Now that we’re in what will surely be a dull news cycle, let’s all look back at that time we were all *sure* that the world was going to end in 2011:
Ah, good times…
Aug 042019
Jul 212019
How can a person know if their religion sucks? Well… if your religion opposes building a world-class telescope, then, yes. Your religion sucks.
It would be one thing if this mountaintop was being used for a casino or a WalMart warehouse or a garbage dump. But a telescope that will show the universe in unprecedented detail? A *good* religion would welcome such a thing.
Mauna Kea: Hawaii protesters delay giant telescope construction
And it seems that his time in the Delta Quadrant didn’t do our favorite Ensign any good…
Hawaii island Mayor Harry Kim gives praise to protesters blocking access to Mauna Kea
And the sickness has spread even as far as Utah:
Utahns gather in ‘sacred’ ghost town to support protest in Hawaii
There is, of course, a compromise: cancel the Mauna Kea telescope and build it on the Moon instead. Such an endeavor would of course cost a bucket of money, many billions of dollars. But there are many areas of US FedGuv spending that could have their funding slashed to fund the scope. During the period of time that say, some foreign aid (humanitarian, military, diplomatic, scientific, etc.) is zero-funded, simply tell the people to thank the Hawaiians for their opportunity to sacrifice for the greater good.
Another advantage of a Lunar relocation: you *can* build a casino next to it. Perhaps just a few miles away behind a hill to block direct impingement of the gigawatts of bright flashing lights. But by building the whole complex on the near side of the moon, those Mauna Kea protestors can squat in ignorance atop their mountain and look up into the night sky and see the bright lights of New Vegas shining down on them from 240,000 miles away, and they can know that they share in none of either the money being made or the knowledge being learned.
Jul 112019
Norse Mythology? Zack Snyder? Anime? Netflix? Sure, Why Not?
Not a whole lot of detail here, but the story is that Netflix will in a few years have an anime-style show set in the “world of Norse mythology.” That *could* be incredibly awesome, but this being Hollywood, I can already feel the cringe.
It’s unknown whether the main characters will be the Norse gods or, potentially, just regular schmoes. It could even be set in any time period from “ancient” to “far future,” because “world of the Norse gods” could just as easily be “today.” Heck, it could be a “Seinfeld” style sitcom where every now and then someone drops a reference to some god or other. Other possibilities:
1) Set more or less today, featuring a military/X-files type organization dealing with a rising tide of weirdness that they slowly come to realize is the forthcoming of Ragnarok.
2) Set more or less today, starring a US Army soldier killed in Afghanistan fighting Surt worshipers who is modestly surprised to find himself waking up in Asgard assigned to Valhalla with the Einherjar to fight and train and die every day, resurrect at evening and partying every night (could be an adjunct to #1)
3) Vikings in the Viking age, out doing Viking stuff, with semi-random supernatural weirdness
4) Tales of the Norse gods themselves, in ancient times
5) Tales of the Norse gods *since* ancient times. Thor in the Old West. Loki at the Stonewall riots
6) Space adventurers in the future, occasionally interacting with beings of Norse myths out among the stars
Many possibilities. But this being Hollywood, one thing seems likely: Thor, who was described quite explicitly as being a redhead, will be a victim of the Gingeradication (Redheadmageddon? Gingenocide? Gingereplacement?).
Jun 302019
If anyone ever wonders why I harp on about dangers to western civilization… behold:
Cornell summer seminar asks: Should we still use concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’?
From the PDF description of the seminar:
“Decolonizing Epistemology”There is a widespread skepticism about many sorts of knowledge claims today, and this skepticism has been promoted from both the right and the left. The skepticism is largely based on the realization that knowledge is always connected to power. But there is uncertainty about what follows from this: is it still ‘knowledge’?The decolonial epistemology project accepts the connection of knowledge and power but then moves to a different set of questions that are organized in two overall components: (1) to critique existing theories and practices concerning knowledge for the ways in which these theories and practices may be supporting the colonial structure of knowledge, and (2) to develop new reconstructed norms for improved knowing practices without reinscrib-ing colonial relationships. To advance this project, decolonial work in epistemology must address the following:
1. Do social identities matter for knowledge claims? How, exactly?
2. How is ignorance socially produced, and what is the solution?
3. Should we continue to use concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’?
4. How can science be done in a decolonial way?
5. How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?
Such a project benefits epistemology as a whole. In exploring the ways in which the disen-franchised have been epistemically discredited, we can develop new insights and theories about the general nature of knowledge and of knowers. This project also benefits every community that is struggling for democracy and justice against the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and technocracy.Thus, the question of knowledge, and of who has knowledge, of what kinds of character traits and motivations will best assist knowing, and of how knowledge claims should be assessed, is key to social change. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it, “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.”
As has been repeated noted, you have to be university-educated to believe something so monumentally stupid.
