Feb 172019
 

For decades people have been arguing over whether Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers,” and the Paul Verhoven movie that is as faithful to the novel as “Star Trek: Discovery” is to the Star Trek franchise, describe a society that is fundamentally fascist… and whether they are in fact advocating for fascism. These days most of the debate revolves around the movie (because reading are hard, I guess); the fact that the military are shown to have some uniforms that are directly inspired by Nazi SS uniforms kinda makes the “fascism” detail kinda jump out at you. And so, on one side we have this detailed explanation as to why the movie advocates for fascism:

But on the other hand, we have this video which does a pretty good job of tearign down the first videos arguments:

In short: the society shown in the movie is a democratic one, one that has a strict set of laws that it apparently actually sticks to and applies fairly. It has freedom of speech, including allowing people to publicly argue against not only government policy but also the basic nature of the government. It seems that businessmen can do quite well and get quite rich while still publicly opposing the government. And while it’s fighting a total war against an alien race, the military respect the capabilities of that race; and while the military seems to be carrying out a *genocidal* war against that alien race, the aliens are doing the same to humanity. Yes, there’s not much empathy for the enemy, but then the enemy does not show any personality to empathize *with.* Their sole means of communications with mankind are to wipe out whole cities of women and children and puppies, and to chop up colonists.

In the movie, the humans seem to be fascist *solely* in their choice of fashion.  It’s the alien bugs that seem to have the more fascist society.

 

 Posted by at 8:10 pm
Feb 172019
 

From the “you can’t make this stuff up” department:

Jussie Smollett, pals reportedly rehearsed alleged attack

Sources said one of the brothers held the rope and poured bleach on Smollett during the 2 a.m. attack, while the other donned a red hat and shouted racist and homophobic slurs at him.

Assuming this is true (and until there are admissions of guilt from the primary and/or a trial that results in certainty, it’s always appropriate to maintain some doubt), it would seem to be a bit of pure idiotic genus. Why? Because:

Smollett has claimed his two attackers called him a “f—-t,” “n—-r” and yelled “This is MAGA country!” before throwing a noose around his neck and dousing him in an unknown “chemical substance.”

If your plan is to claim that an assault with specific events and insults happened, an assault that you are orchestrating for whatever crackpot purpose, you have a few options. One is to just make the claim, based on pure imagination. But the problem here is that it’s not something you *remember,* but something that you *imagined,* so your story could easily drift. Additionally, you could be in trouble if you run up against some expert in determining whether or not you are lying.

But if you actually act it out… you can *honestly* claim that someone else poured bleach on you and tied a rope around your neck and called you names. Things actually did happen, and happened in a particular sequence, and took a definite length of time to occur. This in many ways makes your story more credible and manageable… so long as nobody asks you if you in fact orchestrated the attack.

But then there’s this:

Smollett, 36, also allegedly paid for the rope, which was purchased from the Crafty Beaver Hardware Store

That’s the source of the problems. What would Smollett know of crafty beavers?

Heh. Snerk.

 Posted by at 3:01 pm
Feb 172019
 

So, let’s say I have a 4-page Word document (which I do) that is formatted for standard 8.5X11 pages, but you want to print it off onto one single 11X17 sheet. Two pages on one side of the sheet, to on the other. More, you want it to print like magazine pages, so that the pages are not necessarily in sequence. So one side of the 11X17 would have Page 4 on the left, Page 1 on the right, the other side would have Page 2 on the left, Page 3 on the right. Of course longer files would add further complexity.

Anybody know how to accomplish this?

 Posted by at 2:41 pm
Feb 162019
 

Holy frigid frijoles, Batman:

“Hmm. Road conditions are wintery, visibility is poor. I SHALL FLOOR IT.”

Interesting and potentially uplifting note, once one gets past the monumental idiocy and crazysauce: the people in the truck filming ride out the storm, LIKE SANE PEOPLE, and then once the immediate threat ends they set out to go HELP PEOPLE.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 8:38 pm
Feb 162019
 

“Hero Collector” is going to release a new model kit of the Enterprise-D. That’s good! It’s around 70 cm long, so it’ll be around  1/915 scale. That’s… a little odd. The kit will come with internal lighting. That’s great! But the shape and detail of the model will be compromised in order to accommodate the lighting. That’s… unfortunate. They will be releasing the kit as a “subscription,” where every two weeks you get another box of bits. That’s… well, ok.  The pricing has apparently not yet been announced, which is unsurprising. But… here’s the thing. A prior release of theirs is a “Back To the Future” Delorean which actually looks pretty sweet, and is probably instructive as to how much the Enterprise will cost. Their website shows off the Delorean model pretty well. And they make it pretty easy to sign up for the subscription service. . You get charged every two weeks until the model is complete, and waaaay down on the page it let’s you know that each issue costs $10.90… and there are 130 issues. Total: $1417.

Yikes.

The Enterprise is a bigger model, so I’d guess it’ll cost more. Up to you to decide if perhaps two grand and two years are a fair price for a model that would require a *lot* of work to make accurate. Personally I hope that Polar Lights gets around to making a 1/1000 1701-D kit.

 

 Posted by at 12:43 pm
Feb 152019
 

HBO is currently running a documentary on Mr. Fred Rogers called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” For those too young to remember Mr. Rogers, or those from outside the US, or those who for whatever other reason simply never heard of him, Mr. Rogers was, from the late 1960’s into the 1990’s the host and driving force behind a show on PBS aimed squarely at *small* children titled “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.” Unlike virtually all childrens television, that show did *not* feature loud explosions, flashing lights, clowns, all that stuff. Instead, it mostly featured Mr. Rogers himself being *calm.*

He was, in a word, effeminate: people have long wondered if he might have been gay, but everyone who knew him is quite adamant that he was straight. On his show he was the very definition of “mild mannered,” and the people who knew him say that his off-camera persona was exactly the same. You’d *think* that he would be sort of the poster child of the SJWs… he just doesn’t seem terribly masculine. But I have an alternate take: he was a good example of a Man, and more to the point, a “toxic male.” Let me explain.

