So, as previously mentioned, the recently enacted patently unconsitutional gun ban in Illinois has had a stay put on it by a downstate judge. The state has announced a plan to appeal this to the Illinois Supreme Court. It is understood that the IL SC will squash the opposition to the bill. But… there’s a bit of a wrinkle to the case. Illinois idiot governor Pritzker is one of the defendants in the lawsuit that was brought against the bill… and two of the ILSC judges who would rule on this are financially tied to him. Hell, at a million each, they are *leashed* to him, and that makes their participation a *massive* conflict of interest. They will either recuse themselves… or assure their ruling is overturned.
We now have some relevant settled SCOTUS law that states that judges that are financially connected to a party in a case must recuse themselves. Being that the Governor (Pritzker) is the defendant and 2 new ILSC justices received $1mil each from him to get to where they are….. https://t.co/F78bMUA3nDpic.twitter.com/zWxXerUI24
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.
The New York Times “reports” that black people are having trouble riding horses because they are having difficulty finding helmets:
For Black equestrians with natural hair, finding a helmet that fits can be virtually impossible –– another barrier to inclusion in a sport that remains overwhelmingly white. Helmet companies say there isn’t a simple fix. https://t.co/hhYIBqZV8Bpic.twitter.com/Io9myQ4wKJ
Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t there black people in the Army, Marines, Air Force? Pretty sure they wear helmets there. Don’t black people ride bicycles and motorcycles? Again, they’ve been wearing helmets for decades. Probably even been black skaters and skateboarders, who often seem to wear helmets. How is this a problem?
I’m not a fan of Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends tried to get me to play it going on 40 years ago, and I just didn’t get it (the FASA Star Trek Starship Combat game, though? I was all about that). So I don’t know the lore, settings, characters, etc. But I *do* know that the majority of fans appear to be males. D&D seems to share a lot of the *feel* of Lord of the Rings, which is also popular more among males. And while the males may tend towards the nerdy, the appreciation is for traditional masculine roles… heroes, barbarians, warriors, wizards. Weaklings are not well appreciated in that sort of world view. Even the supposedly week Hobbits turned out to have endless wells of strength and courage and, when called for, badassery.
The male characters, once again, apparently take a back seat to the females, and are depicted as weak and ineffectual. D&D is a role playing game. The players adopt roles… roles that they *want* to play. Characters they’d probably like to *be.* How many D&D players – the presumed base for the movie – want to see themselves as incompetent, weak, lazy, cowardly, useless? So… who is this movie supposed to appeal to?
I was unlikely to see this movie before reading this. “Unlikely” has transitioned to “statistically insignificant chance.”
Ministers briefly considered ordering all domestic cats in Britain to be killed amid fears they could be spreading Covid, a former health minister has said. … “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?
Had that come to pass, what *should* have happened was that the British people *should* have risen up and overthrown their government, putting any official who was supportive of the idea on the same boats the invading migrants had come in on, and shoved them – and the invaders – out to sea.
Since when is a 17-year-old actually a “child?” Especially one who is six and a half feet tall and weighing 270 pounds?
Watch the video and determine for yourself whether he’s a threat. You want him in school with YOUR kids?
Every day I become more and more convinced that homeschooling, formerly the province of religious weirdos, is the answer for parents who don;t want to be complicit in child abuse.
Graphic video.
The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office (in Florida) arrested a 17-year-old 6’6”, 270-pound student who was recorded severely beating a Matanzas High School aide on Feb. 21 after she confiscated his Nintendo Switch. He’s been charged with felony aggravated battery. pic.twitter.com/EuVpLvQcxb
Turns out the AI are learning to code. Two immediate takeaways from that:
1) There goes another career path.
2) Dear Sweet Baby Jeebus, have none of these people ever watched *any* science fiction? Giving an AI that has a demonstrated lack of morality the ability to re-write itself is the very height of “I *told* you not to do that!” insanity.
I saw a somewhat astonishing thing today. GPT was asked a question that it needed to write code to answer, and given access to a Python REPL. It wrote buggy code, then based on the error message it fixed its own code until it worked (and gave the correct answer). It debugged. pic.twitter.com/O6cdxH8gvC
One of the lies Putin and his stooges and running dog lackeys have used to justify the invasion of Ukraine is the goal of “denazifying” the place. To help bolster their claims that the place is rife with Pure Unadulterated Evil, they have tried to associate Ukraine with every bit of nastiness on the planet hoping that something will stick. And recently they thought they’d hit upon a goldmine: a photo of a Ukrainian military commander wearing an ISIS patch. “See? The Ukrainians are working with ISIS!”
Except… no. The Ukrainian in question has been identified, found and interviewed. Turns out he has a slightly unusual hobby… he collects “trophy” patches from his allies and enemies alike and wears them. I’ve certainly heard of worse, and weirder, things for soldiers in combat zones to do. In his case, rather than wearing a necklace of dried human ears (or other conveniently pokey-outey body parts) sliced off his fallen foes, he wears their patches.
And in this case, the ISIS patch came from a Russian Wagner Group fighter.
In the video interview, he’s shown wearing British, American and Ukrainian patches, along with patches containing Christian verses… certainly an odd thing for an “ISIS member” to wear.
So once again, the Putinists are accusing their enemies of doing exactly what *they* are doing: being in cahoots with ISIS.
So there’s this forthcoming movie, “Space Oddity.” The premise is that a guy is selected for a one-way mission to Mars. This is not an unrealistic idea… for every colonization mission throughout history there have been people – lots of people – who went on a one-way trip. That’s how we colonized the entire planet, and that’s how we’ll colonize the entire universe. But instead of the movie being about the boldness of the mission, the braveness of the guy, the vision for the future… it seems to be about the people dragging him down, refusing to let him have his dream. Fark the future of mankind, stay down here with us in the dirt (rather literally in this case).
It’s not entirely clear how the movie will end, but the trailer seems to be one of those that lays out the entire plot. And it indicates that, gosh, love conquers all, including the urge to explore. To that I say: bah. And to my satisfaction, so do a lot of the commenters on the video.
Shymalan spoiler: the girl is from Mars. She needs to keep him on Earth so he doesn’t spread human diseases and wipe out the Mars population. She dies of a common cold in his arms and the movie ends with him packing up her coffin to bring to Mars. He’s part of a secret government organization and his mission has always been to destroy the Martians and harvest all the precious metals on their planet. It’s a horror/thriller.
@joefelice5062
5 days ago