Reportedly Richard Branson is interested. Given his stakes in SpaceShip Two, a roughly similar aircraft in design and concept, that’s not too surprising. Whether Branson will actually pay for it… shrug.
Heh. So some government bureaucrats found out that their jobs were being relocated from DC to Kansas. They were upset about that, even though they work for the Department of Agriculture. There’s not a whole lot of agriculture going on in DC, while Kansas seems to specialize in that. And so like rational adults, they threw a hissy fit.
American Federation of Government Employees members from NIFA snd ERS turn backs on Agriculture Secretary Perdue at session on their unwanted relocation from DC to Kansas City area. #USDA pic.twitter.com/40JlVtuXFl
— Jerry Hagstrom (@hagstromreport) June 13, 2019
The weak-ass excuses I’ve heard from time to time for keeping the bureaucrats centralized in DC include:
1: It makes it easier to communicate from one department to another, or from a department to Congress or the White House. This, of course, is a specious and largely inaccurate claim in the era of telephones, email, texting and Skype.
2: It makes it easier for bureaucrats to transfer employment from one department to another. This is true… and not only irrelevant, it’s also damaging. If your career goal is to hop from department to department, go work at WalMart.
In short: in 2016, on the day after the Presidential election, someone shoplifted some booze from Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio. The proprietor gave chase, caught the thief and the cops showed up and arrested the thief and two of his friends, all of whom eventually pleaded guilty to various crimes. THE END. Right? Well, no.
Keep in mind, this was Current Year Clown World, the thief is of a Protected Class and the bakery in question was right across the street from a Liberal Arts College (Oberlin College, appropriately). So, naturally, students began protesting outside the bakery, claiming that it was a racist establishment because it had the audacity to try to prevent a black person from stealing. Up till this point… well, it’s a nuisance, but whatreyagonnado. But things very quickly got more interesting when the college administration decided to get involved. The college cancelled business contracts it had with the bakery, but, more importantly, issued emails that defamed the business and continued the allegation that the place was racist. There were also apparently efforts by the administration to provide assistance to the protestors, including the printing of libelous fliers, suspending classes to allow the outrage mob to do their thing, and giving them free food and drinks. In this age of wokeness, none of this is really all that surprising anymore. College administrations are bending over backwards – and, often enough, forwards – to try to appease the outrage mobs that colleges and universities seem to be breeding grounds for these days.
But something a little different happened: the bakery sued the college for libel. Something a lot different happened: the jury agreed with the bakery happened. Something wonderful happened: the jury awarded the bakery $11 MILLION on compensatory damages and more than $33 MILLION in punitive damages. Ohio law only allows punitive damages to be twice what the compensatory damages are, so the total will likely be restricted to $33 million.
The guiltiest people here are of course the leaders of the outrage mob. But they are, in the end, mere non-playable characters in the story of modern wokeness, simply carrying out their malicious programming. But the college that allowed this cancer to fester? They’re taking it in the shorts. Their funding will take a hit. Their reputation will take a hit. Some of their alums and other funders might decide that Oberlin, as it’s currently set up and run, is not the best place for their money. So the school might well wind up losing far more than $33 million.
More importantly, now that the precedent is established that schools are financially on the hook for the bad behavior of their students when they actively support those students in their bad behavior, schools not only may start being held to account (watch out, Berkeley!), they may also start changing their ways as a purely defensive measure. At the top of their to-do list will of course be “stop providing aid and comfort to outrage mobs,” but the wiser schools might start realizing that they themselves are to a very large degree responsible for them in the first place. If schools start realizing that having Grievance Studies on campus could cost far more than they’re worth, these useless fields of “academia” might finally start getting relegated to the dustbin of history.
Amusingly, extreme leftists like “Salon” are suddenly terribly interested in freedom of speech, and think that a massive lawsuit over defamation will have a chilling effect on future attempts by outrage mobs to hound businesses, individuals and college administrations into kowtowing to their fascistic and racist agendas. The college could have avoided all this by:
1: Not actively participated in the smears, such as various paid faculty publicly calling the bakery racist on zero evidence
2: Not aided the outrage mob in their attacks.
A rational school would have said nothing, done nothing. If the students wanted to protest… fine, you go do that. But if you miss class, that’s on you.
An important lesson here is that freedom of speech is important, slander and libel come with a cost. There are those who should be paying very close attention to this.
