UPDATE: Launch scrubbed, min engine trouble. Earliest next launch opportunity is September 2.
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The 2-hour launch window opens at 8:30 AM Monday morning, Eastern time. Should be streamed live here:
Also here:
The SLS is an insanely expensive, ridiculously obsolete design, but damn if I don’t hope it succeeds. I did some work on those boosters back in the day… fifteen friggen years ago. Youch.
A clip from… something, a TV show or movie I suppose (UPDATE: it’s from the 2021 movie “Queenpins”). The question: is the guy right?
My own interpretation: you are under no obligation to do anything for anyone, up to and including raising a finger to save their life. That said, a refusal to raise a finger to save a life will be seen as (and probably is) a serious personality defect. But being inconvenienced in order to provide someone with unearned satisfaction or amusement? That’s not the same. And we *do* live in a culture where far too many people are far too entitled, believing themselves *owed* other peoples time, effort and resources. “You have something I want, gimme.” “Boo hoo, I made whoppingly ridiculous financial decisions that predictably bit me in the ass, I want you to bail me out.” Perhaps kids finding out – and then learning to accept – that they can’t always get what they want simply because they want it – is a truly valuable lesson that should be taught and learned more often.
Or maybe the guy’s just a jerk.
But if I’m comfortably seated in a seat I specifically chose – perhaps having paid extra to select that seat – then perhaps I *really* don’t want to get up and move elsewhere. How are you going to compensate me for my cost and bother?
Well, euthanasia *is* a form of healthcare. So as the economic burden of taking care of vast numbers of poor, sick “migrants” and “refugees” continues to mount in places like the US and UK, expect to see euthanasia offered – and then pushed – onto those where the math just doesn’t add up. If you cost more than you add via taxes, if you vote the wrong way, if you don’t make the demographic quotas look right, or if you just contact a government employee who’s having an off day, is in a particular mood, or if he/she/it/they simply dosen’t like the sound of your voice… well, there’s an easier, cheaper way to deal with your heart disease or cancer or PTSD or chronic acne.
Next year, Canada will begin allowing mentally ill individuals to qualify for assisted suicide under this formulation, and it is likely that this autumn the government will receive a parliamentary report recommending that children deemed competent (“mature minors”) should also be eligible.
*NEAT.*
I’m all in favor of euthanasia when the situation calls for it. Are you being eaten alive by a horrific cancer that cannot be cured? Are you trapped in a wreck of a body with no hope of any sort of quality of life? Is your nervous system on fire, making every moment unending agony, with no prospect of fixing it? Then, yeah, I can see taking a few deep lungs full of pure nitrogen as a merciful alternative. But because you’re *sad?* That’s a “no” from me, buddy. Especially Canada’s nonsense about making mental illness among minors eligible for an assisted dirtnap… because how many hormonal teenagers *can’t* be fairly described as bugnuts? Get them away from the social media and their weirdo pervert teachers, deprogram them from CRT and SJW, and just let them mature a bit, and most people will be fine.
And euthanasia should almost never be promoted by the people paying the bills.
The video below has some slightly spicy language. I’m not entirely sure, but I think he’s a little upset about this.
Sylvester Stallone made a career out of playing “action heroes” who tended to be all muscle and little brain… or at least that’s the stereotype. A lot of his characters and movies *seemed* like that on the surface, but were very different underneath. “Rocky” is often thought of as a boxing movie, but it’s really a love story with some boxing thrown in. “First Blood” is thought of as a simple shoot-em-up, but it’s really a story about how society threw away a whole generation of veterans… that monologue at the end *utterly* makes the movie. And “Demolition Man” seems another simple shoot-em-up with sci-fi trappings, but it’s a reasonably deep commentary on political correctness. And the man, when he had the right material, could *act.*
Stallone himself seems to be a pretty smart guy. This comes across *brilliantly* in this clip from a BBC interview from 1977:
A more complete version of the interview:
Pulse Jet engine from a V1 Flying Bomb fired up on Feb 6 2021 at the Military Aviation Museum near Virginia Beach
Having gone through the Commie Cough with subsequent fatigue issues (definite improvement on that front, but still not where things should be), this video speaks to me at a very deep level.
I’m all in favor of megaprojects. Hell, some years ago I made a pretty good stab at a book on the subject… half history of such projects, half illustrated manual of such projects, and half manifesto calling for mankind to plow ahead with such projects. Things like solar power satellites, O’Neill habitats, supra-mundane terraforming, orbital rings, terraformed asteroids (inside and out), Dyson swarms, all that. If mankind is going to make it long-term, we are going to have to do such things, and do rather a lot of them. We will eventually tear apart whole solar systems to rebuild them better. And to get from Here to There, we are going to have to do a lot of intermediate projects… and a lot of them will fail. I suspect that a fair proportion of the early space habitats will turn into disasters; early Mars colonies will be death traps; solar power satellites will fold up like origami. It’s sad, but it’s likely inevitable. It’s not like the history of Europeans colonizing the world was a history of unalloyed success from the get-go; there are whole colonies that just up and friggen’ vanished. But humans learn from such things and do better the next time… and soon enough, the same people who vanished like a fart in the wind at Roanoke have built New York City.
That said: not all megaprojects sound like good ideas. Some that seem like they are probably technically feasible sound like logistic or sociological nightmares. Such is the case with The Line, a whackadoo concept for a skyscraper taller than the Empire State Building… and hundreds of kilometers long. Worse, they want to build the thing in the desert. Worst, they want to build it in *Arabia.* No matter how bad your idea is, building it in a backwards theocratic superstitious cesspit will make your idea even worse.
A video calling out Republican mid-term election commercials featuring guns:
Now, *nobody* should be under the delusion that Republicans in general or these in particular truly have the 2nd Amendment at heart. I accept that chances are *really* good that for at least some of these politicians, the guns they’re shown holding are simply props. But they are holding these props knowing full well that by doing so they will annoy the sort of horrible people who are offended at the idea of American civilians having anything like the sort of right to defend themselves that the IRS’s new army will have.
A video that starts with something VP Harris said back in January, something that every American politician *should* not only say, but believe and work to protect:
“Each country has it’s own identity, it’s own culture, it’s own history, and that should be respected…”
Yup. And “every country” includes *this* country.
But bypassing that for the moment, she then goes on to… well, is “lie” too strong a word?
Kamala Harris says she “rarely, if ever” refers to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as the ‘Northern Triangle,’ out of respect for each country's "identity."
Seems like a weird thing to lie about ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/OLx9I8zIEi
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 28, 2022