A rare moment of judicial rationalism

 Hmm..., Meh., news, Obamazombies, politics, religion, THIS is why Trump won  1 Response »
May 202017
 

‘Clock boy’ Ahmed Mohamed will file new lawsuit after judge dismisses claims against Irving ISD, city

For those who don’t recall… Clochmed was the kid who took the electrical bits out of a commercial digital plug-in-the-wall clock and re-installed them within a nicely conductive metal case (an off the shelf pencil box, now equipped with  wall plug and exposed wiring). When he was arrested for bringing a “hoax bomb” to school (note: not for bringing a bomb… nobody on scene thought it was actually a bomb, they just assumed that it was something meant to *look* like a bomb in order to scare people), his family was able to parlay that into lots of swag, visits to the President, ill-advised compliments from people who should have known better about what a brilliant “inventor” the kid was (remember: he didn’t build the clock… he just took it out of a plastic housing and put it in a metal one), and a chance to play lawsuit lotto with the town of Irving, Texas. The family, after complaining about Clochmeds human rights being violated, pulled up stakes and moved to Qatar where their human rights are certain to be safe.

If there’s anyone about dense enough to think that*clearly* this was racism/Islamophobia on the part of the authorities in Irving, and that such a thing would never happen to Privileged White Kids, let me REMIND YOU: Pop Tart Pistols.

 Posted by at 10:07 pm

Cats From Over Yonder

 cats, photography  1 Response »
May 192017
 

While back in Illinois, I got to catch up with Bruce. He has grown some… but he’s also quite the troublemaker. He has claws and fangs and ain’t afraid to use ’em.

I also got to meet “Jazz” for the first time. He was rescued from the wild six or so months ago… wandering around sick and starving, he managed to stumble across just the right people. Now he’s living the good life. He’s some sort of special breed… a Persian or Himalayan or one of them smoosh-faced critters. Can’t say s I’m overly thrilled with people who think it’s just neato to intentionally breed cats like this whose sinus cavities are so mashed in that they can’t smell well enough to hunt, so that if they get out – or are kicked out – they can’t fend for themselves. But I can say I approve of those who rescue such animals. Jazz is a bit of a special needs cat, but he seems like a nice guy, and deserves better than he had. Fortunately, he got better than he had.

 

 Posted by at 10:23 pm

More “Dark Crystal” coming

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., news, youtube  4 Responses »
May 182017
 

“The Dark crystal” is just… odd. Ain’t no gettin’ past that. It’s sufficiently odd that I’ve always been amazed that it got greenlit and released way back in 1982 (yay! 35 years ago! I feel old yet again!!!!!). in the decades (sigh…)since, there have been numerous rumors of a sequel movie, but nothing ever came to pass. Now, though, it looks like Netflix is busily working away on a *prequel* series.

Reportedly, they’re doing it right… practical effects & puppets, with just a smidgeon of CGI. It might be easier to do the whole thing CGI… and that would make the series immediately forgettable. If they are true to the original, this could end up being a hell of a thing.

Interestingly: “Dark Crystal” could have been even more bizarre. As originally shot, the Skeksis didn’t speak English, but their own language, with subtitles. But apparently test audiences didn’t care for that, so they were re-dubbed into English. Not long after, Reverend Jim was speaking Klingon for good stretches of Star Trek III, and quite a bit after, the Elves and Orks were babbling away in their own languages, proving that audiences really didn’t have a problem with fantasy characters speaking fantasy languages.

As a child of the 80’s… I approve.

