The New Book Burners

 AARRRGH, books, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 142022
 

If this was a sane world and this is what it is portrayed as – rather than some TikTokers simply taking the opportunity to gain some clout using books that were being weeded out for normal reasons anyway – these leftist nuts would be:

  1. Arrested for theft and destruction of property
  2. Fined and made to pay not only to replace the books they destroyed, but to buy more from the same authors
  3. Expelled and forbidden from any government scholarships for higher education

And even if these are books that were being discarded for conventional non-political reasons (note that one of the books has a red “DISCARD” stamp on the cover), what we still have here are lunatics who think that making a show out of destroying history books is a good idea. They are normalizing book burning… if it wasn’t already normalized by these walking, talking, semi-sentient meat puppets. Note that at least one of the “colonizer” authors they gleefully three away was a black feller, an expert on the history of slavery.

 Posted by at 7:14 pm

Whoops: Someone told a lie. And keeps telling it.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., Meh., politics, science, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 142022
 

At first…

The claim is made that Henry Sampson invented the cell phone. But then…

Henry Sampson is interviewed and points out that he *didn’t* invent the cell phone. He invented the “gamma electric cell,” which is to gamma rays what a photoelectric cell is to sunlight. That’s certainly not nothing, and is a useful device that is doubtless beyond the ability of the vast majority of people to invent… but despite the fact that it has “cell” in the name, it has nothing to do with cell phones. But the internet is *filled* with sites touting Sampson as the inventor of cell phone technology.

This points out how widely a rather simple misunderstanding can spread to become “truth,” even though the actual facts are *easily* discovered. I don’t  doubt that sometime several years ago someone saw “gamma-electric cell” and mistakenly *assumed* a link to cell phones. But at some point an honest mistake based on ignorance becomes a lie, even if those repeating it actually believe it. That point is when the facts are easily available to anyone who wants to find them… but they refuse to do so. This puts it in the same category as the “wage gap,” “pink tax” and Creationism.

 Posted by at 9:47 am

Unfinishable movies: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

 AARRRGH, blather, cats, Gah., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 132022
 

In the past couple years as I’ve been buried under a mountain of CAD drafting, I’ve also found myself with access to a lot of streaming content. So I’ve been watching a lot of old movies that I had never seen before… some good, some bad, a lot indifferent. A week ago I watched “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly;” a few days ago, “Pale Rider.” Those were good. Then yesterday I decided to give “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” a shot. Got less than halfway through it when I decided that, even as background noise, I had far better ways to waste my life.

Let’s get this bit out of the way. As y’all may know, I’m pretty anti-woke. But, *wow,* that trans-racial Mickey Rooney character was freakin’ *painful* to look at and listen to. Yeeeeeesh.

But that wasn’t my problem with the movie. The movie is about one “Holly Golightly,” who turns out to be an incredibly shallow, vapid, materialistic gold digger with no apparent redeeming value. That’s pretty much *exactly* the sort of thing I’m not interested in. And the movie was also *boring.* So somewhere around a third of the movie, a new character was introduced. I looked at him and went “Huh. Is that Buddy Ebsen? It looks like him, but the voice doesn’t sound like him.” So I looked on IMDB, and, yup, that was him. As for the voice, I went to the “trivia” section pf the IMDB page for the movie and tried to find reference to whether Ebsen was dubbed by someone else. I didn’t read that, but I did read this:

Audrey Hepburn said the scene where she throws Cat into the rainy street was the most distasteful thing she ever had to do on film.

Wat.

Quickly losing patience with the film, I looked up “breakfast at tiffany’s” and “cat” and “rain” on YouTube, and found the scene in question. It’s the ending scene of the film, and it shows Holly driving away in a taxi in the rain with her pet cat Cat. She gets in a huff for some reason, stops the taxi, opens the door, and puts the cat out onto the street and has the taxi driver drive away. She doesn’t actually throw the cat, but not only does she dump the cat, she dumps the cat onto a busy street; not only that, onto a busy rainy street. That results in this shot:

The main character of this movie casually discards a cat into the rain.

Nah.

ᚠᚢᚳk ᚣᚩᚢ, ᛒᛁᛏᚳᚻ

So, onto something else with more sympathetic characters.

 

 Posted by at 12:02 pm

This does not bode well

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., news, nukes, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 122022
 

For the most part, I’m satisfied to let people be who they want to be. Do whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, so long as you’re hurting nobody else. But the fact is, some things (and people) really are nuts. Mental illness is a reality. And being mentally ill in one area could well mean you are not likely to make good judgements in another.

