After a decade and a half, there’s finally some meager progress towards pointing official fingers towards Saudi Arabia (formerly: Arabia; eventually: Eastern Greater Israel) in the form of a bill in front of Congress that would allow US citizens to sue for damages from 9-11. The Saudis are responding with a threat that doesn’t seem that threatening:

Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill

Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.

Hmmm. OK, they have a bunch of American goodies. If they are open to being sued, the US government might seize these goodies and hold them sort of as collateral in the event the Saudis lose the suits. If the Saudis sell the goodies first to other people/nations, the US might not be able to seize them.

But…

If the Saudis put, I dunno, a New York skyscraper up for sale and there was a risk that the Feds were going to seize it, you can bet that the selling price is gonna be pretty low. If there was no risk of seizure, the skyscraper might sell for a bucket of money, but I don’t see how that in and of itself hurts the US. If the Saudis feel they need to sell off stuff *fast* to beat the bill, then they’ll be selling at low prices, which will be good for the buyers (likely US interests in many cases), while screwing themselves pretty substantially.

If the Saudis manage to sell off all their US holdings and are thus safe from seizure, I’m pretty sure the US can still stick it to ’em. Nail ’em in the international banking arena. Entertaining thought: President Gary Johnson signs letters of marque and reprisal allowing American owned vessels to seize Saudi oil tankers. Imagine Blackwater not only seizing oil tankers and the oil within, but then either converting them to the first privately owned aircraft carriers, or selling them to SpaceX as mobile landing platforms.

Realistically, the bill ain’t gonna pass, as Obama has promised to veto.

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Infographic: approximate location of Saudi Arabia.

A sadly tiny illustration of a “Saturn Space Laboratory” from a circa 1960 NASA brochure (promoting the organization to college students). This looks like something halfway between MOL and Skylab; three pressurized modules in a “wet lab” space station. Diameter looks to be 10 feet, same as the Titan booster; early concepts for the Saturn called for the use of the Titan first stage to be the second stage of the Saturn I, with the second stage of the Titan being the third stage of the Saturn. This may well represent a Titan I or II first stage/Saturn I second stage as a space lab.

Given the entertainingly toxic nature of the Titan II propellants, I’d guess this was an earlier Titan I-based concept.

Magnitude-7.8 earthquake hits Ecuador; at least 28 dead

Ouch. And just a few hours ago…

Japan earthquakes: Dozens killed; ‘race against the clock’ to find survivors

Alaskans and Californians and Indonesians better watch yer butts.

This video demonstrates the French Brun-Latrige Model 1900 pocket pistol. It clearly shoots an odd, small round (probably 8mm, but it looks like the cartridge must be tiny) out of a built-in box magazine of 8 or 10 rounds capacity. It’s pretty stylish and odd looking… looks like something the prop makers for Deep Space 9 would have slapped together for Random Alien Of The Week.

It seems like it’d be difficult to hit anything with this at more than point-blank range; but even if you did, the wimpy bullet would not exactly be a man-stopper. Still, it looks kinda neat. Scale it up by ten percent, run it off the 3D printer, and maybe it’d be a dandy shooter of .380 or even maybe 9mm.

A week ago, the news broke of some brutal bullying at a school in Nova Scotia. The source of the bullying was reported as being the influx of “refugees,” ill-defined. The story would have made a slight kerfuffle and then blown over as these things do… but the newspaper that broke the story then decided to retract the story. Not, apparently, because the facts were in repute, but because the story was incomplete. Now, the story certainly had a whole lot of holes. The origin and nature of the “refugees” was left to the imagination; no names of perpetrators were given; no indication of legal actions were described.

The withdrawal of the story made the story bigger, as it was seen by many as curious, to say the least, if not outright self-censorship in the name of political correctness. And so now, this:

We have listened and will learn from this

The newspaper has issued a mea culpa. Is it for leaving out the afore-mentioned details? Is it for retracting the story, rather than updating it? Guess again, chumps:

We should have asked more questions to clarify what happened and to get broader, more balanced perspectives to ensure that refugee children in the school would not be negatively impacted.

We later removed parts of the story and then the entire piece from our website when we saw it was being shared and misused to attack refugees and immigrants and to malign their faith and culture.

Say, that’s neat. No reference to aiding the *Canadian* children who were being brutalized. Screw those hosers, eh.

More entertainingly is an “I’m quitting” message posted at the newspapers site by one of their columnists. Why’d she quit?

Its prevailing damage is social — it is outright, unchecked victimization of the already victimized.

Note: the victims she references aren’t the kids who were being brutalized at the school, but the ones reported to have done the brutalizing.

Nothing so far written indicates that the story was factually wrong. It is of course always possible that the stories of bullying were made up, that the initial reporters got suckered into writing fiction. But that’s not what the editorial complaint is. Their complaint is that, in essence, they cannot write a proper story about a rapist without explaining what unfortunate event in the rapists childhood made him that way. They cannot write about a cult that performs human sacrifice without extolling all the good that the cult does with their bake sales. They cannot describe a fatal hit-and-run accident until they can explain why the driver did what he did. It seems that they feel that they cannot describe bad events without adding enough fluff to bury the badness under an avalanche of feel-good political correctness.

Thanks to blog reader Herp McDerp for the heads up.

UPDATE: More reporters are getting in on the story and interviewing the people involved, from parents to the school administration spokepeople. Here is one such article. One of the more interesting bits:

“Some of the parents at the centre of this article, the school was speaking to just last week and will continue to speak with them,” Hadey admitted despite the fact he just claimed no student or parent had come forward about the refugee problem.

Additionally, it appears that the chain one student was reportedly choked with was a necklace.