Take, for instance, point 5: “How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?” It’s quite simply: take each individual bit of “indigenous knowledge” and put it to a rigorous scientific test. If it succeeds, great! Now it’s not just “indigenous knowledge,” but, in fact, “knowledge.” If it fails, you can discard it.
And point #3: Define “we,” lady. Those of us who happen to like modernity, science, western civ? Why, yes, we should continue to use rationality and reason. You, on the other hand… by all means, please don’t. I look forward to how successful you are with your “other ways of knowing” when you contact cancer or get hit by a bus or your power goes out.
If Trump was the man that many people desperately wish he was, he’d have the FBI investigating these buffoons to see whether it’s China, Russia, ISIS or those dastardly Dutch who are secretly behind them, pushing them to tar American society down and turn this into a hellscape of idiotarianism and race wars. if Cornell was the university it aught to be, it’d stop funding these ridiculous seminars and “educators.”
The part excerpted above is only a small piece, from a single one of the contributors to this nonsensical waste of time, resources and potential. Go ahead and read the rest of it. It’s filled with stuff that can be *charitably* described as “gibberish.”
This seminar will take Erich Auerbach’s notion of figura, elaborated mainly in his 1938 essay with the same title, as a starting point for a broader inquiry into notions of figure, figuration, and the specific productivity of figural practices in creating aesthetic, perceptual, and cognitive spheres of experience. At its core the seminar will focus on the understanding of the capacity of figure and figuration in deploying ‘plastic’ effects, i.e., in the shaping of and the experimentation with sensual, affective, and cognitive land-scapes.
…
Normatively shaped dys-functionalities, the fact that social practices erode in contradictory reactions that can no longer be made up for, is the “rock bottom” for a certain kind of critique, an immanent crisis critique of forms of life.
…
It invites us to transcend modernity by replacing the alienated genea-logical hermeneutics of suspicion with a rationally recollective hermeneutics of magnanimity that is at once tradition-affirming and tradition-transforming.
I liked this bit:
Faculty and advanced graduate students of literature, the arts, the humanities, the related social sciences and professional studies are invited to apply.
Huh. it doesn’t seem like they’re inviting students of science and engineering. Just students of ridiculous nonsense.
Jun 252019
And if you say otherwise, you’re a terrible human being.
Five killed in Mozambique ‘for being bald’
A new superstitious belief has emerged in some areas of Mozambique – that bald men have gold in their head.
However, the head has to be taken to a witchdoctor who will use magical powers to extract the gold – and make them rich.
If your immediate response is that the belief that bald men have magically extractable gold in their heads is stupid idiocy, it’s because you need to decolonize your mind. Witchcraft is no less valid than Newtonian physics.
Repeat after me: Other Ways Of Knowing.
May 292019
So I was working on the computer yesterday, doing some 3D computer modelling of a vehicle for the next issue of US Launch Vehicle Projects. I was tapping away at the computer, getting more and more into it (yes, sometimes I can become terribly engrossed in my work), and I absently turned on the TV for some background noise. I paid zero attention to the TV for some extended period. Coulda been an infomercial, coulda been a televangelist, coulda been a sitcom; didn’t pay it any mind. As it turns out it was CNN. At some point I glanced up from my work and became transfixed by what I was suddenly hearing. It was truly astonishing.
What it was was a press conference by Amanda Eller, a hiker who disappeared for 17 days in the forests of Hawaii. Normally I’d pay little attention. And normally I’d pay a Regular Schmoe a whole lot of slack when it comes to saying ridiculous things. But what I heard, at least for the few minutes I was stuck listening before I could tear myself away and stab furiously at the “turn it off, turn it off!” button on the remote, was mind-shredding self-involved newage spiritualist nonsense.
I won’t be surprised if this turns out to be another Balloon Boy.
In the video below, I first started noticing it on the TV at about the 30-minute mark.
Fortunately the Magickal Crystal Dumb Rays lost their hold on me after just a few minutes… but I see from the video that it went on for another *hour.*
May 252019
Owners of Kentucky’s Noah’s Ark Attraction Sue Over Flooding Damage
Ahem:
BWAAAHAHAHAHA!!!
Ah, that’s good stuff right there.
May 222019
One hopes that that time is now, at least for Sweden. Via Google Translate:
The government wants to ban runic script – asatroende and heritage enthusiasts rage
In short, the Swedish Minister of Justice wants to ban runes, because Nazis.
Runes.
You know, the script used by Nordic people. In Scandinavia, including Sweden. For hundreds of years.The best outcome for this kind of insanity would be the rise of a Swedish nationalistic movement that permits and promotes Swedes to take pride in their heritage, rather than trying to erase it and their people. I guess tomorrow we’ll see if UKIP and the Brexit Party make a dent in British electoral politics; it would be nice if the Swedes would grow a pair and take their own country back from the insane PC whackos who seem bent on turning it into a UN backwater experiment in trashing European cultures.
