Two MOPs, in fact. Note that the scene of the B-2 unloading two Massive Ordnance Penetrators is from a different test than the footage of the MOPs hitting the ground. The B-2 shot is in glorious Extra Slow Motion, and the B-2 leaps skyward in the process. Given the weight it rather suddenly lost, it’s not surprising that the aircraft would suddenly climb.
Recently-released “Brightburn” is a movie that is essentially the Superman origin story… but Superman turns out to be an evil psycho rather than all that is good and wonderful. He kills with glee and gore, using his superpowers of flight and laser-eyes and whatnot to spread pain and terror, killing both individually and mass murdering. The kid is clearly a villain.
But he could have been beaten to the screen by a few months if only one scene hadn’t been deleted from “Captain Marvel.” In this scene, the “super hero” uses her super-strength to injure a man and extort from him his property under the threat of mutilation. This… is also a villain.
Due to the over-politicization, it took me months to see “Black Panther,” after having caught Every Single Previous Marvel Movie on Day One. I still have not seen “Captain Marvel.” I suspect I never will at this point.
Humans are beings of limited capabilities. And so you can spot a liar right off is someone tells you that they care for *every* human equally, that they feel equally bad for every human death, no matter how distant or unknown. The only time such a person *isn’t* lying, either to you or themselves, is if they in fact feel *nothing.* For sociopaths, it’s true that they care every bit as much about some kid getting smooshed by a truck on the other side of the planet as they do for the kid smooshed by a truck in the street in front of them: they feel zero in either case.
Anyone telling you that they SuperCare (TM) about all the world is trying to sell you something, and they should be instantly untrusted. This should be obvious to all non-sociopaths: nearly everyone has experienced grief over the loss of a loved one. The suggestion that you could feel the exact same level of pain for all the thousands of people who will die just today, and *not* promptly either go insane, have a stroke, have a heart attack or collapse into a singularity, is clearly untrue. Such a person telling you this is virtue signalling atop a mountain of corpses.
There is, as the article linked above points out, another aspect to it: in-group vs. out-group. A family member of *mine* dying is going to affect me more than a family member of *yours*dying. A planeload of Americans crashes in Brightburn, Kansas, is going to affect me more than a planeload of Mongolians crashing in Mongolia.
People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy.
When Grumpy Cat died a week-ish ago, something I saw a fair amount of was religious conservatives complaining that the world was mourning the death of one cat, but not the deaths of thousands of the unborn that same day. And if to you the unborn are lives worthy of mourning, then that rather unhappy position makes sense. But you don’t need to go even that far: on the day Grump Cat died, how many children were sold into slavery? How many old people beaten to death so someone could steal a pittance? How many killed by drunk drivers, or bad/lazy doctoring? How many died due to cancer or other poisoning caused by coal burning power plants that should long ago have been replaced with clean, efficient nuclear reactors, but the environmentalists prevented? How many struck dead by lightning, or fell off buildings while working on them, or slipped on ice and cracked their skulls? The world is full to overflowing with tragedy. And humans, to maintain their sanity, have to put limits on their giveadamn.
And the fact is… for all the thousands of tragic deaths on the day Grumpy Cat died… for the great majority of the people who mourned (in some fashion) that one small cats death, the simple fact is that that one small cat meant far more to those people than any of those who died. I had heard of Grumpy Cat. I had derived minutes of entertainment from looking at Grumpy Cat photos and memes. The geographically nearest human death to me on that day? Didn’t know ’em.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker doesn’t like people who like their own nations:
Methinks the Europeans would be well advised to see to it that Juncker needs to find another job. Maybe he could go far away, where doubtless he’ll find naught but love.
Razorfist gives us some high quality NSFW rantsnark, right here.
“Transdimensional temper tantrum.” Heh.
FYI, the Jefferson quote is available at the Library of Congress, here:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=text
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Right up front: the planet is getting warmer, CO2 levels are historically high (almost certainly from anthropogenic sources), and there is doubtless some substantial link between the two, meaning that human activity is helping to warm the globe. These are hard to deny, and make a person seem like a scientific dunce if he does. However, where the real argument comes in is “what do we do about it?” There are *good* answers to that question, including things like “let’s replace the coal burning powerplants with bigass breeder reactors” and “let’s get to work on synthetic petroleum alternatives such as thermal depolymerization that can turn weeds, sewage and garbage into carbon neutral fuels we can pour directly into the tanks of existing vehicles.” And then there are *bad* solutions, such as “lets just assume that weather-power coupled with handwavy improvements in battery tech will make the place into a green utopia” and “all solutions begin with gutting the US economy.”
The problem with basing all your hopes on the US taking care of it is that the US is a *minor* player in CO2 emissions:
Compared to most of nations *individually,* the US is a major source of CO2. But compare to the world as a whole, the US is small, and getting rapidly smaller. The US, Japan and western Europe are more or less static, but China, India and the less developed countries are burning whatever they can to power their industries. Soon, the US could simply stop burning stuff entirely and the world wouldn’t notice the difference.
Still, one might argue, the US should still make a major, economy-crushing and horizon-compressing effort to do whatever it can; when the world sees the US neuter itself, surely they wil all be inspired to do the same, yes?
