Womp womp…
Jan 152023
Jan 152023
Ummm….
It looks like a lot of things. Like MLK, though, is not one of them. Disembodied limbs doing naughty things, sure. What Starfleet got back from that transporter foulup at the beginning of ST:TMP, sure. But an actual recognizable human? Not so much.
Perhaps it was made specifically to get torn down. In recent years it has become standard practice to tear down statues of historical figures who have the slightest hint of unfortunate or problematic aspects… and, well…
Jan 142023
Attorney General says if sheriffs won’t enforce gun ban ‘there are other people there to do the job’
The attorney general of the state of Illinois is annoyed that the great majority of the county sheriffs – elected officials who do not report to the Governor, nor can he remove them from office – have told the Governor to get bent over the issue of arresting several million citizens for the crime of owning semi-automatic rifles and standard capacity magazines. The AG believes that other police forces than county sheriffs can do the job, such as the State Police. Perhaps he thinks the Governor can call up the National Guard for this task. But for those sheriffs who take their jobs seriously, they may well arrest State Police who attempt to arrest citizens. And the sheriffs would be right to do so: their oaths tend to include words to the effect of “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and banning magazines and firearms is, especially in light of recent Supreme Court decisions, monumentally and obviously unconstitutional.
This would not be unprecedented. Recall the ATF agent who got himself arrested a couple years ago. This was an arrest and tazing that didn’t need to happen; it followed the same script as so many other arrests: someone high on drugs or entitlement refuses to comply even a little bit with simple orders of the police, and things go badly for them. in this case, the ATF agent was high on his sense of overwhelming power… which it turned out he didn’t actually have.
I imagine if State Police or some such start actually arresting the law abiding, various resistance movements will start up that will keep them under surveillance and sic Sheriffs and vigilance committees on them. Real-time monitoring of anyone suspected of trying to enforce the unconstitutional law would seem entirely feasible in this day and age.
Also: virtually all police enjoy “qualified immunity,” which protects them from getting sued when they behave badly. But as I understand it, that immunity goes away if they are doing something unconstitutional. So, ummm… if you are a State Police officer who really doesn’t want to lose his house, his saving and his kids college fund, maybe think twice before violating someones Constitutional rights. Just a thought.
72 hours after the Illinois "assault weapon" and magazine ban bill was signed: https://t.co/IezP9tsHmm
— Rob Romano (@2Aupdates) January 14, 2023
Jan 132023
In general you want your opponent to be dumber and less capable than you. In matters of war and serious geopolitics, you want them to believe things that just ain’t so, to be generally gullible. But at a certain point, those who oppose you can start to believe in false stories that are *so* dumb – the “wage gap,” “white supremacy,” ‘trans women are women,” and so on – that they begin to pose an all new kind of threat.
And so… to Russia:
Russia Is Afraid of Western Psychic Attacks
Psychic powers and the supernatural are, on their own, wholly unthreatening. Things that don’t exist can’t hurt you… the Kremlin can have their psychic warrior beam Bozo Rays at me all day long, won’t harm me a bit. But such things *aren’t* on their own. A belief in nonsense could end up with Putin, say, believing a “psychic” who tells him that the United States just launched a thousand cloaked warheads at Moscow, each filled with a Sith lord dolphin powered by Mary Kay brand dark matter. Since the Russians don’t have an anti-Sith dolphin defense shield, their only recourse would be to strike back at the US with a full nuclear barrage.
In general I fully support my enemies spending as much of their time and treasure trying to gain the upper hand in psychic warfare. Every ruble spent on Miss Cleoski is a ruble not spent on an AK-47 or a MiG or an ICBM. But at some point they go a little too far. Hell, imagine if the Russian leadership began to believe that their psychics were capable of stopping a full US nuclear strike on Russia. That might incentivize a Russian first strike.
