Heh.
Sep 282019
Sep 162019
At the end of the last “Jurassic World” movie, the idiot-child character decided to let a bunch of dinosaurs, including carnivores, loose in northern California. One of the last scenes was a typical Spielberigan shot from a hillside, looking down on the ‘burbs; but what was looking down into the yards full of pets and children was one the Utahraptor-sized velociraptors. The implication was that humanity was about to take a beatdown for its hubris, with monsters rampaging through the population.
Small problem: in the real world it would take about fifteen minutes before every hunter within a five hundred mile radius had his truck loaded up, heading for that location. In about two days, dinosaurs would be extinct again.
Nevertheless, another Jurassic World movie is due out at some point. In the meantime, Universal has released a short flm set sometime after the dinosaurs were released. It’s amusing enough, in particular the very brief sequences during the closing credits of various incidents with the beasts out in the wild. The main story is the “only in California” kind, with people camping in the woods with full knowledge that there are giant predators roaming the region… and, being Californians, they didn’t bring the sort of firepower a sane person would. Of course, a sane person would not take their infant camping in woods full of carnivorous dinosaurs, but hey, Hollywood.
Spoilers:
Sep 152019
FYI:
Beto O’Rourke arrested in 1990s for burglary and DWI
While he was not *convicted* of burglary, he has at least been open and honest about having been arrested for such. It makes you wonder if, perhaps, his psychotic and profoundly anti-American urge to disarm the public is due to him having realized at one point that he had been on a course that would have set him on a course to catching a bullet. It is not uncommon for people who have displayed near-terminal levels of bad judgement and downright stupidity to assume that everyone else is as fatally flawed as they are, and thus everyone else is is as much need of external control as they are.
Sep 142019
I get a subtle hint here that Tim Pool is not a fan of Beto O’Rourke:
Yeah, O’Rourke defeats the lie that “nobody wants to take your guns.” He is quite open about the fact that he wants to make sure that the ability to commit violence is restricted solely to the government and to the criminals; the vast majority of the citizenry is, in his view, to be rendered defenseless.
Yes, Beto is a terrible human being, an example of the worst form of power-mad wannabe tyrant that genetics and upbringing can produce. But he is also a has-been nobody, with no chance of getting the Dem nomination. Like Swalwell, he’s a little more than a jumped -up streetcorner sign-waver, desperately trying to get people to pay attention to him.
The bigger issue here is that the Democratic party and the other candidates are not denouncing him and his proposed policies. At most they are annoyed that he has produced a readily repeated sound bite that will doubtless be used by people who do *NOT* want to disarm and neuter the populace. The Dems aren’t shouting their support for the Constitution or the people’s rights. They are not calling for O’Roarke and Swalwell to be run out of the party on a rail. This is important. The likes of O’Roarke and Swalwell are *gleeful* in their desire to enact laws that they know full well are not only unConstitutional, but which will set the people against the government and *will* lead to bloodshed. The likes of O’Roarke and Swalwell and Warren and Breadline are pushing for or accepting of policies that will, for no good purpose, push the US towards another Civil War. And the likes of Swalwell have already “joked” about using weapons of mass destruction against American population centers in order to terrorize the remaining beaten populace into kowtowing to the will of a totalitarian government. As much as the media likes to scream about how Trump caters to racists via dog whistles, the Dems actually support, defend and protect the genocidal anti-Semites in their midst and the civil-warmongering democidal monsters like O’Roarke. Note not just the nonsensical fear-mongering blather that idiot-child Beto spews forth here, but also listen to the crowd: when he says “Hell yes we’re going to take your AR-15,” the crowd of Dem whackjobs in attendance goes nuts with joyful applause at the notion of a government that sweeps across the land kicking in doors and shooting homeowners, leading to the worst democide this side of the Soviet era.
Never forget that.
Sep 132019
He’s made quite a number of these cardboard guns. *Some* of them seem like they might be turned into kits that could be produced from simple flat sheets, but even the simple ones would require a substantial degree of skill and determination.
Sep 072019
Stupidity has them. *THIS* guy came that close to finding it out.
