Before the Europeans got involved int he transatlantic slave trade, *they* were enslaved by Africans and Middle Easterners. This, of course, is inconvenient for The Narrative.
Mar 252022
Mar 252022
As anyone who has ever had to deal with the myriad of medical maladies that can afflict them, cats are fragile. Conversely, they can be tough little bastards. I saw that years ago when Fingers was still an outdoors farmcat, stoically shrugging off a neck wound that would have utterly ruined a human. And Buddy the cat, set upon by two pit bulls and two “humans,” manages to continue to fight to survive.
Buddy the cat is ‘hanging in there’ after vicious attack by 2 dogs in Philly
There is a brief Facebook video embedded there showing that he is up and about, kneading. That would seem to be a good sign.
No word as yet whether the perpetrators have been found.
Mar 242022
Well, if you want your day ruined, I can hook you up (after the break, cuz this story sucks):
Edit: the story deals with the torture of a cat. Those who know me or who have followed the blog long enough will recognize that this sort of story sets me off in a way few other stories will. Some people argue that this is a mismatch of priorities: in a world of rape and murder and war and genocide and Star Trek Discovery, surely one little cat is a small thing compared to the other horrors humans perpetrate. But as I mentioned a few days ago, animals cannot understand the world as we do. When humans mistreat other humans, even on an industrial scale, humans can understand what’s going on. Even if the “why” is unclear, it’s really not that hard to figure out. But to a cat (or a dog, or a horse, or a racoon, or a squirrel, or a mouse), someone committing acts of horror on them is beyond their comprehension. The human in that story becomes a cosmic horror, a god of pain and madness. THAT is why I refuse to harm critters that I don’t need to (mosquitoes? f’em) for any trivial reason. I’m not some touchy-feely hippie who refuses to eat meat because cows or pigs or fish are sacred, but I will demand that the animal not be tortured. I will have the urge to apply boot to ass to anyone who abuses critters for fun. Because cosmic horror should be avoided in real life.
Anyone who tortures an animal becomes, in a very real sense, a demon. And for someone who does not believe in demons, that’s quite a statement.
Mar 222022
“Cosmic horror” is a genre of horror invented – or at least perfected – by author H.P. Lovecraft. Most forms of horror have the protagonists being menaced with death by knife wielding maniacs, weirdos with chainsaws, werewolves or sharks trying to eat them, vampires looking to drain their blood, aliens looking to wipe them out. Whether good or bad, that type of horror is comprehensible to the protagonist, at least after they’ve had a little while to process what’s going on. But cosmic horror is horror based on the protagonist being wholly *incapable* of understanding the threat, what’s going on, what the future holds. The alien or the maniac can be defeated in the end with a shotgun blast to the face, or a nuke to the homeworld… but the cosmic horror cannot be defeated. It might be avoided, evaded, delayed or bypassed… but the protagonist will never “win,” nor will the protagonist ever really grasp just what the hell is going on.
By definition, this one is tricky to define, trickier to pull off successfully. Fortunately (?), recent event suggested to me an easy to understand analogy for cosmic horror. Take, for example, the story of “Stepan,” a cat made somewhat famous on Instagram. Stepan seems a perfectly normal cat, in perfectly normal surroundings, with perfectly normal humans. The usual sort of photos and videos of Stepan looking cute made the Instagram account famous and popular. But it wasn’t cosmic horror.
Until very recently. Because Stepan is a *Ukrainian* cat.
