Benedict Cumberbatch, i.e. Whitey McWhiteguy. Khan was a Sikh (who’d originally been played by a Mexican of Spanish ancestry). So I suppose that in the miniseries he could be played by a Korean fella. But it would be nice to have Khan played by someone who actually fit the part… either a convincing Sikh, or someone who made a good Ricardo Montalban. Any suggestions?
About that last point: as the rumors of STD sucking have grown (aided by the reveals of plot points that are questionable at best), CBS has taken to using the Ghostbusters: 2016 defense playbook: accuse the haters of being misogynists/alt-righters/racists/whatever because the main character is a black woman. It’s easier to deflect than defend, though that strategy didn’t work that well for Sony & Feig. As part of the deflection, reference is always made to the history of Star Trek being “progressive,” featuring multicultural crews and such. Well, here’s the thing: while it is undeniably true that TOS was well ahead of the curve and featured, for the time, an astonishingly multi-ethnic cast, it was anything but multi-cultural. Virtually everyone came from the same culture, a Federation that came off as a somewhat smoothed-over version of the United States. Uhura, for example, came from somewhere in Africa… but she spoke with an American accent and behaved as if she was raised in American culture. The only accents to be found were on Scotty and Chekov. The only distinctly different culture to be found on board was Spocks Vulcan – importantly, non-human – culture. When Next Gen rolled around, the same situation held true; the only distinctly different culture on display was the Klingon. While the religious affiliations of the crew didn’t come up much on TOS, it was clear that by the time of TNG, all humans (supposedly) had the same religious views, which is one of the more unlikely predictions made on that show.
Look out, Uhura, there’s someone behind you…
A convincing case that Uhura is STEM, not LibArts.
Last few days there’s been some discussion hereabouts about “artificial wombs,” and how they’d play with the legal and social aspects of abortion. Some have suggestion that *if* artificial wombs become practical and *if* the extraction of a fetus and implantation into an artificial womb becomes easy and reliable, then there may be a shift towards looking at natural pregnancy as irresponsible. This may be true.
But another thought occurs. If arti-wombs are easy and practical, then there could be some interesting *politics* developed. The western industrialized nations are currently undergoing a severe drop off in the birth rate, such that a lot of people are suggesting it’s a good idea to import millions of third worlders to replace the native ethnic group and the local culture. For those who see this replacement as an intentional act, a replacement of, say, white Christians with brown Muslims, this is known as “white genocide.” And boy howdy is that an easy way to start a flame war between the SJWs and the alt-right.
Setting aside the conspiracy theories about whether “white genocide” is an actual goal, artificial wombs coupled with fertility treatments – artificial insemination – would play a major role in the discussion. How much of the dropoff in western birth rates is due to women being too busy, to wrapped up in their careers to take the time to get pregnant? If modern western women/families could convert baby-making into something that’s not a whole lot more complex than a visit to a fertility clinic and then a second visit nine months later to pick up Junior, would that simplification be enough to raise the birth rate to replacement levels or even beyond? How many westerners – or indeed anybody – would look at this new convenient approach to babymaking and decide to not just have one or two extra kids, but to have a *lot* of kids? Artificial insemination often leads to half a dozen or more “excess” fertilized eggs. How many people would decide “Great. Grow ’em all!”
Would this led to a “baby race?” Would there be enough white supremacists cranking out platoons of decanted rugrats to counter the rise of black supremacists growing large numbers of test tube arti-womb babies? Would this baby race be a private thing, or would you perhaps have nations – Japan, say, or Denmark – starting up their own modern “Lebensborn” movements to promote the continuation of the native ethnic group and culture? This might be done by having the government explicitly growing babies, but it might also be done by government simply encouraging it on the private level, providing substantial welfare benefits to locals who are growing “approved” crops of kids.
