Jul 302019
 

Or an eggshell.

What’s really amazing is how nonchalant so many of these people are about committing violent assaults while on camera, *knowing* they’re on camera.They aren’t trying to hide their identities, because they think they’re being heroic in assaulting people who hold the wrong political views. Or who just happen to be somewhat near someone holding the wrong views.

Even though this isn’t as bad as shooting or stabbing someone, the mainstreaming of political violence like this co only lead to worse things.

 

 Posted by at 7:18 pm
Jul 302019
 

I’m not a particular fan of Quentin Tarantino, but I will still say that “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” is an entertaining flick. At about three hours it’s a *looooong* flick, and for the majority of the run time I’d say, “yeah, this is pretty good,” but the last fifteen minutes or so… to put it simply, I don’t think I’ve laughed that loudly in a crowded theater in a *loooooong* time.

It is set in 1969 and includes historical characters and events; Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, Steve McQueen, so on. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a washed-up actor, a veteran of westerns now relegated to bit parts; Brad Pitt plays his stunt double, equally hard up for work, but much more relaxed about it. The quest to find some sort of meaning and future is the basic issue throughout the movie, and it works reasonably well, has some pretty funny moments, and is generally entertaining.

It’s at the end when things go off the rails that the movie earns it’s ticket price. A group of people who can be accurately and succinctly described as “end state Antifa” set about to do something horrible… and as with “Inglorious Basterds,” history takes a turn. Ultraviolence ensues, and it’s GLORIOUS. I wound up randomly sitting next to a couple of little old ladies, and when blood and bits started flying, it was so bonkers that these grandmas were laughing themselves fuzzy.

If you want historical accuracy, this ain’t it. If you want “toxic” masculinity (i.e. the sort of masculinity humans evolved to have over millions of years) on display, and you want to see a fitting response to a bunch of anti-“fascist” dirty hippies… then by god this is the movie for you.

 Posted by at 6:09 pm
Jul 292019
 

Recently discovered and described, the exoplanet LTT 1445Ab: about a third larger in diameter than Earth, perhaps 8 times as massive, orbits a red dwarf some 6.9 parsecs (22.5 light years) away. That’s not so unusual, but the red dwarf is part of a trinary system. So a hypothetical observer could see *three* stars in the sky.

It orbits close enough to the primary so that the surface is baking hot and the “year” is only 5.36 days long. Doubtless this means that the planet is tidally locked, so the*other* side of the world should be pretty cold and dark except for when the other stars are in the sky.

Three Red Suns in the Sky: A Transiting, Terrestrial Planet in a Triple M Dwarf System at 6.9 Parsecs

If I did my math right, the mass & radius give an approximate surface gravity of about 3.9 G’s. Not a place to party. In fact very likely a wholly unpleasant place.

 Posted by at 4:24 pm
Jul 292019
 

Add to the list of racists: Baltimore’s former mayor.

As it turns out, Mayor Pugh was removed from office for corruption. Even so, unlike a whole lot of other people on her side, she doesn’t seem to have been nose blind to the earthy scent of rats and dead animals.

And here’s a whole news story full of racists, complaining about the totally-not-real rat problem:

And a news story featuring a couple fighting both rats *and* city hall:

 

More people who are apparently racist against Baltimore: Baltimores subwayworkers.

The point being: Baltimore is rat infested. Is it anyones fault? Maybe, maybe not. Is it racist to point out that Baltimore is rat infested? Nope. No more than it’s racist to claim that southern Mississippi in August is hot and humid, or that southern California is quakey, or that Seattle has a homeless problem, or that Kansas gets tornadoes or that Thatcher, Utah, tends to get infested with skeeters. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.

 

 

 Posted by at 1:42 pm
Jul 282019
 

From wikipedia. Murder rate per 100,000:

Guatemala: 26.10

El Salvador: 61.80

Honduras: 41.70

And in the US, also via Wiki:

Baltimore: 55.77

St. Louis: 66.07

Hmmm. If people from Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador  can claim refugee status in the US due to their fear of violence, it raises a few thoughts:

1) Where can people from Baltimore and St. Louis claim refugee status? I understand there are a lot of apartments standing empty in London, purchased by wealthy non-Brits as investments and money laundering projects. The Brits could simply nationalize the apartments and fill them with a million central American refugees.

2) People from central America are less violent that people in St. Louis. Maybe we should do an exchange?

3) Maybe we should simply settle central American refugees into Baltimore and St. Louis. Sucks for the refugees, but on the aggregate it would make those cities statistically safer. And since it wouldn’t be actual “gentrification,” since the people moving in do not have the sin of being white or even rich, I’m sure the locals won’t mind having their local cultures over-written.

 Posted by at 5:37 pm
Jul 272019
 

So Trump put out another tweet calculated to drive Certain People buggo. And just like clockwork, Certain People went buggo.

