Jan 232022
 

State Department reduces staff at US embassy in Ukraine, orders some family members to leave

“On January 23, 2022, the Department of State authorized the voluntary departure of US direct hire employees and ordered the departure of eligible family members from Embassy Kyiv due to the continued threat of Russian military action,” the State Department said in a statement. “US citizens in Ukraine should consider departing now using commercial or other privately available transportation options.”

Given the crappy job the State Department did in warning Americans to bug out of Afghanistan, this announcement is indicative of either “holy crap this is bad” or “let’s over-react.” I could go with either.

As an aside: I’ve always seen it spelled “Kiev.” When did it become “Kyiv?”

Anyway, I’m just glad that we have such stellar leadership just now, smart and awake like no administration ever before.

 Posted by at 11:28 pm
Jan 232022
 

And probably not for the reason you think…

A lot of the cultural depredations that have occurred in recent years, egged on by the cesspits of social media, might in some small way be reversed if massive lawsuits such as this, and Rittenhouse/Sandmann’s suits against the media, politicians and celebrities who slandered them, are successful. Lightening the wallets of fabulously rich individuals and organizations who think nothing of trying to destroy the lives and legacies of regular folk is a laudable goal, if a probably unlikely one.

 Posted by at 2:26 am
Jan 222022
 

Where some computer graphics experts try to figure out what’s going on in a 5-hour time lapse video that shows an anomalous high altitude *something.* Interesting to watch them go from “what could it be” to “oh, it’s probably this.”

 Posted by at 12:30 pm
Jan 212022
 

The world can usually be approximated to adequate accuracy with a small number of generally simply equations. Go this fast off a ramp at that angle, you will get so high, and land at such a distance. Easy. *Precise* trajectory can be calculated with more inputs… drag calculations, usually, adjustments for wind, that sort of thing. But for first approximations, the math is pretty easy.

Life is hard when you choose not to do the math.

Feel free to either wince or laugh. Either’s good. Both are good.

Shockingly, the guy didn’t die. At least not that time. But he did learn an important lesson: not doing the math *and* not having insurance? Why, that adds up to a million dollars in medical bills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh55zvXg8vE

But his record seems to indicate a lack of foresight. A prior set of “stunts” that resulted in… well, reality, good and hard.

 

 Posted by at 11:39 pm
Jan 212022
 

And yet I can define a sphere. One way to define it: “an object in three dimensional space with a single surface, every point on the surface being the same distance from a single 3D point.” Or, “a three-dimensional object that has the property of any 2-dimensional slice through it, no matter the angle, being a circle.” Or… “a ball.” Many ways to define the same thing. What’s the point of this silly exercise? Madness, that’s what.  Society is being turned upside down to coddle silly weirdos who believe that a humans cannot define something that they are not.

Requisite virtue signalling: you want to be trans, you go right ahead. No skin off my nose if you want to dress up as something you’re not, or take hormones, or have surgeries. Knock yourself out. But when you start telling me that I have to *not* see such things as strange, that I have to change the way I speak and *think,* and that the stupid, ill-formed notions of *children* need to be taken as divine writ… bite me. Some six-year-old declares that he is a she? Uh-huh. I vaguely recall that when I was that age I wanted to be and/or was a squirrel. Such things are to be expected from children, who are largely loaded down with truckloads of imagination and a ziplock baggie of experience and data.

I retain the suspicion that if certain relatively recent changes to the chemistry of food and the environment in the US – the weird hormone-simulants in plastics, birth control pills and the like in the water supply, corn syrup in everything, Odin knows what all in pollutants, etc. – a lot of this trans-mania will fade away. This will leave a lot of people looking at themselves and wondering “what have I done?”

And then the question will be: if changing the composition of plastics will lead to the “deletion” of 90% of a currently favored group by making those people not want to be a part of that group anymore, but to be normal again… will changing that plastic now be considered tantamount to genocide?

 Posted by at 4:57 pm