admin

Yes, you too can have nuclear power in your own home. Seems to actually work. Only one problem…

In short, little sealed glass vials of beta-emitting tritium with a phosphor coating on the inside to convert the beta radiation into visible light are sandwiched between two PV cells. This leads to a battery that puts out just enough juice to power very small devices. Cool! The problem is that those tritium vials cost about $15 to $30 a pop, so you’re looking at more than $30 in parts to make said nuclear battery. Is it cost effective? Is it fundamentally practical? Mmmm… probably not. But for less than a hundred bucks, you end up being able to boast that your thermometer or some such is Nuclear Powered.

Here’s another, talkier video describing much the same thing:

NASA Considering Using Pre-flown SpaceX Rockets for Cargo Flights

SpaceX has also had success recently in recovering Falcon 9 second stages and payload fairings, the nose cones that protect satellites and other spacecraft during launch. After its work was done on Saturday, for example, the Falcon 9 second stage apparently splashed down softly in the ocean southwest of Australia, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during Saturday’s press conference.

Hold up. The second stage soft-landed in the ocean??? Way to bury the lede, guys.

SpaceX sticks 11th rocket landing after launching first used Dragon capsule

Later this summer SpaceX will do their first Falcon 9 heavy launch, and they are apparently planning to *try* to recover the second stage, though they are apparently not very confident of success. But eventually they’ll get it, and then they’ll have a reusable first stage, reusable second stage and mostly reusable payload.

I’ve been watching the rise of Kek & Kekistan for the last several months with what can best be described as “bemusement.” If you are unaware of Kek/Kekistan… first, where the hell have you been? Second, the easiest way to think of Kek it to think back to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. FSM and the Church of the FSM were created as satire, a way to poke creationists with a pointy stick. They use they same lame-brained arguments in favor of teaching “intelligent design” by introducing a wholly ridiculous pseudo-religion that is just as valid an explanation at the traditional “creationist” explanations.

Kek/Kekistan is the same sort of idea, but instead of aimed at creationism, it’s aimed at political correctness and current Leftist extremism. The idea seemed to have arisen after it was pointed out that online trolls -specifically “sh*tposters” who tend to go after social justice warriors – qualify as an ethnic group under British law. What seems to typify Kekistanis is a willingness, nay, a gleeful enthusiasm, to poke the PC talking point of the day, to take the big scary moral panic and wear it like a party hat. The biggest symbol of this is Pepe The Frog. Originally a conventional cartoon character, it was turned into a meme For All Purposes. But since it was *also* sometimes used by members of the alt-Right, many on the far left freaked directly out and declared that Pepe was a symbol of white supremacy/nationalism. If the Left had ignored it, Pepe would have faded away. But they couldn’t let it go, so the alt-Right took it and ran with it. And now Pepe has gone through an apotheosis, turning into Kek (a frog-headed Egyptian god and symbol of the Kekistanis). This is a defining feature of the Kekistanis; the thing you freak out about the most is the thing they’re going to proudly wave as a banner. Call them Nazis and they will start waving swastikas around. Scream at them that they’re racist, and you’ll be bombarded with a million racist memes. The flag of Kekistan is now a green, modified version of a Nazi-era German military flag. The motive isn’t, I think, to actually be racist, but to irritate the hell out of the people who too easily toss such accusations about. The moment you see something and say “that’s not funny,” they’ll take it as a challenge. Too soon for Hitler jokes? Guess what’s coming.

If nothing else, Kekistan is a stellar example of basic human nature. The left demands that certain ideas, thoughts, images and symbols be never allowed. They demand that identity politics be held up as inviolable and divine. And the Kekistanis, being human, respond to such demands as the best of all humans do… with an upraised middle finger. For decades the PC brigade has used beratement and browbeating to bully people into not speaking up, and this sort of thing – and the election of the idiot buffoon Trump – is the natural response. And at least unlike the anti-Trumpers, the Kekistanis are generally funny and non-violent.

On my recent trip to the USAF Museum in Dayton, somewhere along the line I stopped and had a Kek spotting out in the wild:

The video below is a satire of the sort of thing MSNBC would put out about Kekistan. And it takes a good long while to be obvious that it’s *not* straight outta MSNBC.

Insofar as there is an ideology, it seems to be something that was virtually inevitable. For my entire adult life I’ve seen the PC fascists trying to control actions, thought and speech; the lefties should be damned grateful that the result seems to be this satirical response rather than a boot to the head.

Here’s a description of the Kekistanis from the guy who essentially created ’em, YouTuber Sargon of Akkad: