Oscars: I don’t know if this means anything…

 art, blather, Hmm..., Meh.  No Responses »
Mar 132023
 

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a list of all the Best Movie Oscar winners. For no readily apparent reason I decided to look them all up and see how many I’ve watched. Starting in the forties (because why not):

40s: 4
50s: 5
60s: 4
70s: 7
80s: 8
90s: 9
00s: 4
10s: 2
20s: 0 (out of three)

Hmmm. Seventies through the 90’s seemed to make movies I actually wanted to watch. But how about just the movies that were nominated?

40s: 16/50 (32%)
50s: 15/50 (30%)
60s: 21/50 (42%)
70s: 27/50 (54%)
80s: 27/50 (54%)
90s: 32/50 (64%)
00s: 14/55 (25.5%)
10s: 27/88 (30.7%)
20s: 2/28 (7.1%)

It’s less stark here, but again the 70s through 90s won. The outlier is the 20’s… so far it’s looking like a big pile of yawn.

One could argue that the older movies have the advantage, as I’ve had more time to watch them. But in the age of streaming, DVD, Blu Ray, 4k… any movie I *want* to watch, I can. If I haven’t by now, it’s most likely because I’ve seen the trailer or read the propaganda… and it’s just not interesting. Granted, not every movie is for everyone; I’m never going to be a big fan of “chick flicks” or artsy indie flicks about gay cowboys eating pudding any more than some people are never going to be fans of science fiction. But the fact that there seems to be a decline in movies I give a crap about might mean something to someone, I dunno.

Hell, here’s the list of nominees from the 2020’s:

Nomadland
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
CODA
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
Everything Everywhere All at Once
All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

How many have you actually even *heard* of? And how many, when you look them up, look like unwatchable preachy or artsy garbage?

 Posted by at 11:13 pm

Priorities!

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 122023
 

So it looks like Silicon Valley Bank employed people to do fundamentally pointless time- and resource-wasting stuff. This, sad to say, is hardly unique; lots of companies devote surprising amounts of effort end employees time to things that have nothing to do with the companies business or mission. Company baseball teams, for example, have nothing to do with, say, an auto manufacturers core function; claims about “building morale/cohesion” *might* have some validity, but if the company is in dire distress, spending resources on that is a bit unwise. However, a baseball team is unlikely to be a major source of revenue drain.

DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives, however, CAN be a major drain on a company. Not only directly by consuming payroll in hiring these people, but in consuming productivity in redirecting employees to do stuff on company time. And probably more importantly, indirectly by tearing apart the fundamental cultures that promote productivity and setting employees at each others throats and by causing HR departments to drive away – or not hire in the first place – good employees due to them not filling Enough checkboxes, and retaining less qualified employees because they identify with the current politically favored victimhood groups.

So, any time, money, resources devoted to “woke” policies is of course a bad thing. But how bad it was for SVB is yet to be determined, but it looks like they were at least at the standard American major corporate level of wokist self-sabotagery.

While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs

Perhaps this will serve as a valuable lesson to other companies to avoid this sort of nonsense. I’m not optimistic, though… a century of blood driven by big-government collectivism, from the socialists to the Nazis to the Commies, has hardly stopped people from “but this time we’ll get it right.” Additionally: since the list of “conspiracy theories” being proven right seems to grow day by day, conspiracy theories that hold that failures like this are all part of some long plan to centralize power into fewer and fewer institutions seem undismissable.

 Posted by at 3:40 pm

Shut the F Up, Nerd

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, religion, rockets, spacecraft, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 082023
 
Are you ready for the *dumbest* thing you’ll read today? Prepare yourselves…

End ‘colonial’ approach to space exploration, scientists urge

Short response: eat me.

Longer response: let’s take a look at what this idea is, shall we?

But Dr Pamela Conrad of the Carnegie Institution of Science said the focus should shift away from seeking to exploit discoveries.

