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Looks like an exciting day for CNN…

 news  5 Responses »
Jun 232016
 

First up, another mass shooting in a movie theater. This time in Germany; no real details yet apart from “25 injured.” If 25 were injured and nobody’s dead, that’d be kinda hard to explain unless the shooter was armed with a BB gun. CNN is unsure if any of the injured were actually shot, though… it *might* be that the shooter just sprayed into the ceiling, the crowd panicked and 25 people were trampled.

Second: the Freddie Gray van driver found not guilty on all counts. oh, boy! Mayhem incoming!

Third: the Supreme Court has ruled that racist admissions policies are just awesome, so long as they are the politically correct racist policies.

And coming up later: British voters are deciding whether or not to remain a client state of Brussels.

Now all they need is for a jetliner to vanish and CNN’s collective head will explode

 Posted by at 9:46 am

I wander off for a few hours…

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, Obamazombies, politics, weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  34 Responses »
Jun 232016
 

So pretty much all day today I’ve been dealing with getting a book assembled. It’s of unusual format (11 inch-high pages about 40 inches long) and of only 27 pages length, but it cost enough to have printed that I only got ten. And so today I ran my butt 40 miles down the road to the print shop to get it (and a few other things that were printed), and once I got home I’ve spent the rest of the day dealing with these project. After many hours futzing around, I have a grand total of one copy of the book all assembled.

WP_20160622_002

Anyway, I was busy all day today. While driving home I heard something on the radio that made me think someone was playing a little joke, and then forgot all about it. So when I finally finished that first book, I turned on CNN to find that the House Democrats have lost their tiny little minds and have been having a childish temper tantrum all day. If you’ve somehow failed to hear, they’ve been having a “sit in” in the House preventing work from going forward because they lost votes on their initial ideas about restricting the civil liberties of American citizens without due process. Take, for example, Senator Diane Feinstein explaining that it is up to Americans to prove their innocence, a complete reversal of more than 200 years of American jurisprudence. She then goes on to say that that’s just the first step; next comes banning the average civilian firearm.

And the floor of the House looks like it has been invaded by an army of Trigglypuffs, shouting their inane slogans: “Why do you want to let terrorists buy a gun?” “No bill, no breaks!” And other such nonsense, like a bunch of idiot campus causehead protestors. At the same time they’re yapping about wanting a Real Debate, they’re shouting down anyone with an opposing view, like Louis Gohmert pointing out that the Orlando terrorist attack was, in fact, a terrorist attack:

Bah.

fark_EwSDzdYFxmyHYTyGgcrE8FAiQ8E

At left, Rep. John Lewis. He made his name in the 1960’s working for civil rights; now he’s working to curtail civil rights.

The reason I turned on CNN in the first place was to see the Libertarian town hall in hopes that maybe, just maybe, the Libertarians might give me hope this time around. But it was pre-empted by coverage of the Democrats House whine-in. It’s very unlikely, but just barely possible enough that maybe there was some thought in advance to scheduling this childish display in order to wipe out one of the few opportunities the Libertarians have of reaching the public.

And apparently Nancy Pelosi is sending out fundraising emails. Even the talking heads on CNN generally agreed that this was “gauche;” the Dems claim they’re doing this to protect families and children and puppies and baby unicorns, but it’s really just a craven and monumentally cynical publicity and fundraising stunt.

Even Raedthinn can’t stand these idjits, and he doesn’t even watch CNN.

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 Posted by at 12:06 am

“Worst Room:” Universe 25, human-sized

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Jun 222016
 

Everyone who reads this blog with any regularity should be aware by now of “Universe 25,” an experiment carried out more than 40 years ago to create a “utopia” for lab mice that quickly turned into a pretty good approximation of hell. In short, the mice were provided every thign they needed… food, water, clean air, other mice for socializign with. A *lot* of mice. A *vast* number of mice. The mouse population exploded, since mice do what they do; but after a while the population crashed. Not because they all starved or caught some bacterial or viral infection; they simply turned into weeny hipster mice, lost all enthusiasm and stopped breeding. It’s a cautionary tale about not only overpopulation and overcrowding but also welfare states. But that sort of thing couldn’t happen to humans, right?

A day or two back a comment in another post linked to a website “The Worst Room.” This site collects Craigslist and other listings for apartments for rent, Air BNB, that sort of thing, in places like New York City and London. While it doesn’t seem to have been updated since December (maybe 2014), there are a number of listings shown that are worth looking at if for no other reason than to feel relieved that you don’t live in that sort of urban mouse-hole. Or if you *do,* it’s time to realize there’s a better way. There are “rooms” listed that are the size of a closet and cost more than my mortgage.

Next time you see some urban fanboy extolling the virtues of dense-pak living and urban efficiencies and whatnot, just remember: this is how they’re expecting you to live in *their* dreamworld.

 Posted by at 4:36 pm

Pluto: liquid water ocean today?

 awesomeness, news, science  1 Response »
Jun 222016
 

Seems Yuggoth might have a Deep One colony. Maybe under Cthulhu Regio?

Pluto’s Subsurface Ocean May Likely Exist Today

“Our model shows that recent geological activity on Pluto can be driven just from phase changes in the ice – no tides or exotic materials or unusual processes are required.  If Pluto’s most recent tectonic episode is extensional, that means that Pluto may have an ocean at present.  This lends support to the idea that oceans may be common among large Kuiper Belt objects, just as they are common among the satellites of the outer planets,” said Barr, who helped formulate the numerical model and interpret the results.

Pluto wouldn’t have the sort of tidal forces that a place like Europa has, nor solar energy bombardment on the level of a place like Earth. So you wouldn’t think there’d be the chance for liquid water. But the possibility of a warm Plutonian core exists, driven by radioactive decay and residual heat from formation (though not *much* of a chance, given how small the place is, not a whole lot bigger than Luna). This new study suggests that the visible surface features aren’t those that would be expected if the planetary water ocean was wholly frozen, but instead resembled the features to be expected of a thick layer of water ice atop a still-liquid ocean. The difference is Ice-II: if you take regular ice (“Ice-I”) and subject it to Pluto-level cryogenic cold *and* put it under the sort of pressure it would experience under miles of ice, it undergoes a crystalline structural change into a  25% denser form, something like how graphite turns to diamond under pressure. If the deeply buried ice were to transform like that, the surface features would reflect the fact that the deep subsurface was contracting.

 Posted by at 3:37 pm

This here is what you call an “omen”

 AARRRGH, cats, critters, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  2 Responses »
Jun 222016
 

Brazil Just Shot and Killed Its Own Olympic Mascot

Specifically, “Juma,” a 17-year-old endangered jaguar that was trotted out like a prop for a torch ceremony. When returned to its zoo, it escaped, wandered around for a bit, got shot with four tranquilizer darts, and when that didn’t knock it down they upgraded to “solider with a rifle.”

Tell me that this Olympics just looks like a barrel of fun:

Times like this I’m glad I don’t give a rats ass about sports, or otherwise the prospect of having to decide to wander on down to Zikaville to watch some games surrounded by a nation on the brink just might give me heartburn.

 Posted by at 8:02 am

Classy, classy television

 blather, humor, Meh., photography, Utah  2 Responses »
Jun 212016
 

Flipping through the channels, I stumbled across this listing. Oddly, it didn’t seem appealing.

WP_20160620_006

And because why not, here’s a crappy photo of the moon rising over the mountains earlier. Been here more than a dozen years and the rise of a full moon over the mountains remains a hell of a sight.

WP_20160620_010

 Posted by at 1:20 am

Irony

 blather, Crazy, Meh., politics  16 Responses »
Jun 202016
 

Now, this right here is some funny, funny stuff:

Are We in For a Dystopian Future of Endless Suburbs and Robot Cars? 

