If they could make this actually work, they’d wind up rolling in cash.
Nov 162019
Nov 162019
“The End Of The World” is a vague concept. It can cover anything from society slipping into a dark age to global thermonuclear war to the sun exploding and a sudden universal vacuum collapse. Consequently your (“you” can be either a random individual or a major national government) response to a foreseeable End will vary considerably. When it comes to Hollywood, most Ends are preventable (send a team of badasses to fight the aliens or blow up the comet) or avoidable or just survivable. But for this thought exercise, assume a End is on the horizon that can NOT be avoided or survived. Options include:
1) The Sun’s gonna splode. Nowhere in the solar system to escape to.
2) Incoming neutron star or multi-solar-mass black hole will pass inside of one AU from the sun, tossing every planet, moon and asteroid out into the dark, while passing close enough to Earth to tidally disrupt it
3) Message in the cosmic background radiation is decoded giving a hard cutoff date for this particular simulation.
4) Whatever. In five years, humanity is extinct and there’s no avoiding it. No heroics or glorious programs will help.
So, let’s say The End has been detected, checked and confirmed. The experts have run the numbers every which way and there’s no getting around the fact that we’re boned. In fiction, the default position of a government that is aware of this sort of thing is that they will do what they can to keep the facts as quiet as possible as long as possible, to keep people from panicking and to keep the economy humming along. But in the latter case, the necessity of that is to allow The Messiah Project, whatever it is, to be funded and built. If society collapses, then the government can’t build the Mars colony ship or the underground bunkers or the planetary deflector shield or whatever. But in this case, everyone with sufficient clearance to know about The End knows that no Messiah Project will amount to a hill of beans. So in this case, what is your advice to the President? Keep the secret so that the public can go on for a little while longer in ignorance and relative peace, or spill the beans and let people know the truth? Does it matter if society goes down tomorrow if it’s going to be wiped out in five years anyway?
From the other end: you’re a regular schmoe, and the government announces that in five years, The End. The Russians concur, the Chinese, the Brits, the Canucks… every government has their experts check the data and they all conclude that five years and then that’s it. What do you do? Go to work tomorrow or decide to retire (knowing that if too many people choose Option B, then the economy collapses overnight)? Go Purge and Festival? Or eat a bullet?
Nov 162019
I haven’t been paying complete attention to the impeachment hearings, but I listen to it on the radio from time to time. And the video below seems to approximate the amount of meaningful accurate and objective argument that I hear from Schiff & Co.
Nov 152019
Nov 152019
I meant to bitch about this months ago, but… well, I didn’t. Such is life.
Two events hit their fiftieth anniversaries in 2019: the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Woodstock music festival. While Apollo 11 certainly got a fair deal of press, it was nothing compared to the slobbering retrospectives that greeted the anniversary of Woodstock. I actively avoided the numerous documentaries and such about Woodstock that polluted the airwaves, but it was impossible to avoid all the constantly yammerings about it. And something that seemed to be repeated a lot were three words: Touchstone and Generation/Cultural. Examples:
The Woodstock generation reflects on the legacy of a cultural touchstone
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the concert that became a touchstone for a generation.
Woodstock at 50
Re-examining a generation’s touchstone.
Celebrating Woodstock at 50
Woodstock was more than just a music festival, it was a cultural touchstone that has echoed far beyond its own generation.
And so on.
A Google search on those terms return 230,000 hits. A similar search with “Woodstock” replaced with “Apollo 11” returned 59,000 hits, but many of these seem to refer to a “touchstone” in the context of an actual rock that you can physically touch.
This, I believe, is part of the reason why society is such a mess. Instead of the greatest achievement in the history of mankind, that of landing men on the moon, what the Boomer generation seems to consider their “cultural touchstone” was a bunch of losers rolling in filth, filling their bodies with mind-scrambling chemicals and listening to pretentious crapular music that has gratefully largely faded from history.
I’ve often heard of people of roughly the right age claiming to have been at Woodstock when they actually weren’t. This to me makes no sense. Sure, I understand the urge to lie about things in order to make yourself look better… for example I have scars that might seem impressive had they had better origin stories (I once used “I got these when I was a Ranger in the Marines fighting Nazis in Viet Nam,” but oddly I wasn’t immediately believed). But given the option of claiming to have been at Woodstock or having been involved with the Apollo missions… goddamn, who the frak would actually pick the muddy field? Hell, I’d proudly claim to have been the night janitor in the VAB rather than having been some filthy hippie.
Gah. While it’s popular among everyone downstream of the Baby Boomers to blame them for everything, their generation is composed of stock-standard baseline humans. What corrupted them corrupts everyone. But there seems to have been something special that made the lowest elements of their generation rise to prominence to give us damaged entertainment/news industries and politicians who support things that prior generations knew to be vile, and the fact that Woodstock rather than Apollo 11 is their “cultural touchstone” is a prime symptom. Of course no subsequent generation has really improved on that, and that does not speak well of the last half century’s worth of Westerners. Nor for the future.
Nov 142019
As a followup to this…
US-born ‘ISIS bride’ Hoda Muthana isn’t an American citizen and can’t come back, judge rules
Turns out that her father, a Yemeni diplomat, had diplomatic immunity at the time she was born in the US. And “if you’re born here, you’re a USA citizen” does NOT apply to the children of foreign diplomats, for reasons that should seem both good and proper. As a result, when she left the US to provide aid and comfort to enemy cultists, burning her US passport in the process, she tossed away her chance to live in the US.
Have fun in the utopia you chose, darlin’.
Nov 142019
I found this to be both informative and soul-crushing:
While the narrator is correct in pointing out that the corporate world and its products are soulless, the fact is that the major alternative is certainly not an improvement. Witness the technically fine yet humanity-devoid artwork produced under the direction of the Nazis or the screeching aural nightmares of North Korean “music” or the banal, lifeless and dispiriting visual propaganda cranked out by the likes of the Soviet Union, Antifa or the Warren Meme Team, and suddenly the worst corporate music starts to sound pretty good.
Nov 142019
Two people just got the plague in China — yes, the Black Death plague
Actually, not *that* exciting. Pneumonic plague, the more doom-laden version of the same disease as bubonic plague, pops up with some regularity. But thanks to the anti-vaxxers and the masses of refugees fleeing crapholes like Syria and Guatemala and California and the like, diseases that had seemed to be virtually extinct are making comebacks. So along with measles and polio and typhus, expect to see plague return.
Nov 142019
SpaceX successfully completes Crew Dragon engine tests without an explosion
The Crew Dragon ran a series of successful test firings of the Draco and SuperDraco engines. No word on what the schedule might be for a manned flight.
Full duration static fire test of Crew Dragon’s launch escape system complete – SpaceX and NASA teams are now reviewing test data and working toward an in-flight demonstration of Crew Dragon’s launch escape capabilities pic.twitter.com/CMHvMRBQcW
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 13, 2019
Nov 122019
Inflight refueling of aircraft is a challenge at the best of times. Refueling a chopper while it’s carrying a slung Hummer seems like unnecessary difficulty.