I communicated with Dennis Jenkins today. “Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013” had one single printing, there will be no more… and that one printing is finally nearly sold out. It is still available at the original retail price of $170. But once it’s sold out, the secondary market will be the only place to get it and the price will skyrocket… it’s already $228 to $448 on abebooks, a single $364 copy on ebay. Hell it might even be a good investment for resale. This three-volume set is a remarkable work and is worth every penny. Make sure to get a copy before the Green New Deal kicks in and it becomes difficult to ship things!
There are some notable improvements, though it’s still well below *actual* 4K quality. I think the live action stuff could be made close enough, but the CGI shots just don’t seem to look as well to me. Fortunately, if the rights holders really wanted to, they could upscale the live action bits and contract with a large number of quite skilled and enthusiastic amateurs to recreate the CGI shots at 4K directly. I imagine the whole series could be remastered at relatively low cost doing it this way. But even then I doubt that the financial math would work.
So for the last 24+ hours I’ve been listening to news outlets such as NPR and the Bbc hyperventilating about the events in Washington. It seems the talking points memos got out, as there has been incessant repetition of phrases like “armed insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorism.” The action of people walking up to and then into a building is inevitably referred to as “storming” the building.
And then today, the pervy corrupt scumbag nice old gentleman who will be the next President said:
what we witnessed yesterday was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters — don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob of insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.
Now, to be fair Biden *did* actually say something true, though I suspect he didn’t mean it the way reality interprets it:
No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view. And I hope it’s sensitized them to what we have to do.
Yes, the American people saw it. The American people saw the better part of a year where “Black Lives Matter” protests turned into cities on fire. Government buildings utterly trashed, police cars set ablaze, sizable sections of cities simply ceded to *actual* insurrectionists. The American people saw this chaos being lauded by the press and many in government. We saw the gaslighting on a scale not seen since the Commies and the Nazis.
FLOYD PROTESTS: Damage from looting and arson amid mostly peaceful protests over the police killing of George Floyd will cost $1-2 billion in claims, according to the Insurance Information Institute. pic.twitter.com/uaNPwwnUEQ
So what will the American people take from this? Compare and contrast protestors who set cities on fire, who continued their hijinks for weeks and months, and were praised and rewarded for it, with protestors who broke a few windows, wandered around a building for a few *hours,* and THEN LEFT, all without starting *any* fires, and are getting called domestic terrorists by the press and the next President. Cities set on fire by the left are, at worst, attributed to ‘a few bad apples among mostly peaceful protestors.” There is no such attribution of “only a few are bad” for the right wingers actions.
The lesson to learn here is that one side really is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want without a whole lot of official pushback. The other side finds that any protest at all will get them called domestic terrorists by the media and the government. One side is allowed to behave as badly as they like. The other side is being pushed into a corner.
Yeah. This will end well.
At least we’ll get some good memes before the end.
Gotta wonder how many of the agitators were plants.
Less confirmed are situations like this, where someone started trying to break windows… and was then set upon by the other protestors and made to stop. It would certainly be in character for Antifa types to infiltrate a right-wing protest. Not only do they get to carry out the violence that infects their blackened little hearts, they also get to make their political opponents look bad. It’s not like the media is going to make much effort to point out left wingers in the crowd.
Stop listening to MSM lies. I was there in DC. Antifa started to break windows but stops by Trump supporters. pic.twitter.com/4KN2EueEJ9
She was a veteran, a QAnon conspiracy weirdo, and shot in the throat or chest by – reportedly – a plain clothes Capitol police officer not because she was waving a gun around or carrying a karambit, but because she was going through a window.
You can see her get shot at about 0:41 in this video (at least until it gets memory holed):
After a year of being told that arson and murder are just the way change is made, and perfectly acceptable ways for people to express their political views, I remain unconvinced that the government executing someone for trespassing is entirely a good thing. Were the police working under Castle Doctrine? Is there a duty to retreat in D.C.?
Also: Get ready for a whole lot of this sort of thing:
Sometime in the 1980s, a very young version of me came across a then-current magazine article on the OSS “Bigot,” a modification of the 1911 pistol to fire darts rather than bullets. The point was that this WWII-era weapon would be very quiet compared to the standard 1911 and could be used for taking out sentries and the like. Problem was it apparently didn’t work all that well and a suppressor was a lot more sensible. Still, the vague memory of that magazine article has irritatingly stuck with me for decades. As memory serves it had a number of large, possibly full-scale photos of the hardware. Repeated efforts to find it again have failed. It might have been in something like “Soldier of Fortune” or some similar terribly 80’s sort of magazine. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone?
NOTE: “Forgotten Weapons” video about the Bigot with extra audio awesomeness. Go on, guess what it is…
Remember *all* through 2020, when “mostly peaceful protestors” were allowed to trash business districts and government offices with AT MOST a harsh talking to by the police? Yeah… that’s leftist privilege. If you are a right winger and you want to do something vaguely similar, but with a whole lot less of looting and arson, the police will shot you in the neck.
“We want to petition our government.” Government response:
Those sure do look like “high capacity magazines” those fellers have. As well:
Not only “high-cap” magazines but a “hell yes we’ll take your AR-15.” The government gets to have those. Not you or me, though. The likes of us will be restricted to clubs and Molotov cocktails, so long as we pass certain ideological tests. “Want to burn down a book store to protest western civilization and Enlightenment values? Go right ahead. Annoyed about voting irregularities? Here, have a flash-bang.”
David Bowie’s “Heroes” is a song about the triumph of the human spirit. Written in 1977, it is about two lovers separated by the Berlin Wall. Lots of people love this song and are cheered by it:
A lot of singers have covered it. And then… Peter Gabriel released his own version. Same melody, same lyrics, and at least to me it seems utterly flipped into a lament. To me it comes across not “we can be heroes” in the sense that “we have this great potential,” but “we could, but we’re not.” It almost sounds like someone who had the chance to be a hero and failed and is now living with the failure.
I gotta say I find the Gabriel version far, FAR more evocative.
The UK’s Royal Mint commissioned an American artist to design a coin to celebrate author H.G. Wells. His design references “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine” and “War of the Worlds.” All fine and dandy. Except… ummmmmmmm…………..
