Uncategorized – Page 8 – The Unwanted Blog

School’s Out Forever

Mar 092009

Is there *any* collection of photos of Detroit that won’t make you weep when you realize that the same idiotarianism that did that damage is now in charge of the entire US federal government?

http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/schools-out-forever.php

This is both truly awesome and truly sad. It looks like something out of some abandoned former Soviet industrial town.

But without a doubt, my favorite bit has to be this:

The report in the student’s own handwriting says: “This is what I was at my locker and the 8th Grade Hall and so she came up to me and said you said you ain’t like me I said if I did what you gonna do about it then she hit me…”

Awesome.

There comes a time when the decision has to be made: “Do we try to fix this building… or do we burn it to the ground and start fresh?” That decision came to New Orleans (and was decided incorrectly, IMO), and it looks about time to do so in Detroit. Detroit, and much of Michigan, is based on the auto industry. Well, that train has sailed. The Big Three automakers are going to have to either completely rebuild their own businesses, or fold up. Neither of these options bodes well for Detroit; for these companies to re-organize successfully, they’d be well advised to pull up stakes and move somewhere safer and with less corruption (ahemUAWahem).

Obama to Seek New Assault Weapons Ban

blather, dumbassery, Obamazombies, politics, Uncategorized, weapons 2 Responses »

Feb 262009

This is hardly surprising, but it’s still sad. Sad to see that the moron we stupidly elected to the highest office in the land surrounds himself with other morons, such as this jackass:

From ABC News:

The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

“As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder told reporters.

The obama administration looks like it’s trying to set off a civil war or a mass exodus of seceding states. With the biggest power-grab and pick-pocketing the American taxpayers have ever seen now law, there is an increasing grumble to bail out of the US. At the small end there’s the “Tea Party” movement; up to the “Sovereignty Movement,” and right up to outright secession (note that in that last link, the writer assumes that secession is only discussed by “extremists;” when what seems more likely is that the writer merely assumes that anyone who dares to discuss the topic is by definition an extremist).

States seceding from the US would, at least in the short term, be an unmitigated disaster. While the last time this happened bloodshed was avoided until the South decided to militarily attack the US Federal Government, if states split from the US today I am not entirely convinced that the US government would be as hesitant to spill blood. And if one state secedes from the Union successfully, the rest of the US will likely fall apart to some degree sooner or later. A Balkanized US is right out of the worst genres of apocolyptic fiction.

On a smaller scale, secession could be a fantastically useful thing. For example: Illinois would benefit no end if it would secede from Chicago. Let Cook County, with it’s ridiculous laws and fantastically corrupt politicians, go their own way. In California there was the “Bay Area Nation” idea, where San Francisco and surroundings would split off to form their own hippie utopia. Such a small nation would obviously be a great advantage… the die-hard socialists and communists would have a place to flock to (thus freeing up space “back home” for people who aren’t friggen’ morons), and the US would have yet another blatant example of why collectivism is a dumbass economic system when the Bay Area Nation fails even more utterly than Cuba has. Plus,the US would have a place to empty its jails into.

But what’s going on today is much more widespread. I heard similar rumblings during the Clinton administration… but those rumblings took years to get up to speed, and I don’t recall them being as loud at their worst *then* as they are *now,* only a month into the obama regime’s reign. As “Atlas Shrugged” daily transitions from a bizarre fantasy novel into a disturbingly accurate look at the government, the chances of obama pushing things too damned far and spurring a Strike just look more and more likely. Setting up a blatant socialist state and grabbing the guns is just asking for trouble.

Obama’s Little Blue Book… Part Deux

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Feb 182009

As a followup to this posting: while I’m still uncertain as to whether the “Pocket Obama” Little Blue Book is the real deal, I can confirm that THIS little blue book is for real. Saw a stack of ’em for sale at the Ogden Costco today. And even though Costco had marked the price down to $6.59 from Penguin Books price of $15.00, it seems I still wasn’t quite able to afford it. It was either that, or the five dollar used DVD of the old serial “Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.” I bought the one that I knew was more important and which had the best thinking and ideas behind it.

Penguin Books certainly seemed to stamp this book out in one hell of a hurry. And to fluff up the pagecount, they added filler, Lincoln’s two innaugural addresses, the Gettysburg address and Ralph Emmersons “Self Reliance.” I’m guessing that “Das Capital” wasn’t available.

Bear Lake

blather, photography, Uncategorized, Utah 3 Responses »

Feb 162009

Fianlly made it up to Bear Lake today. Took a few panoramas on the way up:

And a few non-panoramas:

There was an incredible display of iridescent clouds, which were as impossible to get decent photos of as they usually are.

