A taxi passenger seems to have set off a bomb in a taxi outside a hospital in Liverpool, England. Remarkably, the taxi driver not only survived, but is apparently already out of the hospital.
Note that the news coverage gives the identity of the taxi driver and shows his face (there is no suspicion that the taxi driver did anything wrong), but the identity and photos of the bomber, and several of his compatriots who have been arrested? Hidden. Odd, that.
Don’t got to San Francisco until there is a complete overhaul of the city government, an overhaul that includes a draconian crackdown on criminality to the point where the city uses eminent domain to claim Alcatraz and drops thieves and muggers onto the island from helicopters.
Some programs fade away; some die sudden deaths. The Saturn V, and the Apollo program in general, seemed to just sort of fade away; the public perception *seems* to be that as public interest in Apollo post Apollo 12 or so rapidly faded, interest in continuing Apollo faded, and thus the program was just allowed to die, finally killed off by Nixon.
Small problem with that narrative: the actual date of the death of the Saturn v can be precisely determined. in the NASA History office archive some years ago I found a memo by NASA Administrator James Webb, dated July 31, 1968, where the production of new Saturn V vehicles was cancelled. This limited the future of Apollo moon missions to only those Saturns already then under construction. Note that this is almost a *year* prior to Apollo 11 landing on the moon, and about four months prior to the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon could, perhaps, maybe, have restarted Saturn v production, but that’s not clear: when programs like this are cancelled, the staff vital for them *scatter.* Tribal knowledge evaporates. Equipment is sold for scrap, left to rust. Restarting production likely would have been fabulously expensive.
In mid 1968, the Apollo/Saturn program was obviously not facing post-success disappearing interest. The public was still thrilled. What NASA was facing was a slashed budget, with funds needed to further the progress of mankind being diverted to “Great Society” social programs. So instead of missions to the Moon and beyond, we got another fifty years of malaise, burdensome taxes and families being actively discouraged and dissolved. Thanks, LBJ. Thanks a lot.
I stumbled across some paperwork that for no readily apparent reason I’ve kept for a quarter century. Shown below are two correspondence that might be of some amusement. They deal with my very first “real” job after graduation, when I was hired to work on a The Next Big Thing project for Orbital Sciences Corporation.
First up (some personal data redacted):
Neato! I’m hired! So I packed up my stuff (including my baby archive, which fit in two boxes), drove from Illinois to Virginia right smack in the middle of the Blizzard Of The Century, spent a bucket of cash for an apartment, and started an exciting new adventure, sure to be filled with excitement, career fulfillment and fair and reasonable treatment from my employers. What could possibly go wrong?
Gee, that was fun.
It was a short, sharp shock that gave me a good solid look at the aerospace industry in the US. Unfeeling corporations, sociopathic bosses, incredibly blinkered, short-sighted management *and* self-serving unions, all beholden to quite possibly the *dumbest* politicians in human history.
I shoulda gone into art. I have no real talent for it… but then, I’ve seen “Star Trek: Discovery” and it’s clear that talent and skill are no longer important or even desirable in modern artistic endeavors.
Back before the yammering yahoos were forever going on about the need for “strong women characters,” pop culture was *full* of strong women characters. Star Trek: Voyager ended up kinda jam-packed with them… Janeway, Torres, Seven of Nine all ended up being well-written, well acted characters with distinct respectable personalities. Kes… meh, not so much. Modern live action Trek, sadly, has failed spectacularly in that regard, producing characters (both male and female) who run the short gamut from utterly forgettable to incredibly childish and annoying. Honestly: the bridge crew of the Discovery is *loaded* with women. How many of them do you even know the names of?
Janeway was a *proper* Starfleet captain: she commanded respect without having to berate people; she was emotionally affected by the things that happened around her and to her crew, but she was Captain enough to know when to keep it together. But then there’s “Michael Burnham.” Gah.
Burnham deserves no respect. Nor do the talentless hacks who write her.