One of the documents lost from the NASA Technical Report Server when NASA gutted it in 2013 was a Chance Vought corporation report on a simulator for their lunar lander. The “Apollo Rendezvous Simulator Study” from July 1962 focuses of course on a ground-based simulator, not on a detailed design of their lunar lander… but fortunately the documents do show art and diagrams of the lander. It is an odd looking little bug, with giant windows and a configuration similar to the Soviet LK in that there were no distinct descent and ascent stages, but a single manned vehicle that would leave the landing legs and some tanks behind when it lifted off.
Fortunately, even though it was scraped from the NTRS it can still be found on the Internet Archice/Wayback Machine. Huzzah!
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
1: Put down the twitter-phone.
2: Have your ad people watch this, learn this, live this and then produce their own updated version.
“Morning in America” was freakin’ genius. Simple, beautiful, poetic, with a minimum of “the other guy sucks,” except for a small zinger at the end.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a major step forward in the political lurch towards leftist totalitarianism, proposing at every turn “democratic socialism.” But she is not an end, simply another brick in the wall. Gentlemen, behold:
Newly minted and curiously spelled Denver council president Candi CdeBaca wants straight-up communism.
“I don’t believe our current economic system actually works. Um, capitalism by design is extractive and in order to generate profit in a capitalist system, something has to be exploited, that’s land, labor or resources. And I think that we’re in late phase capitalism and we know it doesn’t work and we have to move into something new, and I believe in community ownership of land, labor, resources and distribution of those resources. And whatever that morphs into is I think what will serve community the best and I’m excited to usher it in by any means necessary.”
She wants to skip over the Venezuelan economic collapse and go straight to the Kampuchean killing fields.
In the 13th episode of season four of “Futurama” entitled “Bend Her,” our space heroes go to the 3004 Olympics. The character bender, a robot built for the purpose of bending girders, thinks that he should be able to easily defeat the robots competing in the “Bending” competition. He believes this until he actually sees these professional athletes bending girers he could never hope to, and it makes him feel epressed and inadequate. Until he sees the female division, with fembots struggling to bend clothes hangars and the like. So, he formulates an idea: he puts ona scarf, claims to be a fembot named “Coilette” from the land of Robonia. He easily dominates the various competitions, and is feeling on top of the world until he discovers that he’ll need to undergo gender testing to prove he’s a fembot and not a manbot. In order to pass, he undergoes soeme quick reconstructive “surgery” and has his male oil replaced with female oil.
At the time, this seemed a silly, fanciful sci-fi plot line. Clearly the stuff of fiction.
But then…
In short: athletes in male bodies who identify as female are by law allowed to compete in female sports against athletes in female bodies. And simply put, in most sports male bodies dominate female bodies. So if a transgender girl competes, everyone knows that she is going to win. This disheartens the biological females. If there are two transgender athletes, it take a girl who might have come in first and pushes her to third; a girl who would have come in third and moved on to the next level now comes in fifth and is now out of the competition.
You have to wonder what the long term effect of this will be. Male athletes who are mediocre against other males will come in first by a substantial margin against females, so the Benders of the sporting world will doubtless take advantage of this. Female athletes will see themselves being pushed out. And when you have *no* chance… what’s the point in bothering to compete?
So I wonder if girls sports will simply go away, either through disgust and disappointment by the biologically female athletes who know there’s no point (and the parents and other spectators who are there to watch *girls* compete against *girls* and are turned off by what they’re seeing), or by simply going “co-ed.” Because if the transgender female athletes are the new standard in performance, and their performance is not fundamentally lower than biological male performance, the reason for having separate male and female divisions goes away.
To me the solution seems obvious: a transgender division. Bio-males vs bio-males, bio-females against bio-females, everyone else against everyone else. Unfair? Maybe, but life’s unfair. The rational goal isn’t to make life fair for everyone, because you can’t. The rational goal is to make life as fair as you can for the most you can. And making life fair for the 98% or so and less fair for the 2% makes more sense than the other way around.
Whoa.
Lol Keanu ain’t taking no chances. 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/nnfIOZKbT1
— Kemoy Lindsay (@KemziLinzi) June 9, 2019
When taking photos with women, Keanu Reeves doesn’t seem to actually touch them. Probably safest these days.
Oh FFS:
For the purposes of clarity “H**k” is in fact “Honk,” and “Garbage Human” is the username for the person who discovered Facebooks new policy.
Yes, really. pic.twitter.com/bO7l1yl4PV
— Garbage Human 🗑 (@GarbHum) June 8, 2019
So, you’re a band in a shopping mall in Mexico, when all of a sudden the joint starts flooding (presumably due to rain bursting through the roof). What do you do? Why… you go out like a legend: