“The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent” looks like the best kind of bonkers. It also looks like a regular studio movie with a decent budget, so maybe his career will get back onto track. Not that “Willy’s Wonderland” wasn’t a hoot, but small films like that aren’t going to pay for castles filled with dinosaurs.
The voyage of the USS Connecticut to San Diego sounds like a month of food poisoning.
Likely did 6000 miles at 10 knots on the surface. Ride would have been rough because the friggen’ nose got ripped off… and because submarines aren’t designed to sail on the surface, the boat would have rolled like a drunken Bill Clinton.
They estimate repairs could take *years.* This is not the sort of industrial capability that wins wars with near-peer opponents. Early in WWII, the USS Yorktown was blowed the ᚠᚪᛣᚳ up and returned to sea after 48 hours of repair, serving admirably to lay a historic beatdown on the Japanese navy at Midway before finally being taken down by masses of aircraft and a salvo of torpedoes. None of that “years in drydock” ᛒᚪᛚᛚᛋᚻᛁᛏ… it was rebuilt in a damn hurry and sent back to the fight like a boss. Today the Navy runs one of only *three* Seawolf class subs into a friggen’ rock and it’s out of commission for a Presidential administration.
… at the National Museum of the USAF in Dayton:
Some *really* interesting things there, such as a Crossbow and an Iraqi MiG 25. A lot of restoration work is needed on some; others look about ready to display. I’d kinda like to see that MiG stripped of the Iraqi markings and restored as a Soviet version… and then parked near the SR-71/XB-70.
Note also that as the drone flies down the length of the MiG the camera pans down, eventually pointing more or less straight down. *THIS* needs to happen with planes like the SR-71, XB-70, YF-12: get me some good, clear imagery of these aircraft from above. Complete coverage, please.
The most toxic creatures are typically brightly colored. This makes sense: their defense comes from your reluctance to touch them, not from their ability to fight you or defend themselves. Any animal ignorant enough to go after a dart frog or a blue ringed octopus will certainly kill it, only dying later from the various toxins. Those toxins won’t have done the frog or the octopus any good, so they brightly advertise “don’t approach, crazy dangerous toxicity here” by way of coloration, also known as”aposematism.”
Humans do it too. Example:
Short form: an Instacart driver destroyed an elderly couples $50 worth of groceries after having claimed to have delivered them because the customer had a “we support the police” sign in the front yard. That’s nuts. Fortunately, the toxic creature in question has adopted coloration meant to warn people from approaching too closely:
I don’t use Instacart, so I don’t know if it sends you a photo of the driver before you order. If so, the presence of dangerhair on your driver should be a big warning sign. The presence of dangerhair on *anyone* should be a warning sign. Avoid dangerhair at all costs. This includes hiring and dating, unless you have a burning desire to see your business, home, property, life savings and quite possibly your immune system go up in flames.
For those interested in helping out the victims of the dangerhair in question, there is, of course, a GoFundMe.
Thanks to the Pinko Pox, a *lot* of people are now working from home. And a lot of people are discovering that their employers are less interested in actual productivity than the *appearance* of productivity, something I discovered years ago at ATK (by the end of my time there I could get my whole days work done within the first half hour, and the need to try to look busy the rest of the day literally drove me buggo until the end).
Short form: if you work remotely using a company-supplied computer, chances are that the computer has “bossware” installed that tracks mouse/cursor movement to make sure you’re at the computer and on the job. So if you get up to take a leak or answer the door, your employers will know in a few seconds that you’re not moving the mouse anymore, and you could get in trouble.
Never fear: the free market is here to help with any number of “mouse jigglers” that will give the *appearance* to bossware that your mouse is being constantly manipulated. Some of these are bits of USB hardware. Some are software. Some are actual mechanical devices. My favorite, though, are simply YouTube videos: play the video on a phone or tablet and place an optical mouse on it; the moving lines spoof the mouses optical sensor into thinking it’s being moved.
Heh. The entrepreneurial spirit will always find a way to stick it to the man.
