Jun 242022
 

UKHSA: Poliovirus detected in London sewage

Monkeypox didn’t quite work out. Maybe polio will finally allow the British government to start welding British people into their homes so they won’t see the millions of third-worlders that the British government will bring in…

In seriousness, this is unlikely to amount to anything. Polio isn’t particularly fatal, and finding polio in the sewer is unlikely to mean many infections except for those darn kids who swim in it for fun. But any excuse to cause a panic that can be engineered to increase government power will be taken.

 Posted by at 12:42 pm
Jun 232022
 

Halfway through the crowdfunding effort, Tomy only has 14.9% of the backers needed. Unless there’s a big surge, I can’t see how this is going to happen. And it’s a damned shame, it looks like a nifty thing. So if you have an extra $600, give it some consideration. If you have an extra $600 but don’t want a big die-cast Enterprise, buy it anyway and send it to me. I’ll give it a good home. Or you could just send me $600 directly. I’d be fine with that too.

32 Inch Star Trek Enterprise – Die Cast Metal Replica

They’ve recently updated the description to include three shuttlecraft as well:

I think they just butted up against some historic bad luck. An expensive luxury item in the middle of Bidenomics? That’s just tragic; they’ve likely been at work on this project for a few years, and the timing just plain sucked. I just hope that if this doesn’t go through they don’t throw it all away, but store what they need to safely and try again when things are better. Not sure when that’ll be… maybe year two or three of the DeSantis administration?

 

 Posted by at 8:08 pm
Jun 232022
 

Here’s the proof a NYC high school diploma is worthless

“‘The Three Little Pigs’ story was read round-robin style in a grade 11 classroom, which demonstrated limited student access in this class to grade-level text,” according to the department’s Office of Accountability. … At Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, more than one-third of all classes were being disrupted by students’ chatter …

Sure, society needs people who are no more skilled than required to dig a ditch. But the problem is, these kids are doubtless also being taught that they are special snowflakes and that anything less than a lavish lifestyle of hookers and blow is a sign that The Other People are oppressing them. So these “students” will not only leave school utterly incapable of performing any but the most basic tasks… they’ll be unwilling to do them. One might wonder why this sort of thing would be promoted. Well… one might wonder that if one had not been paying attention. Why would this sort of thing be promoted?

1) These kids will be useless, sure. But they’ll still be allowed to vote. And who will they probably vote for? The people promising to make their lives easier without effort on their part.

2) They will consume resources without contributing. Thus they will be a net drain, requiring someone to fill in for them. And who better to fill in for them but similarly low-skill, but less offended foreign workers of dubious legality? And who will they and their offspring and their enablers probably vote for? Why, most likely those politicians who promise to not deport them.

Maybe Congress should spare a moment from the January 6 show trials to look into the matter of politicians whoa re *really* working to damage the United States. It might be worth seeing who’s getting paid or influenced by, say, the ChiComs. The Rosenbergs sizzled for doing less damage to the US.

 Posted by at 7:24 pm
Jun 232022
 

Well, here it is, the dumbest, worst thing you’ll read today:

A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It’s Bad for You

The author believes that merit is a terrible idea, and that it should be abandoned. And replaced with what, exactly? I know you’ll be stunned: he doesn’t say. Because repalcing the concept of advancement through merit – intelligence, hard work, determination, talent, whatever – even if a lot of the time it comes down to random chance (i.e luck) with *anything* else is self-evidently an awful idea.

Consider: some singers rise to *billionaire* status. Most singers end up singing in the shower, and not much further. Some shower-singers are probably objectively better than the billionaire singers. Well, so the fabulously successful ones may have gotten there through luck. What of it? Got a better way? Lotteries?

 Posted by at 12:37 am
Jun 212022
 

This hydraulic fire gets out of hand faster than you can say “Uh-oh, I’m on fire.”

 

 Posted by at 7:33 pm
Jun 212022
 

A Napierville (near Chicago) police officer has pulled over a car for running a stop sign and is talking with the driver when *another* car pulls up and the driver of that car launches himself towards the cop, wielding a hatchet. The cop puts him down *real* fast.

The big question is WTF was Edward Samaan, the weirdo in this tale, thinking.

 

The full dashcam, no meaningful audio:

The full bodycam footage:

 

Bet that civilian driver had one *hell* of a story for his friends and family later that day. I kinda hope he got let off with a warning; the interaction between the driver and the cop was seeming to be cordial and respectful. He blew a stop sign, which ain’t good… but I think watching a maniac get put down might be considered adequate.

One thing I’ll never understand is on display here. The Bad Guy gets shot multiple times in the torso/abdomen. He is *down.* It’s unclear whether he’s conscious; it’s quite clear that he is very, very incapacitated. And yet the cops that gather around keep shouting commands at him to roll over onto his stomach. Dude… he ain’t doin’ nothin’ nohow. He’s *done.*

 Posted by at 12:45 pm
Jun 192022
 

There is a bit of a thrill in the last moments of any auction. I suppose it’s like gambling or sportsball-watching, neither of which I’m into, but I guess there is a similar result. Anyway, this afternoon saw the end of an Ebay listing for a lot of McDonnell manned lifting body + ASSET documentation & blueprints; this is exactly the sort of thing the APR Patreon/Subscription was created for. Having seen such auctions go for *stupid* sums in the past, I expected the same here, so I had a group of people together to crowdfund it. I was prepared, with crowdfund backing, to bid a *stupid* amount for it. And in fact I did bid a *stupid* amount (well above what I’d gathered via crowdfunding) in the last few seconds. Fortunately, the final cost was not so tragically high, so the funders only got charged a smidgeon and my tragically over-stretched credit card didn’t get demolished.

Still, those last few moments were troublesome. Because as it turns out, my cardiopulmonary system ain’t over the Pinko Pox yet, and my system *really* didn’t like that at all. That aspect of the exercise  sucked.

But hey, manned lifting body. Woo.

 Posted by at 9:57 pm
Jun 182022
 

Because why not.

Two weeks ago yesterday I started displaying symptoms of covid, a coughing fit came on *very* suddenly Friday afternoon and lasted all through the night. Temperature stayed normal until sometime early Saturday, at which point it went up about five degrees F from my baseline and the day became *really* awful. Sunday was bad, but not quite as horrifying. Monday saw a test and confirmation that the ChiComs had got to me with their little pandemic. Since then it has been a general even improvement; temperature fluctuations disappeared within 4-5 days. Coughing has remained, though it’s at the “kinda annoying” level now.

I have, however, noticed some things that continue to hang on: physical exertion results in almost complete systems collapse, and my brain remains a little fuzzy. I can do CAD drafting no sweat; I can bitch and moan online just fine. But fiction writing – which I’d typically engage in to the tune of about a page or three a day – has dropped to an average of two sentences a day at best. And non-fiction writing remains challenging: I start writing, then need to refer to source documents… and I just can’t maintain focus. And there remains a general indefinable *weird* feeling, akin to fatigue but… a little different.

So, nothing at all like the disease I was promised, what with ventilators and hospitalization and death in a forgotten corridor. But it’s dragging on well past the point when it has lost its novelty.

 Posted by at 4:51 pm