Beak Lake from the scenic overview:

It was not the best day for photography of Bear Lake. The sky was a bit hazy, and the lake is fairly well iced over; the result is a bland lake. Bear Lake, on clear, ice-free days, is a most astonishing blue. Anyway, apart from a stop in Logan to get the earlier panoramas, I pretty much drove straight to Bear Lake, passing up many photo-worthy stops on the way. I lef tthe Bear Lake region around noon, meaning I still had several good hours for photography left. My plan was to drive back slowly, and take a buttload of pics on the way.

Yeah….

And then this happened:

Seems this car spun out on the slick road and slammed straight into the car just beyond it, head-on. I got on the scene within a minute or two of it happening. There were no truly serious injuries… but the driver of the brown car was in a *lot* of pain. Once I saw that her foot was attached to her ankle at a truly unique angle (roll axis +60 degrees), I could see why. I started clearing out room in my econobox to pack her and her kid into it to drive ’em down the road to Logan, but those of us chuckleheads on the scene decided that since the injury was not immediately obvious to be life threatening, best thing would be to leave her to the pros. Took a fair while for the authorities to get on scene… we were well up in the mountains with no cell phone service, so a few early responders took off down the road to contact 911 before I got there. I spent half an hour or so freezing my harbls off a few hundred yards down the road, by a blind bend, trying to slow down oncoming traffic (with variable success).

When the authorities did eventually show up, they arrived in force: a forest ranger (first one on scene) , two state troopermobiles, a paramedic truck, a fire truck, an ambulance and a second very large paramedicmobile.

By the time I left the scene, the daylight was fading fast, so I didn’t get much done in the way of photography.

Snowmobiles are exceedingly popular in some places, and they leave faint trails. They are subtle, but if you know where and how to look for them, you can find them…

And just as I pulled into Logan proper, the two State Troopermobiles caught up with me…. and they were escorting the towtruck which was hauling the car that got mashed:

So, all in all a bit of a bust of a day. But at least it was better than it was for others.

Yeah. How did I see this coming…

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Feb 142009

From the website of unindicted co-conspirator Islamist organization “Council on American-Islamic Relations:”

Muzzammil Hassan receives award from CAIR-PA Chairman Iftekhar Hussain and CAIR National Chairman Parvez Ahmed

This was at the CAIR-PA First Annual Banquet in 2007. Expect the website to be slightly altered in the near future. The website does not seem to give an indication as to just what the award was, or was for. Perhaps “2007 Award for Greatest Advances in the Art of Takeyya.” Perhaps for a 12-part documentary series on “Honor Killings: Should You Use an Axe,a Sword or a Carving Knife? We Examine The Options.”

Something “Truthers” would rather you didn’t see

blather, politics, science, Uncategorized 5 Responses »

Feb 112009

Not that it’ll do any damned good, of course, but keep these images on tap next time you’re accosted by a “Truther.”

One of the “arguements” used by these sad, deluded loons (or outright charlatans) is that the World Trade Center building collapses on 9-11 had to be the result of thermite charges planted inside the buildings in advance, because “fire doesn’t melt steel” and similar rubbish. Well, granted. Burning paper and plastic are unlikely to cause steel to liquify. But consider the photos below of the Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church in Jacksonville, FL. The church went up in flames back in 2007. The Church was a relatively standard steel-frame “warehouse” sort of structure…. almost certainly not filled with napalm, hydrogen, thermite or liquid oxygen. Just the usual wooden pews, tapestries, wood panelling, that sort of thing. See photos of the fire HERE.

The end result of the fire was that the steel structure was left standing, but pretty much everything else was burned away. Take a good look at the aftermath photos, such as HERE and HERE. You know what I see? I see a steel structure, lightly loaded (the beams forming the roof only had to support the roof, obviously, not 20 stories of skyscraper above), and exposed to a relatively brief fire… and sagging under their own weight. No, the steel didn’t melt. But it sure as hell softened. It softened enough that the weight of nothing more than the steel beam caused that steel beam to sag significantly.

Now, imagine what would have happened to this structure had it been fed with jet fuel and had a million pounds of skyscrap on top of it. Does fire need to melt steel for a building to collapse… especially if that building had just been structurally damaged by a jetliner?

Next time you run into a pack of these genetic defectives, mock them mercilessly. If you make them cry, you win extra points (but only if they’re “male,” as making girls cry is dishonorable).

Obama calls for budget cuts

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Jan 312009

Well, whoopadeedoo! Obama wants a 10% cut in budget proposals for 2010. Now, what part of the FedGuv budget could he want these cuts in? Could it be Social Security, which is now nearly a quarter of the budget? Could it be some of the failed “Great Society” programs which together consume more than a third of the budget? Perhaps the Department of Education, which has done more to damage the cause of educating Americas children than anything else in history?

