Oct 202022
 

Stacey Abrams, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate trying again, has an interesting solution to the economic crisis: kill the children. They cost money, you see. If you didn’t have your kids, you could better afford gas and food and rent and such. Says so at about 4:23:

 

 

This is the person that the knavish dullards behind “Star Trek Discovery” chose to portray as the President of Earth. Ironic given that she is basically advocating for human – or at least Western – extinction. It seems more likely to me by far that she is working for outside forces – whether China, Klingons or the Chaos Gods – to depopulate at least the United States, to clear it out with minimal fuss so it can be colonized by someone else.

 

 

 Posted by at 7:33 pm
Oct 202022
 

So some European protestors – never mind what they’re protesting or why, because it hardly matters – decided that the thing to do was glue themselves to the floor of a VW dealership in Germany. The dealerships response? Close the doors, turn off the lights, turn off the furnace.

That’s a good response. I imagine their maintenance and cleaning staff will be able to clean up the inevitable yellow and brown stains and freshen the air. Keep the doors locked. Don’t let anyone in to provide the protestors food or drink or solvents; let them peel themselves up and seek their own medical attention.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 6:05 pm
Oct 202022
 

Seems unlikely, but…

Deranged Putin has ALREADY tried to detonate nuclear bomb but was scuppered in last-minute ‘sabotage’, insider claims

The article seems distinctly lean on actual details and evidence. Claim is made that *two* attempts to test nuclear weapons – including an underwater test in the Barents Sea –  were aborted due to emergencies of some kind, actually caused by people somewhere in the chain realizing that the whole idea was nuts. How the quoted “expert” would know this is unclear.

I can see Putin deciding to set off nukes as a show of force. I can see his own people sabotaging the effort, because they don’t want their families to be evaporated. But while such events are plausible, I’d need evidence before I believed they actually happened. And the thing is, incidents like this will almost certainly never have adequate evidence… until an actual bomb actually goes off.

In any event, I’m glad that some time back I got me a functional radiation detector.

 Posted by at 12:59 pm
Oct 182022
 

Ukrainian police use AK-47s (or maybe AK-74s, I can’t tell) to try to take out Russian anti-civilian buzz bombs. The *claim* is that they shot one down, but that’s hard to determine form the footage… it could well be that the thing just crashed where it did because that’s where it was aimed. They really need to get Tom Selleck on the case.

The Ukrainians, as unlucky as they’ve been, are lucky that they didn’t defund the police and replace them with social workers. I’m not sure that clipboards and unearned moral smugness would de-escalate an incoming raid of kamikaze drones.

 Posted by at 8:39 pm
Oct 182022
 

BU researchers create hybrid COVID virus, causing friction with the government

The “new” version is deadlier (at least to mice). Now, I can see value in such work… create a nasty variant so you can *cure* or create a vaccine against said nasty variant before it pops up naturally or is created and weaponized by an antagonistic nation. Still: you might wanna kinda be careful about that sort of thing. If for no other reason than it makes for bad PR. Numerous news stories point out that this hybrid killed 80% of the mice infected with it. That’s bad. Fewer news stories point out that the original natural virus killed 100% of the mice infected with it. So it’s the kind of story that can be turned scary by dropping a bit of context. And science stories *always* lose context, because journalists seem to be a rather dim bunch, resistant to understanding the subjects they report on. So if you are a scientist working on something as touchy as this… maybe take a moment to reflect “Is this the sort of thing I should be doing, and if so, maybe I should have a really clear layman-level explanation ready to go.”

 

 Posted by at 12:20 am
Oct 182022
 

Russian losses are expanding beyond Ukraine…

13 dead as Russian warplane crashes into apartment building near Ukraine border

Russian news agencies have reported that at least 13 people died when a warplane crashed on Monday into a residential area in the Russian port city of Yeysk after suffering engine failure.

Gotta admit, this is a hell  of a shot (I assume it’s from some sort of security camera):

That pilot who saved himself and doomed an apartment building has some splainin’ to do.

The Russians have received 140 SU-34s, and have apparently lost 14 of them so far in the war. Maybe they shouldn’t go tossing them all willy-nilly into apartment blocks.

 Posted by at 12:08 am
Oct 162022
 

So “Halloween Ends” opened this weekend. On a budget of $20 million, it has made an estimated $41.25 million domestically in the opening weekend, pushing itself to profitability in a handful of days.

The low budget –  $17 million – horror movie “Smile” has, in just a bit over two weeks, made $71.2 million, making it a rampaging success.

That’s nice. How is this newsworthy? Compare that performance to “The Woman King.” On a budget of $50 million, after a month it has made $59.7 million domestically. D’oh.

It seems the strategies of glorifying the actual villains while accusing the potential customers of being bad people didn’t work so great.

Snerk.

One of these days Hollywood types *might* figure out that hating the audience is not a good plan. In the mean time… keep hemorrhaging dollars, dorks.

 Posted by at 5:34 pm
Oct 162022
 

Last night both the Unwanted Blog *and* the APR Blog got borked. *Again.* This time, though, I had the backup blog running so I didn’t stress about it too much.

Gah.

And then it magically came back to functionality… but this sort of thing remains *damned* annoying.

 Posted by at 11:36 am