One reason why I collect aerospace historical documents and diagrams, scan them and distribute them is because when things are held in a single place, a single event can destroy history. This happened when the San Diego Air and Space Museum burned to the ground in 1978 as a result of arson, destroying its collection of aircraft, artifacts, books and documents. The aerospace community promptly rallied around the ruined museum and contributed more aircraft, artifacts, books and documents to help build a brand new less flammable museum… but a whole lot of things were just simply gone. I’ve seen the current SDASM archive (at least as it existed around a decade ago), and can only imagine what it *might* have been had the original contents not been lost.
The video below comes from the SDASM YouTube account. It’s hard to watch… for several reasons.
Fingers had surgery yesterday to deal with dental issues. This kinda came out of the blue (the last six months or so have seen a *LOT* of issues that just seem to arrive out of nowhere with little to no leadup, just… BAM). I should have seen it at least a few days earlier; starting about a week ago she became surprisingly friendly with me. She is typically pretty aloof; she was only ever really friendly with Raedthinn, while she sees me as, at best, a somewhat terrifying roommate. But it seems that the old girl was in pain and the only way she had to communicate it was through the appearance of affection.
Those who’ve been around this blog long enough might remember that 11 or so years ago she was badly wounded. It was the sort of damage that, had she been a human, said human would do little more than writhe on the floor and wail incessantly until pumped full of morphine. But Fingers… she just seemed to ignore it and get on with things. So either she’s grown soft in the years since, or she *really* hurt. In any event, I got her in to the vet as soon as I figured out there was a problem (I had about a 1/10 second glance inside her mouth, and had to struggle to get that; it was enough to tell me there was a problem) and they performed some dental work. Two teeth were to be extracted, but apparently they just sorta… fell out. This problem is not new; Koshka also had dental issues that resulted in two teeth just popping right out.
Fingers was unsurprisingly loopy when she came back from the vet. But once the anesthetic wore off, she went right back to ignoring me. Which would seem to be a good sign that the pain is gone.
Best way to pet Fingers is to catch her asleep.
The other cats have reacted to Fingers with complete nonchalance.
In 1985, Rockwell International thought there might be a business case for commercialized space solar power systems. This could be akin to a miniaturized version of the Solar Power Satellite… while it looks like the normal approach would be a more or less conventional solar power systems simply attached to a customer payload, the possibility existed of remote systems that beamed energy to customers with microwaves.
“Beforeigners” is a Norwegian-language series about what happens after people from the past (stone age, Viking age, Victorian era) mysteriously start popping up in the present day and have to be integrated into modern civilization.
Doubtless this will be some sort of morality tale about those Poor, Poor Migrant Refugees currently overwhelming Europe. But I can’t help but think that a major influx of Viking culture and bloodlust into modern day Scandinavia might do some interesting things about Scandinavia’s apparently deeply rooted self-hatred. Unleash a tribe of Vikings into Malmo and things will get *interesting.*
See, if parents had been on the job for the last fifty or so years, the Democrats wouldn’t be facing the nightmare of having Berni Sanders as their nominee.
Democrats 2020, you seem to have two options if Bernie is your nominee:
1: Losing to Trump, AGAIN.
2. Being personally responsible for bringing communism to the USA, and the famines and pogroms that will inevitably follow.
In Britain, your “right” to healthcare is dependent upon whether you express the correct viewpoints, it seems. This will add to a rule that says doctors don’t have to provide healthcare to a patient who is violent, which certainly make sense, but now they don’t have to provide healthcare to someone who says something “inappropriate.” It should be interesting to see how broadly it’s interpretted. If you’re wheeled into the emergency room and you promptly start hurling racist invective at the staff… well, that ain’t nice of ya, and I would expect that nurses and doctors are grown up enough to just shrug off that sort of thing, but this rule will cover that and allow the medical staff to wheel your right on back out into the street. But will it *also* cover you if you are, say, a well known preacher of some particular religion that says nasty things about womenfolk and/or the local native ethnic types? Hmmm…
As always, Prager U is confounding. Their videos on religion and science are often the worst form of dreck, but their videos on history and politics are usually spot-on. The one below explains what set “The West” apart from the rest of the world. Why, starting about the 16th century, did western Europeans and their descendants begin to pull away from the rest of the planet in terms of standard of living, wealth, power? The people who hate the west and westerners claim it was because of slavery, war and imperialism, conveniently forgetting that slavery, war and imperialism are *universals.* Wherever westerners went, they encountered empires that enslaved and waged war. The Stanford historian Niall Ferguson here comes to much the same conclusion I long ago did, though he breaks it down to six points, where I break it down to three:
1: Science. The scientific method, the most powerful tool to understand the world as it actually is, was developed and perfected in western Europe.
2: Capitalism. If you want wealth generation, nothing comes close to capitalism. After centuries of systems such as mercantilism, actual capitalism broke out in western countries and colonies, and they started getting stinkin’ rich.
3: Democracy. Allowing people a say in how their lives are lived and governed turns out to be a dandy way to let people actually be happy about their lives. Coupled with capitalism, democracy lets people and populations decide to improve their lot; add science into the mix, and now the people have the *tools* to materially improve their lives.
One can argue about *why* western Europeans developed these three systems , and the rest of the world did not (or at least did not develop all three at the same time). But one cannot honestly argue that they weren’t the drivers of Western Civilization Exceptionalism. Science, Capitalism and Democracy are necessary and sufficient for massive progress. This has been proven in the 20th century: civilizations that had lived in feudal muck and mire for millenia without these three either adopted them or had them forced onto them, and shot forward. Those nations that did not adopt these, or outright rejected one or more of them, stayed backwards, surviving – if they did – on pure nastiness.
