Yay, back to posting with my phone. This time my internet computer give me a blue screen of death about a minute after startup due to “memory management.” Shuts down starts up crashes again rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Nothing seems to affect it, so tomorrow off I go on a time wasting expensive journey to try to get it repaired. Friggin huzzah.
Well, the audio here should just about satisfy your monthly required dosage of Teh Dum. Short form: a university professor arguing that space doesn’t exist because he’s never been there, and that the only reason why people say that it does is because Evil White People, and that the fact that there are black astronauts who have claimed to actually go to space only means that they are participating in whiteness. Oh, and that trusting someone else’s experience about something you’ve never actually experience is “colonialism.”
And it gets better: the students try to make the argument that the proper thing to do is eliminate all the white people… by shooting them into space, which the professor argues does not exist.
Interestingly, as stupid as these people clearly are, there’s an interesting basis for a sci-fi future buried in there. Hmmm…
Picking up where we left off…
In 1985, Rockwell considered the possibilities of space-based commercial services such as modules added to the Space Station or free-flying on their own and propellant scavenging from the External Tank and OMS pods. in the decades since, neither of these has come to pass. Commercial modules for the ISS have been proposed, but none flown, and certainly no free-flying man-tended commercial space facilities have been launched. Similarly, the idea of scavenging residual propellant is a good one… *IF* you can do it cost effectively. Every drop of rocket fuel returned to Earth is a waste of money and potential, along with being a potential environmental hazard when it’s inevitably just dumped into the atmosphere after re-entry or touchdown.
I walked into a “Field & Stream” store today just to see what sort of stuff they had. I expected it to be akin to the “Cabellas” that populate Utah… outdoor supplies, sporting goods, guns, that sort of thing. It seemed to be mostly much the same but there was a difference that made me shake my head.
I quickly made my way to the firearms. There in the case was the Sig Sauer “Spartan” pistol shown below:
This is a 1911 with some cosmetic details, which I don’t care much about, and a rail for a laser, which would be a handy addition to a standard 1911. I’ve little use for expensive cosmetics on firearms; I’m perfectly happy with my pistols being utterly unadorned. But as with all things, “Because I Wanted It” is a necessary and sufficient explanation for why any American should buy*anything,* from a Furby to a Pound Puppy to a Rose Tico inaction figure to a dressed-up pistol to an M-60 machine gun to an over-sized smoke-belching six-wheel-drive pickup truck to a “Hillary For President” shirt.
But this one was humorously ironic in my view. On the side of the slide in raised (and I believe quite inaccurate) letters is King Leonidas’ famed line, “Molon Labe.” This is the ur-text of the anti-gun-grabber movement; the Spartan kings response to the Persian demand that he give up his weapons was “Come And Take Them.” This is an appropriate sentiment for the side of the gun, but where it was problematic was the store itself. The “Field & Stream” store is part of “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” a company that *used* to sell all manner of conventional normal firearms, but a few years ago knuckled under to the civilian disarmament thugs and removed all modern sporting rifles from their stores. Not a single AR-15 or M-1A or AK-47 or AK-74 to be found. Dick’s responce to “give up your guns” was “here ya go.”
It was easy to leave the store without having spent a dime.
“Blade Runner” promised that by November 2019 Los Angeles would be:
A: More or less on fire
B: A “Multicultural” hellhole
C: Full of flying cars
Typically in the prediction racket, “two outta three ain’t bad.” But here the two really kinda suck, and the one missed out on is a bummer.
If Musk gets his way, there’ll soon be ads selling the off world colonies. It would funny as frak if he plastered these ads on the sides of blimps. And one might argue that there are replicants… beings in the shape of humans but with messed-up emotions and programmed responses. But SJWs are a bummer of an outcome.
