Two weeks ago yesterday I started displaying symptoms of covid, a coughing fit came on *very* suddenly Friday afternoon and lasted all through the night. Temperature stayed normal until sometime early Saturday, at which point it went up about five degrees F from my baseline and the day became *really* awful. Sunday was bad, but not quite as horrifying. Monday saw a test and confirmation that the ChiComs had got to me with their little pandemic. Since then it has been a general even improvement; temperature fluctuations disappeared within 4-5 days. Coughing has remained, though it’s at the “kinda annoying” level now.
I have, however, noticed some things that continue to hang on: physical exertion results in almost complete systems collapse, and my brain remains a little fuzzy. I can do CAD drafting no sweat; I can bitch and moan online just fine. But fiction writing – which I’d typically engage in to the tune of about a page or three a day – has dropped to an average of two sentences a day at best. And non-fiction writing remains challenging: I start writing, then need to refer to source documents… and I just can’t maintain focus. And there remains a general indefinable *weird* feeling, akin to fatigue but… a little different.
So, nothing at all like the disease I was promised, what with ventilators and hospitalization and death in a forgotten corridor. But it’s dragging on well past the point when it has lost its novelty.
The Babylon Bee is at its best when you read one of their satirical articles and realize that if you didn’t know it was satire, you’d accept that it was a real, if perhaps disturbing and/or insane, article. Well… here’s a website that doesn’t seem to say anywhere that it’s satire, and I can’t tell if it’s satire or complete insanity:
There are a hundred pages of content, with about ten articles per page. A thousand articles of satire is a hell of a commitment to cause… but then, so is a thousand articles of utter nuttery. There are articles such as:
The site seems to just take whatever “articles” get written and submitted to it. So it may be a fully serious site (a lot of the articles seem fairly normal) that is either:
1) Being bombarded by articles written by loons
2) Being bombarded by articles written by trolls pretending to be loons
3) Being bombarded by both trolls and loons
Either way… I’m all for people paying attention. A bunch of leftwing lunatics who want to tear down civilization? That sort of thing should be noted. Insane trolling proves indistinguishable from honest insanity? That should also be noted.
A day or two back I was sent a screenshot of a tweet that claimed to be someone working at the Mayo clinic saying that they loved to tell Trump voters that their healthy pregnancy was in fact ectopic (fetus developing outside the uterus, such as within a fallopian tube), with the result that the twit is happy that this will be a healthy white baby getting needlessly aborted. This tweet is in fact a hoax, but one that keeps making the rounds on regular cycles, outraging those it’s intended to outrage.
But even though it’s fake, it got me thinking. What would happen if some malicious medical practitioner made such diagnoses with the intention of causing people to get abortions? For starter, they would probably not have much success; an ectopic pregnancy is probably not something that can be dealt with with standard surgical abortion practices… at the very least the abortionist would note that the fetus is right where its supposed to be. Perhaps abortion pills would do the job, dunno. But let’s say that this theoretical medical malpractitioner scored some successes and got a few healthy babies aborted. What would be the *legal* result?
I’d assume right off the bat whopping great lawsuits… against the malpractitioner, whatever clinic they worked at, whatever abortion clinic did the job. But how about legal? It’s my understanding that if you assault a pregnant woman and kill her fetus, at least in some states you can be charged with murder (wikipedia says 38 states recognize “feticide”). How about if you trick a woman into getting. an abortion? Abortion is of course legal, which raises the philosophical problem of it being ok to kill a fetus in one instance but not another, murder here being based on the mothers point of view, not the fetus’. Here, a legal act would presumably become illegal because the mother changed her mind after the fact.
For the past year or whatever I’ve had better things to write, but something I’ve *wanted* to write is a way to canonize “Star Trek: Discovery,” to fit it in with actual Star Trek. As is abundantly obvious, STD simply doesn’t fit in the canonical Star Trek universe. There are too many differences, from the designs of ships, to the design of species, to the history and lore, to technologies that simply don’t fit and wouldn’t exist. Without handwaving away such things as the Klingorks or the mushroom drive, how can you possibly conclude that STD is in any way canonical? I’ve got it worked out, but I don’t currently have a good way to turn it into a standard narrative story. One of my interests here – because of course it is – is to produce ship designs that actually fit into the TOS design ethic.
