No blood vial for you

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 192021
 

One of the more tiresome conspiracy theories of recent years says something along the lines of “the political leadership class are a bunch of vampiric pedos, running vast trafficking rings and performing Satanic rituals.” There is no need to bump up the perceived evils of socialists, authoritarians, grifters, pervs, collectivists, commies and the other degenerate genetic defectives who populate the halls of power… the banal realities are awful enough to negate any excuse to keep the majority of them in power.

So a day or two ago a video started making the rounds seeming to show Gropey Joe getting kinda handsy with a little boy who secretly slips him a vial full of what looks like blood. Turns out the video is doctored; the original video is from July 2021 and shows Biden giving the kid something, probably a face mask (*why* he does that is unclear since the kid is already wearing a mask). Sure, a kid handing blood to a man who looks about 15 minutes in a Hollywood studio makeup chair from a starring role on “What We Do In The Shadows” is creepy… but as propaganda, it’s not necessary. The original video is creepy enough. Any other context an old man pressing this much child flesh would result in a media freakout, and perhaps deservedly so. Witness the compare/contrast between the doctored video and the original, with minimal but appropriate commentary:

 Posted by at 11:25 pm

Some people might argue that this is excessive

 art, awesomeness, history, models, ships, wisdom, youtube  No Responses »
Dec 152021
 

Those people are wrong. This 1/100 scale model of the German schlachtschiff Tirpitz is loaded to the gills with lights, smoke, sound and moving parts. It’s clearly a labor love, or at least of obsession. (Note: the video is over sixteen minutes long, but it seems to crap out just before 8 minutes)

Imagine if the pizza shop robber had decided to take up building model ships rather than robbing pizza shops. He might have avoided taking a bullet to the face and becoming a laughingstock for the whole human race. I hesitate to guess what this Tirpitz model might sell for if the builder was of a mind to sell it; certainly far more than robbing restaurants would ever net.

 Posted by at 10:11 pm

Everything is an opportunity for *somebody*

 art, awesomeness, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 132021
 

Thanks to the Pinko Pox, a *lot* of people are now working from home. And a lot of people are discovering that their employers are less interested in actual productivity than the *appearance* of productivity, something I discovered years ago at ATK (by the end of my time there I could get my whole days work done within the first half hour, and the need to try to look busy the rest of the day literally drove me buggo until the end).

Workers Are Using ‘Mouse Movers’ So They Can Use the Bathroom in Peace

Short form: if you work remotely using a company-supplied computer, chances are that the computer has “bossware” installed that tracks mouse/cursor movement to make sure you’re at the computer and on the job. So if you get up to take a leak or answer the door, your employers will know in a few seconds that you’re not moving the mouse anymore, and you could get in trouble.

Never fear: the free market is here to help with any number of “mouse jigglers” that will give the *appearance* to bossware that your mouse is being constantly manipulated. Some of these are bits of USB hardware. Some are software. Some are actual mechanical devices. My favorite, though, are simply YouTube videos: play the video on a phone or tablet and place an optical mouse on it; the moving lines spoof the mouses optical sensor into thinking it’s being moved.

 

Heh. The entrepreneurial spirit will always find a way to stick it to the man.

 Posted by at 10:33 am

New Zealand continues the slide

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, religion, science, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 122021
 

Long ago, New Zealand made the Soviet Union smile when it banned any form of nuclear power – RTGs, reactors, bombs – in their territory. This meant that US naval vessels such as aircraft carriers and subs were banned from New Zealand waters, making that region just a little bit safer for Soviet interests. Well, the Soviets may be gone, but the anti-science mindset that they set in motion in the West continues to gain steam. behold:

Māori professor under investigation for views on mātauranga Māori

…Professor Garth Cooper, who is suddenly in the news because he is under disciplinary investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, the nation’s premier organisation promoting science and the humanities.

Cooper is a Fellow of the society and — alongside eminent philosopher of science Robert Nola — risks being expelled from the nation’s most prestigious academic club.

The reason for the investigation is that Cooper and Nola were among seven professors who wrote to the Listener in July questioning a government working group’s proposal to give mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) parity with what were described as other “bodies of knowledge” — “particularly Western / Pākehā epistemologies” — in the school science curriculum.

In other words, Māori knowledge would effectively be given equal standing with physics, chemistry and biology.

Short form: superstition and anti-science are to be granted equal standing. Even questioning that could cost you your career.

Yes, “indigenous groups” around the planet (i.e. cultures based on backwards pre-Enlightnement, pre-scientific superstitions) do know a lot of useful stuff. People who live in jungle areas often know that “this plant will cure a headache, that one will fight malaria, this one will kill ya dead.” That’s useful *knowledge,* but it’s not *science.* Science is a method to discern the truth, to separate signal from noise. To suggest that “well, this is what we’ve always believed, so it’s as valid as five hundred years of careful trial and error and methodical study and attempts at falsification and revision of hypothesis when data comes in” is not just wrong, it’s stupid. The only people who can see this sort of development as a good thing are people who want to see civilizations collapse.

The West used to know what to do with people who worked against their own countries to aid, knowingly or not, their nations enemies.

