Unlikely as it may initially sound, he kinda seems to pull it off. Of course, it looks like they are trying to recast one of the most downright villainous Presidents in US history as some sort of hero, but this being Hollywood I guess that’s what you have to expect.
US Bomber Projects #20 will be a “special” covering the Boeing XB-59. This will bring together and update the Model 484 and 701 diagrams from prior issues and will add a bunch more, fleshing out not only the development of the B-59 configuration but also showing some of the designs that followed it.
Eighties kids will no doubt remember A-Ha’s mid 80’s song “Take On Me” and the video that went with it. The video was pretty remarkable for the time, visually interesting through animation rotoscoped over live action footage, made to look like black and white “comic book” art. And even though it was only a few minutes worth of music video, it took something like four months to animate.
And now it can be done essentially instantly with an augmented reality app. The results are a little off, not *quite* the same… but people would have lost their minds in 1985 if the video had been made using something like this. I’m not sure that in 1985 we would have understood just what you were going on about if you said you shot this on your *phone.*
Video quality’s not great, but the subject is:
And:
And…
And…
And…
So, President Giant Middle Finger continued his trend of WTF-worthy tweeting today by declaring that transexuals would henceforth be banned from the US military. Apparently, the response from the people who actually run the Department of Defense was something along the lines of “who’s doing what now?” CNN’s talking heads are trying to figure out if the President has the power to unilaterally make that change, and, if so, whether he can do it via tweet.
Because I know y’all are just dying to find out, my opinion on transsexuals: meh. Whatever. You be you. My only problem is when “you being you” requires that “taxpayers be paying for you being you.” Now, consider this:
A) Jim Smith joins the Army and gets his arm blown off. He wants a replacement Luke Skywalker robohand; it is good and proper for the US Army to spend what it takes to get him one.
B) Jim Smith gets his arm blown off and then tries to join the Army to get them to give him a new Luke Skywalker robohand. Ummmm… no.
Lots of people are saying that there is a lot of vital talent in the pool of transsexuals that the military could use. Well, no doubt. There is also a lot of talent available in the pool of people with missing limbs, bad hearts, no eyesight, Type 1 diabetes, drug addiction, schizophrenia, flat feet and criminal records. The military has a *lot* of reasons for rejecting applicants that have little to do with talent (80% of Military Recruitments Turned Down).
So, the point: if someone is post-operative, needs no more medical care for their missing limb or gender dysmorphia, or if they are able to do the job *without* the elective and expensive medical treatments and won’t get it until they’re out, then I see little reason to say “trannies out” (other than to annoy SJWs). But if someone wants to sign up for the military with a “pre-existing condition” and expects and demands that the military – i.e. Joe Taxpayer – pay for it, I have a bit of a problem with that.
But springing this change on the military via tweet after there are apparently already transsexuals out in the open in the military, meaning that they would theoretically get kicked out? Yeah… that’s… wellllll…… that’s becoming pretty much par for the Trump course, I suppose.
Well, here’s where the world is… I’m posting a link to a YouTube Gucci ad.
All I can really say about it is that it does effectively capture the look and cheesiness of 60’s/70’s TV sci-fi, in particualr Star Trek, Lost In Space and Space: 1999 (which the ad uses the theme music from). Well… that and I can add that it’s appropriate in that it makes fashion models into effective old-skool SF aliens, because they pretty much look like freaks anyway.
Honestly, what is the purpose of an ad like this? Anybody want to spend money to dress up like that, outside of cosplaying or starring in a fan film?
Hmmm.
Not a whole lot of data. Seems Season One will cover the Mercury 7, with Season Two covering the Apollo program. So… sounds like the original “The Right Stuff” merged with “From The Earth To the Moon.”
The answer to the Great Silence, anyway. It’s an interesting hypothesis I was very recently reminded on via a comment on this blog (and I *believe* the idea has been raised hereabouts before, but can’t really be bothered to go digging).
