Man made horrors beyond your conception brought to you by AI:
Feb 162023
Feb 142023
Not everyone can have kids, due to physical issues, or bad circumstances, or whatever. Not everyone *should* have kids. Not everyone *wants* kids. Not having kids is not something to be shamed for. But not *wanting* kids is at least a little weird; like it or not, that’s the meaning of existence. Screw supernatural or divine reasons… you are on this Earth because a billion years of evolution has ingrained within every single being’s DNA the urge to reproduce their kind. That’s just the way it is. You are the end product of the better part of a trillion generations of sexual reproduction, and to think that it ends with *you* is a little disconcerting.
Some people realize that *they* should not reproduce because their DNA is messed up. They have a genetic disease that could/would get passed on, leading not only to misery for the kid, but degradation of the gene pool. Or they know that they are psychologically messed up – either through bad genetics or bad life experiences – and they know that they would mess up the kid. The people who make these realizations and intentionally refrain from having kids should be simultaneously pitied *and* celebrated. They are doing the species proud.
But then you’ve got people like Z-list celebrity Chelsea Handler, who doesn’t want kids because they’d get in the way of her hedonism. Sure, in her case it’s best that she’s had not children – and at age 47 her chances of reproducing are now incredibly low, probably zero – because she’d mess them up. But it’s not selflessness that motivates her, but selfishness.
Here’s the video she posted that’s making the rounds. Judge for yourself: does she come across as someone truly happy with her choices, or someone who now has to live with her choices and is rationalizing real hard?
Just another day. pic.twitter.com/Bf4cdBqunG
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) February 10, 2023
She’s basically whacking you over the head while she repeats at loud volume a mantra about how happy she is.
She’s getting pushback. Which is… I dunno. It’s worth pointing out how weird her attitude is, but it’s not worth getting in a twist over. My little blog post here will be abut the sum total of my giveadamn about the issue. But she has responded to it, and it just seems like more copium. What *does* disturb me is the “oh, so stunning and brave!” applause she gets from her audience about this (insert conspiracy theory about They Don’t Want You To Reproduce Yourself):
Chelsea Handler wants you to know that she's really happy being a childless 47 year old. Like seriously happy. She's so happy, you guys. Okay? Nobody say she's sad. She's not. Definitely not. pic.twitter.com/r7GHi132FR
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) February 14, 2023
This sort of thing comes across to me like someone who is objectively *not* physically attractive sitting in front of a mirror, smiling real hard, and telling themselves over and over and over just how beautiful they are. That’s just weird.
Feb 132023
You can listen to the audio of the Lake Huron shootdown in the video below, via The Drive:
It’s small (the size of a “four wheeler,” probably meaning an ATV), it’s dark metallic and gives a good sun glint, has strings dangling from it, looks like a “container.”
Hmmm.
The government might not be protecting us for Chinese spying, and certainly isn’t protecting us from what might be an industrial/environmental disaster on the scale of Chernobyl, but hey, they’re lashing out at party balloons like there’s no tomorrow.
Pay no attention to the massive chemical release behind the curtain:
THREAD: Photos, videos, and news reports about the train derailment and toxic chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio.
This may be the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 13, 2023
Feb 132023
I really hope that this is some sort of skit, but I fear it ain’t.
And I had to pay for that Volvo, working part time at K-Mart. Getting a whole damn *car* as a birthday present? Sheesh. The privilege.
Feb 122023
Just… no.
The first video shows some “15-minute city” fanboy extolling the virtues of the forthcoming open-air prisons, in part by crowing about how everything you could want would be within a 1.5 kilometer walk from where you live. What if I want a long-distance shooting range? What if I want to go duck hunting? What if I simply want to get ten miles away from cities? What if I want to see the actual Milky Way at night? What if I want *quiet*?
The second video shows the inevitable result of this sort of central planning: China has walled off bits of towns and requires people to show their electronic passports in order to get through the gates. Passports that can be shut down at the discretion of the bureaucracy.
This is what China's 15 Minutes cities looks like
Thread 1/
One neighborhood , with hundreds apartment buildings and tens of thousands people , have only few exits, where you need to scan your QR code COVID passport and your face to get in or out.https://t.co/78WGlO6ZqZ pic.twitter.com/GOtJHBE8nY— Songpinganq (@songpinganq) February 12, 2023
Feb 122023
US Shuts Airspace Over Lake Michigan, Cites “National Defense”
Seems the balloons are coming pretty fast.