Trump’s ‘rat-infested’ attack on lawmaker was racist, says Pelosi

What did Trump tweet?

 

Baltimore? Filthy, dangerous and rat infested? Clearly trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Charm City” is a clean, safe utopia by all accounts. Such as:

Baltimore drivers ranked worst in America by Allstate for second straight year

And…

Baltimore is the nation’s most dangerous big city

“Baltimore is the big city with the highest per capita murder rate in the nation, with nearly 56 murders per 100,000 people.”

And…

Baltimore On Most Rat-Infested Cities List Again: Orkin

I mean, *everyone* loves Baltimore. It’s a universal.

Bernie Sanders likens West Baltimore to ‘Third World’ country

Facts, it seems, continue to be racist.

 

 Posted by at 10:55 pm
Jul 262019
 

So I watched the first episode of the new Netflix series “Another Life.” On a certain level, the show has promise:

1) The premise is interesting… an alien Macguffin lands on Earth and TMA-1’s a message to another star system. So since the humans can’t make any sense out of the Macguffin, they send a starship to this distant star (clearly the show isn’t set in the present, but if they said what year it was I missed it)

2) The production values are quite good. The sets and the exteriors of the starship all seem quite quality.

That said… after one episode I want every member of the ships crew to get fed through a woodchipper.

A) They’re on some sort of government starship…yet they do not wear uniforms.

B) They’re mostly twenty-somethings, for reasons which are unclear.

C) They act like teenagers. Not “19 years old and well-disciplined by a year in the Service” teenagers, but “14 year old petulant children unfamiliar with discipline, decorum, basic manners and a work ethic” teenagers.

D) There’s a violent mutiny within minutes of the first hint of difficulty.

E) They’re all Pretty People, with two exceptions:

E1) The Fat Guy with the beard and long hair: this Hurley lookalike, clearly a darling of the Space Service’s physical training program, will doubtless be set up to be the show comic relief or general doofus

E2) The What The Hell Is That character, apparently the ships doctor. Is is an android designed to be confusing and offputting, using its unnatural appearance to dissuade crew from wasting time and resources in the medbay? Who knows.

It’s the usual “most important mission in history,” and this is the best Starfleet has to offer?

And then there’s the production design. Sure, a great deal of effort went into making it all look good, but less went into making it look *right.*

α) The bridge. You know how we’ve all laughed about how Starfleet keeps forgetting to install seat belts? Whoever designed this ship forgot to install *seats.* While the ship is being buffeted and banged up by Stock Standard Sci Fi Space Storms, our bridge crew of mental defectives are standing around getting thrown into the bulkheads. Which, of course, are not padded in any way. But even assuming a smooth ride, you don’t want your crew just *standing* all day, when they could sit down easily enough.

β) Ah, but there *are* seats. After banging the crap out of everyone through several attempts to fly multiple close orbits around a star (a concept that made no sense whatsoever… seemed like they were going for “slingshot maneuver,” but you don’t go into a circular orbit even once around a target star, never mind three times), suddenly not only does a cockpit with “manual controls” open up, but jump seats magically appear for some of the other bridge crew to strap themselves in… *away* from their duty stations.

γ) And then there are several open, exposed, *large* lightning-based electroenzapulation panels littering the ship. Basically a chunk of wall, a meter or two wide and at least that tall, just sitting out there in front of Odin and everybody with constant forked electrical arcs zapping around ’em. Nobody paid them much mind, so I figured they must be some sort of weird decorative thing, or a strange way to display power consumption… something. Until one character gets knocked into one and gets burned to a dead crisp.

W.

T.

F.

Netflix. Dude. There are people out there who you can bounce your ideas off of to make sure stupid crap like this gets caught early enough so that dorks like me can’t pounce on them, point and laugh. Some of us even work cheap. They could point out that some of your ideas don’t make a lick of sense: while the notion that a star isn’t actually where it seems to be because of gravitational lensing could be an interesting one, it falls apart when you make it plain that humans have been zipping out between the stars for *decades*. Because in all that time stellar cartographers would have noticed the problem. the target star here is pi Canis Majoris, which is about 100 light years away… a journey of only 3 months. Things go wrong when they end up at Sirius (kinda along the way to pi Canis Majoris), which is 8.6 light years away. If 100 light years is a trip of only 3 months, then most assuredly humans will have traveled much further that Sirius in *every* direction by this point, and thus the news that pi Canis Majoris is being lensed will have been in all the papers. Cripes, if it’s only 8 days to Sirius (based on taking 3 months to go to pi Canis Majoris), there’s probably a Vegas-style resort in orbit around the place by that point.

That pile of stupid was scraped up from just the first episode. Guh.

Netflix did great work on “Lost In Space.” So how the frak they screwed this up… dunno.

 Posted by at 9:11 pm