The author of the piece discusses the idea that the advent of self-driving cars will allow for the spread of suburbs, with people leaving dense city centers for spread-out suburbs. This sounds not unlikely to me. But where it gets funny is… well, right off the bat:

If you are exactly like me, you live in a dense urban environment and assume that dense urban environments are the way of the future, and suburbs are dark hellpits full of enormous PetSmart outlets and molly-soaked teens. … If you are exactly like me, you naturally expect that over time a larger and larger percentage of the population will move to dense urban areas, which are more efficient and more lively and more ecologically sound and which will be, with proper political leadership, more cost-effective…

No, dude. Not exactly like you. I’ve lived in the burbs, I’ve lived in the country, and I’ve spent time in the dense urban environment. While I certainly prefer the country to the burbs, I couldn’t get out of the city fast enough. And that’s just on a one-day *visit.*

Sure people are different. lots of people prefer to be in tightly packed peoplezoos like Chicago or New York. But the reasons typically given for why they prefer the cities generally strike me as being logically flawed (such as the notion that citylife is “greener” that non-citylife… how many acres of green growing stuff does the author have? I have 4.5 or so), or appeals to emotions that will only appeal to a certain percentage of the population. If your big thrill is to get coked up and party all night at a club, or to spend *vast* sums at restaurants, then, great, cities are for you. If your goal is to be able to see the Milky Way, to see wildlife, to actually look *outwards* rather than *inwards,* then cities really aren’t for you.

Something I inevitably see in these articles about how preferable cities are to anythign else is that public transportation, buses and trains, is just vastly better, cheaper, cleaner, more efficient than privately owned cars. If your world is just a few miles wide, from your small apartment to your small cubical to your clubs to your bars… then, yeah, being on a small track makes sense. But if your world is wider than that, then public transportation is less than useless. If I suddenly decide that I want to be 100 miles away in some random direction, simply because that’s what I want to do, what train or bus will take me there?

Plus: when the inevitable happens – a nuclear/biological/chemical attack, a Carrington event, an economic downturn, a public sector strike, a plague, etc. a self-contained arcology full of feminist studies majors and artisanal wine connoisseurs and man-bun aficionados doesn’t really seem the place to be. When New York City goes down, that place is going to eat itself… and then it will slowly spread outwards, turning the surrounding regions into a blasted wasteland.

 Posted by at 5:11 pm

[omitted] – UPDATED: Unredacted

 blather, Hmm..., news, politics, religion  7 Responses »
Jun 202016
 

The FBI has changed their mind and released an unredacted version of the brief transcript. The relevant bit is this:

Orlando Police Dispatcher (OD)
Omar Mateen (OM)

OD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
OM: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficent [Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [Arabic]. I wanna let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What’s your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.
OD: Ok, What’s your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him [Arabic], on behalf of the Islamic State.
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call.]

Now, was that so hard? What, is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi friggen’ Candyman or Voldemort? Say his name and he’ll getcha? No.

It’s interesting that we live in a time where those in power are afraid to say the name of our enemies. Was Reagan afraid to say “Communists?” Was FDR afraid to say “Nazis?” I think there is a disturbing amount of magical thinking on *both* sides of the issue… the right demanding that Obama and such say “radical Islamic terrorism” rather than more generic “terrorism,” and at the same time Obama and such virtually refusing to say it. Both sides seem to think that the word “Islam” has some sort of inherent power. But there is a definite difference between one side wanting to speak the truth twice as much as needed, and the other side not wanting to speak the truth at all.

 

Original post, earlier in the day:

The FBI has released edited transcripts of Omar Mateens calls to 9-11, made during his terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It has some unusual redactions.

——

ORLANDO—In order to provide an update on the progress of the investigation into the Pulse nightclub shooting, the FBI is releasing an excerpt from the timeline of events inside the Pulse nightclub during the early morning hours of Sunday, June 12, 2016. Out of respect for the victims of this horrific tragedy, law enforcement will not be releasing audio of the shooter’s 911 calls at this time, nor will law enforcement be releasing audio or transcripts of the calls made by victims at the Pulse nightclub during the incident. Furthermore, the name of the shooter and that of the person/group to whom he pledged allegiance are omitted.

The following is based on Orlando Police Department (OPD) radio communication (times are approximate):

  • 2:02 a.m.: OPD call transmitted multiple shots fired at Pulse nightclub.
  • 2:04 a.m.: Additional OPD officers arrived on scene.
  • 2:08 a.m.: Officers from various law enforcement agencies made entrance to Pulse and engaged the shooter.
  • 2:18 a.m.: OPD S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons & Tactics) initiated a full call-out.
  • 2:35 a.m.: Shooter contacted a 911 operator from inside Pulse. The call lasted approximately 50 seconds, the details of which are set out below:

Orlando Police Dispatcher (OD)
Shooter (OM)

OD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
OM: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [in Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [in Arabic]. I let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What’s your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to [omitted].
OD: Ok, What’s your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call.]