Hangfires are fun. Less fun: putting your face in front of them.
Sep 062019
I’m selling off a chunk of my library. Below is a link to a PDF catalog with thirty books, all of which I’m selling for five dollars ($5) each plus postage. If you are interested, just send me an email letting me know which one(s) you want and what your mailing address is. First responder for any book gets it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s3oc8d2tdup687f/books%20for%20sale%209-6-2019.pdf?dl=0
Also available is a multi-volume report on the Space Station as envisioned in 1984. This is available to the first responder for $60 plus postage.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ev8cdujenszxu99/stationdocs.pdf?dl=0
If interested, send an email to 
I’m also pondering selling off a whole bunch of sci-fi paperbacks in lots.
Aug 302019
No, the *world* needs the audio to this:
Aug 232019
It’s a common refrain among politicians and celebrities who want to disarm the public that it is too easy for regular people to buy mundane firearms with which to defend themselves. Every now a journalist will actually put that to the test… mostly to prove the claim correct and feed the narrative that America needs to make sure that civilians are disarmed in the face of the criminal element. But sometimes it doesn’t go according to plan:
I tried to buy a gun at Walmart twice, and roadblocks left me empty-handed both times
The short form of the story here is “gee whiz, WalMart *doesn’t* make buying a gun as simple as just picking one up off the shelf.”
There’s lots to chuckle at here for anyone who actually knows anything about the process of legally buying a firearm. but the thing that caught me off guard right up front: the journalist started the process by trying to find a nearby WalMart that sells firarms. Fair enough. But when she finally finds one, a mere thirty minutes drive away, she makes a point of discussing how she put the destination into her nav system in order to get there. Ummm… WalMarts aren’t that hard to find. It comes across like “I’ve never been to WalMart before,” which smacks of the sort of snootiness that makes regular folk laugh at these goobers who are ignorant about how the bulk of the nation actually lives.
Aug 162019
Hmmm.
Exclusive: Russian Doctors Say They Weren’t Warned Patients Were Nuclear Accident Victims
As more information dribbles out about the recent Russian missile explosion that released radiation of an undefined sort, this story is kinda interesting. There is some hey-didn’t-I-see-that-sort-of-thing-on-that-Chernobyl-show level paranoid bureaucracy skullduggery going on with doctors not being given all the facts, but one of the more interesting bits is that one of the doctors who treated the incident victims was found to have cesium 137 in his muscle tissue. There are a whole lot of useful bits of data left out here, such as how *much* cesium 137 and whether he could have picked it up elsewhere or whether any of the many other doctors and nurses involved were also contaminated with cesium 137. Given how often cesium 137 shows up in lower left nuclear incidents, such as industrial radioactive sources being simply lost or misplaced, it’s entirely possible that that one doctor came across it somewhere else. But if the doctor was contaminated internally to an important degree by a victim flown in from hundreds of mils from the incident site, it would indicate that there must be a *lot* of cesium 137 floating about. because cesium 137 would be an odd substance here. It’s a byproduct of the fission of U-235, but you’d imagine that uranium would be the bigger story if that was the source. It’s not seemingly terribly useful for military applications.
Cesium 137 is a beta emitter; it’s pretty much useless in a reactor, though I imagine someone clever might be able to find a way to harness the beta emissions somehow. It won;t make a bomb, though you might turn very fine powder into a cladding for a dirty bomb. Cesium salts are water soluble and play hell with biological systems since it infiltrates easily. But it’s actual practical uses in industry all seem kinda pointless for a missile:
Caesium-137 has a number of practical uses. In small amounts, it is used to calibrate radiation-detection equipment.[5] In medicine, it is used in radiation therapy.[5] In industry, it is used in flow meters, thickness gauges,[5] moisture-density gauges (for density readings, with americium-241/beryllium providing the moisture reading),[6] and in gamma ray well logging devices.[6]
I *suppose* it might have been used in a propellant flow meter for a rocket engine? Maybe?
I’m no nuclear expert, but for the life of me I can’t come up with a good use for the stuff.