Speaking ahead of a panel event on Saturday on the ethics of space exploration at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Washington DC, she said: “If we were willing to seize that as not just a possibility, but an imperative then oddly enough, the Star Trek series and culture becomes a prime directive for how we could explore space: seeking not to interfere.”

In the Star Trek series, the Prime Directive, or General Order 1, of Starfleet Command sets out that the Starfleet should not interfere with the social, cultural or technological development of any other planet.

Conrad said that rather than setting out to own or take resources from space, humans should endeavour to be “gentle explorers”.

Tell me you’ve never actually watched Star Trek without telling me you’ve never actually watched Star Trek. The Prime Directive – which they broke all the freakin’ time – said not to interfere with the development of an intelligent species. but strip mining moons and asteroids? Hell, yes? Starfleet and the United Federation of planets were *all* about resource extraction. Hell, they were in favor of the damned Genesis Device which would completely pave over entire solar systems to build brand new ones with shiny new planets. Because of course they were: the UFP weren’t stupid.

Oh, but it gets worse. So much worse:

What’s more, he said Indigenous people had deep connections with bodies such as the moon.

“Part of that connection is inherent to the culture and the way of living and way of knowing,” he said, adding any damage to such bodies was therefore a concern.

As a result, Neilson said those working on space missions, such as the Nasa Artemis programme – which seeks to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually send humans to Mars – should engage with Indigenous people in advance.

Haha no. Why the frak should NASA give a damn what a bunch of ignorant boobs who think the Moon is a space fairy think? When they build their own rockets, then they, too, can have a say.

Around a week ago I read yet another article about how cloning the woolly mammoth was right around the corner. Well, maybe. But what stuck with me were some of the comments: the scientists were “playing God,” and the mammoths being extinct were part of “Gods plan” and that it was wrong to try to upend that. Well, here’s the thing: if one assumes God exists, then humans de-exticting the mammoth would either:

1) Also be part of Gods plan

2) Be proof that God ain’t so great; mere humans can reverse what a supposed omnipotent being did.

So if some “indigenous group” thinks the moon is some neato-keen religious symbol that should not be tinkered with, and the United States and China race to pave the place with mines and solar panels… maybe those indigenous groups need to rethink their religion.

Leaving the future of humanity in the hands of people who are stuck in the past is not just dumb, it’s criminal.

The United Federation of Planets didn’t screw with primitives. But they also didn’t put primitives on the Federation council.

 Posted by at 6:09 pm

Dr. ᛞᛁᛇᛋᚻᛁᛏ

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., rockets, science, Worldwreckers, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 052023
 

Sir Sic (the Social Inequality Crusader) mocks a “college professor” who claims to have a mechanical engineering degree and who claims that rockets cannot work in a vacuum. Because he not only doesn’t understand basic science, he thinks it’s all a conspiracy.

The original video seems to date from quite some time ago; the version I found was uploaded to YouTube in 2017, and was apparently in existence some time prior to that. Unfortunately, no information is given about who this guy is, and whether he’s *actually* a college professor. Given the accent, he’s clearly not a westerner… which is a relief. There are already quite enough shrieking morons in American academia. And while I’m appalled at anyone claiming to be an engineer talking uneducated and factually wrong smack about science, it’s much less offensive to me if they are from a competing or even adversarial land. However, since he’s speaking *English,* it’s not impossible that he’s an enemy agent come to the US in order to dumb down American college students.

Another possibility is that he not only knows he’s full of BS, he’s actually trolling. Perhaps his purpose is to confuse the kiddies, and then get them to correct him. Teach them critical thinking and skepticism. Teach them to not trust The Man, but instead to apply the lessons of science and arrive at the facts. However, “he’s a moron” is a hell of a lot simpler explanation.