Jan 112023
On the one hand, earlier today the FAA ordered a “ground stop” to all domestic flights, basically shutting down the aviation economy:
Buttigieg responds to latest transportation crisis as he faces continued criticism
On the other hand, eggs are becoming a luxury good, unavailable to regular folks.
Egg Shortage: What’s Behind Soaring Prices – and When Will They Go Back Down?
In the Midwest, a dozen large eggs cost an average of $5.17 last week, compared with roughly $1.50 in January 2022 and 94 cents in 2021. …In California last week, the average price for a dozen eggs reached $7.37, according to the USDA’s Egg Market Overview report.
This is apparently due to a bird flu wiping out chicken in industrial quantities.
Things don’t look great for Virgin Orbit
AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., news, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ
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Jan 102023
Virgin Orbit is Richard Bransons space launch company. Their launch system, LauncherOne, uses a 747 to haul a more or less conventional expendable rocket into the air for launch to orbit. yesterday they flew a launch attempt, the first orbital launch attempt from the UK. Note “attempt.” It got close, but something went wring and the vehicle didn’t attain orbit. That’s never a good thing, but things apparently weren’t good at the company before then.
Even before Monday’s launch failure, Virgin Orbit’s finances were dismal
The math seems weird:
Independent estimates suggest that, over that time, Virgin Orbit spent as much as $1 billion to develop and test its LauncherOne rocket and air-launch system. The company made its first successful launch in January 2021 and has averaged one mission every six months since then.
An obvious question is this: With such high development costs and a low cadence for a rocket that sells for $12 million per launch, how can Virgin Orbit be financially sustainable?
How indeed. $12M per launch would require 83 launches to make a $Billion, and that’s forty years at the current rate. And $12M is the selling price of the mission, not the profit.
Jan 092023
Here’s your new “zombie apocalypse writing prompt:”
Study using mosquitoes to deliver vaccines has Chinese researchers buzzing
In an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications on December 16, researchers said they had developed new technology that can turn a mosquito into a flying vaccine carrier to immunise animals in the wild.
Oh, goodie. Commie scientists studying ways to deliver vaccines, drugs, plagues, manmade horrors beyond your comprehension, etc. via skeeters.
The ChiComs have already announced that they are working on genetic weapons to target specific ethnic groups for everything from death to dumbing-down. This seems like a decent enough way to deliver such a weapon in certain geographic regions.
Now, is the idea of immunizing wild animals against pandemics a good one? Quite possibly. Is the use of skeeters to do this a good idea? Possibly. Would I trust anything produced by people who think that Mao and his policies were good ideas? Not a chance in hell, Skippy. If you buy into socialism, you’ve demonstrated a sufficient lack of critical thinking skills and judgement that you should be kept far away from anything more scientifically complex than a wooden block.
Jan 042023
A couple of tweets showing the spectacular state of American cities today…
Someone needs a tazin’…
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) January 4, 2023
And New York City? Don’t go there.
New York City Grocery Stores right now …
2023 is so far🔥🔥🔥
🔊music …😰 pic.twitter.com/sUFfmJVGpJ
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) January 3, 2023
Here’s a fun related article:
Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities
People no longer *need* to live in big cities quite as much as they used to. The pandemic helped this process along by forcing people to work from home; and once people – and businesses – realized that people could work from *anywhere* and not have to deal with commutes and the nightmare that is the urban area, a lot of people *wanted* to bail out of big cities. Turns out Poop Central, AKA San Francisco, is seeing a *lot* of empty offices as people pull the D-rings and flee that rathole.
Jan 032023
I need more context.
The truckdriver didn't care pic.twitter.com/6Woes6Fggm
— Expensive accidents (@expensiveaccide) January 2, 2023
Dec 262022
We’re clearly being led by the very, very best:
The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn
For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in.
Spectacular.
I have hopes that the lawyers sure to be hired by the families involves *are* fans of merit and are the best at what they do so they can sue this high school and its administration into oblivion.