Oh, my, yes indeedy. I’ll take three.
It helps that this suppressed semi-autoshotgun is being operated by a feller with an *extremely* fast trigger finger. With a thirty-round drum it also produced its own smoke cloud to hide behind.
Dec 082016
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Dec 082016
And it’s from here in Utah!
Judge dismisses Utah man’s lawsuit against Taylor Swift
The dumb thing isn’t that the lawsuit was dismissed, but that it existed in the first place. In short, Random Guy writes an unsolicited song for Taylor Swift, who is reportedly a singer. Swifts agents never gave her the song. I suspect that celebrities get a *lot* of unsolicited stuff, the bulk of it talentless crap; I’ve no reason to suspect that this was any different. So the songwriter decided to sue for emotional damage or some such nonsense. The judge wisely tossed the suit.
If you remember back to when I first brought up Trigglypuff, I mentioned the minor difficulty I had in that I don’t want to mock people based on their appearance or other physical issues, but in some cases the persons behavior opens them up to all manner of ridicule. Well, guess what. Here we are again. Watch the video in the link and you’ll see what I mean.
Dec 082016
Looks like *somebody* had a hell of a lot of fun making this:
Dec 082016
America’s first astronaut to orbit the Earth, dead at 95. He was the last of the Mercury Seven.
Not strictly relevant, but…
Dec 072016
This cartoon makes an important point:
As an American, I’m often confronted with people who demand that if I take any pride in American developments such as the space program or defeating Communism I must also take responsibility for things like slavery and the mistreatment of the Indians. On a simplistic level… sure, I suppose. But the distinction I make: I refuse to feel shame or pride for things that NO LONGER EXIST. The space program? Still exists. Slavery? A century and half gone. Nuclear power? Still exists (despite the best efforts of the anti-nuke activists). Jim Crow? Generations gone. First and Second Amendment? Still in force. Trail of Tears? Long over.
There are wrongs that still exist. The War on Some Drugs, for example. The Great Society programs that have contributed to the collapse of the family structure and the permanence of poverty. Idiotic rules and regulations on *everything,* political correctness and speech codes, the lack of forward progress on nuclear power, astrologers, televangelists, dubstep. They still exist, so we should own them. But demanding that people alive *now* take responsibility for things that happened and *ended* long before they were born is just stupid and wrong.
Dec 072016
From the NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, December, 1961: An illustration of the forthcoming Saturn C-5 S-IC stage. This appears to be *mostly* as the S-IC would be built, but there are some detectable differences. Missing are the four small (and apparently superfluous) stabilizing fins that appeared on the outboard engine fairings. And located at the front are the eight retro rockets that would end up inside the aforementioned engine fairings.
This illustration came via EBay. The full-resolution scan (all 15+ megabytes of it) is available in the 2016-12 Dropbox folder for APR patrons. If you’d like to gain access to this and two years worth of high-rez aerospace goodies like this, as well as help out the effort to procure and preserve aerospace goodies like this, please consider joining the APR Patreon.
Dec 062016
It’s difficult to read stuff like this and not conclude that a lot of lefties have lost their damned minds:
Trump’s election stole my desire to look for a partner
Poe’s Law comes into force here as well. It *could* be that the author is a right-winger cranking out fictional BS, simulating the stereotypical loonie leftie. And it could be that this is just an annoyed leftie, pretending to more crazy than she actually feels.
However it works out, it does point out a bug in the human operating system that I think is one of the more dangerous flaws we have: the desire to be seen as a victim.
We see it in several religions: the idea of the “martyr” as the ultimate in virtue. People getting upset about a mythical “war on Christmas” because some bored barista said “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas.” Or believing that there’s a “war on Christians” because they are not granted a special position in government-funded organizations like public schools or city council meetings. Or in one particular Religion Of Peace that thinks that it is in a House of War, that the whole world wants to destroy them because they have a monopoly on The Truth.
And of course we see it in the political realm, where a whole lot of people seem to think that armies of Evil Right Wingers are going to come and lock up Teh Gheys or force women into staying home barefoot and pregnant, or that there is a genocidal war by cops against black men. We see it in the faked “hate crimes,” where a people vandalize their own stuff in order to get… what? Sympathy? Funding in a GoFundMe account? Five minutes of fame, even if much of it is ridicule? And even the ridicule plays into the sense of persecution… which is what far too many people seem to thrive on. “I’m persecuted, therefore I’m Special and Important and my opinions carry special importance, and my failures aren’t really *my* failures, but signs of just how important I am that The Man has to put me down.”
Bah.
All I can say about the author of the piece above is that she seems… a little excitable. She mentions that she was dating someone when the election happened and that she halted the process when her candidate didn’t win.I imagine the feller was a little confuzzled about what just happened. But with any luck, that guy will read this essay and realize “Wow, did I ever dodge a bullet here.” And then he will give a little smile of relief like Billy/William/Man In Black/Gunman/Best Damn Character On TV here did in the season finale of “Westworld.”
Sadly, while Westworld has been picked up for a second season, it apparently won’t air until 2018. Feh. This is an outrage!
Dec 062016
Dec 052016
In Britain, trespassing doesn’t seem to be a crime. Heck, it seems that trespassing is specifically *legal,* with “roamers” being given extraordinary protections under the law while they are clambering around on property that is not their own. Witness:
Cow attack farmer given suspended sentence over walker death
In short: someone decided to go wandering around on a farmers property, property that had cows on it. You know, those big-ass thousand-pound bundles of muscles, anger and dumb. This someone took his dog with him… you know, those yappy little bundles of energy that cows Just Don’t Like. In the end, the cows stomp the dude to death.
So how does the British legal system respond? Not by admonishing the walkers family for having raised a dumbass, too stupid to recognize that other people property is, you know, not his, and too stupid to avoid animals that *individually* could easily kill him – and which come in herds. Instead they punish the farmer for not having somehow made his farm idjitproof.
Dec 052016
The first full trailer for “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” is out. And, sure, it looks pretty good… until near the end when Drax opens up. And then it turns it up to 11.