 Posted by at 6:26 pm

The WTFometer pegs at 11

 art, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., Meh., politics, religion, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
May 182017
 

This is some sorta propaganda art-film. The winner of a competition organized by the horrifically-named “Européens Sans Frontières (Europeans Without Borders),” the purpose of which, best as I can gather, was to produce a film about the plight of “migrants” as they try to gain access to (and gain control over) the lands and womenfolk of western Europe. I think that’s it, anyway. But the end result is… well, I’ll have to let it speak for itself, cuz I sure as shootin’ can’t explain it:

What *seems* to happen here is that a bespectacled European fairy aids some human traffickers in smuggling a family of “migrants” into western Europe in order to provide cheap labor and put some locals out of work. or something, it’s hard to tell. The original was in French, so maybe it loses something in translation. The thing is, I honestly can’t tell what the actual propaganda is here. Is it supposed to be “we welcome our replacements,” as seems the PC thing for Europeans to do these days? Or is the complete ridiculousness of it meant to satire that sentiment? Or – and I might be going a bit out on a limb here – is this actually a dark tale about one of the few remaining European fairy folk getting revenge on the European humans who wiped out her kind by sneaking in other humans from an alien and antagonistic culture, knowing full well that once a critical mass of the invaders are in place Europe will be plunged into another meatgrinder, killing off  tens or hundreds of millions of humans,  and providing the now nearly extinct fairy folk with a measure of justice against the Europeans who wiped them out centuries before?

 

 

 Posted by at 4:44 pm

Religion = Instinct?

 Hmm..., news, religion, science  15 Responses »
May 182017
 

This will, no doubt, result in calm, reasoned discussion:

Atheists are more intelligent than religious people, say researchers

In short, the argument goes: religion evolved as an instinct, providing evolutionary advantages. Intelligence, however, allows one to over-ride instincts. Thus on average an intelligent person is more likely to be an atheist because they can bypass their instincts in favor of reason.

Note the direction in which the logic flows: “if you are more intelligent, you are more likely to become an atheist.” It’s *not* “if you’re an atheist, it proves you’re intelligent.”

So. Surely nobody will be upset or annoyed by this.

But then there’s this:

“It’s true that people who are less intelligent tend to have more children than people who are more intelligent,” Dutton tells Newsweek . “And intelligence is negatively associated with religiousness. So on that basis, you would expect religiousness to increase.

“If you have higher intelligence, you’re less instinctive. You’re lower in what you might call ‘evolved instincts’ that have evolved over thousands and thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution, when natural selection slowed down.”

He says that with intelligence being around 80 percent genetic, eventually there will be a decline in intelligence—and, as a result—a rise in religiousness. And this, he adds, could eventually lead to the fall of society. “It was commented on at the end of Rome, that the upper class weren’t having any children. It’s the same now,” he says.

I’ve seen that movie.

 

This is, perhaps shockingly, a concept I touch on in my Zaneverse novel.

There is another way to look at the evidence: prison. Prisons are jam-packed full of violent, stupid, thuggish brutes. They don’t, however, seem to be overflowing with atheists; rather, prison ministries of all kinds seem to be going gangbusters. Intelligence and prison seem to be negatively correlated; prison and belief in a deity that *explicitly* told your dumb ass not to do exactly what got you chucked into prison seem to be positively correlated.

 Posted by at 11:56 am

Another Zaneverse Update

 blather, My Fiction, science fiction  2 Responses »
May 172017
 

My first novel, as yet untitled, currently clocks in at 106,000 words and it’s not quite done yet. At about 300 words per page, this works out to 353 pages. When done I expect it’ll be around 400 pages. But then it’ll probably need a whole lot of editing.

Whether it’ll get published, I can’t say. But I do think it’s actually pretty good. The first quarter or so of it is a slightly reworked “Going to Gimli,” and many of the questions raised in that story (like “what the frak is the deal with Earth” and “who/what are the Segregators”) are answered by the end. It’s not Important Literary Literature, but I think it’s actually pretty entertaining and reasonably clever.

If interested, see my first story “Mass Disappearance,” followed by “Going to Gimli,” and then two story fragments, “Launch” and “A Matter of Some Gravity.”