 Posted by at 4:51 pm

Yes, it’s a joke, but still…

 art, humor, politics, wisdom  No Responses »
Dec 092021
 

I do wonder how well that would work in the real world. In parts of California, stealing less than $950 is a misdemeanor, more than $950 is a felony. The practical  upshot is that local prosecutors don’t bother with going after the misdemeanor thefts, because that would require doing their jobs and that would get them accused of -ism by brainless activists. Slapping a felony-level price tag on a candy bar seems like a clever solution, but I suspect that the prosecutors would be just as diligent in letting the newly minted felons go.

 Posted by at 6:08 pm

Suicide Booths

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., Meh., news, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 062021
 

There is a market for this. But this… this is too much.

Controversial Assisted Suicide Pod Cleared for Use in Switzerland

So how does this pod work? It fills with nitrogen, displacing the oxygen. The “resident” should then rather calmly, peacefully and painlessly pass out in under thirty seconds or so, and actually expire in five to ten minutes. As a way of executing people, I’ve long suggested nitrogen; it’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s clean, it doesn’t have the ethical issues that hanging, firing squads and lethal injections have. So why do I have a problem with this pod? Because it’s massively over-engineered. You know what you’d need? A scuba tank full of pure nitrogen and a face mask. That’s it. Maybe a heating element/ heat exchanger so you’re not inhaling really cold nitrogen. The suicide pod is supposed to be made transportable so people can do themselves in in the surroundings of their choice, like by a lake or at the mall or wherever… but a simple gas tank and a mask? I see old folks toting those things around all the time (typically filled with oxygen, however).  A very quick google search brings up this oxygen supply system:

It costs $350 and could be just as easily filled with nitrogen. Or helium if the person wants to go out making other people laugh. And it’s profoundly reusable, and easily transportable.

There’s no need to make this sort of thing all that complex.

 Posted by at 5:03 pm

Victory Through Air Power

 aircraft, art, history, Hmm..., Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, rockets, science fiction, weapons, wisdom, youtube  No Responses »
Dec 012021
 

The most recent APR rewards included a CAD diagram I created of the “Disney Bomb.” This little known weapon was created by the British in WWII, but dropped by USAAF B-17’s in the last months of the war in Europe. The reason for the unusual name: in 1942 Disney produced an animated propaganda film on the history and potential or military air power. This film included sequences of the war to come, depicting some kinda-sorta sci-fi thinking. Included here is a bomb with a rocket motor, used to penetrate the reinforced concrete roof of a submarine pen. This gave some British engineers ideas… and they made it reality. The Disney bomb was imperfect, but damned if it didn’t work. Next time someone argues that sci-fi doesn’t actually directly inspire engineers to create the future, remember the Disney bomb.

The YouTube version of “Victory” linked below is pretty awful in reproduction quality, but it’s the best I’ve seen (it was released on DVD some years ago).

 Posted by at 12:19 pm

The precedent has been set

 history, Hmm..., news, politics, wisdom  No Responses »
Nov 242021
 

So, we have this now:

Jury finds Unite the Right defendants liable for more than $26 million in damages

$12 million of the damages were against James Fields, the guy who rammed his car into a crowd of protestors and killed a woman (and who seems rather unlikely to have $12 million in spare change). So that leaves around $14 million levied against the organizers of the rally due to the damage and injuries that occurred.

This… this precedent has potential. For example:

Widespread vandalism and looting during BLM protests will cost the insurance $2 BILLION after violence erupted in 140 cities in the wake of George Floyd’s death

I have little doubt that there’ll be a whole lot of “yeah, but, no, see, the thing is…” from those trying to deflect responsibility from those who spent a year or more fomenting violence and arson and death on a nationwide scale. And I’ve little doubt that there will be few city, county, state officials with the integrity and courage to bring these suits. But those suits that are brought *should* be enough to bring historically vast damages: a billion or more in compensation to cover the property that was destroyed, and a few dozen billion in punitive damages for being a bunch of hatred- and violence-spewing dickheads.

 

And there is also this potential source for a massive lawsuit:

‘It sounds like the revolution has started in Wisconsin’: Black Lives Matter activist says Waukesha Christmas parade horror that left five dead was linked to Rittenhouse verdict

It’s actually *six* dead with the passing of an eight year old child: https://www.gofundme.com/f/waukesha-parade-attack-sparks-family

If the racist hate crime in Waukesha turns out to have actually been a result of anger over the Rittenhouse verdict, the families of the injured and the dead would seem to have a massive case not only against the perpetrator but also the same news outlets, celebrities and polticians who spent a year lying about the facts of the case in order to gin up hatred.

 Posted by at 3:02 pm

Astra attained orbit

 awesomeness, history, news, rockets, science, wisdom  No Responses »
Nov 222021
 

Took them a while and a few failed attempts to do so… but that “a while” was a historically short period. Five years and change from the founding of the company to the first orbital flight is about two years quicker than any other private rocket company.

Astra becomes the fastest rocket company to reach orbit

They were able to achieve this by disdaining NASA-style analysis paralysis and just designing a good-enough launch vehicle, followed by iterative testing, failure, fixing, testing again. This worked well for SpaceX; it worked well for Astra. Compare with SLS…

 Posted by at 12:11 pm
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