Stepan the Internet-Famous Cat Escapes Ukraine, Finds Safety
The shelling of Stepan’s town of Kharkiv caused Stepans humans to pack up and unass themselves and their cat to France. Now, a war, even a bad one, is something humans can understand. A human adult can understand it quite clearly. A human child will have difficulty, perhaps, but unless the child is stupid or incapable of communication, the war can be explained to him/her. The idea that “fire bad” and “bombs bad” and “incoming rockets bad” can be impressed upon them, and rockets and bombs can be explained as to what and why they are, how they work. But to an animal? Sorry, no. Explain all you want, a cat is never going to grasp the first damn thing about a war. All the cat knows is that their life was going along pretty well, then their food-monkey-butlers started acting strange. Then they started running around, then there were loud noises and the big warm cave they live in crashed down and burned, one of the monkey-butlers burst open and stopped moving, the other started making really loud noises then ran away, now the world is rain and snow and fire and wind and loud noises and other monkey-butlers running around making loud noises and sometimes falling over and stopping, and sometimes kicking at them and what is the foul smelling black goop that spilled on my fur and why is it suddenly bright red and why does it hurt and why when I run away the red crackling pain stays right on me ow ow ow…
Yeah. To a cat, a dog, a horse, war is *never* going to make the first bit of sense. It will always remain incomprehensible chaos and madness that will pursue them into their dreams, years after normality has returned. War (or an earthquake, or a house fire, or a tornado, or a hurricane, or one of their humans suddenly going insane due to booze or meth or bad news, or…) is simply beyond an animals ability to begin to comprehend. It is the very essence of cosmic horror. The trick for an author who wants to capture cosmic horror is to do for human characters what war would do for an animal character. The idea is straightforward enough, simple to understand, like “add one extra dimension to a line, you get a square; add one extra dimension to a square, you get a cube; add one extra dimension to a cube, you get a tesseract.” But while the concept is straightforward enough, that last step can be a doozy to really pull off.
By the way, here’s Stepan while being evacuated. This is the look of someone who has peered into the abyss and come away uncomprehending, hope and joy drained from them, refilled with a new fear. This cat has seen some ᛋᚻᛁᛏ. If your human protagonist looks like this at the end of the tale, you *may* have successfully introduced them to some form of cosmic horror. On the other hand, if real-life humans or animals end up looking like this due to actions you have taken… please consider that you may be the baddie.
Mar 212022
So yet another Boeing 737 crashed, this time in China, taking more than 130 people with it. little is known yet about the cause, but the thing seems to have lawn darted straight into the ground. Unless Russian separatists whacked it with a Buk or the Chinese operator *really* bungled maintenance or the pilot decided that Today Is The Day, the chances are real high that once again this one is on Boeing.
Chinese Boeing jet crashes in mountains with 132 on board, no sign of survivors
Boeing was for a long time the premier American manufacturer of jetliners, with “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” being a sincerely held opinion among many. And then… Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas. In the process, the successful Boeing management approach, which was engineering-centered, was replaced with a more management-centered approach. Since then, Boeings ability to get *anything* successfully done, from the 787 to the 737 Max to the Starliner capsule to the SLS, seems to have been seriously compromised. Boeing is unlikely to produce a new jetliner within the next *generation.* They, the designer and manufacturer of the B-47 and B-52, are unlikely to ever again build a fighter or a bomber. The Delta IV launch vehicle is yesterdays news; the SLS is a hideously overpriced and underuseful dinosaur, the Starliner is so far behind schedule and over budget that if it ever carries out a manned mission it’ll be a miracle. All of this is Boeings fault.
Nobody else in the US is likely to build a jetliner anytime soon. Lockheed stopped trying with the L-1011, decades ago; Northrop-Grumman aren’t into jetliners. Nor-Grum are building the B-21; Lockheed is building the F-35. And… that’s pretty much it for the foreseeable future. Boeing is, for all intents and purposes, done. if this crash turns out to be the result of more Boeing incompetence, they could well find themselves is *serious* trouble quite soon. The phenomenally successful 737 line might end up a sky-pariah.