Here’s my basic outline of how STD fits into the TOS universe:
Michael Burnham is a crewman on the USS Shenzhou, under Captain Georgiou, about a decade before the adventures of the USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk. But here she’s an Ensign, and the ship is “canon design.” It would have the same basic layout as shown on STD, including the underside-bridge, but the components would fit in with the TOS era. It would look like something that Franz Joseph or FASA would have come up with.
She goes down to the desert planet that STD started on. As on the show, she fires a phaser blast down a dry well in order to crack the well open and allow the locals to access the water. Here’s where things start to diverge. The bottom of the well is damp and musty; when the phaser strikes and break through into the high pressure water below, a blast of damp air is shot up the well. Burnham takes the blast of wet air to the face. Nothing major, just enough to knock her over. But in that cloud of damp air are the spores of a local cave-fungus. She breathes in a snortful of them, and they promptly begin to do their thing. They invade her system, but are un-noticed during transport back to the ship.
Soon, the fungal spores invade her brain and she falls into a coma-like stupor, but her brain goes into overdrive and she begins to fantasize in a Walter Mitty like fashion. Her boring life gets transformed into one where her parents were Special Science Types until they were killed by Klingons; instead of having an undistinguished adolescence, she was raised on Vulcan by the ambassador, who in reality she once saw at the Academy and was impressed by (but who never noticed her). Instead of just squeaking by on the entrance exams, she was a Very Special Candidate for Starfleet, and instead of barely being noticed by her Captain, she was beloved… not just by the Captain, but everyone.
The ships doctors try to cure her of the mushroom infection, but only manage to suppress them and bring her around. She has suffered brain damage; the spores have bonded to the neurons in her brain and are slowly beginning to supplant them, forming their own network of mycelial synapses. She goes bugnuts and under the LSD-like influence of the shrooms, steals a shuttle and causes an incident with a nearby Klingon garbage scow. It’s a minor incident, easily and quickly patched over, but she thinks she’s started a war with the Klingons. The crew of the Shenzhou realize that she’s beyond their aid, so they contact the nearby science vessel USS Discovery to come and pick her up. On the way to drop her off at the Tantalus V mental institute, she slips further into delusion, taking in the scraps of information she has picked up about the USS Discovery and its crew and fully filling in back stories that make no sense. Thus all the constant talk she hears about “she’s being driven by spores” and “a mycelial network,” words she hears only partially and in passing while fading in and out of consciousness, are applied not to herself but the ship. By the time she is dropped off at Tantalus V, her brain has been fully dominated by the fungal network; she’s dreamed *years* of fantasies in the weeks the Discovery takes to transport her.
Something-something handwave something about Dr. Simon van Gelder at the Tantalus V facility using an early version of the neural neutralizer (“Dagger of the Mind”) to stabilize her now quite corrupted brain; psycho-tricorders (only mentioned once, I believe, in “Wolf in the Fold”) are used to read her mind and get her story from her. Her long, rambling fantasies where she is time and again the most important person in the universe and everyone loves her are recorded for academic purposes; decades later a Ferengi named Quark acquires the complete set of archival recordings and translates them into a series of holodeck programs. They become rampagingly popular across the Federation; the stories of increasingly bizarre aliens and technologies and histories begin the new fictional “sporepunk” genre, alternate histories of Federation worlds or historical characters that go basically off the rails due to the introduction of spore-based technologies. Klingons file official protests – and unofficial threats – over the slanderous way they are presented, but it’s far too late to complain to Burnham, who died long ago, one of the few sad crazy people who could not be helped by modern medical technology. The stories are of some concern to certain quiet departments of Starfleet and the Federation… how could she know about the Terran Empire? She dreamed up the holodeck and atmosphere-holding force fields decades before they were installed in Starfleet vessels. Section 31 is, perhaps oddly, *not* concerned about what she dreamed up about them. They conclude that she must have heard some rumor about them, as doubtless many Starfleet officers have, but by imagining them being a vast, well-known and fully out in the open organization, this actually gives the real Section 31 cover. After the “sporepunk holodramas” go public, any future mention or rumor of Section 31 can now be safely laughed off as having been inspired by those silly stories.