(Shortly thereafter, the shooter engaged in three conversations with OPD’s Crisis Negotiation Team.)

  • 2:48 a.m.: First crisis negotiation call occurred lasting approximately nine minutes.
  • 3:03 a.m.: Second crisis negotiation call occurred lasting approximately 16 minutes.
  • 3:24 a.m.: Third crisis negotiation call occurred lasting approximately three minutes.

In these calls, the shooter, who identified himself as an Islamic soldier, told the crisis negotiator that he was the person who pledged his allegiance to [omitted], and told the negotiator to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq and that is why he was “out here right now.” When the crisis negotiator asked the shooter what he had done, the shooter stated, “No, you already know what I did.” The shooter continued, stating, “There is some vehicle outside that has some bombs, just to let you know. You people are gonna get it, and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid.” Later in the call with the crisis negotiator, the shooter stated that he had a vest, and further described it as the kind they “used in France.” The shooter later stated, “In the next few days, you’re going to see more of this type of action going on.” The shooter hung up and multiple attempts to get in touch with him were unsuccessful.

  • 4:21 a.m.: OPD pulled an air conditioning unit out of a Pulse dressing room window for victims to evacuate.

(While the FBI will not be releasing transcripts of OPD communication with victims, significant information obtained from those victims allowed OPD to gain knowledge of the situation inside Pulse.)

  • 4:29 a.m.: As victims were being rescued, they told OPD the shooter said he was going to put four vests with bombs on victims within 15 minutes.

(An immediate search of the shooter’s vehicle on scene and inside Pulse ultimately revealed no vest or improvised explosive device.)

  • 5:02 a.m.: OPD SWAT and OCSO Hazardous Device Team began to breach wall with explosive charge and armored vehicle to make entry.
  • 5:14 a.m.: OPD radio communication stated that shots were fired.
  • 5:15 a.m.: OPD radio communication stated that OPD engaged the suspect and the suspect was reported down.

Based on OPD radio communications, there were no reports of shots being fired inside Pulse between the initial exchange of gunfire between responding officers and shooter, and the time of the final breach. During this time, the shooter communicated with an OPD 911 operator and an OPD crisis negotiator, and OPD radio communications reported that victims were being rescued.

The FBI urges the public to provide information about the shooter and any contact they may have had with him. Since the release of the FBI’s Seeking Information poster, the FBI has received thousands of tips. The FBI will investigate every tip.

To provide a tip, please call 1-800-CALL-FBI or visit tips.fbi.gov.

 

————

And there it is. Note the multiple incidents of “[omitted],” reportedly “Islamic State” or some variation. Why delete that? Before the transcripts were released, a lot of right-wing commentators and bloggers and such were claiming that the FBI was deleting all references to Islam from the transcripts for the usual politically correct reasons, but the transcript explicitly points out that Mateen called himself an “Islamic soldier.” Note that only the first call to 9-11 is transcribed in more-or-less full; the other conversations with the authorities are summarized.

“The name of the shooter and that of the person/group to whom he pledged allegiance are omitted.” This just strikes me as odd. I can’t really come up with a good reason why the FBI would do that. Magical thinking? If you invoke the name of ISIS, they’ll come flooding through the mirror like a bad horror movie demon?

 Posted by at 9:09 am

S-IC on the move

 awesomeness, history, rockets, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Jun 192016
 

There’re some neat photos here…

NASA’s Last Apollo Saturn V Rocket Is on Its Way to Mississippi Instead of the Moon

“Last Saturn V Rocket” in this context means “last unrestored S-IC Saturn V first stage.” It has been in storage at Michoud for 45 years, and will now be restored and put on display at the INFINITY Science Center. This booster was meant for Apollo 19.

Every time I see one of these I get a little bit more annoyed at Lyndon B Johnson who had production stopped in 1968. The Saturn V should have remained in production, with incremental improvements, into the early 1980s.

ಠ_ಠ

 Posted by at 12:32 pm
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