Some interviews with people involved, including a schoolgirl who backs up the original allegations (I guess the narrative will be that she’s an actress or a liar) and the spokesman who says that no parents have contacted the school and then says that parents have contacted the school:

This is an older one, but still pretty fargin’ funny:

There are two very popular memes in political discourse regarding income and taxation:

Women get paid only 79 cent for every dollar a man makes
The rich aren’t paying their fair share of income taxes

It’s easy to understand why these are popular. They’re easy to express (and put on bumper stickers), they make lots of people feel like victims, and they are a great way to drive wedges between large segments of the population. So for authoritarians, fascists, Progressives and other forms of just plain awful people, these are great “facts” to spout as loudly and as often as possible. But are they true?

As to #1: do women on the whole earn less than men? Yes. Is it because of discrimination, that evil bosses simply pay women less than men Just Cuz? Not even close. Whose fault is it that a woman gets paid less than a man, then? Simply put… the womans fault. Because, generally speaking, the path these women have chosen is a path that *necessarily* leads to lower paying jobs. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin was on NPR a few days ago and made some important points:

Disproportionately, women, particularly those who are mothers or who are taking care of others, would like greater predictability in their hours. They would like less on-call hours. They would like fewer periods of long hours. Well, those jobs are often the jobs – the ones that have the longer hours, the less predictability – those are the ones that are often the higher income occupations.

What this basically means is if you want to get paid the big bucks, you have to work the crap jobs. Sure, doctors get paid more than septic tank techs. But the doctors who are on call 24/7 get paid more than those who keep normal business hours; the ones who put in 60 hours a week get more than those who put in 40. The same goes for the septic tank techs. If you need to have predictable hours to take care of the rugrats… you get paid less. If you simply *want* predictable hours just because you don’t want to be on call 24/7, you get paid less. And it appears that women are more interested in more stable hours… and less of ’em.

Additionally: If you have two employees, A and B, who start at the same time, with the same skill set and work experience, you will probably pay them the same. If, two years in, A decides to take a year off… when A comes back, B will have put in one more year of work than A has. It doesn’t matter if A left to raise a baby, take care of a dying parent, study abroad, study a broad, hike the Appalachian Trail or follow Phish on tour, the simple fact is… A wasn’t at work for a year, while B was. B’s getting a raise that A’s not getting. B has not only put in more hours, B is more up-to-date on what’s going on. B has demonstrated more utility to the company than A has. And as it turns out, women are more likely to be “A” than “B,” generally due to the whole “raising offspring” thing.

When all that gets factored in, the “wage gap” shrinks substantially, to the point where economist Goldin said:

On average, when we measure these differences, we do find a residual gap. And in certain cases, we would feel very comfortable as researchers in saying this is discrimination. But it’s very, very hard to do that because it’s hard to find the smoking guns.

I’m a historian as well as an economist. And in the past, we really could find smoking guns. People would actually say, I pay women less than men. We don’t find that anymore. So we have to really search for the smoking guns. I know they’re there. I know that there is discrimination. How much is there – probably not that much.

So… sure, there’s some discrimination. But where? It does not seem to be readily findable.

OK, so on to Number 2, those dastardly richies not paying their fair share. Ummmm… well, the facts don’t seem to support that:

…after all federal taxes are factored in, the U.S. tax system as a whole is progressive. The top 0.1% of families pay the equivalent of 39.2% and the bottom 20% have negative tax rates (that is, they get more money back from the government in the form of refundable tax credits than they pay in taxes).

The squawking for a “basic income,” where people – all people – would get paid some amount of money annually simply because they’re alive (and if they are Democrats in Illinois, being alive probably won’t be a requirement) gets louder every year. As robots and illegal aliens make more and more of the minwage workers obsolete, you can bet that this call will only get *painfully* loud. Now, we already have lots and lots of people who are negative taxpayers, as described above, and the highest tax rates are paid by those who make the most. So how are the rich not paying their fair share? Should more people at the bottom be cut off from the responsibility of funding the government that takes care of them, while those at the top should be squeezed for more? If you do that, and many want to, you put the burden of taxation on a smaller and smaller group of people. And the smaller the group of people, the more influence they have… by pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere, by dying, by simply stopping. Remember, a lot of the people who want to tax the rich often say stuff like “aren’t you rich enough” or similar. So, let’s say the really high earners suddenly agreed with them and decided to retire. Then… this:

In 2014, people with adjusted gross income, or AGI, above $250,000 paid just over half (51.6%) of all individual income taxes

It wouldn’t take too many durned rich bastiches to decide to retire and live the easy life before the federal budget revenues implode.

Has your religion grown old and stale? Are you looking for a new way to view the universe that doesn’t require you to make hard choices based on hard facts, but instead just based on whatever makes you feel good at the time? Then I’d like to introduce you to Jibbers Crabst.

Now, I ask you: do you have any proof that a giant fire breathing lobster *doesn’t* live beyond the rings of Saturn? Huh? No? Well, there ya go.

Up for auction:

#6226 – Lunar Rover Prototype

An original mid-1960s lunar rover prototype, or Local Scientific Survey Module, developed for NASA by Brown Engineering and known as the ‘Brown LSSM.’ Development of the prototype took place in 1965–1966, and it was used for lunar rover mobility tests and to conduct human factors studies and mobility evaluations. This vehicle was actually driven by the great rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and he can be seen with it in photographs. Otha Vaughan, a member of von Braun’s team, has examined the vehicle and identified it as authentic. It had been disposed of and long ago ended up in the hands of by a scrap metal dealer, who preserved it in his scrapyard. The rediscovery of this ‘lost lunar rover’ was the subject of several news stories in late October 2015.

It’s in kinda rough shape. But hey… you’ll probably be the only kid on your block with one.