So the ships of STD exist, the configurations are there, but everything is crazy big, everything is too sharp and edgy and shiny with lens flares in an abundance explainable only by way of an optical cortex being attacked and sparking.
I suppose the chances were good, but the commies finally got me. After starting to feel like garbage on Friday, I had one hell of an awful weekend and got to the drug store today to get the covid test today. Huzzah, positive.
Things are not so bad now, but Saturday was really something, with a fever high enough to make me loopy. The whole weekend was characterized by “inertia,” not just physical, but mental. It stripped me of anything resembling enthusiasm, initiative or creativity. I sat my ass in front of the computer all weekend to work on Book 3… and I plopped out a grand total of four sentences.
Things today are much less awful, though still awful. Temperature is all over the place, though no longer as high as Saturday. I’d like to think that the worst is passed… but who knows. So if I vanish… well, there ya go.
EDIT: I just noticed that I posted a surprising number of posts on Saturday.
Alrighty then. This particular bit of video has been making the rounds the last few days. In short, it shows an apparently unhinged feller going bugnuts on a subway train in New York City, at one point assaulting a woman who begs for help from her fellow passengers. Nobody raises a finger, other than to film it.
The arguments I’ve seen basically boil down to two sides;
1: “Where are the men? What has happened to make men such cowards that they will not help a woman in distress?”
2: “Strong independent woman don’t need no man.”
Argument #2 is of course pure snark. There is validity to it… a lot of modern feminists sneer about the utility of men, but they get kinda quiet about that when TSHTF. But that need not be litigated here. Argument #1 is of greater interest.
This is hardly the first Public Transit video depicting violence and a lot of people standing around doing nothing more helpful than looking uncomfortable. The basic story is not new; look at Kitty Genovese. People stand around and are basically useless a lot of the time. “It’s not my fight.” “I could get injured.” “If I ignore it it’ll go away.” “Someone else will help.” “Maybe I’m wrong about what’s really going on, who’s the bad guy.” And so on.
But there are of course a few new ones:
“If I wade in, I could get sued, by the perp, by the bus/train company, by a bystander, by the victim herself.”
“If I use any kind of force, I could get arrested.”
“That guy is black. I’m white. If I intervene and edited video goes out, I could get cancelled, lose my job, my career, my friends, home, family.”
It is normal for people, and I believe men in particular, to fantasize about playing the hero. I’ve often seen people, and here in particular that tends to be man-hating modern feminists, claim that the “male power fantasy” is that they will be Billy Badass, able to lay a beatdown on their opponents, be just the meanest, toughest, strongest, scariest sumbitch out there. I have no doubt that many men daydream about just that, viewing themselves as the GigaChad that all the women insta-swoon over. But I also believe that a lot of other men have a different sort of “male fantasy:” that when the moment comes, when they are needed, they will prove to be competent. That they will be up to the task, whatever that task is. Change the tire, put out the fire, save the damsel in distress. And, if needed, wade into the fight and succeed. But these sort of fantasies rarely ever get put to the test. And actual violent lunatic is *not* someone you, a sane person, want to go up against. And so if you don’t actually have to… it seems most of the time, you don’t.
Especially now when trying to be a hero, doing the right thing, being selfless, stands a not unreasonable chance of having a large and vindictive chunk of society dropping on you and your future like a ton of angry, unthinking bricks.
What would you do? What would I do? Hell if I know. What I’d like to *think* I’d do is, to start off, *not* wade in and try to lay out the whacko. That would not go well. But what I’d like to think I’d do is to spot one or two likely looking other guys, preferably large and young, get their attention and have a *group* wade in. A few people stepping between whacko and victim might shut down the aggression. Might not. But three against one is way better odds than one against one.
– – –
Perhaps just through random chance, YouTube recommends this video after the one above:
It shows the sort of thing that any decent man *wishes* he could pull off… and any smart man knows he couldn’t. In reality, Our Hero would be incapacitated or dead in seconds.
Counterpoint: Snack Man.
Huh. The Snack man video is “age restricted.” The clip from “Nobody” doesn’t seem to be. Go ahead and try to make that make any kind of sense.