Sure, this is Britain, but the same nonsense would likely apply here as well:
A Cambridge University physical sciences professor sent out an email to his student saying:
“Please be careful how you handle yourselves here in these early weeks: remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a “good time” – and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern in possible or acceptable.”
“Physical Sciences is a VERY hard subject, which will require ALL of your attention and your FULL brain capacity (and for a large fraction of you, even that will not be quite enough). You can ONLY do well (i.e. achieve your potential, which rightly or wrongly several people here assumed you have) I you are completely focused, and learn to enjoy the course. People who just TAKE the course, but enjoy their social life, can easily survive in many subjects — but not in this one.”
He is… NOT WRONG.
But people flipped out anyway.
I remember a few professors early in my aerospace engineering studies who made the same point, and they were not only not wrong, they were not wrong to do so. I had one Statics (a basic course required of *all* engineers, so the classroom was a huge auditorium) professor in particular who spent the first week badgering us, more or less bullying us to quit and find some field other than engineering. And he was partially successful: as memory serves, something like a third of the students bailed in that first week. And they were right to do so: if you can’t take some pressure, you shouldn’t be an engineer. If you go into art and get it wrong… who cares/ if you become an engineer and get it wrong. buildings collapse, planes explode, people die and nations fail. Science and engineering are *hard,* and spending your time partying and drinking will *not* help you. if the professor here convinces a student to study rather than party, he could well prevent an adequate student from becoming a failed one.
Those who are arguing that the professor is wrong are setting up students to fail. Even if the university dumbs down the requirements for graduation so that students who should have failed end up passing, once they get out into the private sector, they will find that they are incapable of remaining employed.
A ramshackle rambling diatribe full of distortions, half truths and nuttery, courtesy NBC News:
Any rational examination of the evidence showed that Rittenhouse was repeatedly attacked and defended himself appropriately, shooting only those who actively tried to physically harm him. This is the very definition of “self defense,” but the smug schmuck who wrote the piece ain’t having it. And then there’s this:
The truth is that too many white Americans probably see themselves in Rittenhouse — afraid of anyone, whether white or of color, who wants to live in a more equitable country — even if some don’t want to say so out loud.
Rittenhouse, and white people in general, aren’t afraid of people who “want to live in a more equitable country.” But murderous rioters and arsonists tearing up cities, destroying lives and livelihoods, burning buildings and books? Yeah. It’s not just white people who are justly leery of those types. But that’s not the narrative the author – who you’ll be shocked to find is a “
The Chinese Communist Party is doubtless looking upon “thinkers” like this with satisfaction. One wonders if the FBI might find something interesting by examining certain financial records. There was a time when the FBI took seriously their job of defending the US against Communist subversion. If the US is to survive in a meaningful way, it would be helpful if the FBI once again took that job seriously.
The fact that a piece of art is made *specifically* to “tug at the heartstrings” does not negate the fact that sometimes that art can do that job very, very well. Behold:
Do comics count for #inktober ?
I cried making this. pic.twitter.com/k1z9YCVChL— Jenny-Jinya (@JennyJinya) October 8, 2019
And if you think *that’s* rough, here’s a longer-form comic by the same artist. If you’ve ever known the company of a black cat, this one will ruin your whole evening.
The artist focuses on animal cruelty so… yeah.
And not just a few, but Elaine Thomas falsified strength testing data for hundreds of production runs going back to the 80’s while working for a foundry that provided steel used in the construction of submarines. The company she worked for only figured it out in 2017; they did the right thing in promptly canning her ass and letting the Navy know, but they apparently tried to pass this off as a series of mistakes, not fraud. Unclear why they would do that, maybe they thought that *they* would be on the hook more for having a dishonest employee rather than merely an incompetent one.
Remember how “walls don’t keep people out?” And how “a few American rednecks with AR-15’s can’t fight off the US government with its F-15’s and nukes” (just before the Taliban took over an entire friggen’ country)? Well, now roads are racist and keep people geographically isolated better than force fields:
I half keep expecting to wake up one day and find out that the current administration has finally admitted that they are just a bunch of edgelord comedians whose practical joke in seeing how far they can troll a nation simply got out of hand.