1: He knew what he wanted, he went for it and did not let obstacles stop him. He had his doubts about himself, but he did not publicly whine about them; he just plowed ahead with *his* agenda.

2: He knew that some people thought he was fruity and weird. And his response was *not* to demand acceptance or to wave his own flag or to preach about how awful people who didn’t like him were. He basically just shrugged off the haters and kept on being himself. He was comfortable with what he was, and didn’t care if you weren’t. Or at least if he did care, he didn’t make an issue of it.

3: He had a sense of morals and ethics, and he stuck to them. He knew what he considered right and wrong, and did not compromise in order to get people to like him (though he did do so from time to time in order to attain his greater goals).

4: He recognized the importance of control. The difference between the Man and the SJW is that the Man wants to control himself, while the SJW wants to control everybody else. We’re forever being told that keeping your emotions bottled up is a negative feature of toxic masculinity, that you are instead supposed to give vent to every feeling, to validate all your feels. But one of Mr. Rogers’ more famous little songs is “What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?” which includes:

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?

It’s great to be able to stop
When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song:

I can stop when I want to
Can stop when I wish
I can stop, stop, stop any time.
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling is really mine.

The message here is that rather than letting your feelings control you, you can control them. And to take pride in learning self-control. Imagine… taking pride in an *accomplishment,* rather than some aspect of your body or ancestry that you were merely born with.

5: And then… the way that very same song ends:

Know that there’s something deep inside
That helps us become what we can.
For a girl can be someday a woman
And a boy can be someday a man.

Imagine someone today suggesting that a boy can become a man, that a girl can become a woman… without at the same time suggesting that a girl can become a man, or in facts already is a boy, or is a furry, or a zir, or an otherkin, or what-the-hell-else. If that song came out today, the screaming about the lack of representation would be deafening.

That song seems to me to have a lot on common with Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” and there are few better tributes that can be paid to a piece of poetry.

 

He was a man from an era that is now gone. He was a man who deeply and truly cared about the welfare and upbringing of children, and was entirely open and honest about it (something that, these days, would make people suspicious). He was not the ideal of the Manly Man, but I gotta give respect to a man who lived as he chose and fought for what he believed… while not trying to be an authoritarian scold to those who did not agree with him. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and yet he did not, so far as I’m aware, ever inject his religious beliefs into his messages; he simply *lived* them.

If you’ve got HBO, watch the documentary. It’s good. I was especially impressed with the “foot bath with Officer Clemmons” bit. *This* is how you teach a moral lesson… get people thinking, rather than telling people they’re horrible… and still, to make it clear that there is right, and there is wrong.

 Posted by at 6:19 pm
Feb 152019
 

A magazine ad from 1967 showing a concept for a “Hot Cycle” helicopter. The “hot cycle” was a way to spin the rotors without imparting a massive torque to the fuselage as usually happens with helicopters, requiring a tail rotor to counter. here, instead of mechanically linking the engine to the rotor via drive shafts and gears, the engine exhaust was ducted up through the central rotor shaft, then out to the tips of the rotors, and then ejected through thrust-generating nozzles. This would impart only a trivial amount of torque to the fuselage, largely from friction with the shaft bearings. it was a great idea, but there were some issues with leakage around the bearings as well as being impressively loud and fuel-hungry.

Note that while the “hot cycle” eliminated the great majority of the need for an anti-torque tail rotor, this and similar designs still had one. This tail rotor would be used to swing the tail back and forth, yawing the aircraft at low speed.. This woudl require that the rotor be able to provide thrust in either direction on demand.

 Posted by at 3:03 pm
Feb 152019
 

This could prove interesting:

Police say 2 brothers being questioned in reported Jussie Smollett attack are now ‘potential suspects’

The article gives no indication as to *who* the brothers are or what the motive might be… or whether they were working *with* Smollett. These little tidbits, though, are interesting:

police sources have said detectives are investigating the possibility that Smollett staged the incident with the help of the brothers, who according to their attorney know the actor from working on the show and have also spent time with him at a gym.

And…

A law enforcement source told the Tribune the two men, who are black, were brought in for questioning Wednesday night from O’Hare International Airport.

And…

Another neighbor described the brothers as “aspiring actors.”

Huh.

Of course all of this is uncertain. But if it is accurate that two black actors who knew Smollett are the suspects… I’m having a *really* hard time seeing this as having gone as the Preferred Narrative would suggest.

 

ADDITIONAL:

Two Nigerian immigrants to be charged for Jussie Smollett ‘hate crime’

The basis formuchof that is TMZ, which is not exactly a source I would trust… since they seem to be the source of much of the hype aroudn this case int he first place.But supposedly:

1: The police wanted Smolletts phone records, and he refused to turn them over. So they got a court order and got them from the phone company without his knowledge. But then he turned over a PDF file with his phone records… which had some redactions. the police compared the actual records to the redacted version and figured out who Smollett was trying to hide from them. That led them to these brothers.

2: One of the brothers was an extra on Smollett’s show “Empire.”

3: The brothers left for Nigeria almost immediately after the “attack,” but they came back a few days ago.

Huh.

 Posted by at 2:16 pm