 Posted by at 11:27 pm

Build the Enterprise

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, models, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
May 172017
 

There have been a lot of Star Trek model kits over the years, enough so that it seems like a producer would have to have something pretty unique to make their mark on the market. It seems that some years ago a project was started in Japan to market a truly unique model of the Enterprise-D. What the “Build The Enterprise” entailed was a “subscription” system where once  a week or so the subscribers would receive a magazine with Technical Manual-type stuff and parts to continue the build. In this case, the build was a 1/900 scale cutaway model of the Enterprise, with each deck represented by a sheet of laser-etched plexiglass. “Build TheEnterprise” was aimed at and released solely in the Japanese market.

As anyone who has been reading this blog long enough knows, I’m intimately familiar with the concept of “boy howdy, this project I’ve embarked on is certainly cool and I have high hopes for it” transmogrifying into “well, that didn’t sell worth a damn.” Heck, that’s pretty much *every* project I’ve initiated (anybody want to prove me wrong and turn American Nuclear Explosive Devices into something so popular that I’ll get off my ass and finally finish issue#2?) Of course, I’m just one goober with no marketing department, no marketing *budget*, no interpersonal skills and more stubbornness than sense. So you’d expect that professionals, with access to the experts (in this case, the likes of Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach and others who, if you know anything at all about Star Trek ship design and model making, are well-known names) and who have had considerable success in the past, would have another success with a project like this.

Ooops.

They had the bad luck of starting up right after the tsunami and Fukushima reactor meltdown. As a result the Japanese model building market wasn’t in the mood and the project failed. One hundred issues were projected… only four were actually released. One would hope that a project like this would be recoverable in some form… a Kickstarter or some such. Because from all appearances it was a heck of a thing. But it seems that it has been simply abandoned by those in power.

 

 

So, let that be a lesson to you: do your market research first, and think twice before doing your initial release just before a major earthquake right next to a nuclear reactor that has been hobbled by red tape and anti-nuclear activists. And you can add the failure of this innovative cutaway model to the list of things the anti-nuke Luddites have inflicted on mankind by making sure that old reactors can’t be replaced with new ones.

 

 Posted by at 2:03 pm

Ya gotta ask yourself: “Will this get me that job at Lockheed?”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Meh., religion, science, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
May 162017
 

We all know – because some people just won’t shut the hell up about it – that there is a “wage gap” between men and women. Those who are honest about the topic know that a large fraction of the gap comes down to the fact that there are a lot more men in the STEM fields, which tend to pay better. So, how to close the gap? Hire more womenfolk, obviously. But how does a woman get hired as, say, an engineer, a technician, a mechanic, a scientist? Forget all that “schooling and hard work” crap, there’s a better solution! Coming soon to a university curriculum near you, no doubt…

Here’s What It’s Like To Be A Queer, Polyamorous Kink Witch

Meet a woman who ties herself up and casts spells to find empowerment.

Well, hell, and here I thought “empowerment” came from learning all you could, making yourself invaluable and doing a good job. Apparently, though, it actually involves ropes.

Guh.

Hey, weird chick, you be you. If this sort of thing is fun and entertaining for you, then, whoopee, I guess. Fine, great, whatever. But when this sort of thing is touted as real and anything remotely resembling rational or aspirational, as opposed to being a cautionary tale of “this is what happens when someone is unsullied by reason or skepticism,” it’s hardly a wonder that far too many people avoid good and useful paths in life – the kind that aid society and pay well, but require that you work hard and honestly – in favor of buying into magic.

Behold:

When I say “magic” I don’t mean I’m turning something into something else — magic is working with energy. You can’t create something that isn’t there. You’re using energy and you’re manipulating energy with intention, so I’m working with the energy of my own self-love and manipulating that and working with that in a positive way and setting intentions for myself.

Urk.

There’s a new use of words like “energy” and “intention” that I really don’t think apply to anything in the real world.

Or as Fark called it:

“Here’s What It’s Like To Be A Queer, Polyamorous Kink Witch.” Translation: PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEE

 Posted by at 11:42 pm
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