The difficulty with this guys world view is that he lives in a world where rockets exist in space and perform just fine. Of course the conspiracy theorist would argue that that’s all just a scam; there are no space rockets. But then the counter to *that* is “go outside at night and look up. You’ll see satellites.” And doubtless there are terribly clever and fundamentally stupid counters to *that.* Robert Goddard encountered just this sort of dumbassery more than a century ago when the New York Times mocked him for claiming that rockets would work in a vacuum. Not only did he have the math behind him, he actually demonstrated it. On ground level, by firing a rocket in a vacuum “track.” Nothing stopping people from replicating this today. A long length of plexiglas or polycarbonate clear pipe, with a model rocket motor at one end, pumped down to very low pressure, then fire off the rocket and watch it zip down the tube. Do that a couple times, both with vacuum and with air pressure. It’s a safe bet the rockets in vacuum will move faster.

This “professor” is an exemplar of “other ways of knowing.” I fully support his ambitions… for other countries.

 

 Posted by at 11:21 pm

The Last Blockbuster

 art, blather, history, Hmm..., humor, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 272023
 

There is one “Blockbuster” video rental store surviving, in Bend, Oregon. Given that Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010, it’s a bit surprising that one exists at all. The surviving store appears to exist on nostalgia; tourists taking in the novelty of The Last Blockbuster. Well, whatever works.

Kids these days will never know the thrill of getting to go to a mid-1980’s video rental store and perusing the aisles of VHS tapes. Seeing fantastic box art for movies that in your heart of hearts you know is going to be utter trash… some low-budget “Star Wars” or “Conan” knockoff, starring who’s-that spouting garbage dialog and wearing laughable costumes. It was friggen’ fantastic… at the time. Now, a bunch of these movies that back then you’d have to go out of your way to find are now instantly streamable; the ease of access makes their crappiness stand out all the brighter, with none of the fun. Bleah.

Rarity makes things seem more valuable. This is not an amazing revelation, of course. And now movies at home aren’t rare, aren’t difficult to access. There’s little to no social aspect to picking out a movie; instead of driving to the store and communing with strangers about what might or might not be worth renting, you just click on something and up it pops. I imagine that in not so many years you’ll be able to think of a movie and it will promptly start playing directly into your head, courtesy your government mandated Neural Chip. And soon enough after that, AI will make that Brain Streamable movie be anything you like: that “Jaws 2” meets “Debbie Does Dallas” crossover you always wanted? Here ya go. And shortly after that the Brain Streaming Content will be fully interactive; you’ll be able to live out the adventure yourself inside your own head; no holodeck needed. The entire accessible universe of time and space and imagination will be instantly and nearly freely available. And after a few weeks, everyone will be bored of it.

At least for now that last Blockuster is operating, and has a sense of humor.

 Posted by at 11:02 pm

“Mans Best Friend”

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, critters, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 262023
 

A couple pit bulls got out of their yard in San Antonia and attacked people, killing an old man. Unlike a lot of dog attacks, this one was caught on video as a woman drove by. The attack is… something. It’s not safe for work. If you watch it, even though parts of it are blurred, you’ll need some mind bleach; these dogs tear the man apart. I think you can see when they rip his face off. So… maybe ya wanna watch it, maybe ya don’t. The Link HERE includes the attack video as well as a later video as three firefighters – presumably the first responders – try to deal with one of the pit bulls with *axes.* Three grown men wielding fire axes can’t deal with the damn thing.

Yeeeeeeeesh.

Extra yeesh: last week I took my garbage can out to the curb late at night. While out there I heard yelling down the block. Like a friggen’ moron I stood there in my front yard trying to see what was going on; sounded like a bunch of kids chasing someone or something. Turns out they had lost control of a dog, now running loose. Like a FRIGGEN’ MORON I continued to stand there as the dog came out of the darkness and ran up to me. A pit bull dragging a leash. We stood abut 8 feet apart just staring at each other, me suddenly feeling like a FRIGGEN’ MORON for not packing heat. Fortunately the kids came running up a few seconds later and got hold of the leash and hauled the dog away. I don’t know what would have happened had things gone on a few seconds more, but it’s possible that that might have been the end of this spectacular blog.

