Sunrise over the Wasatch mountains, taken from the window of a moving car. Not the best photos, certainly didn’t capture the colors involved, but still potentially of interest. All the smoke from California has really meddled with things.
So what happens when a Christian couple watch a music video based on Nordic heathenism?
I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but they can be interesting or amusing to ponder. I’ve dreamed one up (and I’ve not doubt I’m not the first) that could explain a current situation.
We’ve all seen that there has been a spate of “deplatforming” by most of the major social media companies. It has, I’m sure, surprised nobody that the bulk of these have been aimed at those on the right side of the political spectrum. One of the more high profile of these was Alex Jones, who I’m not sure is so much “right wing” as “straight up whackaloon” with some views that are right-ish. Why might the likes of YouTube and Vimeo and Facebook and Twitter being doing this? In some cases, there is a clear violation of terms of service; in other cases it’s not so clear, and there are some distinct inequities (Candace Owens, conservative, gets suspended for retweeting the racist tweets of Sarah Jeong, a leftist who has *not* been suspended; Alex Jones gets booted off everything because he’s “fake news,” yet “Ancient Aliens,” The History Channel and Giorgio Tsoukalos are allowed to remain). So the obvious conclusion is that these companies are doing this either to placate the screeching left, or because they themselves are on the left. But there is a *possibility* that there is another explanation.
Every time these companies boot someone for blatantly political reasons, they hasten their own demise. They are ticking off the right half of the country directly, and no doubt also disturbing a noticeable fraction of the non-looney portion of the left. These actions spur the creation of alternative social media that caters to the political right and reduce their own customer base. This is of course a bad business decision. But the calculus may be that if they *didn’t* do this they’d irritate their leftist customers. And the left is far more intolerant of opposing viewpoints than the right is these days; not too many conservatives were cheesed off that Twitter allowed Obamas campaign on there, for instance. So the choice is between letting the conservatives stay and risking their leftwing customer base (along with risking firebombs from their leftwing customers), or booting their conservative customers, who almost certainly *won’t* firebomb their offices. Both choices are bad.
Here’s where the conspiracy theory comes in.
As I have pointed out several times, these are private companies and they are free to reject the business of whoever they want. But every time they do that, they incentivize right wingers to demand that these companies be disallowed, by law, from booting people for political reasons. It might be that this is what these companies actually want. If they are barred from booting someone for political reasons, the whackjobs won’t be angry at, say, Twitter for letting Trump tweet. And the companies will keep paying customers on both the left *and* the right. It would be no particular issue for Facebook to permit Alex Jones *and* The History Channel to stay on; they each drive considerable traffic and thus ad revenue. “Gee whiz,” they might say to the rabid Antifa horde, “We’d *looooove* to boot everyone with a MAGA hat avatar, but, gosh, we’d be in violation of Trumps latest executive order. Sorry guys…”
It is, almost certainly, too much to hope for that what these companies secretly want and are working towards is actual freedom of speech and a minimum of censorship. But it’s interesting to ponder.
Another ebay find, this one depicts the HLH transporting cargo from a ship to shore. It appears to be constructing storage tanks, presumably for oil or water, from prefabricated sections.
A question was asked in the comments on a previous post what the anthem of the US Space Force should be. In responding I looked up the only conceivable choice on YouTube and posted it. But after that I continued to scroll down the YouTube page and found this, a video from 2010. Someone took a commercial and mashed it up with the US Space Force theme song and… it’s beautiful.
If some people can get away with trying to re-write history for their own political purposes, then by God I want *this* to be American history as taught in the schools I have anything to say about. This is history as it should be.
The language, as may be guessed from the title of the video, is a little salty. So crank it up, and if your boss complains tell him he’s a got-dam yella Commie and what he should be doing is put it on the PA system.
A less than entirely pleasant news story out of Merry Old England features thirty entirely normal, completely stereotypical English men having a spot of bother with the local constabulary, eh wot. Bad form, lads! Think of the Queen!
The satellite is doing some wacky maneuvers that make some experts think that it is a weapon, or a weapon testbed. Most likely explanation is that it is an satellite inspector/destroyer. This accusation of course results in spluttering outrage from the Russian government… the same government crowing about building a nuclear powered cruise missile and a long range nuclear powered autonomous submarine with a multi-megaton warhead designed to take out American coastal population centers.
OK, politicians: if you want the coveted Unwanted Blog Endorsement, I don’t care what your policies are on transgendered bathrooms or gay wedding cakes. You either support the creation of a Space Force equipped with Orion-powered deep-space bombardment forces or you can go pound sand, ya commies.
Throughout most of human history – and during all of human pre-history – being stupid was an effective way of removing yourself from the gene pool. But over the last century or so, western civilization has been substantially covered in nerf so that stupid people stand a damn good chance of living not only long enough to reproduce, but reproduce a *lot.* However, the rst of the world is not necessarily so safe for the invincibly stupid. Gentlemen, behold:
“Humans” are not kind. *Some* humans are kind. Some humans are monsters. Most humans are just sorta okay. Similarly, some human cultures are kind, some suck. And if you go into a culture that sucks, the monsters are much more likely to put their monsterism on display. THIS IS NOT A SECRET. This is common knowledge. To believe this…
“Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.”
