That’s a lot of crazy

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Gah., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 152022
 

Since yesterday’s mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, plays directly into The Narrative, there’s little point in my going on about it: the media will blat on about this for *weeks.* Still, the shooters manifesto has been found and published online several places, such as HERE. It is one hundred and eighty pages. It is bad news: the ghouls in the media and the political class will eat this up. The shooter is a straight up neo-Nazi white supremacist. A lot of his complaints are fact-based, a lot are garbage; his conclusions are nuts.

Something that immediately leaps out when your eyes glaze over at the sheer scale of his jibberjabber is how much effort he put into planning… and in documenting his plans and thoughts and whatnot. He has a long section on the weapons he planned to use: the primary one was a legally purchased AR-platform rifle that he illegally modified. He goes into detail on where he got it, how he modified it, opinions on the relative quality of various manufacturers, blah, blah, blah. It’s the sort of document that would be described as “autistic” in its detail.

While I can’t imagine the level of nuttery that would cause someone to decide that shooting up a grocery store is any kind of good idea, I also cannot imagine the thought process behind documenting the whole thing… or the reasoning that concludes that this act will cause a whole bunch of like-minded folks to rise up and wipe out millions of people they don’t like. All it will end up doing is shutting down valid debate and eroding rights a little more. And driving up the cost of guns, magazines and ammo, which you can now expect yet another run on. Even though he did this with an illegal gun (and specifically targeted a New York store, due to the 10-round limit and low number of legal concealed carriers), expect New York to decide that a new round of laws are needed to prevent this sort of thing. Laws that won’t do diddly to quash the less newsworthy and far more voluminous homicides that take place regularly.

ADDITIONAL: Ruined Leon’s video on the subject is worthy of a view.

 Posted by at 1:25 am

Don’t threaten me with a good time

 awesomeness, dumbassery, Forward!, humor, news, politics  No Responses »
May 142022
 

If you are going to insult someone, it’s generally most effective if the insult actually sounds like an insult, or the satire is clear. The least effective kinds of insults are the ones where the insulted person wears the insult as a source of pride. Remember “box of deplorables? How’d that work out?

Biden’s new ‘ultra-MAGA’ label came after six months of liberal-funded focus group research: Report

The president’s new slogan was quickly embraced by Republicans

GOP laughs off Biden’s ‘ultra-MAGA’ attack, calling it ‘hilarious’

Biden officials, though, are digging in. “The term ‘MAGA’ is repellent to swing voters,” a source familiar with the White House strategy told NBC News.

I haven’t done months of polling, but with gas prices at a record high, inflation back to 70’s levels, the threat of nuclear war *closer* than the horizon, baby formula vanishing from the shelves… “Make America Great Again” seems like it aught to be a pretty appealing notion just now.

If you do a Google Image Search on “ultra MAGA,” the first things that pop up are a row of “Ultra MAGA” T-shirts. Who do yo think would be buying and wearing these? Democrats hoping to stick it to the Trump voters? Amazon is already loaded with “Ultra MAGA” T-shirts and hats and other products. If you want to see a bunch of them, click HERE (and if you buy from that or the following links, some of that Ultra MAGA money trickles down to me. So, you know… spend baby spend!).

 

And then there’s this. It’s not an Ultra MAGA shirt, but the message is a good one:

 Posted by at 3:23 pm

As hobbies go, it’s an unusual one

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., models, youtube  No Responses »
May 132022
 

This feller (somewhere in Asia… somewhere where monkeys are a thing) makes steel-reinforced concrete miniature bridges and similar structures. I wonder at how permanent they are… not exactly because of build quality, but because of the fairly vast footprint they have and the fact that they are anchored not to bedrock but to dirt.

 

 Posted by at 12:53 am

Aliens in the Earth

 awesomeness, history, Hmm..., news, paleo, science, science fiction  No Responses »
May 132022
 

About two years ago I posted about some very deep structures in the Earth near the core; a few years before that, I posted about an “Atlas of the Underworld” showing a bunch of subducted former continents. There is a new theory about those deeper structures: they are remnants of Theia, the Mars-sized planet that plowed into Earth  billions of years ago and shot out the rubble that became the Moon.

Why are there continent-sized ‘blobs’ in the deep Earth?

I suggested the faint possibility that hundreds of millions of years ago some Terrestrial species evolved to intelligence, built themselves a civilization and then got wiped out, their continent then being subducted. A hundred kilometers down there may be the superheated remnants of some ancient civilization. We will almost certainly never be able to go there to pick through the molten or semi-molten rubble… but if they built big enough, and out of the right materials (say, they made *vast* stone pyramids in regular grid patterns) it might just barely be possible that someday advanced tomography of the interior of the planet may detect signs of that civilization. An alien civilization mere kilometers away… and more difficult to get to than the forest world circling Alpha Centauri.

Well… who knows how far things got on Theia before it smacked into Earth. It might have been the seat of a galactic empire. The whole surface of the planet might have been covered with a ten-mile-thick solid city structure and equipped with several levels of orbital rings. And then it hit Earth. A thousand kilometers down, laughably far away, may still reside some of the tougher megastructures built out of heat resistant alloys that mankind hasn’t even come to dream of yet.

Likely? No. Possible? Maybe. An intriguing enough idea that paramount should promptly stop funding STD and STP to instead start work on a series about this ancient civilization? Yes.

 Posted by at 12:08 am

Sagittarius A* imaged

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, photography, science, youtube  No Responses »
May 122022
 

Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

The structure imaged above is about the size of the orbit of Mercury. That sounds pretty big… but given the distance to the center of the galaxy, it’s about the same apparent size as a donut on the surface of the moon. Take THAT, “other ways of knowing.”

An earlier video showing stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole. I remain impressed that we can watch stars move from this great distance. The James Webb Space telescope should return some even better footage in the years to come.

 Posted by at 9:33 am

“Bimboism”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 122022
 

Well, here’s another “this is why we can’t have nice things” -ism that Current Year has gifted us:

In short: Women who think they’re pretty, pretending to be stupid and being stupid as a result and bringing everything else down with them.

Playing up stupidity as a way to get out of responsibility is no better than pretending to be a cripple to get out of responsibility. It’s a a scam.

 Posted by at 8:37 am

Who knew that Chinese TV news would have the most amazing bit of footage for today?

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, Crazy, news, photography, politics, rockets, russian empire, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 112022
 

*WOW.* Not a fun day to be a tanker.

 

 Posted by at 2:38 pm
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