Having Boeing either go belly-up, or turn into an ossified tax-dollar sink that provides nothing usable in return are both bad results. This would be bad for Boeing employees, Boeing stockholders, American taxpayers, the US military, the US economy as a whole. So is it time to consider breaking Boeing up? Instead of one complacent conglomerate, take its various parts and pieces and separate them, give them separate and unrelated managements set them to compete with each other. Make the Phantom Works – formerly McDonnell Douglas turf – into its own thing. Turn Boeing HQ in Chicago into… I dunno, a WalMart or something; can all the business majors who have turned Boeing from a rampaging engineering success story into a freakin’ joke. Boeing has factories in Everett, WA, Renton, WA and North Charleston, SC. Make them separate companies. Set them to compete against each other for the next generation jetliner… BWB, LTA, electric, what-the-frak-ever. If one fails spectacularly, it doesn’t mean the others will suffer at all; indeed, a failed company could be seen as instructive. The failed former division could be picked up for a song by, say, the USAF and DARPA; the people responsible for the failure can be fired, better people brought in and the division set the task of cranking out experimental types.
The US used to have a *lot* of major aircraft manufacturers. Perhaps the days when the economy could simultaneously support the likes of Boeing and Convair and Lockheed and McDonnell and Republic and Grumman and Douglas and Martin and North American and Bell and Curtis and Sikorsky and Vought and Northrop and Hiller and Fairchild are over… but now we have *one* jetliner manufacturer, *one* fighter company, *one* bomber company. This is intolerable.
Behold: A Boeing.
Mar 202022
AAAAaaaahhhhh….
Best of luck buddy.
Mar 192022
California lawmaker found with loaded handgun in his luggage at Sacramento airport
Not just any lawmaker… this is Assemblyman Jim Cooper D-Elk Grove, who in 2016 authored a bill to ban the right to make your own firearm. He doesn’t want *you* to have a gun, but boy howdy he sure wants his own.
If this was *you,* you’d spend a good chunk of the rest of your life in prison. This guy? No charges. In fact, they held onto his gun for him, returning it as soon as he got back from his trip. Why? Because he’s former law enforcement, and they’re allowed to have firearms in certain areas of the airport. Where they’re *not* allowed to take a firearm is on an airplane, where he was trying to take his gun, stashed in his man-purse.
If these jackholes didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
Mar 182022
Oh yeah. This is looking up.
Putin chillingly calls for ‘self-purification’ of Russia from ‘scum and traitors’
Going this far off the rails seems to indicate that the war isn’t exactly going to Putins plans. Yammering on about phantom Nazis and the like indicate an Antifa-like divorce from reality, which is just *awesome* to contemplate considering he’s got access to thousands of nukes.
Mar 172022
Yeesh.
Note: some kinda rough stuff here. A 22-year-old dog sitter was mauled by a pair of dogs. She was bit *800* times. I’m honestly kinda shocked that the cops who responded didn’t plug the dogs on the spot.
The ability to clone *faces* can’t come soon enough.
Mar 162022
There are three good arguments for homeschooling:
- The school board is full of whackadoodle propagandists, pushing political rubbish
- The teachers are political propagandists, pushing political rubbish and often causing psychological harm
- The other students are… not good to be around.
This one is Number 3.
Moment Texas middle school student hurls CHAIR at substitute teacher, 73, leaving blood pouring from man’s face – with elderly victim then throwing TWO chairs back at unruly teenager
Note that the video news piece says that the school district is cancelling classes and enacting some policy changes. That’s nice… but at least from what’s said here, the response is not just inadequate, it’s wrong. They are banning the use of headphones and cell phones during the day – but this doesn’t seem to have been a cause of the fight in the first place (rather, a student in the wrong classroom, refusing to leave). In fact, the use of a cell phone as a video recorder allowed this issue to come to light. Instead, what the school district *should* have announced is a zero tolerance policy regarding violent students. If you think it’s the height of wit and wisdom to chuck a chair at someone else, you need to no longer be around other kids. Certainly not at taxpayer expense.
So here it’s a case of students you wouldn’t want your child around until you begin them in combat training, and a school board full – apparently – of corrupt and/or incompetent fools.