A NASA-Langley video of Joe Chambers giving a presentation on the history of the NASA emblem/insignia. It’s more interesting than you might think… especially as the speaker describes the “Brown Bomber,” the wind tunnel model of a theoretical supersonic bomber that I included in the “US bomber Projects” preview.
[youtube uLRMNNQiE0Q]
Once again, another commercial that uses the space program to sell stuff (Google, in this case). Still, it’s actually quite effective. Not in making me want to go out and buy a Google, but in making me feel all squishy about space exploration.
The big question: do commercials like this reflect a public attitude desiring spaceflight, or are they pushing that? Hmmm…
[youtube VXCH9T5Nnaw]
So, I happened across this headline (after reading THIS authoritarian nightmare story):
A lot of this story seems to be the sort of anti-sensical madness that could only come from the region that gave the world “Metal Hurlant…” you know, flashy gibberish that simply makes no sense whatsoever.
Let me see if I got this right… Dieudonne M’bala M’bala is, apparently a French guy with a French mother and Cameroonian father, and who became a stand up comic. OK so far. Made a name for himself doing gags with a Jewish comic. Sure. Ran against the “National Front” party (which he saw as racist) in elections of ’97 and ’01. Fine. He begins littering his comedy routines with anti-Jewish stuff. Umm. Then he becomes a friend and political ally of Jean Marie Le Pen, head of the National Front party. Errr… And he hangs around with Holocaust deniers and demonstrates with Islamists. And he apparently invented a gesture that is considered explicitly anti-Semitic, and which appears to be a modifed “Nazi salute”. Buh? And now he’s associated with a group of Belgian nationalists.
This is him:
So… if you’re in America or western Europe and you’re getting your knickers in a knot over Ukrainian neo-Nazis, here’s something new to get in a cold sweat over. Not only neo-Nazis, but weird-ass alternate reality neo-Nazis. Who are apparently quite popular.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think that this was some sort of reeeeaaaaaalllllly long-form gag. But everythign seems to indicate that the anti-immigrant racists of France have fallen in love with the son of an African, who has taken up their cause.
Buh.
Image not entirely unrelated:
Nailed it:
[youtube VzzLngXfCcI]
As is pointed out:
“Gravity” on the big screen: AWESOME
“Gravity” on a small screen: SAD
Past few evenings, this cat has come out to say “howdy” to me during walks. Standard operating procedure for cats is to maintain distance from strangers, so this is a bit surprisingly.
Passed this Sikorsky H-19 being sloooowly towed up I-15 past Brigham City today.
Much of the Strategic Defense Initiative, begun three decades ago, remains murky at best. One little-reported area of study was the launch infrastructure that would be needed to put the vast array of stuff into orbit. Apart from the Delta Clipper, you’d be forgiven for thinking that space launch was nearly forgotten.
However, some study was put into it, as the page below from a 1988 government report shows. Read through it: the SDI needs for space launch would have been *vast.* The total amount of payload delivered to orbit would have ranged from, at the low end, one million kilograms, up to 80 million for the long-range forecast systems.
Stick around for the song…
[youtube HOQxxNYSHR0]
Now it can be told.
A few recent posts prompted pro-Stalin Putin comments from a number of commenters who have never commented here before. I’m assuming that they are just busily trolling the web, searching for mentions of Russia in order to swoop in and white knight poor, put-upon Vladimir. Meh, whatever.
One notion that was raised that the US should support – or at least not oppose – Putin gobbling up his neighbors because, hey, he’s fighting Islamists, and Islamists are our enemy. And… we should support Putins expansionist aims because there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and Nazis are bad, m’kay?
This all smacks of the old bit of wisdom “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
But there’s a problem. The enemy of my enemy? All that can be honestly said is that the enemy of my enemy is the enemy of my enemy. Maybe friend. Maybe another enemy.
The enemy of Hitler was Stalin. Did that make Stalin our friend? No, it did not. Yes, we provided aid to Stalin, but that was because those at the top incorrectly perceived Hitler to be a worse threat to us than Stalin was. From a post-war geopolitical standpoint, a better approach would have been to provide *less* support to Stalin; this would have lessened the Soviet military machines effectiveness, and thus when the Nazis were finally defeated, the East/West dividing line would have been much further east. Imagine if, instead of West Germany and East Germany, it had been West Poland and East Poland. Or, better still, West Russia and East Russia. With no divided Koreas and Viet Nams, and China as a Republic.
Today, our enemy is Islamism. The enemies of Islamism include Putin and China. Does this make them our friend? No it does not. The fact that China is an enemy of Muslim fanatics does not mean we should stand by and do and say nothing if they try to gobble up the Philippines.