Let’s see…

Defense Official: Obama Calling for Defense Budget Cuts

Oh, of course.

The Obama administration has asked the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon’s budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent — about $55 billion — a senior U.S. defense official tells FOX News.

Last year’s defense budget was $512 billion. Service chiefs and planners will be spending the weekend “burning the midnight oil” looking at ways to cut the budget — looking especially at weapons programs, the defense official said.

Let me guess. Missile defense? F-22? F-35?

So, in summary:

The future we could have had

blather, politics, religion, science, Uncategorized No Responses »

Jan 242009

As has been long known, the scientific method has been around for longer than the term “scientific method.”

Aristarchus of Samos worked out the heliocentricity of the solar system.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the diameter of the Earth to remarkable accuracy.

The Antikythera mechanism was built around 100 BC, and demonstrated high levels of knowledge both of astronomy and mechanics… knowledge that would not be regained until the time of da Vinci.

Heron of Alexandria invented many of the principles of hydraulics – and even jet propulsion – still in use today.

And then there’s this:
A Prayer for Archimedes

An intensive research effort over the last nine years has led to the decoding of much of the almost-obliterated Greek text. The results were more revolutionary than anyone had expected. The researchers have discovered that Archimedes was working out principles that, centuries later, would form the heart of calculus and that he had a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of infinity than anyone had realized.

…

Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes’ work has revealed “a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics.”

In The Method, Archimedes was working out a way to compute the areas and volumes of objects with curved surfaces, which was also one of the problems that motivated Newton and Leibniz. Ancient mathematicians had long struggled to “square the circle” by calculating its exact area. That problem turned out to be impossible using only a straightedge and compass, the only tools the ancient Greeks allowed themselves. Nevertheless, Archimedes worked out ways of computing the areas of many other curved regions.

So, Archimedes had worked out the basics of calculus more than 2,000 years ago. As much as I despised calculus in college, and in the years since have found precisely no use for it, it’s nevertheless tragically true that calculus is a requirement for much of the modern world. The mathematics used to understand and utilize the forces of nature would be virtually impossible without calculus. So, if there was this spur to science so long ago, what the hell happened?

Mysticism, that’s what frakin’ happened.

What happened to make Archimedes’ original work vanish for centuries is unclear… it just disappeared. But some hint of the disdain with which learning about the natural world was held can be found in the description of the history of the actual book:

Archimedes wrote his manuscript on a papyrus scroll 2,200 years ago. At an unknown later time, someone copied the text from papyrus to animal-skin parchment. Then, 700 years ago, a monk needed parchment for a new prayer book. He pulled the copy of Archimedes’ book off the shelf, cut the pages in half, rotated them 90 degrees, and scraped the surface to remove the ink, creating a palimpsest—fresh writing material made by clearing away older text. Then he wrote his prayers on the nearly-clean pages.

With modern science, we can recover some of what was lost. But the bulk of what has been lost will never be recovered. Had the traditions of inquiry that the Greek philospher-scientists began not died out due to the power of the mystics – the Pythagoreans, the Christians and the Muslims in particular – Odin only knows where we would be today. Coupling Herons understanding of steam power with the unknown Antikythera mechanism builders knowledge of mechanics, it is not impossible that practical steam engines could have been built 1900 years ago. Moving the Industrial Revolution up by 1500 years could mean that today, the big political debate would be whether or not to fund the Constellation mission to the Andromeda Galaxy.

Lockheed CL-788 SST

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Dec 282008

An early ’60’s (1962-63 timeframe) design for a variable geometry SST based on the NASA SCAT-16 geometry (the drawing appears to be in error in describing it as SCAT-15, which was a substantially different geometry). See HERE for Convairs view of an SST based on the SCAT-16 geometry.

The work was done for NASA. Requirements included a range of 3,200 miles, 125 passengers and a cruise speed of Mach 3.0.

A Very Cthulhu Christmas

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Dec 132008

Some scrapings off of YouTube. I’d pay real money to see a bunch of carollers actually go door-to-door trotting out these hoary old chestnuts…
Carol of the Old Ones

Awake Ye Scary Great Old Ones

I saw mommy kissing Yog-Sothoth

Away in a madhouse

Freddy the red brained Mi-Go

OH CTHULHU !!

It’s beginning to look a lot like fish-men

If I were a Deep One (this one is *really* good)

The Shoggoth song

The Cultist Song

Have yourselves a scary little Solstice

Great Old Ones Are Coming To Town

Silent Night, Blasphemous Night