Fun times must be brewin’ over at the Clinton Election Politburo…
Trump is up by 0.2%.
Trump got real close to Clinton twice before, but only for very brief moments. Should be interesting to see if this lasts. If it lasts and is meaningful…
In related news…
… former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is polling at 10 percent.
Run, Bernie! Run!
Could be real interesting this go-round.
As much as I despise the very idea of “hate crime laws” since they set some people up as being more important than other (just about the most un-American thing I can think of, next to anti-blasphemy laws and soccer), I can’t help but get a chuckle out of this:
Targeting cops was *already* the sort of thing that got you extra time in the pokey, but now there’ll be even more plus extra fines.
Two CAD models in progress which will be 3D printed to form the basis of resin kits:
The article mentions that a desalination plant near Santa Barbara can be brought online with the expenditure of buckets of cash… and that the plant has been sitting there, idle, for 25 years.
Apparently, it was built during a drought, and about the moment it came online the drought ended, so they stopped running the plant. But the thing that gets me: during all the time that California supposedly hasn’t needed the water, California has been draining the Colorado river dry. Which leads to *this* news story:
Yeah, desalination is expensive. But then again, so are social programs and prisons and sanctuary cities. So I have no sympathy for a state that is rich as hell, blows it’s money on silly nonsense and ignores the things it needs to do. If California would build a hundred desal plants along the cast, each with its own nuclear powerplant, much of Californias water problem could be dealt with during droughts. And when the droughts end, the nuclear powerplants would power the state.
Something California doesn’t seem to understand is that there are *other* states that rely on the Colorado River… states that, unlike California, don’t have a vast ocean coastline to fall back on. I wonder about the possibility of states like Nevada and Arizona suing the bejeezus out of California, suing them for, say, a trillion dollars. *That* might inspire the California state government to finally shake off the scourge of Greenpeace and the like and doing what needs to be done to actually protect the environment.
I really want to think that the next Star Trek movie will be good, but I dunno. I guess I’ll find out in July. Anyway, here’s the latest trailer where we see, once again, the starship USS Enterprise getting destroyed:
Several very brief shots near the end show another ship that looks a lot like the NX-01 Enterprise from the Star Trek: Enterprise series, but reportedly it’s actually this ship, the USS Franklin:
It seems the Enterprise gets trashed, the surviving crew lands on an alien world covered in wrecked ships, and they just happen to find what I presume is an old Federation vessel just lying around on the surface. Scotty wipes down a few bits with WD-40, McCoy kicks an instrument panel and the thing coughs back to life.
So, an Egyptian journalist goes to Israel to see what the place is like. Is he treated the way the Arab press (and much of the western press) says Arabs are treated in Israel? is Israel the land of apartheid it’s promised to be? Was he whipped through the streets by bloodthirsty Jews? Let’s find out:
… I gotta wear augmented reality shades.
Anyone who has read Brin’s “Existence” (or a whole bunch of other sci-fi written since the 80’s) will recognize the world depicted here in “Hyper-Reality.” It looks… awful.
The trick is going to be how to deal with the overload. The internet has become swamped with ads and spam and malware; a highly interconnected augmented reality world will as well. The obvious answer will be the equivalents of adblockers and anti-spam/malware programs, but those lead to bloat and programs running slower and slower. The other answer will be to just take the glasses off/turn the implants off. But anyone who has seen a teenager glued to their phone knows that people who grow up with this sort of thing will become dependent upon it. So… dunno. The occasional random EMP burst, maybe?
What happens when you institute socialism on a national basis? Stuff like this:
“Life here has become a misery. You walk around always stressed, always scared, and lynching offers a collective catharsis,” Violence Observatory director Roberto Briceno-Leon said. “You can’t do anything about the lines or inflation, but for one moment, at least, the mob feels like it’s making a difference.”
Feel the Bern!
An article describing a little-known Austro-Hungarian submachinegun from 1915:
It’s an odd one… with a water-cooled barrel and the choice of either box or drum magazine. But the drum was pretty bizarre… it didn’t affix directly to the gun, but via a flexible chute. Now, if the chute was *really* long, like three feet, then the gunner could carry the ammo on his back. But it was only a few inches long, which would seem to make the thing pretty cumbersome and limiting.
Giggity!