Jan 282022
 

A trio of youngun’s react to The Smiths “How Soon Is Now,” and demonstrate a shocking lack of knowledge of basic 80’s culture. There’s a lot here where all I can do is shrug, kinda bug-eyed, and babble “uhhh…. but… ummm… how do you not… errrrrrrrrrr……”

That’s right: Get Off My Lawn.

 

 Posted by at 8:52 pm
Jan 282022
 

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow. Or in this case, many, many booms from the Tonga eruption a few weeks back.

I do wonder if this is what a full nuclear exchange would sound like from a few dozen miles from a major cluster of targets. If you were on a boat forty miles out from, say, New York City and Putin and/or Xi started raining nukes onto it, would it sound like this?

 Posted by at 2:43 pm
Jan 272022
 

Whoopsie

 

“Three days before the Peacemaker premiere our [Scandinavian] booking agency [United Stage] dropped us from their roster because there was too little interest in the band,” singer Åge Sten Nilsen (aka “Glam”) said in a recent interview with Billboard. “I told them, maybe they should wait a couple of days … But they didn’t.”

 Posted by at 10:57 pm
Jan 272022
 

So, as Los Angeles and other localities allow criminality to skyrocket, new stories get crazier and crazier. Recently it was reported how trains are being robbed in broad daylight, with the thieves turning the region into a third world garbage pit. It got worse: the same spot saw a train derail, possibly because of all the garbage left on the tracks:

Freight train derails in Lincoln Heights

The local and state government have proven wholly unwilling to deal with the issue. But trains are almost definitionally inter-state commerce, so couldn’t the federal government swoop in? Granted, that would require that the FBI be able and willing to do its job, the Justice Department willing to prosecute *actual* criminals, the government as a whole being full of people willing to uphold the Constitution and their oaths of office. So… yeah, maybe not so likely to happen, or at least happen effectively. But at least theoretically, shouldn’t the FBI, ATF, IRS, DOT and just about every other Alphabet Agency be on the job here, ready to swoop in, snatch train robbers, and send them to some FPMITA Prison for a term of decades?

 Posted by at 3:59 pm
Jan 272022
 

So, remember how I was saying “Wu Flu infections are up, but actual deaths are stable, so it seems that things are kinda ok?”

Snerk.

First: Infections. It looks like the latest spike has peaked in the US (though obviously not in the EU).

So, huzzah. The latest version of “worst” is over, right?

Welllll…

 

A fairly straight upwards line for the past three weeks. Neato.

It has also been freakin’ cold in much of the US the last few weeks. Given how enthusiastic the US system is to report any death even remotely related to Pinko Pox as caused by it, it would be interesting – and rational – to try to correlate Commie Cough deaths with flu, pneumonia and other winter maladies. Further interestingness might be had by trying to discern how much of this might be caused by people not turning up their thermostats as high as they might due to the much higher energy costs. I know it’s often pretty frigid in *this* house, because my monthly gas and electric bills have doubled compared to a year ago. Interesting, that.

 Posted by at 10:39 am
Jan 232022
 

State Department reduces staff at US embassy in Ukraine, orders some family members to leave

“On January 23, 2022, the Department of State authorized the voluntary departure of US direct hire employees and ordered the departure of eligible family members from Embassy Kyiv due to the continued threat of Russian military action,” the State Department said in a statement. “US citizens in Ukraine should consider departing now using commercial or other privately available transportation options.”

Given the crappy job the State Department did in warning Americans to bug out of Afghanistan, this announcement is indicative of either “holy crap this is bad” or “let’s over-react.” I could go with either.

As an aside: I’ve always seen it spelled “Kiev.” When did it become “Kyiv?”

Anyway, I’m just glad that we have such stellar leadership just now, smart and awake like no administration ever before.

 Posted by at 11:28 pm
Jan 212022
 

The world can usually be approximated to adequate accuracy with a small number of generally simply equations. Go this fast off a ramp at that angle, you will get so high, and land at such a distance. Easy. *Precise* trajectory can be calculated with more inputs… drag calculations, usually, adjustments for wind, that sort of thing. But for first approximations, the math is pretty easy.

Life is hard when you choose not to do the math.

Feel free to either wince or laugh. Either’s good. Both are good.

Shockingly, the guy didn’t die. At least not that time. But he did learn an important lesson: not doing the math *and* not having insurance? Why, that adds up to a million dollars in medical bills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh55zvXg8vE

But his record seems to indicate a lack of foresight. A prior set of “stunts” that resulted in… well, reality, good and hard.

 

 Posted by at 11:39 pm
Jan 212022
 

And yet I can define a sphere. One way to define it: “an object in three dimensional space with a single surface, every point on the surface being the same distance from a single 3D point.” Or, “a three-dimensional object that has the property of any 2-dimensional slice through it, no matter the angle, being a circle.” Or… “a ball.” Many ways to define the same thing. What’s the point of this silly exercise? Madness, that’s what.  Society is being turned upside down to coddle silly weirdos who believe that a humans cannot define something that they are not.

Requisite virtue signalling: you want to be trans, you go right ahead. No skin off my nose if you want to dress up as something you’re not, or take hormones, or have surgeries. Knock yourself out. But when you start telling me that I have to *not* see such things as strange, that I have to change the way I speak and *think,* and that the stupid, ill-formed notions of *children* need to be taken as divine writ… bite me. Some six-year-old declares that he is a she? Uh-huh. I vaguely recall that when I was that age I wanted to be and/or was a squirrel. Such things are to be expected from children, who are largely loaded down with truckloads of imagination and a ziplock baggie of experience and data.

I retain the suspicion that if certain relatively recent changes to the chemistry of food and the environment in the US – the weird hormone-simulants in plastics, birth control pills and the like in the water supply, corn syrup in everything, Odin knows what all in pollutants, etc. – a lot of this trans-mania will fade away. This will leave a lot of people looking at themselves and wondering “what have I done?”

And then the question will be: if changing the composition of plastics will lead to the “deletion” of 90% of a currently favored group by making those people not want to be a part of that group anymore, but to be normal again… will changing that plastic now be considered tantamount to genocide?

 Posted by at 4:57 pm
Jan 212022
 

A NASA video from four years ago describing how a Certain Volcanic Island near Tonga arose and against all odds survived the battering of the sea.

Whoops.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is the first island of this type to erupt and persist in the modern satellite era, it gives scientists an unprecedented view from space of its early life and evolution. The new study offers insight into its longevity and the erosion that shapes new islands. Understanding these processes could also provide insights into similar features in other parts of the solar system, including Mars.

Also:

 Posted by at 9:51 am
Jan 202022
 

Under cover of darkness no less.

Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from front of NYC’s Museum of Natural History

At least it’s not going to be melted down, but instead sent to North Dakota.

A modest proposal: relocate all of the statues, pre-modern art and historical/science museums from the coasts into the interior (“flyover country”), and relocate all the hippies and “social justice” and “mostly peaceful” protestors from the interior to the coasts. The National Air and Space Museum can be split between the SAC museum in Nebraska and the USAF Museum in Ohio; perhaps some can go to the Wings over the Rockies museum in Colorado.

And then relocate all the gender/ethnic studies programs from the interior colleges and universities to the coastal ones; all of the STEM studies from the coasts to the interior. Trust, me, *everyone* involved would be happier.

 Posted by at 5:27 pm