No, it hasn’t. Let me illustrate with a fairly famous scene:
An alien takes on the guise of Abraham Lincoln. The alien does it well enough that it seems that “Lincoln” actually thinks he’s Lincoln. Lincoln then goes on to use the term “negress,” which is not only a term describing race, but also sex. That in and of itself would be enough to set off the baying hounds of wokism… he’s “assuming her gender,” as well as using a word that was probably pretty cringey even back in the 1960’s, never mind 2022. And how does Lt. Uhura respond? By *not* being offended. By not *taking* offense, by not assuming that offense was intended. Nobody gets mad, nobody tries to police speech or teach “Lincoln” about his privilege or in any way demonstrate the sort of unhinged lunacy that defines wokism. Those characters just smiled and went on about their day. They were all about free speech.
“We’ve learned not to fear words.” Try to square that with wokism.
Also note in that clip above, Kirk points out that humans have finally learned to be delighted with what they are. Can you think of any concept more transphobic?
Honestly, that one clip above utterly refutes most of the world view of the woke. If people thought as suggested above… the woke would find no purchase and they’d be about as relevant as theosophists.
Also: Yes, the bridge of the Enterprise was multi-ethnic, certainly “progressive” for its time. But it was also *mono* cultural. Everyone spoke the same language, had the same basic values. They didn’t bow to “other ways of knowing;” they relied exclusively on objective reasoning and hard science. The only two who even had non-American accents were two white guys (Scotty and Chekov).
They all packed heat when they went someplace new and unknown. They didn’t freak out about other people packing heat. They kept and bore arms.
They worked within (and accepted) a hierarchical command structure. When the Captain ordered, you obeyed.
It was a meritocracy. You didn’t rise through the ranks based on identity politics.
They guarded borders and prevented, sometimes violently and lethally, illegal border crossings. Whether it was Romulans or Klingons trying to sneak across the Neutral Zone, or Borg trying to migrate en masse into the inner Federation… the cops showed up to shoo ’em off.
Capitalism was alive and well. Private traders and private property were not loudly touted as they would have been had Ayn Rand written the scripts… but you had asteroid prospectors like Cyrano Jones plying his trade; space yachts like the SS Aurora out there being stolen by dipshit space hippies (who, like modern wokies, abandon objective reality for mystical nonsense, and end up being injured and killed by their ignorance); con men like Harcourt Fenton Mudd trying to make their fortunes dishonestly in a system that does not seem to mind if you make a fortune *honestly.* Yes, “Next Generation” tried to portray a post-capitalist future, but that only worked insofar as they were a post scarcity society: anyone could have a desktop fusion reactor and a desktop food replicator. Even in Next Gen, average schmoes could own their own stuff, including ships and plots of land. The Ferengi were depicted as despicable capitalists… and yet, they were legally allowed to be as capitalist as they liked, so long as they didn’t cheat. *Everybody* did business with the Ferengi. Because capitalism gets stuff done.
Related: private property is sacrosanct. And more to the point, you are your own property, and nobody can tell you what to do with you (outside the bounds of following the legal orders of your superiors, of course). And “you” include artificial people like androids and sentient computer programs. You do not belong to the village or the society or the state. Anyone tries that crap and Kirk will phaser the bejeebers out of the control system.
The favorite episode of those claiming that Star Trek was “woke” back in the sixties is “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which shows irrational race hatred. As if irrational race hatred and modern progressive/woke politics are somehow mutually exclusive. These people love to hate white people, white history, white culture… and they hate ’em so much that they have expanded the franchise to hating Asians because they are “white adjacent.” Wokies *want* the government and society and businesses and regular people to treat people differently based on race. Captain Kirk and company not giving a rats ass about someones race? That sort of thinking is alien to wokism.
Numerous episodes deal with time travel, and they make great efforts to not change history. There’s an entire department of the Federation devoted to making sure that history remains unchanged. How about the woke? They make every effort to change history every chance they get. Whether it’s tearing down statues or re-naming institutions or *eliminating* institutions or destroying national pride by claiming that the founders or national heroes were actually evil or that the principals upon which this or that nation were built are evil and corrupt, the woke do everything they can to re-write history, the facts be damned. Modern wokies with access to time machines would be the Department of Temporal Investigations worst nightmare.
Related: the great works of western literature, philosophy, politics and science are still highly venerated. They have not been memory holed or retconned. Scotty is proud of his Scottish heritage. Chekov is proud of Russia. Kirk is clearly enamored of America and American history and virtues.
