A little while back the most vacuous of the current crop of congresscritters engaged in some fantasy role-play where she pretended to be a future version of herself extolling the virtues of the world accepting and enacting her Green New Deal policies. Even without the most basic surface understanding of just how nutty her ideas are, it was painful to watch as any “the world will come to understand and celebrate my greatness” self-congratulatory piece of self-insertion sci-fi literature would be.
But then you actually analyze the details and, man, this thing is stooooopid.
I finally got around to stitching together photos I’ve taken since October. I’ll be posting some reduced-rez versions over the next little while, because why not. If anything is interesting, let me know. The dates the photos were taken are in the filenames.
So we had a whackaloon shoot up a synagogue in California. In this case we have an orgy of evidence about the shooter in the synagogue because the guy, in the finest tradition of true whackaloons, left a friggen manifesto. You can read it HERE. It’s not very long, but great googaly moogaly is it jam-packed full of Jew-hating crazy. It reads like the sort of unhinged monologue that a poorly-written movie Klansman would screech to his three inbred followers.
A few things can be gleaned from it. First, there’s a level of antisemitism there that is hard to fathom where it even came from. It had to have been building for a good long while. But it seems that the motivation for doing this came about recently… specifically, the Christchurch New Zealand mosque shootapalooza. This guy calls it out specifically as an inspiration, while also throwing in a bunch of video game and even PewDiePie references. He’s clearly a fanboy of the Christchurch shooter. Would he have gone after the synagogue had it not been for NZ? Hard to say, but this level of crazy must have been around for a good long while. Chances are that he would have snapped at some point, but it’s clear that Christchurch was the thing that got him moving. It has long been suggested that a big part of the cause of the modern school/mass shooting “epidemic” is crackpots seeing the news coverage that others get and becoming infected with a copycat virus. It seems that this is another data point.
In the modern lunatic manifesto tradition, it has a “question and answer” section. Seems he’s not a fan of either Trump or conservatives, though you know that both of those groups will be tarred by this guys actions. He’s a European, which he takes great pains to repeatedly go on about, and he’s quite vocal about his Christianity… which I bet will irritate the hell out of a whole lot of Christians who seem to think that that Jesus feller might have looked a little askance on someone trying to massacre Jews.
Back in 1982, Argentina and Britain went to war over the Falklands. Those are a tiny smattering of rather underwhelming islands in the south Atlantic, hell and gone away from anything, with virtually no meaningful resources to speak of. It was consequently an unusual war: nobody was trying to grab goodies (there aren’t any) or expand living room (the Argentinians don’t really want to live there). It was, for the Argentinians and their dictator, one of those truly dumbass sort of wars: “a matter of pride.” For the Brits… the Argentinians were invading British soil and capturing British citizens. One could well argue about what Britain wants with those islands since they provide neither strategic advantage nor economic boons; wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper to simply give them up? But, unlike, say, some uninhabited rock, British people lived there and called the place home.
The Argentinians, in contrast, once laid claim to the land, but hadn’t exactly colonized it. For most of its history up until the time the Brits finally laid claim to the place in 1833, it’s population was highly variable between “a few” and “absolutely nobody.” At various times the French, Spanish and even Americans landed military forces there, and the occasional fisherman dropped by, but until the Brits nobody wanted to *live* there. It is by all accounts a cold, damp, fairly miserable place… Scotland, in other words. So why the frak the Argentinians *still* get all pissy about the place it anybody’s guess.
And pissy they seemingly are, to the point of cranking out some fairly amusing “The Malvinas (the Argentinian name for the Falklands) were always ours, and will be again!” propaganda. How they expect that to happen, I dunno, since the 3,000+ Falkland Islanders are pretty unanimous in wanting to stay British. If Argentina *really* wants the islands, the obvious approach would be to simply pay off the people living there. A million US dollars per person would seem like it might stand a good chance of buying their votes; a mere three billion dollars or so, and the Falklands can be the Malvinas without firing a shot.
The Falklands have been British for going on 180 years. Nobody alive ever knew anybody who remembered when the Falklands weren’t British. If you’re Argentinian and this sort of propaganda speaks to you… just let ’em go, because, man, they’re gone. Otherwise you’re going to ulcerate over something you can’t have, wouldn’t want it if you had it, and might do something stupid over. Instead, devote your efforts to colonizing, say, Eros. Even worse than the Falklands, but they can be yours forever.
This reminds me: one of the stories I wrote for “War With The Deep Ones” was “Falklands.” I thought it was pretty good, others did too. Might have to do something about all that one of these years.
When the United States nuked Japan, President Truman was right up front with everybody in stating clearly that the new weapons used were atom bombs. What *didn’t* happen, though, was the publication of photos of the bombs themselves. As a consequence, films from the 40’s and 50’s that depicted the actual atom bombs – such as 1947’s “The Beginning Or The End” – showed rather fanciful bomb designs… because the film-makers had to guess. And surely (I have do doubt the logic went) bombs that are based on such an unconventional process must have unconventional configurations.
It was not until 15 years later that the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were actually shown to the public in the form of photographs. Now, of course, you can get up close and personal with any of a number of actual bomb casings scattered around in numerous museums, but up until the reveal in late 1960… the average person had no idea what those early nukes looked like. Below is the December 12, 1960 article in Aviation Week showing the first photos; it’s interesting to note that even 60 years ago there ere already stirrings of the ulcerating over sensitivities and feelings that now so dominate any discussion of nuclear technology.
One “Jose Benito Guanajuato” of North Salt Lake had apparently built quite the chemistry lab in his home in order to manufacture explosives for the purpose of bombing the “American Towers” in Salt Lake City, because he believed that these towers contained ICE, Homeland Security and customs facilities. Turns out they’re just condos, so his plan was to murder a lot of people (a thousand? Dunno) in order to kill people who aren’t even there.
Guanjuato, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wants to eliminate ICE. Let’s see if he gets the sort of press that a major terrorism plot deserves.
So Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) went to Gibraltar to… I dunno, vacation or campaign or something, and Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of Gibraltar decided to smack talk about him on Twitter (with bonus extra-special high government official spelling and grammar errors):
I don’t believe anyone in #Gibraltar interested in listening to anything that this person has to say. My disgust grows at the mysogenistic, rascist & anti-Semitic diatribe that his person utters. This is not politics. As far as I am concerned its hate speak with no place in Gib. https://t.co/88rFMKqUwt
So driving along I listened to Science Friday on NPR today. They had a segment about poetry based on science, a concept which at least seemed like it aught to be promising. But the poems they read… wow, just, just awful, including one by the worlds most over-rated hack, Maya Angelou, which sounded like so much word salad. (Rather tellingly, both the description of the “poem,” that it was “an absolutely stunning poem,” and the title of the poem, “A Brave and Startling Truth,”are the sort of SJW buzzwords that make you sit up and take notice that you are about to be barraged with self-important nonsense.)
Everything they had on display sounded like the “poets” not only had the level of science understanding of your average Star Trek: Discovery writer, but the poetic skills of a lobotomized Speak N Spell. This crap is to “poetry” what low-end rap lyrics are to opera. I know art is subjective, but shouldn’t poetry sound, you know, like poetry, and not the stream of consciousness gibberings of someone whose experiences with science is restricted to “experimenting” with shrooms?
If you want to listen to this drivel… well, here ya go.
