Probably not. Still, it’s amusing to think of this as the next generation of the EM-50.
Saw this in western Iowa a few weeks ago; apparently they were there to deal with local flooding.
Hard to invade Czechoslovakia from Iowa, but here we are.
They laughed at Trump a few years ago when he suggested that the current crop of history-hating protestors would demand the removal of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues because they, too, fell short of the level of moral perfection that modern SJWs demand. These same people demanded that Brett Kavanaugh be not only denied a seat on the Supreme Court, but fired and made a permanent pariah because of unsubstantiated, and in many cases clearly fraudulent, claims about youthful impropriety.
So… will they be consistent and demand the erasure of Martin Luther King Jr. and all his works from the history books?
It’s not the affairs that should be really noted here. SJWs seem to be generally unconcerned with such things, especially when it’s one of their own. But it seems that MLK also #MeToo’ed pretty badly:
The FBI document says: ‘When one of the women protested that she did not approve, the Baptist minister immediately and forcefully raped her’ as King watched.
He is alleged to have ‘looked on, laugh and offered advice’ during the encounter.
Huh.
Now, since I’m one of those horrible moral degenerates who demands actual evidence before passing judgement on someone, I have to say “I’ll believe it when I hear it.” Which, honestly, I suspect I never will… I’d be stumped if the FBI had held onto these tapes for fifty years and only released them now. And I’ll bet a nickel that if they are released it’ll be audio mush… a lot of static, a lot of “something vague is going on,” some muffled voices that someone claims is MLK, but could just as easily be an impersonator or someone who just happens to sound like him. But even so, the mere *claim* of the existence of this tape is more evidence than was ever presented against Kavanaugh, and he still got not only death threats but serious attempts at ruining his life and career. There are, I suspect, no statues of Kavanaugh, no roads or schools named after him; but if there were during the confirmation hearings you can bet that those would have been torn down or damaged.
Right wingers, or no-Nazis, or white supremacists, or Republicans, or whatever boogeyman the left wing is ulcerating about today are hardly likely to tear down statues of MLK. Apart from an exceedingly small number of whackaloons, the conservative side of the spectrum doesn’t generally go in for rioting and physically damaging things. That’s the lefts playbook. So it will be interesting to see if the SJWs are even vaguely consistent and decide to stuff MLK down the memory hole alongside some of history’s other great monsters like Washington and Jefferson.
Starfleet is renowned for making some rather unfortunate errors: the M-5 computer wargame, the Prime Directive, agreeing to not develop or use cloaking devices. But this one takes the cake:
This bright yellow M-41 Walker Bulldog tank has been maintained by the U.S.S. Yeager Chapter of Starfleet International, a science fiction club at Bluefield State College in West Virginia, for about 20 years. It needed a new coat of paint, so they took a chip to a paint store which provided them two containers of “Tank Green.” They thought it looked funny when they started applying it, but assumed that it would dry to the right color. Having dealt with a lot of paints over the years, it’s definitely true that a lot of paints look substantially different before they dry, but unless they painted this tank in record time they had to have seen that it *wasn’t* drying to a proper olive drab. So they’re going to sandblast, reprime and repaint.
At least they didn’t leave it embedded in an asteroid in the neutral zone.
A small magazine article from 1963 describing and depicting a MOL-like “space lab” equipped with a SNAP 2 nuclear reactor. This would have provided something along the lines of 3 kilowatts, plus an added bonus radiation environment. As show in the art, the reactor would be separated from the lab by a fairly long extendable rod, provided a reduction in radiation flux. The reactor would be the small object at far left; immediately next to it would be the “shadow shield,” typically made of tungsten (to stop gamma rays) and lithium hydride (to stop neutrons). This conical frustum is typically the most massive part of space reactors like this, and was used to shield a relatively small conical region, in this case centered on the space laboratory. If someone were to do a space walk from the lab and drift too far away to the side, entertaining things could well be done to their DNA. Extending beyond the shadow shield is a black cone, the thermal radiator for the system. Contained within the radiator would be tanks of mercury, pumps and turbogenerators; liquid sodium metal would flow through the reactor then through a heat exchanger, boiling the mercury. The mercury vapor would then either directly flow through the radiator, being cooled back to liquid, or through a heat exchanger, some other fluid being passed through the radiator.
Numerous ideas were floated through the mid 1960’s for attaching reactors such as this to MOL-like space labs. The main problem with this was that these labs were typically planned for only a single use; in that case, hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells or solar panels would almost always make more economic and mass budget sense.
Ahem:
Ah, that’s good stuff right there.
Two MOPs, in fact. Note that the scene of the B-2 unloading two Massive Ordnance Penetrators is from a different test than the footage of the MOPs hitting the ground. The B-2 shot is in glorious Extra Slow Motion, and the B-2 leaps skyward in the process. Given the weight it rather suddenly lost, it’s not surprising that the aircraft would suddenly climb.
Recently-released “Brightburn” is a movie that is essentially the Superman origin story… but Superman turns out to be an evil psycho rather than all that is good and wonderful. He kills with glee and gore, using his superpowers of flight and laser-eyes and whatnot to spread pain and terror, killing both individually and mass murdering. The kid is clearly a villain.
But he could have been beaten to the screen by a few months if only one scene hadn’t been deleted from “Captain Marvel.” In this scene, the “super hero” uses her super-strength to injure a man and extort from him his property under the threat of mutilation. This… is also a villain.
Due to the over-politicization, it took me months to see “Black Panther,” after having caught Every Single Previous Marvel Movie on Day One. I still have not seen “Captain Marvel.” I suspect I never will at this point.
Humans are beings of limited capabilities. And so you can spot a liar right off is someone tells you that they care for *every* human equally, that they feel equally bad for every human death, no matter how distant or unknown. The only time such a person *isn’t* lying, either to you or themselves, is if they in fact feel *nothing.* For sociopaths, it’s true that they care every bit as much about some kid getting smooshed by a truck on the other side of the planet as they do for the kid smooshed by a truck in the street in front of them: they feel zero in either case.
Anyone telling you that they SuperCare (TM) about all the world is trying to sell you something, and they should be instantly untrusted. This should be obvious to all non-sociopaths: nearly everyone has experienced grief over the loss of a loved one. The suggestion that you could feel the exact same level of pain for all the thousands of people who will die just today, and *not* promptly either go insane, have a stroke, have a heart attack or collapse into a singularity, is clearly untrue. Such a person telling you this is virtue signalling atop a mountain of corpses.
There is, as the article linked above points out, another aspect to it: in-group vs. out-group. A family member of *mine* dying is going to affect me more than a family member of *yours*dying. A planeload of Americans crashes in Brightburn, Kansas, is going to affect me more than a planeload of Mongolians crashing in Mongolia.
People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy.
When Grumpy Cat died a week-ish ago, something I saw a fair amount of was religious conservatives complaining that the world was mourning the death of one cat, but not the deaths of thousands of the unborn that same day. And if to you the unborn are lives worthy of mourning, then that rather unhappy position makes sense. But you don’t need to go even that far: on the day Grump Cat died, how many children were sold into slavery? How many old people beaten to death so someone could steal a pittance? How many killed by drunk drivers, or bad/lazy doctoring? How many died due to cancer or other poisoning caused by coal burning power plants that should long ago have been replaced with clean, efficient nuclear reactors, but the environmentalists prevented? How many struck dead by lightning, or fell off buildings while working on them, or slipped on ice and cracked their skulls? The world is full to overflowing with tragedy. And humans, to maintain their sanity, have to put limits on their giveadamn.
And the fact is… for all the thousands of tragic deaths on the day Grumpy Cat died… for the great majority of the people who mourned (in some fashion) that one small cats death, the simple fact is that that one small cat meant far more to those people than any of those who died. I had heard of Grumpy Cat. I had derived minutes of entertainment from looking at Grumpy Cat photos and memes. The geographically nearest human death to me on that day? Didn’t know ’em.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker doesn’t like people who like their own nations:
Methinks the Europeans would be well advised to see to it that Juncker needs to find another job. Maybe he could go far away, where doubtless he’ll find naught but love.
Razorfist gives us some high quality NSFW rantsnark, right here.
“Transdimensional temper tantrum.” Heh.
FYI, the Jefferson quote is available at the Library of Congress, here:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=text
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