Behold who the Biden administration is hiring to help plan for the future of nuclear waste.

Biden Puttin’ On The Dog

Tolerance goes just so far. And then it gets pushed *too* far and it snaps back. Are we at that point? near that point? beyond that point? I dunno, but if I was *kinda* like this person, but nowhere near as nutty as this person, I’d be *real* worried about the inevitable pendulum swing in the other direction. I would post the photos that this person happily and willingly puts out onto the internet, but I at least *kinda* try to keep this as a safe for work, safe for family and safe for life blog. If I included the photos, parent groups across the land would try to get my blog yoinked from public school libraries… and they’d be right to do so.

Apparently he has the right degrees, the right education to technically work in the field of nuclear waste handling. But imagine being a standard, normal engineer tasked with working alongside this guy in his dresses and dog-play. Yeeeeesh. If nothing else, he is making everything in his life all about him. There are reasons why “professional attire” is what it is… and conformity is part of that. It is not strictly from an authoritarian desire to make everyone conform to some arbitrary standard, but to make everyone focus on their *job* not on their attire, or on what Bob’s wearing today. The physical sciences are hard enough without having to deal with loonies that you can’t respect. The job needs to be about *the* *job.* Intentionally dressing bizarrely as a way to garner irrelevant attention to yourself seems to denote massive narcissism, if nothing else.

 Posted by at 9:10 am

The brightest of bulbs

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 102022
 

Behold Juliette Kayyem:

Juliette N. Kayyem (born August 16, 1969) is a former bureaucrat, author and host of the WGBH podcast The SCIF.[1] She serves as a national security analyst for CNN and is a weekly guest on Boston Public Radio. She is the Belfer Lecturer in International Security at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is a former candidate for Governor of Massachusetts[2] and a former Boston Globe columnist, writing about issues of national security and foreign affairs for the op-ed page.

This genius, this pinnacle of human enlightenment and intellectual achievement, has this to say about Canadian truckers:

For starters, I’m not sure how great an idea it is for a US government lackey to be suggesting that a neighboring nation attack its own citizens. For second, she wants to slash the tires and drain the fuel tanks of trucks on a bridge… and *then* remove the trucks from the bridge.

Tell me you’re a fascist without telling me you’re a fascist…

 Posted by at 6:23 pm

Well, I’ve gone and joined Twitter

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah.  No Responses »
Feb 092022
 

Weird thing is, apparently I did it before. I tried to sign up and was informed that the email address I planned to use was *already* associated with a twitter account. Huh. Musta been a good long while ago, as I have no recollection of that. (Anybody know how to figure out what the username associated with that might be?)

Anyway, my plan is to use it solely as a blog backup of sorts, and a way to maintain contact when next the blog goes belly up.

I guess this is me now:

Sigh.

 

And so the degradation begins. Soon, TikTok. And then an Only Fans. Uuuuuuuugh.

 Posted by at 6:10 pm

Blog issues

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., Hmm...  No Responses »
Feb 092022
 

A number of people earlier today noticed that up-ship.com and the blog both seemed to have vanished. This occurred promptly after IT fixed a *previous* issue, one where if you came to the site using “https” rather than “http” your browser gave you a security warning. Fix one problem, incur another, worse one. But things now seem to be back up and running.

But it will happen again. It *always* happens again.

So once again I’m faced with a dire prospect: signing on to some form of social media, such as twitter, as a way to maintain some sort of online presence the next time the blog goes kerblooey. Every time it happens, I get messages from people worried that I’ve yoinked the blog, or it has been hacked, or I’ve died. The second issue has happened before, and I do fully expect that one of these days I’ll die (I haven’t yet, but looking at the track record of humanity, the verified list of actual immortals is pretty thin)… but it’ll likely take more than a few days for my website to get scrubbed after I keel over.

So… anybody have preferences/suggestions as far as social media platforms? All I’m interested in is something where I can post links to the latest blog post, and “I’m not dead” updates when needed. Gettr? Gab? I tried Discord specifically for aerospaceprojectsreview blog alternative, but I quickly found that I didn’t much care for it. Twitter, irritating as it is, seems the most popular choice. Taking suggestions.

 Posted by at 2:42 pm
 Older Entries  Newer Entries