We all have heard the lie that “nobody wants to take your guns,” just before some authoritarian gun-grabber proposes a law that would make you an insta-felon simply for owning the stuff you currently own. To get an idea what things would look like in a future where the gun-grabbers get their way, take a look at this BS:
A guy has stage four pancreatic cancer and uses marijuana-derived capsules to relieve the pain. Missouri has voted to make medical marijuana legal, but the la has not yet taken effect. And so thus the cops got a call that someone smelled pot, and they came to roust a guy who looks about as harmless as a squirrel.
As one of the commenters on the news site said:
If you are dying of cancer and are counting down the few remaining weeks or days, I do not care if you smoke heroin and snort oxy. I mean what harm could it do. As for the police, yeah they need to be smacked hard on the back of their heads with a Gideons Bible, but I want to know who made the call for them to roust the dying guy. Whoever called them in needs a swift kick to the “mummy and daddy parts” with steel toed boots.
No matter what arguments are made for prohibition laws, the end result is always nonsense like this.
And why do so many cops have such ridiculous haircuts? Hard to take them seriously looking like that.
I’ve been running my PC a lot recently, doing some fairly processor-intensive graphics work (see HERE). Yesterday, I didn’t go tot he computer room. Today, I took a bunch of reports and books to it to do some scanning… and couldn’t gt the friggen’ thing to really come on. The fan ran, the lights on the tower came on, a USB drive would light up… but the speakers remained silent and two different monitors claimed to have no input. I tried hard reboots several times with no changes. There was a small, somewhat rapid (2 to 4 hz) clicking coming from inside.
I finally decided that something was trashed and that I’d have to run it to a computer repair place tomorrow. At the very least this would mean a buck of cash down the drain; worse, the possibility that months of scanning of documents would vanish. So I started unplugging everything. I unplugged the power cord before the monitor cord, and noticed that the “I can’t see sh!t” notice on the monitor screen had changed. Shoved the power cord back in and the PC popped right back to life like nothing had happened; the programs that were running and files open two days ago were still right there on the screen. The ticking vanished. Everything seems perfectly fine now.
Right now 170 gigabytes is being copied from the hard drive to a portable. So… what the frigg happened here? Any ideas? Is the PC boned, just getting a short second wind before going kaput? Or is it just one of them nothing to worry about things?
The Crew Dragon successfully splashed down and was recovered. To all appearances, this flight was entirely successful, meaning that this summer SpaceX *should* start flying manned capsules to the ISS. Once that happens, the US will be a spacefaring nation once again. About friggen’ time.
There are, however, some people who are a little unhappy about this:
Basically, Russia has been resting on their Soyuz laurels for far too long. Once NASA is no longer paying them $400 million a year to launch a few US astronauts to the ISS, Roscosmos is going to have hard time affording the launch of their own cosmonauts. And they don’t really have anything in the pipeline to compete with SpaceX, certainly not in the near term.
Also resting on their laurels are other American launch providers… Boeing, Lockheed, ULA. The Delta IV and Atlas V looked *really* outdated compared to Falcon, and the ULA “Vulcan” launcher, which throws away the whole booster except for a propulsion/avionics module which is to be air-snatched prior to splashdown, is a half-hearted joke compared to the Falcon 9’s recoverable boosters.
Something I’ve noticed a *lot* of over the years: a bunch of the people who push for “progressive” policies to remake the US under central control have no idea about the *scale* of the United States. A lot of this seems to be because these people seem to live within relatively small geographic confines. They tout the wonders of electric cars that get, at best, maybe sixty miles range and then need to spend eight hours recharging; sixty miles is less far than to the nearest decent book store for me. When I travel to visit family, I put one thousand two hundred miles onto my car in *two* *days*, then, a short time later, turn around and travel the same distance home. (Having flown that route last year for the first time in some years, I’ve little desire to fly it again… at least until I can fly it in something other than steerage class.)
Some years ago I traveled for a contract job… a drive of something like 2,200 miles each way. Back when I used to go on vacation, it would consist of picking a somewhat random direction and going thataway until I ran into something interesting, a week or two later looping around back home having put 4 to 6 thousand miles on the car. That’s freedom.
But the people who would make themselves my feudal lords would have me believe that being trapped within just a few dozen miles of my home, with *occasional* long distance travel by uncomfortable train (note: the distance from my house to the nearest Amtrak depot is longer then the range of most electric cars; I’m not sure if such a car could get me to the nearest Greyhound Bus depot), is sufficient. I’m not sure if they understand that their end goals would leave tens of millions of fellow Americans essentially permanently cut off from society… or, perhaps more likely, they would simply enforce roundups and forced migrations to densely packed urban dystopias, leaving the vast center of the country largely unpopulated. I have no doubt that this would suit their leader class, who like the idea of vast unpopulated “preserves” that only they can visit, treating, say, Iowa as their own personal country estates.
Amazon has been working on a Lord of the Rings series for a while now. Very little about it is known apart from the fact that it will probably be the most expensive series in history. All that was released about the series was that it would be set in a different era than the LotR movies. The relatively vast spans of time in Tolkeins back story means that the field is *very* wide open.
Amazon has been very slowly dropping the tiniest of hints about their series. Recently they released a map, something that Tolkein fans can appreciate. And when it comes to Middle Earth, maps mean not just “where,” but “when. Behold:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. #LOTRonPrimepic.twitter.com/7TuQh7gRPD
— The Lord of the Rings on Prime (@LOTRonPrime) March 7, 2019
The world of Middle Earth underwent substantial changes throughout Tolkeins “Silmarilion,” the history of the Elves from the creation of the world up to the events of the Lord of the Rings. Consequently, a map can nail down the general time frame. The existence of the island of Numenor, for existence, indicates that the show will be set in the “Second Age,” ending some 2500 or so years prior to the events of LotR. But if you read the comments in the link posted above, it’s clear that some people have sufficient understanding of the lore of Middle Earth that they can nail it down to a particular generation of people based on the existence and apparent size of certain forests. If these superfans are correct, then Amazon is indicating:
it would seem that the map portrays a time period somewhere around 1,500 S.A., or during the creation of the Rings of Power, and around one generation before Númenor started to go into slow decline.
This all assumes that:
1: Amazon really knows what they’re doing
2: They’re not trolling (like having this set well *after* LotR, and the map just being an ancient relic)
3: Amazon is sticking to the canon.
Given recent defilements of canon in the likes of Star Trek and Star Wars, it is not impossible that corporate suit-bots or highly influential NPCs demanding “representation” and the like aren’t going to screw with things. Numenoreans and the peoples of the usual realms of Middle Earth are traditionally understood to be White Folk (and elves are *really* white folk), so a truly faithful series would likely have almost no “people of color” whatsoever except for roles such as pirates and slavers and barbarians from far southern lands… roles not likely to go over too well with the PC crowd. So on the one hand I would not be surprised to see canon-violations in the interests of appeasing the Offendatarians, and once you make those compromises, *everything* becomes mutable.
On the other hand: Amazon is spending a lot on this show. I mean… A LOT: at least $500 million. You could run a pretty good space program on what Amazon will plunk down for this. And when you’re spending that much… do you *really* want to piss off the base?
This subject has been mentioned on this blog before (way back in 2008, 2012, and 2013), but here’s a brand-new video covering the subject of the inconel foil insulation that protected the F-1 engines on the Saturn V when they flew. This insulation was rarely seen by the public and made the engines look entirely different from what people were used to, because the insulation was something of a last-minute addition to help counter some severe heating cause by exhaust gas recirculation as well as direct thermal radiation roasting of the central engine.
A video where some guys get into the archives of the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. On display is a sizable (looks like about 1/50 scale) Space Shuttle, ET and Boosters made from plexiglas. It is a thing of beauty, surely a chore and a half for the model shop back in the day. This is *not* the final Shuttle design; some differences are obvious such as the split cargo bay doors and, while unmentioned in the video, the existence of extended OMS pod fairings, reaching out onto the aft of the cargo bay doors.
Last time I visited the USS&RC in something like 2005 they had a much bigger plexiglas STS model on public display, something like 1/10 scale, along with a gigantic plexiglas Saturn V. Such things are fantastic artifacts, and if you are working on a complex engineering project like this a see-through plexiglass large scale model is terribly helpful. I suspect that such things are only rarely made these days, as computer graphics are a lot easier, cheaper and more readily updatable. But nothing beats a Real Thing. And at least so far, 3D printing is not up to the job of stamping out large-scale transparent models like this. But someday…
The thing that sets “cosmic horror” apart from other kinds of “horror” isn’t that it’s set in space or deals with aliens, but that it confronts the protagonists with forces so far beyond them that their world views are shattered and they are forced to realized just how cosmically tiny they are. Almost inevitably this causes them to break down or go mad in despair and hopelessness. But that has always kinda baffled me: if you already *know* that you are, cosmically speaking, truly unimportant… will the reality of it really crush you? Similarly, sometimes people are confronted with their own mortality, or with the end of the world, or some such, and they go bugnuts. But then, *everybody* dies, and we all know it. The United States won’t last forever; western civilization will collapse into an unrecoverable dark age; a supervolcano will go off and blanket the continent in a yard of ash; the sun will bloat, turn red and die. We *know* these things, and yet generally people just get on with life, even knowing the general futility of what they do in the grand scheme of things. We’re every day faced with The End and our own unimportance, yet we don’t go bugnuts and run through the nearest WalMart stark naked squirting cheap generic ketchup all over the bagged tighty whities in the mens department while screeching about Yog Sothoth and white privilege. Most days, anyway.
A contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft was Robert E. Howard, creator of “Conan the Barbarian.” Howard was *very* different from Lovecraft; where HPL was a bookish, sickly New England introvert, REH was a a rootin-tootin’ six-gun packin’ brawlin’ Texan. But different as they were, Howard and Lovecraft were literary friends, trading not only correspondence but also incorporating each others ideas and sometimes even characters into their own mythos. It is not unreasonable to say that Conan lived in the same world as Cthulhu, the Deep Ones and the Elder Things, just ten or twenty thousand years earlier than most Lovecraft tales. And Conan was aware of similar sort of entities and unimaginable powers beyond himself; he knew that his place in the universe was insignificant. But Conan never fell into despair or went mad at the thought of it. Robert Howard was well aware of Lovecrafts “cosmic horror,” yet he had an answer to it in the form of how Conan viewed the world:
“I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”
Basically… “Meh. Ain’t nuthin’ I can do about it.”
I was reminded of all this today after reading this article:
The contents of which article are pretty much what’s promised by the title. A paper has declared that not only is climate change accelerating and inevitable, it’s unstoppable and it will lead to essentially the end of modern civilization within the lifetimes of many of those reading the paper. Accurate or not, I dunno (not my area of expertise). I do know that history is replete with sudden climatic changes that have trashed civilizations; a volcanic eruption in the fifth century wiped out harvests around the Mediterranean and helped spread a plague; the result of these was a terminal weakening of the Roman Empire as well a chaos among surrounding barbarian nations. The result of all that was Rome finally fell and Rome went from a city of more than a million to a virtual ghost town.
The last twenty years have seen record heat wave on top of record heat wave; the oceans are getting warmer and acidifying. Holes are bursting open in the Siberian tundra, spewing out kilotons of methane to go speed up global warming some more. If the oceans warm up a few more degrees, the methane hydrates on the ocean floors might burst and loose *their* megatons of methane into the atmosphere. The Indians and the Chinese are sending more CO2 into the atmosphere every year, having long since surpassed the US. And the people in the west who claim to care about this sort of thing the most are proposing actions not only doomed to fail, but to make things worse. Where an active program to develop nuclear power could not only clear CO2 out of the atmosphere, it could bolster western economies; instead, we get rubbish about ending air travel and relying for our very lives on the whims of the weather. The article points out that in 2018 Europe reaped six million tons less wheat than it should have due to droughts; if European climate alarmists were honest and non-hypocritical, they would recognize that a reduced – and presumable reducING – harvest means that fewer mouths can be fed… and thus Europe should *not* take in massive numbers of third worlders to live on the dole.
The article suggests that *lots* of people have read this paper promising DOOOOOM in about a decade, and have taken to panic and despair. What the article does *not* suggest is that these people are turning that despair into anything productive. Some are heading out into the sticks to live as “climate preppers,” which, if the climate is going to change as much, as bad, and as permanently as some suggest, is a singularly useless thing to do. It would be like building a waterproof underground bunker on some low-lying Pacific island in order to ride out sea level rise. Instead, these people should either:
1: Do like Conan and just get on with life. By doing so they will still contribute to the economy, providing some meager assistance to those few who are working on actually useful projects like space colonization and nuclear power.
2: Actively contribute to, say, space colonization, nuclear power development, third-world birth control, continent-scale aqueducts and desalination systems, planetary scale geoengineering efforts, etc.
I was also reminded of the alternatives to despair and madness when faced with cosmic horror after watching this simple yet surprisingly funny recent Saturday Night Live skit:
I have heard about this Soviet-era war movie for years, now it’s on YouTube. Those who have seen it have generally proclaim it as a masterpiece; from what I understand, it’s about as fun-filled as “Schindler’s List.” So it’s on my “I guess I’ll get around to it when I feel like piledriving myself into a depression” list.