I’ve seen a lot of people wanting to ban the pit bull breed. And then I see a lot of brainlets try to link banning a dangerous breed of dog to “See? You should also want to ban assault weapons, hurr durr!” It’s a bad analogy. The AR-15 is just a tool… as are the pit bulls teeth. Nobody suggests banning dog teeth, but banning the dangerous *entity* wielding those dangerous weapons. So if you want to link pit bulls, AR-15’s and bans… ban the crazy dangerous *people* who would behave like pit bulls.

 Posted by at 8:39 pm

“Bio Weapons Labs” in Ukraine

 AARRRGH, blather, Hmm..., Meh., politics, russian empire, science, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 152023
 

The idea that there are bioweapon labs in Ukraine is pretty effectively debunked by Ryan McBeth:

The fact that there are *biological* labs in Ukraine strikes me as entirely unsuprising… and entirely to be expected. Ukraine is an agricultural nation, and where you find agriculture *and* modern society, you find laboratories that study agriculture. And a large part of that is studying the diseases and pests that can damage agriculture. The midwest of the United States is littered with such labs, many in local universities, where researchers study everything from anthrax to locusts, aphids to fungi. But the Russian propagandists months ago made a big, fake deal of this, and a distressing number of people in the West fell for it.

 Posted by at 2:09 pm

A protocol right out of sci-fi: does it exist? Should it?

 AARRRGH, blather, Hmm..., nukes, politics, science fiction  No Responses »
Feb 142023
 

So by this point it should not be a spoiler that a flashback at the beginning of episode 2 of HBO’s “The Last Of Us” has a scientist realize just what biological horror has been unleashed in Jakarta, Indonesia. In short, it’s a mutated fungus that essentially kicks off a zombie apocalypse. There is no medical treatment for this; the only response is to “bomb.” The Indonesians apparently try that, but with minimal effectiveness. And because of course: if you need to burn down a major city with millions of people, destroy everything and kill everyone, going about it with some strike fighters and maybe some cargo planes is just not gonna get the job done. Ya gotta nuke. And Indonesia doesn’t have nukes.

 

The same basic idea has popped up elsewhere from time to time. It was the climax to the movie “The Crazies,” where the US nukes a city in Iowa to stop the spread of an engineered war bug. A nuke would have been the right response to “The Thing.” A nuke was going to be the climax to “The Andromeda Strain” till they realized that the radiation would only make the alien disease hulk out.

 

These are of course science fiction situations. A zombie apocalypse is almost certainly never going to happen; aliens that can absorb terrestrial life and spread at nightmarish speeds are equally unlikely. But *some* disease outbreak that could endanger human civilization, or even human existence? Sure, that’s conceivable. Someone could try to understand an outbreak in some third world village only to realize that it’s a strain of super-smallpox, something the existing vaccine would have no effect on; one person gets away with it, and billions could die. Nuking the village – and the surrounding ones – would be a reasonable response in that situation.

 

The existence of an emergency protocol where some third world government could ask the US, Russia or China “could you please nuke me,” or where such a strike could be called in by WHO officials, would almost certainly never be publicly acknowledged until it happened (if even then). But would such a protocol even be diplomatically possible? Would the nuclear powers sign on? Would the non-nuclear powers sign on? If it had to be called upon, would the nuclear powers be relied upon to do it… and would those who *didn’t* set off the nuke be relied upon to not use the situation for political gain?

 

Assume The Plague breaks out in some backwater in the Yucatan. Mexican officials figure it out, realize the severity of the problem, and ask for some canned sunshine. Half an hour later, eight warheads come raining down, courtesy an Ohio-class boomer out in the Atlantic. Rain forest goes *foom,* tens or hundreds of thousands die, maybe millions. Does the US explain why? Do Russia and China, along with Britain and France and the rest, step up to the podium and say “We concurred, and had it been in our back yards, it would have been out nukes?”

