New video shows Texas school shooter Salvador Ramos holding bag of dead cats
He was reportedly fond of hurting cats. People knew this… friends, family, others.
So, sure. Blame the inanimate object.
May 312022
May 302022
First up: “President” Joe Biden says that a 9mm bullet from a pistol is “high caliber” and will blow a lung out of your body.Consequently, there’s “no rational basis” for having something as “high caliber” as a 9mm for “self protection” or hunting
He lies and says you couldn’t buy a cannon when the 2nd Amendment was written, when the government was also handing out letters of Marque and Reprisal, allowing private ship owners to work as armed privateers. He also says “you couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons” when the 2nd Amendment was written (“citation needed”).
The man who fled from Afghanistan goes on to say that in order to take on the government you need an F-15 or an Abrams tank. Which is why the Ukrainians, lacking F-15s and Abrams tanks, were conquered overnight by the Russians, I guess?? Then he goes on to say that “everybody’s getting more rational” about gun-grabbing.
And then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau goes ahead and gives a damn fine reason for Quebec to declare independence, opening the door for the western provinces to go their own way. A semi-autonomous region from from Alaska through BC and Alberta and Saskatchewan and Yukon down through Montana, the Dakotas to Texas through Iowa and Nebraska and New Mexico is looking better and better. Persuade Cook County to secede from Illinois and boy, do we have a deal.
To all those who would have citizens surrender their right to self defense to the same party that supports defunding the police, collective punishment for grievances from generations ago and wiping out vast swathes of their own offspring… how about “no.”
May 302022
Daredevil and Spider-Man can rest easy tonight…
AHHHHH!!!! My eyes!!!!
May 302022
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.
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Well, this is depressing
AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ
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May 302022
What’s more depressing is that their estimates may well be optimistic.
NASA mission to put humans on an asteroid ‘revealed’ – will you still be alive?
Researchers analyzed NASA’s budget since the 1960s to gauge how likely a mission to the asteroid belt is within the next century.
…
The researchers concluded that a crewed mission to the asteroid could take place as early as 2073, while astronauts may land on Jupiter by 2103 and on Saturn by 2132.
FFS.
Remember when NASA had some fricken’ *vision?* At least now there are vastly faster options than NASA.
I don’t, because it was before I was born. But just a few years before I came on the scene, NASA really did plan for an adventurous future, on an optimistic timescale. For instance, this from 1966:
“Research station on Titan” by 2000 or so.
*Somewhere* around here (I thought on this blog) I’ve got a chart I believe by Krafft Ehricke that lays out a more detailed vision of the future, along the lines of the crude graph above. Familiar to anyone?
May 292022
Not only did The Washington Post mess this up in their tweet (left) about how George Floyd died, they did the same thing on their own website (right) pic.twitter.com/nWhNEAvFke
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 24, 2022
So much has changed in those two years. Two years ago, he died because he had taken a fatal dose of fentanyl, and now he’s been shot. But even more has changed:
Sigh.
May 242022
Here we go again:
15 killed in shooting at Uvalde elementary school; gunman dead, Gov. Abbott says
Rather amazingly, they’ve already released the ID of the shooter: 18 year old Salvador Romas. I suspect that might be an attempt to get ahead of the inevitable political narrative that pops up about this sort of thing. A narrative that’s usually wrong, but serves a purpose.
If you were thinking about buying an AR-15 and/or mags and/or ammo… it’s *really* time to get on that. The politighouls will be all over this; there’s nothing professional gun grabbers love more than dead children. It’s unclear what weapons were used… a handgun almost certainly and *perhaps* a rifle. He seemed to have at least two AR-15’s, based on the social media posts he made.
Salvador Ramos: Suspect in Uvalde Elementary School Shooting
May 242022
This makes for an interesting read:
SFWA eats their own: Mercedes Lackey is made Grand Master, banned from Nebulas on same day
The SFWA is the formerly respected “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” presenters of the formerly respected Nebula Award. Mercedes Lackey is a… well, I guess now *formerly* respected writer of left-leaning science fiction, quite popular and successful, and now her reputation and potential future career could be trashed because she off-handedly referred to a black guy as “colored” rather than “person of color.” She’s 72. I suspect she spent a good many formative decades in a time when “colored” was the preferred term. So now the SFWA and the baying ghouls who populate it and Twitter are out for the blood of an old lady who many of them, five minutes earlier, considered a hero because she had gay characters in her stories back in the 80’s.
According to her husband, whose Twitter account virtue signals at a professional level, she has been badly emotionally damaged by the treatment she’s received. You tear up old people, sometimes you break them. I wonder just how happy and proud these bargain bin revenants will be if they manage to bring her to an end. I suspect “a lot.”
Here’s a potential explanation as to why so much of modern science fiction seems so awful: the gatekeepers have changed from the people who know what they’re doing and are good at it… to just whoever. And that invites the political whackaloons.
As the creep of leftist identity politics has spread throughout the organization, a startling erosion of quality came with it. This is perhaps most objectively apparent in their membership qualifications, which were changed in May of 2014. Until then, to be considered for “Active membership”, an applicant had to have sold three pieces of short fiction at a 8c per word or one book for $2,000 or more in a Qualifying Professional Market (in other words, a top-tier publisher like Tor or Del Ray).
It was after this time that the “Associate Member” tier was introduced, which came with a gallingly low bar for entry – one paid sale of short fiction at a pro rate OR one that has been self-published, or published by an indie or small press for an amount equivalent to 8c per word. In other words, slap a thousand words or more up on Kindle, fork over your $90 annual fee, and you get to vote on the finalists for the Nebulas.
May 232022
I remember this when it happened. Thought I’d seen the last of this guy. Now it looks like I’ve seen the last of affordable gas and food.
Stumbled across this montage from the doomed Biden ‘88 campaign and I’m crying at the McLaughlin Group reactions at the end. pic.twitter.com/A9etqn8J4H
— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) May 23, 2022
May 232022
Max is a Maine Coon from Bucha. He was taken by Russian soldiers & left in Belarus. Thanks to kind people who used his QR tag to find his owners, Max has been reunited w/ his family. @USAID is proud to have helped make this possible thru our partnership w/ the 🇺🇦startup Animal ID pic.twitter.com/GYNyEuAjov
— USAID Ukraine (@USAIDUkraine) May 20, 2022
Stealing washing machines is weird, but it’s understandable if you assume that they have no basic appliances back home. But stealing pets is done purely out of malice.