Religious aspect can’t be ignored, either. I once worked with an evangelical feller who planned to have not just a couple of kids with the missus, but a *lot.* Their plan was to have as many kids as they possibly could, because of that “be fruitful and multiply” thing. Well… something along the lines of twenty kids seems to be the approximate limit, if the Duggars are anything to go by. In that case, the wife is kept more or less permanently pregnant, which to my mind is a “what, really? No, really?” sort of situation. But if the artiwomb comes on the market, “being fruitful” could take on a whole new meaning. A family into this sort of thing could easily have a crop of half a dozen kids a year for, say, ten years. *Affording* all that might be a bit of a chore, but if you honestly hold to the notion that God wants you to make as many kids as you can, then how could you ignore this technology?
Nope, not a post about SJW’s screeching about an insufficiency of diversity in STEM fields. Instead… photography.
Your average modern decent camera has a white balance setting that allows you to choose from settings such as direct sunlight, incandescent lighting, fluorescent lighting, etc. The idea is that you can get photos that look right even if the lighting is off.
Trouble is, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s “right.” Below are four late-night panoramas. The two that look “bluish” use the “incandescent” setting; the apocalypse-orange ones use “sunlight.” The latter are the closest to real, I think, in that the clouds and skyglow are lit up by a vast number of sodium incandescent lights. When the white balance is set to “incandescent,” the horizontal panorama looks ok to me, but the vertical one… well, I’m torn. The bluish one kinda looks better (especially the horizon), but the orangish one captures the colors of the Milky Way better.
Opinions?
A device you see from time to time in science fiction is the “artificial womb.” It would be a handy device for a woman who wants to have a baby but for whatever reason cannot actually carry the baby. Or for interplanetary or interstellar colonization: once you have the machine set up, you can grow baby cows or rabbits or dogs or people from easy-to-ship frozen embryos.
Well, neato: some first steps in developing a practical “artificial womb” have been taken, successfully gestating the last month of premature lambs which were subsequently “decanted” and raised for a year.
So, good news, right? A technology that could make life better, right? Who could possibly have a problem with this?
If you said “pro-abortion activists,” ding ding ding you win!
The argument is that the artificial womb should make it possible to push the “age of viability” earlier and earlier during pregnancy, and that could affect the legality of abortions, pushing the legal maximum limit earlier and earlier. And so… this technology is bad.
Right now if you are, say, 9 weeks pregnant and you want you kid out, hoovering it out through a cuisinart seems to be about the only way. So far as I’m aware very little work as been done on safely, much less conveniently, removing a fetus and the associated support infrastructure. The reason for this should be obvious… until now there’s been nothing you could do to save the fetus. But now, at least theoretically a fetus could be extracted and put in an artificial womb and raised successfully.
Of course, carefully extracting a live fetus is more of a chore than a simple abortion. But the artificial womb isn’t quite ready for prime time, either. Seems like some work should allow for a relatively straightforward transfer of a viable fetus to an artificial womb.
What the people upset about this are arguing is that it will make it more difficult for women to get an abortion because a technological advance would expand the definition of what a person is. This is not exactly a new concept in history. Cough cough slavery cough cough.
Here’s the thing that bugs me about the people upset about this: the technology, once perfected, should allow for functionally the same outcome as abortion. You walk in with an unwanted pregnancy, you walk out without one. This difference is… killing a fetus vs. not killing a fetus. If it bothers you that you can’t legally kill a fetus anymore, then it seems to me that your issue was never “a womans right to control her own body,” but rather “I wanted to kill a fetus because reasons.”
Uhhhhhnnnnnnn……..
Interesting explanation on not only why STD isn’t canon to the “Prime” universe, but why it legally *can’t* be.
Not exactly traditional, but…
On October 12, asteroid 2014 TC4 will pass *extremely* close to Earth: perhaps 4,200 miles from the surface (but perhaps as far out as 170,000 miles). Fortunately it’s a dinky little guy…no more than 100 feet in diameter, probably smaller. The trajectory is vague because it was only tracked for a few days in 2012, and then it was too small and distant to be seen.
An asteroid such as this… smallish, passing close to Earth… would make a *fantastic* early target for interception and capture. Adjust the orbit so it swings past the moon; brake it at closest pass and put the rock into high Earth orbit. Obviously it’d be better to use Earth and perigee kicks for braking and orbit capture, but just *imagine* the red tape wrapped around that environmental impact statement.