“Masterclass in political propaganda.”
The BBC seems determined to lie to the British people about British history. The fact that they are doing it seems pretty well undeniable. The real question is “why?”
Someday, someday probably quite soon, Enoch Powell will be revered as a prophet. But not by very many.
The first Jordan Peele movie that looks like something I want to watch:
Looks like the basic idea is “alien abduction.” I suppose, though, coming from Peele, it’ll turn out to be white racism.
Elon Musk gives an hour-twenty update on Starship. Claims confidence of an orbital launch sometime in 2022.
The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun. It orbits between the star and the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet — and takes just five days to complete one orbit around Proxima Centauri.
The star is already known to host two other planets: Proxima b, a planet with a mass comparable to that of Earth that orbits the star every 11 days and is within the habitable zone, and candidate Proxima c, which is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.
Proxima Centauri is a small star, with seemingly a decent collection of planets. This *may* be evidence that planets should be pretty common. And while there is a roughly Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of Proxima, it is very unlikely to be congenial to life. Proxima, like many red dwarfs, is a flare star. And while the Sun also spits out some substantial flares from time to time, with these itty-bitty stars, the habitable zone is *real* *close* to the star. The flares that on the sun would be barely detectable on Earth, would quickly strip the atmosphere from an Earthlike planet orbiting a red dwarf.
For the most part, I’m satisfied to let people be who they want to be. Do whatever you like in the privacy of your own home, so long as you’re hurting nobody else. But the fact is, some things (and people) really are nuts. Mental illness is a reality. And being mentally ill in one area could well mean you are not likely to make good judgements in another.
Behold who the Biden administration is hiring to help plan for the future of nuclear waste.
Tolerance goes just so far. And then it gets pushed *too* far and it snaps back. Are we at that point? near that point? beyond that point? I dunno, but if I was *kinda* like this person, but nowhere near as nutty as this person, I’d be *real* worried about the inevitable pendulum swing in the other direction. I would post the photos that this person happily and willingly puts out onto the internet, but I at least *kinda* try to keep this as a safe for work, safe for family and safe for life blog. If I included the photos, parent groups across the land would try to get my blog yoinked from public school libraries… and they’d be right to do so.
Apparently he has the right degrees, the right education to technically work in the field of nuclear waste handling. But imagine being a standard, normal engineer tasked with working alongside this guy in his dresses and dog-play. Yeeeeesh. If nothing else, he is making everything in his life all about him. There are reasons why “professional attire” is what it is… and conformity is part of that. It is not strictly from an authoritarian desire to make everyone conform to some arbitrary standard, but to make everyone focus on their *job* not on their attire, or on what Bob’s wearing today. The physical sciences are hard enough without having to deal with loonies that you can’t respect. The job needs to be about *the* *job.* Intentionally dressing bizarrely as a way to garner irrelevant attention to yourself seems to denote massive narcissism, if nothing else.
One of the odder concepts from the 1950’s was this circa 1959 Bell Aircraft concept for a nuclear powered helicopter. Very little has come out about it in the decades since; some crude schematics of how the reactor and propulsion systems would be arranged, a bit of text, and this one piece of art. Supposedly this vehicle would have a fuselage some 300 feet long (including rotors, it would be much longer), have a top speed of 200 miles per hour and weigh 500,000 pounds. The artwork looks more like the result of turning the artist loose on the idea of “giant nuclear helicopter” than an interpretation of an engineering study; nuclear reactors powerful enough to lift a half million power helicopter and neither small nor minimally radioactive. A heavily shielded reactor would have to be fitted within this vehicle *somewhere,* and there would doubtless not be windows in that region. This design, though, has windows along the whole length of the fuselage, with little space for a shielded reactor. This design seems to have been designated D-1007.
The full-rez scan of the art has been uploaded to the 2022-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
The one where Forgotten Weapons takes a mass driver to the range:
I think I’ve mentioned this “weapon” hereabouts before. It remains interesting-yet-meh, shooting a half-inch diameter slug of steel at seventy some meters per second. This is *really* subsonic (something like Mach 0.2) and unlikely to prove fatal barring a good head shot at close range. Still: it’s early days for this technology. Jack up the muzzle velocity by a factor of ten (require a factor of >100 more energy being dumped into the projectile, a non-trivial task) and they’ll really have something… a “firearm” capable of proper firearm performance, requiring no gunpowder and, by the time it becomes available, largely 3D printable by the average home printer… with the non-printable bits being distinctly non-firearm components, thus unregulated.
Where you get to be lectured by a seemingly unceasing string of woke talking points about how humans, who owe our usefully capable brains to eating meat, need to become vegans in order to not be racist and misogynistic because… reasons.
It must be *amazing* to live in a brain like the one on display below. Eating meat is white supremacy. Somehow. Apparently popular culture is filled with depictions of “sexy fish” who want to be consumed. Fortunately, a lot of her more insane gibberings are met with laughter.
Behold Juliette Kayyem:
Juliette N. Kayyem (born August 16, 1969) is a former bureaucrat, author and host of the WGBH podcast The SCIF.[1] She serves as a national security analyst for CNN and is a weekly guest on Boston Public Radio. She is the Belfer Lecturer in International Security at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is a former candidate for Governor of Massachusetts[2] and a former Boston Globe columnist, writing about issues of national security and foreign affairs for the op-ed page.
This genius, this pinnacle of human enlightenment and intellectual achievement, has this to say about Canadian truckers:
The convoy protest, applauded by right wing media as a "freedom protest," is an economic and security issue now. The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada. Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks ✔️ https://t.co/nvRQTfPWir
— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) February 10, 2022
For starters, I’m not sure how great an idea it is for a US government lackey to be suggesting that a neighboring nation attack its own citizens. For second, she wants to slash the tires and drain the fuel tanks of trucks on a bridge… and *then* remove the trucks from the bridge.
Tell me you’re a fascist without telling me you’re a fascist…
Trust me, I will not run out of ways to make this hurt: cancel their insurance; suspend their drivers licenses; prohibit any future regulatory certification for truckers, etc. Have we learned nothing? These things fester when there are no consequences. https://t.co/JnKOy7EuHd
— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) February 10, 2022
Either I don’t understand “female comedians” or I don’t understand modern woke stand-up. But to me, this joke just sorta fell down. The punchline collapsed.