May 162019
Due to laws being passed in Alabama and Georgia and the like that greatly curtail the legality of abortion, discussion of the general topic seems much more common in recent days. Listening to NPR today, there was a piece on the debate on when human life begins, largely focusing on various religious views on the subject. My own views are pretty straightforward and are not religion based: human life begins at conception. Why? Because:
1) It’s obviously alive. Sperm is alive, egg is alive… fertilized egg is alive. At no point in the process is it non-alive, unless it has died.
2) Obviously it’s human. What, is it a Komodo dragon?
That said, the point at which a living human fertilized egg becomes something to give a damn about is a much trickier question. For those who believe that give-a-damn begins at conception… well, that’s a simple and straightforward answer. Others believe that *birth* is when human rights are magically bestowed upon what had previously been a simple expendable mass of tissue. This is much less sensible, because a fetus can be removed from the womb prior to birth and can survive.
My own view: I dunno. You terminate (for no medically necessary reason) a baby that’s seconds from birth… that to me is murder. But you take a Day After pill and the undifferentiated blastocyst gets flushed from the system… meh. But somewhere in between, things get fuzzy.
The pro life people almost invariably come at this from a religious angle, and that is a good way to irritate me. But their hardline view on “at conception” is consistent and a position worthy of respect. The pro abortion people, however, come at this from a non-religious position, which yo would *hope* means a scientific one. But it almost never is. Instead, it’s usually internally inconsistent and sometimes downright terrifying.
On the one hand, they tell us that this is all about “womens health” or “womens rights,” because the fetus is little more than a parasite which is threatening or even merely inconveniencing the mother. Yeah, ok, but… she remains inconvenienced *after* birth. The “parasite” remains every bit as dependent upon human assistance for the basic of life after birth as before. Even so, you can’t just toss a baby in the trash. Nor can someone wander through a neonatal unit and stab all the preemies and not get charged with something rather substantial. Not just the legal system, but actual humans look down on infanticide. Even if the infants not only weren’t actually born, but were not even due to be born for several months yet.
For a legal system to be a *good* legal system, it has to treat people consistently. What’s “murder” for one person is “murder” for another, if the circumstances are the same. But with the unborn, it’s different. If someone attacks a pregnant woman and intentionally assaults her unborn child with the intention of killing it, that’s murder or attempted murder. But if the mother gets an abortion… it’s not murder. And this disturbs the bejesus out of me: someone can decide that what is recognized as a human *isn’t* a human, and the legal system accepts that. I’m cool with the legal system accepting Person A intentionally killing Person B if it’s a matter of self defense or defense of another, but at no point does the legal system decide that it was ok for A to kill B because B wasn’t a human and did not deserve human rights.
The new laws that have been passed basically make abortion illegal except in the case of the mothers life being in medical risk due to the pregnancy. The people I’ve heard argue against these laws have often used a very similar argument… that these new laws will ban the “great majority” of abortions, thus openly accepting that abortions are not about the life of the mother, but because she simply wants it done. For those people who truly believe that even the smallest blastocyst is a human life worthy of protecting, the knowledge that some people can rather nonchalantly chose to murder their babies in the interest of convenience must be maddening.
The NPR piece ends with this:
“… they don’t see it as just property, and they don’t see it as fully human, but somewhere in between.”
Cuz, yeah, declaring someone to be somewhere between human and property… gosh, when has *that* ever been a bad thing?
I’ve posted much this sort of rambling incoherent post before, largely because the subject keeps coming up and keeps not being resolved. Seems to me that science can provide some solutions:
1) A modernized Norplant that not only can be easily implanted, it’s *mandatory.* It could be mandatory for all women who:
A) Are on government assistance, in jail, on parole, in the country illegally, etc.
B) Are over the age of 13 (or whatever) and have not yet passed Motherhood 101 and received their Parenting License. Sure, the idea of the government licensing people to be able to have babies is a fairly terrifying thought, but they want to license other Constitutional rights, so why not?
2) Perfect the artificial womb, and come up with a way to extract a fetus from a womb and implant it within the robo-womb. The procedure would have to be on par with an abortion in terms of safety and time consumed, but that doesn’t seem too unreasonable. I’m sure Bubbles Cortez would be perfectly happy to let the Green New Deal wait on hold while the resources for it are devoted to this project. Once the baby is extracted and implanted in the artificial uterus, adoption can begin. Fetuses that are sufficiently early on that they can be safely frozen can be put into long term storage for the day we need easily transported workers for the Off World Colonies, or for after some horrifying plague rubs out a large fraction of the population.
May 072019
Yes, anti-Semitism does seem to be on the rise. But it seems to be coming from the left, not from the Nazi boogeymen we’re forever being hysterically warned about.
Rep. Ilhan Omar Supports Group That Produced Child Beheading Skit
There’s a lot to be irked about here. Seems to me that the video below produces a lot of opportunities for deportations. The kids may not be at fault, but their parents and the people who run this “society,” cranking out violent backwards propaganda and teaching these kids in an alien and unhelpful language, certainly seem like they would be a lot happier in Syria.