OK, the Great Silence, otherwise known as the Fermi Paradox, is one of the great modern scientific mysteries. The universe, given the vast number of stars and planets and the seeming ease with which life seems likely to arise, should be abuzz with life, and one would expect a whole lot of technological civilizations. Enough so that the sky should be filled with radio messages, laser beams, starships, all that good stuff. But so far as we can tell… nothing. So, where is everybody?
Assuming that intelligent species arise with some commonality, something must be shutting them up. There are lots of ideas, but one branch of the theory-stream deals with “horrible things happen to them that kill their civilizations.” The most commonly discussed idea is that civilizations get to the nuclear stage and promptly blow themselves to bits. But there is a new culprit that I think merits discussion: Social Justice Warriors.
We are finding in our own civilization that we reached the spacefaring level of technology, and now we’re giving over control to screeching sociopaths who are opposed to science and math for reasons that are best described as “incredibly f’ing stupid.” If they succeed, humanities chances of being a long-term technological civilization, to say nothing of a starfaring one, will be reduced to nil. If the advanced cultures give themselves over to weak-willed, weak-kneed, weak-minded self flagellating nonsense, chances are good they’ll be conquered by the death-worshiping barbarians, plunging the world into a new dark age it is unlikely to recover from. Even if conquest doesn’t come, a rejection of western science in favor of identity-science will retard technological advance – and perhaps even prevent mere stagnation, as people won’t understand the stuff they already have – long enough so that high energy density power systems such as fossil fuels and nukes are no longer available, likely stranding us on this planet forever.
I hate to think that SJWs are a universe-spanning problem, plaguing civilization after civilization, like some sort of telepathically induced epidemic imposed on sentient species by vast cosmic horrors who want to screw with the little guys. But unwillingness to *want* something to be true or not means nothing about whether or not that something *is* true.
So, now that the “SJWs did it” hypothesis is out there, the next step is an important one: what do we call it? “Branding” is an important way to get a hypothesis out into the public. “Higgs Boson?” Boring. “God Particle?” Tell me more! And to my mind, getting people, especially people in the STEM field, to consider the potentially universe-wide societal collapse possible due to acceptance of “social justice” nonsense is very, very important.
The official story is that Russia is in Syria in order to fight ISIS and other jihadis… *not* that they’re there in order to get them selves a strategic foothold in the region by way of supporting Assad so he’ll give ’em a port. But then there’s this:
Hmmm.
Some might suggest that this is irony,or turnabout s fair play. The US armed the proto-Taliban against the Soviets, after all. But in the 80’s, the great threat was the Soviet Union, not global jihadi terrorism. Now that the Russian government claims that jihadis are enough of a threat that they’re willing to carpet bomb cities full of civilians, they are *apparently* arming the very same jihadis.
But good news! it need not be restricted to just the field of geography, but can go *anywhere.* What’s their new line of attack? Why… citing experts and prior research is bad!
This exciting new idea is laid out in a paper published in Gender, Place & Culture A Journal of Feminist Geography
Oh FFS.
“Feminist geography?” Is there “feminist geology,” too? “Feminist organic chemistry?” “Feminist trigonometry?”
Gah.
History lesson: once the Nazis started gaining power in Germany they started driving Jews out of positions of power, including academia. Modern nuclear and particle physics was labeled “Jewish physics,” and not only were Jewish physicists made unwelcome or outright driven away, their *science* was done away with, replaced with “Aryan Physics.” The end result of *that* was that the United States got a whole lot of Jewish physicists and The Bomb, while Germany got an expensive uranium nothingburger. Whilethe German government did eventually allow for the use of “Jewish” ideas like quantum mechanics and Relativity, Jewish scientists and authors could not be referenced. This made proper utilization of the knowledge difficult… which, in retrospect, is just as well.
Trying to shoehorn identity politics into anything even remotely science related is a fast path to Epic Fail.
