As they say, celebs die in threes. Art Bell a few days ago, R. Lee Ermey yesterday, Harry Anderson today.
These were all “B” celebs, I suppose. A shame “Night Court” isn’t on Netflix.
Well, someones bad day is amusing for someone else…
Pretty sure someone’s got some ‘splainin’ to do…
Saw this on the road a few days ago, heading south on I-15 between Brigham City and Ogden. Theory: the government is getting ready for the Yellowstone supervolcano to go off and to do so with such force that the Great Salt Lake will be tossed around, a giant wave of brine sent sloshing southwards. Second theory: anything else.
And yet the world is full of pajamaboys. Sigh.
Sure, bombs, poison gas, cruise missiles, threats, nuclear war, blah, blah, blah. But then this:
It’s not news that, *insanely,* the US is dependent upon the Russians to send our astronauts to the ISS. If the current situation gets bad enough that the Russians no longer will launch US astronauts, then there are two possible outcomes:
Who needs wind tunnels to check out your space capsule configurations when you have shotguns?
An update to THIS STORY from a bit over a week ago, where a guy doused himself with gasoline and a quartet of cops tried to keep himself from going FOOM. If you don’t want to see security camera footage of what some folks on fire looks like, don’t click on it. If you do… well, here ya go.
And then there was this entirely unrelated piece:
Sadly, the video cuts off a few seconds too early. The best part was the uncomfortable silence for a few seconds among the anchors as they processed the end of the piece, followed by laughter.
This is *spectacular.* So some Sri Lankans moved to Britain and had themselves a kid, but did not effectively learn the language. The kid was born with cerebral palsy. Because the parents didn’t speak adequate English, the medics who attended the birth could not explain to the parents that, you know, you need to feed the kid from time to time, and now some nine years later the kid is in bad shape in part because the parents didn’t adequately feed the kid. This is, of course, the fault of the medics who, and I’m quoting here, “failed to overcome the language barrier, directly resulting in the child suffering catastrophic brain injuries.” And now the British taxpayers are on the hook for some millions of lawsuit lotto that the family has won.
Because it’s every medical practitioners job to be proficient in every language on the planet, so long as that medical practitioner is in a western country.
Gah.
If you are a parent, isn’t it kinda *your* duty to see to it that your kids are properly taken care of?
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Anyway, there was also this on the side of that page:
Commissioned by anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate, the Yougov poll of 5,200 people also found that 51% of people believe immigration is putting pressure on schools and hospitals.
Huh. Wonder why.
The article says that 40% of respondents agreed with a speech given in 1968 by some guy named Enoch Powell, who was a politician of some kind. In case you are an American and don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of all things British, here’s the speech:
In looking that up, I came across the following. It’s apparently a speech in a British TV crime drama, made by the villain of the piece. And it is a speech, if you read the YouTube comments, that speaks to just a whole lot of people. That’s the problem with forced multiculturalism: the natives didn’t ask for it. They weren’t consulted. And when they complain, they are cast as villains for wanting to keep things they way they have known them to be. And once you decide that someone is a villain for wanting to live in their own homes with their own cultures, they will sooner or later no longer give a damn about whether or not you see them as a villain. You can call someone a racist or a fascist or a Nazi or a misogynist or a sexist or a what-the-hell-ever only just so many times before the nasty word loses its sting and becomes meaningless. And when you call them that bad word for being opposed to something they can *see* as being *actually* bad… you will make them decide that that bad word isn’t something to run from, but is instead their natural ally. So good job, “progressives,” you’ve made the rise of fascism and nationalism and actual racism pretty much inevitable.
“The Amazing World of Gumball” explains some complex subjects in ways that are enlightening and, let’s face it, accurate.
The stock market and economy:
The meaning of life turns out to be a whole lot more Lovecraftian than most kids shows would have you believe, on both the small and large scale:
Video games are dangerous. But are they the *most* dangerous?
Proxima Centuri, as has been know for a few years now, has a roughly Earth-sized planet in it’s habitable zone. Yay! But… Proxima is a red dwarf. Worse, it’s a red dwarf with some serious flare activity. Since it is so small and dim, the habitable zone is *real* close to the star, which means that flares can do some serious damage to planeary atmospheres. How bad are Proximas flares? Well…
“In March 2016 the Evryscope detected the first-known Proxima superflare. The superflare had a bolometric energy of 10^33.5 erg, ~10× larger than any previously-detected flare from Proxima, and 30×larger than any optically measured Proxima flare. The event briefly increased Proxima’s visible-light emission by a factor of 38× averaged over the Evryscope’s 2-minute cadence, or ~68× at the cadence of the human eye. Although no M-dwarfs are usually visible to the naked-eye, Proxima briefly became a magnitude-6.8 star during this superflare, visible to dark-site naked-eye observers.”
Yikes.
When a flare is 68 times brighter than the rest of the star… that means you have some variability issues. An earth-like world around Proxima is *real* unlikely. Assume that one – let’s say Earth – was suddenly miracled into existence smack in the middle of the habitable zone. You’re going about your day when there is a sudden “BING” sound, and the quality of the sunlight suddenly changes. Not quite as bright, a bit redder (almost like a really powerful incandescent bulb), but just as warm. You look at the sky. It had been a nice bright blue; now its a darker, less happy blue, leaning a bit purplish and gray. You look at the sun and it hits you: “hey, that ain’t right.” It’s the wrong size… visually much bigger. You can almost look at it with just sunglasses. When you do, it looks blotchy.
But you’re not a terribly jittery person. Things looks slightly different, but everything seems to still be functioning, so who cares.
And then SURPRISE FLARE. The sunlight gets ~70 times brighter for a few minutes. Anything flammable flamms. The road melts. You go blind. A portion of the atmosphere says “screw this noise” and blows off into space; there is a slight but measurable permanent decrease in atmospheric pressure even after all the CO2 from the fires settles out.