Most politicians go their whole lives dreaming of a photo half as good as either of these. Lindsey Graham demonstrating how to respond to unreasonable protestors…
How do you know you’re on the right side of history? When your opponents act like this:
Love the look on that fellers face.
Why is it that the people who are most demanding of being heard are the ones who scream loudest?
A followup to this post.
She is not longer teaching students, so that’s good. BUT: she “will be traveling internationally for university research.”
So… publicly calling for racist and sexist murders followed by corpse defilement will, if you work for the right people, earn you some overseas vacation time.
Well, this is horrifying:
Just about all of our electronics is made in China these days. This has allowed the Chinese military unimaginable access not only to Western-designed technology, but to the manufacturing process. One result of that is that a *lot* of the hardware that has shipped from China has shipped with tiny little extra chips… chips that allow the Chinese government to spy on virtually everything. How far this is from allowing the Chinese government to take control of American systems, I don’t know, but since these chips allow other computer systems access, I have to imagine that things aren’t too far from that potential.
As y’all are aware, I’m generally unthrilled with the notion of government over-regulation. But I’m starting to come around to the idea that maybe it’s a mistake to have vital electronics manufactured in an aggressive antagonistic foreign nation. We used to make earlier generations of such things here in the US; the reason we don’t anymore is of course the fact that it’s a lot cheaper to make them overseas. But with modern automation… perhaps that should be revisited. There’s no reason why such things can’t be made in the USA, and given the vital national security implications, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.
Perhaps start by mandating that anything meant to be owned or operated by the federal government has to be manufactured where the federal government has complete oversight of the manufacturing and delivery process. Everything from the computers that control F-35 fighters, to the smart phones held by FBI agents. Since the government is always willing to pay Way Too Much for stuff, that should mean that companies should be willing to relocate their manufacturing back to the US to get a slice of those fat government contracts; and once the capability is back in the US, then selling at reduced cost to the likes of Amazon and Apple should be possible.
One can hope that perhaps there was some strategic genius behind Trumps trade war with China: instead of generic flailing, *perhaps* the purpose of it was to drive up the cost of doing business with Chinese manufacturing so that the motherboards would be made in the USA again. Perhaps.
A glimpse at the first draft of the diagrams for US Transport Projects #8. The careful observer will note that there have been a number of “Forthcoming” posts over the last several months with no followup of a final product. There will be, at some point, a mass release of a larger than usual number of USxP issues.
Somewhat similar to Doomcock in that he’s all about the anger, but instead of the supervillain aesthetic The Rageholic presents more of an old-school metalhead with a whole lot of NSFW language and a bucket more video editing than Doomcock. Also a lot more video game stuff, but from the couple videos I’ve seen so far, the feller’s a hoot. This spoilerific review of “Death Wish” is all kinds of entertaining.
A good rant can be quite heartwarming.
An ad from a 1966 issue of Aviation Week that I bet would bring down the wrath of the professionally offended were it published today.
So there I was at somewhere around 5AM, wondering if sleep was ever going to be an option, when a distant but authoritative “WHAM” echoed through the house. “Huh,” I says, and go back to scribbling. A little while later the sound of approaching sirens, so, being male, I went to the front door to watch the emergency vehicles zip by in the dark. I noticed that they stopped not far up the road. So I wandered up that way to see what was doing.
D’oh.
What we got here: a 90-degree bend in the road (north-south to east-west) with an agricultural ditch running north-south, just east of the N-S leg of the road, passing underneath the E-W leg. Concrete barrier blocks *used* to wall off the ditch on the northern side of the road. Some of those barrier blocks are now at the bottom of the sea, along with a quarter of the truck.
This corner has been trouble before. But a new wrinkle was added this time. It has not rained in months; this is not exaggeration: September has seen *no* measurable precipitation. It was probably sometime in early June that the rain last fell and actually made it to the ground. As a consequence, the road has been covered with dust, dirt, tire rubber and leaked oil for months without any way to wash it off. And Tuesday the remnants of hurricane Rosa started to hit the area, dumping rain down with some seriousness. Wednesday was clear, but by evening it started raining again… not powerfully, but non-stop. So all that lubricant that had been deposited on the road all summer was *finally* getting slowly lifted off. But it’s a gradual process, and while it’s going on it’s almost like the road is covered in soap. So, here comes a truck. I don’t know the course of the event, but it can be guessed fairly clearly. So once again, exciting doin’s in downtown Thatcher, Utah.
I suspect the state environmental people are going to be thrilled that a truck went for a swim in a fast-flowing ag ditch, bringing all its oil and gasoline and radiator coolant with it…
Apparently the truck had one occupant, not seriously hurt.
When I was in college in the early 90’s, there were a few contemporary cartoon TV series that were exorbitantly popular at school: Ren & Stimpy, Beavis & Butthead (mmm-mmm-mmm-heh, fire), and Animaniacs. From the standpoint of the animation quality, these are pale in comparison to some animated series that are on today… but especially with Ren & Stimpy and Animaniacs, I defy people to argue that modern cartoons necessarily improve upon them (Gumball, of course, is quite possibly superior, or at least in the same class). They were ostensibly meant for kids, but were clearly aimed at adults with some things in them that would make an observant adult go “dayum.”
Two of the voice actors for Animaniacs were recently shown videos of modern children being shown Animaniacs, and the results are amusing. Especially the updating of Yakkos singing the nations of the world song: in the quarter century since it was originally written, there have been a number of newly recognized nations. And once again, Rob Paulsen, voice actor of Yakko, nails it.
So nicknamed because of the “TG” designation and its discovery near Halloween 2015, “The Goblin” is a *damned* *distant* object. Roughly 300 km in diameter, its perihelion (nearest distance to the sun) is 64.8 U… 64.8 times further from the sun than earth. But the aphelion, the furthest distance it gets from the sun, is a staggering 2,037 AU. As a consequence, each orbit takes 34,080 years. It is currently about 80 AU out, and is barely visible; for the majority of it’s orbital period, it would be too far from the sun to be visible from Earth. This implies that there may well be a *lot* of these sort of objects drifting around out there.
For comparison, Plutos aphelion is 49.3 AU.
The Goblin is nowhere near being a planet; it’s only about one-third the diameter of Ceres. But if it is representative of a large family of trans-Neptunian objects stretching out to the Oort cloud, then there is a whole lot of territory out there. Assuming we can nail down practical and efficient fusion power, then each of these objects could be mulched and turned into a substantial number of independent space colonies, or perhaps just terraformed as-is, possibly by putting a big plastic bubble around them, and then putting a powerful fusion reactor “Sun” into a roughly 24-hour orbit around the world. There’s no good reason why Man cannot seed life to a million worlds just in the immediate vicinity of the sun.
An advertisement from 1963 illustrating a quite-possibly artistic license nuclear powered space probe heading towards Jupiter. The probe was to use the SNAP-50/SPUR powerplant (300 to 1200 kilowatts of electricity) to power a circular bank of ion engines. The realistic nature of the design should be questioned due to the lack of any apparent communication system… no great big radio dish, in other words.