Ahhh…. about that:
When I was a kid, “O Noes, hairspray is going to destroy the ozone layer!” was all the rage. And then… we fixed it. The world got together and figured out what chemicals – in particular CFCs – were bad for the ozone, and the world agreed to curtail the use of such things in aerosol cans and air conditioners and fridges and the like. We’d actually won. There were safer, better options available, no need to use the dangers stuff. And yet… here we are, China’s cranking out trichlorofluoromethane in order to make foam insulation. Not because they *need* to, but because it’s cheaper. Well, what makes anyone sane and non-stupid think that things would be any different with CO2? China is in it for China. If global warming wipes out the American agricultural heartland, they’re hardly going to be too upset about that; nor will the Chinese Communists shed too many tears over the loss of the Everglades or small Polynesian islands.
If you really want to do something abut CO2, you have to take care of the biggest issues, not just focus on the small players. And this means that you will need to either:
Once again we’re back to nukes, the only foreseeable system that could potentially provide the *vast*amount of power the world needs without the CO2 emissions, and without the vast consumption of land area needed for low power density weather power systems.
Clearly, the US should go ahead and nuclearize anyway; never mind global warming, it’s otherwise still the right thing to do economically, ecologically and technologically. Just don’t expect the global climate to improve until the likes of China and India get on board.
So there I was, driving along and minding my own business, when NPR had to go and crush my day. They had a piece on “wildlife tourism” that included an interview with a Swedish conservationist who is working on a documentary about tiger farms in Asia. There used to be 100,000 tigers in the wild, now there are 4,000 or fewer; but there are more than 12,000 in “farms.” Normally I’m all in favor of farming… it’s a dandy way to preserve a species. Cows, pigs and chickens sure ain’t going extinct anytime soon, for instance. But tigers ain’t chickens. They are a fundamentally different sort of critter, and while eating pigs and sheep and the like is a perfectly fine thing to do, the uses made of tigers are pretty much all freakin’ ridiculous. The nadir of the story comes in the link above at about the 38 minute mark. A Chinese shop owner in Laos has some pink items that caused curiosity due to their color; the description for how they’re pink made me want to punch the radio to make it shut the frak up, then pull over, rip the radio out of the car, throw it onto the pavement, jump up and down on it, set it on fire and toss the smoking remnants into a deep dark pit, then drive to my nearest congressman and demand that the world withdraw from east Asia the right to use modern technology until their culture has grown up enough to be allowed to have things like electricity and the internal combustion engine and antibiotics and the Haber process.
Clearly, I was a tad annoyed. Listen at your peril.
Farming tigers for useless trinkets and fraudulent medicines is a ridiculous notion. Farming them for their meat, just as much so… predators make terrible farm animals because you have to feed them, you know, meat. Cows can get by with grass and weeds, but predators need many times their own meat-weight in food-meat, which is clearly stupid economics.
Still, there are more tigers in farms than there are in the wild. Soon, wild tigers will likely be extinct and will only exist in farms, zoos and the homes of a few crazy people. A great idea would be to get people to stop hunting them in the wild, but the same economics that makes farming them profitable also spurs people to hunt them, and there’s bound to be several jackholes who have an itch to be the guy to bring down the very last wild tiger.
I’ve honestly few ideas about how to save the species. Other than an east Asian zombie apocalypse, the best I have is a series of planetary terraforming projects to create continent-sized wildlife parks, something that relatively tiny orbital habs are sadly insufficient for. Creatures like lions and tigers require relatively vast herds of prey animals, and vast herds of water buffalo and antelope and the like require a whole lot of open area. The total sustainable population of tigers in an Island Three would probably be far below the safe number needed for decent genetics. So maybe we can get the animal rights activists behind the idea of terraforming Venus and Mars? Doubtful, I suppose, but probably easier than convincing two billion Chinese to knock it off with the powdered rhino horn-based boner pills.
As previously mentioned, the blogs required some updating of various things. One big update was to the WordPress version. It all seemed to work out well until, rather suddenly, whenever I’d go to create a new post all I got was a blank screen. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Completely empty.
Turns out the problem was the new “Gutenberg” editor. It is, frankly, a pain in the ass to use, and now it sorta crashes the program. Fortunately there is a “Classic Editor” plugin that restores the old, *simple* post editor, and clearly allows me to create posts again. So if you have a WordPress blog and encounter this problem, installing the “Classic Editor” may well be the fix.
Until the next issue comes along, anyway…
Great googally moogally! I thought my Orville 3D model was pretty good, but… dayum.
One hopes that that time is now, at least for Sweden. Via Google Translate:
In short, the Swedish Minister of Justice wants to ban runes, because Nazis.
Runes.
You know, the script used by Nordic people. In Scandinavia, including Sweden. For hundreds of years.The best outcome for this kind of insanity would be the rise of a Swedish nationalistic movement that permits and promotes Swedes to take pride in their heritage, rather than trying to erase it and their people. I guess tomorrow we’ll see if UKIP and the Brexit Party make a dent in British electoral politics; it would be nice if the Swedes would grow a pair and take their own country back from the insane PC whackos who seem bent on turning it into a UN backwater experiment in trashing European cultures.