Numerous times humans are shown to have adopted the dress, food and customs of other races (Vulcans and Romulans spring to mind). And yet… nobody screeching about “Cultural Appropriation.” Everybody makes use of whatever they find that they like, that works for them, that profits them.
Several episodes deal with insanity. How does the federation, Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise deal with the mentally ill? They send them to high-tech looney bins which work to MAKE THEM SANE. They do not try to convince them and the people around them that their “emotional interestingness” is Stunning And Brave. They do not go along with delusions. They cure people who are bugnuts. Doctor McCoy would take one look at the blue haired weirdos who populate Twitter and Libs of TikTok and start mass injectiosn of anti-whacko meds.
And… colonies. Colonies galore. Colonialism on a galactic scale. Small colony vessels, vast colony armadas. Worlds getting terraformed to suit *our* needs.
HA! Found ’em. Well, there’s the better part of a day’s theoretical productivity flushed down the obsession s-hole. I’d *swear* I’d shared these before, but I can’t find evidence of that. Either I imagined it or I did so elsewhere. It *may* have been in support of “Man Conquers Space,” many long years ago, an exercise as dead and buried as the dreams of manned missions to Neptune by 2000. Anyway…
Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASA budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.
This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.
Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.
Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get? Facebook? Twitter? Weirdos and vanity and decay?
Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:
The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.
Ya may have noticed a dropoff in aerospace postings, and a reduction in yammering in general. This is largely due to being swamped… Book three is due soon, and I’m up to my eyeballs. I have barely enough time to write the book, take note of the world going straight to hell, and occasionally bitch about it. Health concerns, a major time-suck a few months ago, have largely (though not completely) evaporated; financial issues remain. Feel free to buy stuff, subscribe to stuff, hit that tip jar.
And once I’m done with Book three… Book four looms.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will be on hand to receive 132 pallets of formula produced by Switzerland’s Nestle S.A. set to arrive in Indianapolis, the White House said Saturday.
132 pallets, huh? Wow. That might cover one good sized city for… what? A month?
I guess it’s a good thing that Americans have stopped having babies, because apparently we can’t feed them ourselves anymore. But *of* *course,* we can provide for illegal invaders. Yes, we should feed those in detention. But… they should leave detention as quickly as possible. Preferably on aircraft flying directly to Tierra del Fuego or points south. In a time of crisis in the US – and even in good times – illegal aliens should be deported ASAP.
I’ve visited a number of WalMarts and grocery stores lately, and the “baby formula” aisles look about like the “toilet paper” aisles during early 2020.
It seems that the root cause of the baby formula shortage was *one* Abbott factory in Michigan shutting down due to contamination concerns back in February, and not yet back up and running. Why are things so concentrated that one single factory can control the fates of so many Americans? Shouldn’t this sort of thing have more localized and widely distributed production? That one factory could fail for any of a number of reasons, including but not limited to accidental fires, Mostly Peaceful Protests, the spiking price of gas shutting down transport to and/or from.
And as always, you can count on the far left extremists to take this situation and go absolutely whackaloon. Take, for example, this article from Vox:
It is basically a propaganda piece extolling the evils of breastfeeding, compared to the good and proper approach of formula-feeding. While some of the points are valid, it’s worth noting that the world “mother” never once appears in the article. Nor do “woman” or “women,” odd omissions given the subject of the article. The closest they come is “birthing parent.” Even then, that only appears in a single panel of a cartoon explaining that if a “birth parent” doesn’t want to breastfeed its infant, it shouldn’t have to, full stop. Because the needs of a dependent human are less important the the shallow desires of someone else. Which logic I’d be interested in seeing deployed against, say, dependent humans such as prisoners and welfare recipients. How about men who simply “don’t want to” pay child support or alimony? I just got hit with a massive property tax bill. I don’t want to pay it. Would Vox be equally as sanguine about my desire to not take care of the responsibilities that I willingly signed up for?
Storytime: an EMP weapon goes off a few hundred kilometers over the central US, shutting down virtually *all* production lines in a thousand-mile radius for a span of a year or so. Fill in the rest.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23479134/breastfeedingPanel_4.png)