The NOTAM over Lake Huron appears to quite large and cover almost 1/4th of the Lake pic.twitter.com/FTfDy0elt0
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) February 12, 2023
🚨#BREAKING: Canada has just Closed a section of Airspace over the Great Lakes and near the U.S/Canadian Border due to an “Active Air Defense Operation”. pic.twitter.com/NFCRR4ACCr
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 12, 2023
Clearly if the Commies are swarming our skies with balloons, they need to be shot down. But while balloons are cheap, AIM-9X missiles are expensive as are F-15 and especially F-22 sorties. Reserving air supremacy fighters for swatting balloons over Canada or Montana means they can’t be deployed elsewhere for roles more requiring their capabilities. The ability to take out balloons *cheaply* is needed. A suggestion: instead of expendable missiles launched from advanced fighters, how about reusable missiles launched from cargo jets, or modified corporate jets? Missiles such as AQM-37C. This missile was a target, and some variants were fitted with a parachute recovery system. The AQM-37C was capable of Mach 4 flight up to 100,000 feet. The AQM-37 series is now long out of production and no longer in service, but the design has worked for fifty years and could be certainly updated. It could be rebuilt for precision command guidance or some onboard guidance; it could be meant to simply dart through the balloons envelope, or blast over it real close while spewing out small submunitions. Build them in vast numbers for economies of scale; build variants for other roles such as surface attack, recon, whatever, to spread the cost and utility around. If you’re *real* good, build them for in-flight snatching; if you are *extremely* good, build them to be snatched by the launch aircraft.
Feb 112023
Ummm…
Another Russian spacecraft docked to the space station is leaking
a Progress supply ship attached to the International Space Station has lost pressure in its external cooling system
C’mon, Russia. You used to be cool. For a time. A brief window. Back when the worst thing about y’all were your wacky likkered-up drivers on the ice.
Feb 112023
I haven’t seen it, so don’t blame me. But this reviewer *really* didn’t like it:
Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them
The third season is yet another misguided waste of everyone’s time.
Whoa.
The previews look better than the first two execrable seasons, but that’s a low bar indeed.
I am reminded of a reaction video I recently saw. Even in my advancing decrepitude that’s not that big of a mental achievement, considering I saw this video yesterday:
The young lady in question watched “Galaxy Quest” without the benefit of being a fan of Star Trek. Without, in fact, the benefit of actually knowing much about Star Trek. And yet, with minimal exposure to TOS or TNG… she got “Galaxy Quest.” Maybe a few of the jokes skipped past her, but the main themes? Fully understood, accepted and appreciated. A point she raised that caught my attention: near the end when the nerd-kid is contacted and learns that his favorite show is actually real, the young lady stated that she thought that this must have been the dream of many Star Trek fans. Little does she know: whole generations of Trekkies and Trekkers lived in the desperate hope of living in the world of Star Trek. For some this meant daydreaming about serving aboard the Enterprise. For some it meant doing what needed to to become authors or actors or film/TV show makers in the hopes of bringing their own dreams of trek to life (looking at you, Seth MacFarlane). For some of us it meant going into science and engineering in the hopes of starting mankind on the road to trekking the stars. And her realization got me thinking.
Over the last twenty-some years some “Galaxy Quest,” it has been almost universally hailed as one of the best Star Trek Movies. It is certainly one of the movies that shows most clearly a love and understanding of the original Star Trek. Within the movie, an alien race has picked up TV transmissions of the sci-fi series “Galaxy Quest,” and they decided to rebuild their entire society to conform to the vision of “Galaxy Quest,” and in doing so the saved themselves from oblivion and gave themselves hope and a new reason to go on. So… my thinking is this: the “Galaxy Quest Test.”
The test is simple: take a series or a movie that claims to be Star Trek, and imagine that it gets beamed out into space. It is picked up by an earnest alien race capable of understanding it. They have much the same ethics, hopes and fears as humanity, even if they don’t look anything like us and are really rather innocent, despite the fact they are being ground out of existence. What are the chances that these aliens will watch the show or movie and decide that the vision they’ve watched and understood is such a wonderful thing that they will choose to emulate it?
I can see this with TOS. I can see it with TNG. I can see it with Lower Decks and certainly Prodigy. I can see it with Voyager. I can kinda see it with Deep Space Nine. But the Kelvin movies? *Any* season of Discovery or Picard? Not a chance in hell.
So, when watching Star Trek Picard season three, keep this question int he back of your mind: “What would Mathesar think of this?”
Feb 102023
Fetterman hears voices like the teachers in ‘Peanuts’ after stroke, struggles to adjust to Senate life: report
I’m shocked.
Also, he went into the hospital Wednesday sue to light-headedness. There was some early speculation that it was another stroke, but apparently it wasn’t. It’s being downplayed… but as I understand it he’s *still* hospitalized. For light-headedness. Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about.
I can’t imagine why America’s opponents are seeing us as weak and ineffectual these days. Regarding which:
US military shoots down ‘object’ flying in territorial waters over Alaska
Another balloon. It’s reportedly smaller than the Chinese spy balloon (with a “car-sized” payload), was flying at about 40,000 feet, and it took an F-22 and an AIM-9X to bring it down. Wreckage crashed onto ice and has been recovered.
Feb 092023
Chinese spy balloon carried ‘multiple antennas’ for collecting signals intelligence, State Dept. says
… photos taken by high-altitude U-2 planes confirmed the presence of the equipment, including “multiple antennas … likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications” and “solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors.”
So, it was listening to us. Interesting to ponder just what it was listening *for.* Being a balloon, it would have had only minimal ability to target a specific site; it would have been able to scan a swathe of the country. Was it listening to cell phones? Was it listening for military-type transmissions and where they came from (looking for hidden bases/missiles/whatever)? Is the US going to start taking air defense seriously?