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.
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:
Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the concert that became a touchstone for a generation.
Re-examining a generation’s touchstone.
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.
As a followup to this…
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’.
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.
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.
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
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.
Wonderbar. AIDS continues to mutate. I await the day it mutates into an airborne strain.
Had AIDS been dealt with as a usual non-political disease would have been, with quarantines and cultural acceptance of the fact that you actually make efforts to *avoid* spreading it, AIDS would now be a footnote in the history books. But… nope.
A cat to be respected. Quilty reminds me of Raedthinn who also was skilled in the art of opening doors that I’d just as soon he didn’t.
Quilty will not be contained. And he has no shame.Quilty loves to let cats out of the senior room.Repeatedly.Several…
Posted by Friends For Life Animal Rescue and Adoption Organization – Houston on Tuesday, October 29, 2019