… is to believe utter nonsense. “Evil” may or may not be an objectively determinable thing, but it is *certainly* something that, by the western understanding of “evil,” exists in the world. And some places are *loaded* with evil, whether or not you believe it to be. And if you choose to disbelieve in the existence of evil and human malevolence, you are courting just the sort of disaster that befell these people. It’s not so much a matter of saying that they “deserved” to be run over with a car and repeatedly stabbed… but then, someone who throws himself off a cliff in the belief that the rocks below love him and wouldn’t hurt him doesn’t “deserve” to die either.
The Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender was a tailless fighter design from WWII. It was intended to be an improvement on then-current designs in terms of performance, but proved to be disappointing. After years of development and flight testing, it was overtaken by jet propulsion and failed to make it into production.
I have made the much-larger full-rez scan of the cutaway available to $10+ APR Patreon patrons. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
Let’s assume that global warming is sufficiently bad that DOOOOM is on the horizon unless we do something about it. Further assume that we’ve reached the tipping point, and that no conceivable reduction in carbon emissions is going to make a difference. What do we do?
The obvious answer: solar shields in space. Vast constructs, or vast numbers of smaller objects, located either in Earth orbit or in the L-1 point between the Sun and Earth, intercepting some percentage of sunlight, shadowing Earth. This is the obvious answer because it would require – and thus drive the creation of – a vast, efficient space industry. Done right, some meaningful part of those solar shields would actually be solar power stations, beaming energy down to Earth in the form of microwaves.
Sadly, the useful suggestions of a space industry tends to make the sort of people who demand that Something Must Be Done snicker. So, what can we do on the surface?
First, the goal: the current energy imbalance (actually more of a power imbalance) is something like 500 terawatts. This means that sunlight comes to Earth, some gets absorbed, some gets reflected back out into space. Of the fraction that gets absorbed, some gets stepped down and radiated out into space as infra-red. But due to greenhouse effect, less energy gets reflected & emitted than come in. That 500 TW imbalance leads to a slow temperature rise.
So how do we fix that energy imbalance? The straightforward answer: reflect at least 500 terawatts of sunlight out into space, energy that *currently* is absorbed. Some people have suggested putting reflectors or bright white insulators on the polar ice to help keep them from melting, but this doesn’t make sense: ice is already white. You’re putting a reflector on a reflector. You might provide some small amount of local cooling, but from a planetary standpoint the effect of X square kilometer of reflector at the poles would be trivial compared to the effect of those reflectors in lower latitudes. Putting the reflectors on deserts might seem sensible…but sand is also quite bright when seen from space. But you know what’s dark? Take a look:
Oceans are dark. Almost black, in fact… the albedo of ocean water is abut 0.06, meaning that it reflects about 6% of the light that falls on it. So if you want maximum effectiveness on a planetary scale, put reflectors over ocean water. And that’s what I suggest: floating reflectors.
To be effective, the reflectors must be cheap, easily produced in vast area and not destructive to the environment. If the reflectors have the albedo of ice – say, 0.7 – a rough hand-wave can be made as to what the surface area of the reflectors would need to be. I’m assuming reflectors that simply float flat on the ocean surface. At noon with the sun directly overhead, one square meter of reflector would reflect 70% of the sunlight that falls upon it, which is approximately 1000 watts/square meter. Of course, that reflector does not spend the whole day with the sun directly overhead; half the day is of course spent in darkness. And during daylight, the sun start off on the horizon, goes to the zenith then drops back down to the horizon. So, over a full day-night cycle, assume that a one square meter reflector reflects the equivalent of 10% of the sunlight that might fall on it if it always faced the sun. And with an albedo of 0.7, that’s 0.7 X 10% = 7%. So a one square meter reflector could account for, daily averaged, 70 watts of sunlight reflected away to space.
70 watts isn’t a whole lot, especially compared to that 500 terawatts imbalance. It would require a minimum of 7.14 trillion square meters of reflectors. That’s a whole lot. It works out to a square patch of ocean some 2,670 kilometers on a side. Paving over a chunk of the ocean that big would do substantial damage; photosynthesis would be shut down in the darkness. But it need not be one giant solid patch. Instead it could be a *lot* of smaller patches.
My suggestion for the reflector would be something simple and dumb… essentially a one square meter slab of styrofoam. Obviously styrofoam itself is not a good choice: it’s not biodegradable, and it is produced from carbon sucked out of the ground. Far better would be a slowly-degrading foam made out of plant material. Thus carbon is sucked out of the atmosphere, turned into plants, turned into foam and eventually dissolved into the ocean (or nibbled up by ocean critters). Assuming such a foam can be produced with similar properties to styrofoam, it would have a density of about 0.1 grams per cubic centimeter. Thus a one square meter slab five centimeters thick would mass five kilograms. An alternative would be a synthetic white plastic sheet material, perhaps similar to styrene at 0.9 grams/cubic centimeter. A sheet one meter square by 3 mm thick would mass 2.7 kilos. 7.14 trillion of these would mass 19.3 billion tons. A modern supertanker can carry something like 320,000 tons of petroleum; if “reflector tankers” could carry the same mass of feedstock goop, then a mere 60,000 tanker sorties would be required to transport the feedstock to mid-ocean reflector production facilities. Of course there will be land locations where ocean currents are such that a factory built on shore could simply spit reflectors out to sea and they’ll drift away.
Now, one might argue that trillions of reflectors made by tens of thousands of supertanker hauls is kind of nuts and, well, one would not be wrong. But unless I’ve done the math wrong (not altogether unlikely), that seems to be what’s required. There are some mitigating factors here that can be a little helpful: