Here ends the great American experiment. Let’s start divvying the place up.
As soon as it is established that Presidential candidates are openly courting the votes of people who refuse to speak the language of the United States, that’s a good sign that we have failed as a nation. The US is, like Britain, just a geographical region, with nothing binding the inhabitants together anymore. Every man, woman, family, tribe, ethnicity, identity group for themselves.
Using reverse thrust on the propeller, Raider can break without flaring the nose, can hang in the air to increase time on target during a dive. This is deceleration from 160 to ~60 knots. pic.twitter.com/y1YZiNgpsf
It is a common sneer that “those guys” are mired in a culture that is a millenium out of date. But it is worth remembering that it is entirely possible, if you are an adult, that you may well have known someone who remembers an America or a Britain or a France that, at night, was Fricken Dark. And while it is another common sneer that the “Gilded Age” of robber barons and unfettered capitalism was just Terribly Awful And Not At All Progressive… that culture of greed, massive egos and rampaging, unflinching and often cruel progress lit up the world. In a remarkably short time, due to the grasping desire of a few men for knowledge, power and money, the West went from streets filled with horse crap, water filled with cholera and the night filled with the dim squint of a few gas lamps to cities where the streets were clear, the water clean (-ish) and the night brightly lit and the superstitions of the dark largely swept away. The comparison between, say, 1870 and 1910 makes the advances of 1980 to 2020 look like garbage. Yay, now we have social media. Whoopadeedoo.
The closest to the “Current War” we have today *might* be something like the vague competition between SpaceX and Blue origin. I hope that that race to colonize the universe is as fruitful as the fight among Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.
A year and a half ago I made a single post describing the “interstitial tales” that I wrote for “War With The Deep Ones.” WWTDO is a book filled with short-ish stories about the first day of an invasion of H.P. Lovecrafts “Deep Ones,” waging a war to wipe out humanity. These stories, set all over the globe, were to be separated by little-bitty sub-stories set in the more than a century from the time of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” to the start of WWTDO. These little tales string together to give a basic history of one organizations efforts to understand and prepare for the threat.
As I said, I made one post, and promptly didn’t make another. Because follow-through is for suckers, I guess. But what the heck, I’ll try again. I’ll post one a day till I’m through them. They will be in simple blog-text after the break, not EPUB or PDF or any such. As always, comments, critiques and large sums of cash welcomed.
Google has, of course, an “autocomplete” function. You type a portion of a phrase to search for and it produces a series of possible responses. Google’s ideas are… a little bit interesting. Behold:
How much of this is just because that’s what people look up, and how much of it is because of Google’d official positions on political matters filtering down to search suggestions, I dunno. But how many people actually look up “Women can do anything” or “boys can be bugs” or “men can have periods?”
A new superstitious belief has emerged in some areas of Mozambique – that bald men have gold in their head.
However, the head has to be taken to a witchdoctor who will use magical powers to extract the gold – and make them rich.
If your immediate response is that the belief that bald men have magically extractable gold in their heads is stupid idiocy, it’s because you need to decolonize your mind. Witchcraft is no less valid than Newtonian physics.
It was a rainy spring. The result of that is mosquitoes galore, and much to my annoyance they’re finding their way into the house. Anyone have suggestions on devices for dealing with the little horrors, traps or the like?