 

A difficulty here is that the process would have to be *fast.* And under some situations, the response might have to be damn near apocalyptic. Let’s say instead of a jungle village, it’s Jakarta. You have a *big* city to deal with… and you have all the airplanes that left the airport in the last hour or three. You’ll need to somehow convince the pilots to immediately land, and keep everyone on board. And those that don’t, and especially those that report an outbreak, you’ll have to deal with. Simply shooting them down won’t do: they’ll spread the problem when they crash. You’ll have to nuke the planes in flight, and I’m not sure that capability even exists anymore.

 

 Posted by at 8:37 pm

This sure sounds like copium

 blather, Crazy, Hmm..., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 142023
 

Not everyone can have kids, due to physical issues, or bad circumstances, or whatever. Not everyone *should* have kids. Not everyone *wants* kids. Not having kids is not something to be shamed for. But not *wanting* kids is at least a little weird; like it or not, that’s the meaning of existence. Screw supernatural or divine reasons… you are on this Earth because a billion years of evolution has ingrained within every single being’s DNA the urge to reproduce their kind. That’s just the way it is. You are the end product of the better part of a trillion generations of sexual reproduction, and to think that it ends with *you* is a little disconcerting.

 

Some people realize that *they* should not reproduce because their DNA is messed up. They have a genetic disease that could/would get passed on, leading not only to misery for the kid, but degradation of the gene pool. Or they know that they are psychologically messed up – either through bad genetics or bad life experiences – and they know that they would mess up the kid. The people who make these realizations and intentionally refrain from having kids should be simultaneously pitied *and* celebrated. They are doing the species proud.

 

But then you’ve got people like Z-list celebrity Chelsea Handler, who doesn’t want kids because they’d get in the way of her hedonism. Sure, in her case it’s best that she’s had not children – and at age 47 her chances of reproducing are now incredibly low, probably zero – because she’d mess them up. But it’s not selflessness that motivates her, but selfishness.

 

Here’s the video she posted that’s making the rounds. Judge for yourself: does she come across as someone truly happy with her choices, or someone who now has to live with her choices and is rationalizing real hard?

She’s basically whacking you over the head while she repeats at loud volume a mantra about how happy she is.

 

She’s getting pushback. Which is… I dunno. It’s worth pointing out how weird her attitude is, but it’s not worth getting in a twist over. My little blog post here will be abut the sum total of my giveadamn about the issue. But she has responded to it, and it just seems like more copium. What *does* disturb me is the “oh, so stunning and brave!” applause she gets from her audience about this (insert conspiracy theory about They Don’t Want You To Reproduce Yourself):

This sort of thing comes across to me like someone who is objectively *not* physically attractive sitting in front of a mirror, smiling real hard, and telling themselves over and over and over just how beautiful they are. That’s just weird.

 Posted by at 8:34 pm

And the balloonageddon continues

 aircraft, blather, Crazy, Hmm..., news, politics, rockets, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 122023
 

US Shuts Airspace Over Lake Michigan, Cites “National Defense”

 

Seems the balloons are coming pretty fast.

 

 

 

Clearly if the Commies are swarming our skies with balloons, they need to be shot down. But while balloons are cheap, AIM-9X missiles are expensive as are F-15 and especially F-22 sorties. Reserving air supremacy fighters for swatting balloons over Canada or Montana means they can’t be deployed elsewhere for roles more requiring their capabilities. The ability to take out balloons *cheaply* is needed. A suggestion: instead of expendable missiles launched from advanced fighters, how about reusable missiles launched from cargo jets, or modified corporate jets? Missiles such as AQM-37C. This missile was a target, and some variants were fitted with a parachute recovery system. The AQM-37C was capable of Mach 4 flight up to 100,000 feet. The AQM-37 series is now long out of production and no longer in service, but the design has worked for fifty years and could be certainly updated. It could be rebuilt for precision command guidance or some onboard guidance; it could be meant to simply dart through the balloons envelope, or blast over it real close while spewing out small submunitions. Build them in vast numbers for economies of scale; build variants for other roles such as surface attack, recon, whatever, to spread the cost and utility around. If you’re *real* good, build them for in-flight snatching; if you are *extremely* good, build them to be snatched by the launch aircraft.

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 6:17 pm
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