Long ago, New Zealand made the Soviet Union smile when it banned any form of nuclear power – RTGs, reactors, bombs – in their territory. This meant that US naval vessels such as aircraft carriers and subs were banned from New Zealand waters, making that region just a little bit safer for Soviet interests. Well, the Soviets may be gone, but the anti-science mindset that they set in motion in the West continues to gain steam. behold:
…Professor Garth Cooper, who is suddenly in the news because he is under disciplinary investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, the nation’s premier organisation promoting science and the humanities.
Cooper is a Fellow of the society and — alongside eminent philosopher of science Robert Nola — risks being expelled from the nation’s most prestigious academic club.
The reason for the investigation is that Cooper and Nola were among seven professors who wrote to the Listener in July questioning a government working group’s proposal to give mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) parity with what were described as other “bodies of knowledge” — “particularly Western / Pākehā epistemologies” — in the school science curriculum.
In other words, Māori knowledge would effectively be given equal standing with physics, chemistry and biology.
Short form: superstition and anti-science are to be granted equal standing. Even questioning that could cost you your career.
Yes, “indigenous groups” around the planet (i.e. cultures based on backwards pre-Enlightnement, pre-scientific superstitions) do know a lot of useful stuff. People who live in jungle areas often know that “this plant will cure a headache, that one will fight malaria, this one will kill ya dead.” That’s useful *knowledge,* but it’s not *science.* Science is a method to discern the truth, to separate signal from noise. To suggest that “well, this is what we’ve always believed, so it’s as valid as five hundred years of careful trial and error and methodical study and attempts at falsification and revision of hypothesis when data comes in” is not just wrong, it’s stupid. The only people who can see this sort of development as a good thing are people who want to see civilizations collapse.
The West used to know what to do with people who worked against their own countries to aid, knowingly or not, their nations enemies.
CNN has a handful of “before and after” satellite photos showing the destruction wrought a few days ago in the Kentucky region. Some of the destruction is straight out of Tornado Cliche Central, like lightly constructed farm outbuildings turned into confetti; others are more interesting, such as a heavily built courthouse largely trashed and an Amazon warehouse ripped in half while two identically built nearby buildings seem intact.
I know… CNN has something newsworthy? Shocking!
I can remember a scene from an *early* (late 40’s, early 50’s) novel about nuclear war that has a nuclear bomb going off in or just above an American city. The scene in question goes into some detail about the effects of the blast; I recall being impressed with not just the detail, but the grimness of the description. But for the live of me I can’t recall what the book was. I *thought* it was “Alas, Babylon,” but I’ve gone back and forth through the book, and it doesn’t seem to be there.
I know that’s vague, but does this sound at all familiar to anyone? Sadly my collection of fiction books got thinned out after Utah (and will thin out some more shortly). I used to have a great big dedicated “apocalypse” section, but it’s scattered and tattered now.
It’s late in the season for tornadoes, but boy howdy they came out in force yesterday and stomped Kentucky. The videos of the damage are remarkable:
Of course, there’s no disaster that can strike regular American citizens that political hacks won’t squat on and cackle like glee-filled ghouls. For example, one “Nell Scovell,” a supposed comedy writer and producer who created the TV series “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
Note that she attributes this tornado outbreak to climate change, which may be the case at least in part. But she lays the blame for this not just on Americans but on a few American politicians in particular. She leaves the Chinese, the greatest polluters and carbon emitters in human history, wholly blameless. If the FBI was actually doing their job, they’d be well advised to take a look at Ms. Scovell’s finances to see whether and how much the CCP is providing her to deflect attention from their responsibility. It would be worthwhile to see if she belongs on the same page of the history book as Swalwell and the Biden crime family.
More vids:
I’d love to see this catch on in grade schools. It would be a hoot to see how teachers who screech on about their pronouns and end up on Libs Of TikTok would react to a lil’ dickens busting out with this version of the song…
You can get a copy of the coloring book HERE.