The Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. A hundred gallons of gas, about nine fillups in my bitty car, would save you less than twenty bucks. If four dollar a gallon gas was enough to stifle travel… taking 18 cents off the price of six dollar gas ain’t gonna do squadoo.
Well, here it is, the dumbest, worst thing you’ll read today:
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?
This hydraulic fire gets out of hand faster than you can say “Uh-oh, I’m on fire.”
Catastrophic failure at an aluminum extrusion line. Looks like an overpressure event and the oil itself (over a drop ceiling no less) open a portal to a demon dimension… pic.twitter.com/VQeM0f85Mw
— j.d.christopher (@jdchristopher) June 4, 2022
Photos of the aftermath. Remarkably good, all things considered. The investigation currently involved local police, so it will likely be some time before we hear more about the root cause. pic.twitter.com/cwq0hfYvQH
— j.d.christopher (@jdchristopher) June 5, 2022
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.*
I had this image in my head of what London, England, looked like. Tea and crumpets, eh wot, and all that. Terribly civilized people, high culture, a bunch of, well, English people. Behold:
Sadiq Khan's London 👇 pic.twitter.com/C5Oiws2fN6
— Dan 🏴 (@DanTheMan5043) June 12, 2022
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.
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.
The Babylon Bee is at its best when you read one of their satirical articles and realize that if you didn’t know it was satire, you’d accept that it was a real, if perhaps disturbing and/or insane, article. Well… here’s a website that doesn’t seem to say anywhere that it’s satire, and I can’t tell if it’s satire or complete insanity:
There are a hundred pages of content, with about ten articles per page. A thousand articles of satire is a hell of a commitment to cause… but then, so is a thousand articles of utter nuttery. There are articles such as:
And so on
The site seems to just take whatever “articles” get written and submitted to it. So it may be a fully serious site (a lot of the articles seem fairly normal) that is either:
1) Being bombarded by articles written by loons
2) Being bombarded by articles written by trolls pretending to be loons
3) Being bombarded by both trolls and loons
Either way… I’m all for people paying attention. A bunch of leftwing lunatics who want to tear down civilization? That sort of thing should be noted. Insane trolling proves indistinguishable from honest insanity? That should also be noted.
Trump had a tenuous relationship with hard facts. When he told the American public things that were untrue, it *tended* to be in the form of “I will make everything awesome.” Exaggerations, self-promotion and feel-good propaganda, that sort of thing. But Trump was a piker compared to the Biden administration when it came to bald-faced lying directly to the American public. Biden and his lackeys will look you in the face as your house burns down around you and tell you that your house has never been in better shape.
Keep it up, Joe. November can’t get here soon enough.
As part of the ongoing “January 6” dog and pony show, Senator Cruz got the opportunity to quiz the FBI on their participation in the events. It would have been *really* easy for the FBI rep to simply say “no” (or “not to my knowledge” or “not in any official capacity”) when asked if the FBI was involved, if the FBI encouraged criminality, if the FBI committed criminality. The actual answers are simultaneously uninformative and say everything.
Ted Cruz asked the FBI if any of them were involved in the riot on January 6. It's a simple "yes" or "no" question. Guess what their response was. pic.twitter.com/Jo4x1s0E3O
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 15, 2022