Where we watch a guy react to “Moonraker” for the first time:
By many metrics, “Moonraker” is a bad movie. By any metric it is the goofiest, most ludicrous Bond movie. And yet it’s my favorite Bond movie; I have watched it *many* times. First on HBO back in the day, then on laserdisk, then VHS, then DVD, then Blu Ray, then streaming and one of these days on 4K if it’s ever released on that format. It’s bonkers, it’s dumb, the physics is just *awful.* And yet it has some of the awesomest bits of Bond ever: Hugo Drax is far and away the best Bond villain ever; Jaws returns and steals every scene. And Jaws’ love interest Dolly? The two make the best couple in all of the Bond movies with a love story for the ages.
And the Space Marines? Stupid, but I love it.
I have a 1/72 “4D Vision” cutaway model of the Space Shuttle (purchased long, long ago when they were affordable) set aside for the specific purpose of turning it into Moonraker 5, complete with laser and ark cargo. Some day…
More than 25,700 people have crossed the English Channel to the UK so far this year in small boats, according to data compiled by Britain’s PA Media news agency. This is three times the total for the whole of 2020, PA reports.
The coast guards and volunteer rescue services of both Britain and France are being taxed to the breaking point by “rescuing” illegal colonizers, rather than capturing and deporting them. You’d think that the Royal Navy would be out there defending Britains shores.
$12 million of the damages were against James Fields, the guy who rammed his car into a crowd of protestors and killed a woman (and who seems rather unlikely to have $12 million in spare change). So that leaves around $14 million levied against the organizers of the rally due to the damage and injuries that occurred.
I have little doubt that there’ll be a whole lot of “yeah, but, no, see, the thing is…” from those trying to deflect responsibility from those who spent a year or more fomenting violence and arson and death on a nationwide scale. And I’ve little doubt that there will be few city, county, state officials with the integrity and courage to bring these suits. But those suits that are brought *should* be enough to bring historically vast damages: a billion or more in compensation to cover the property that was destroyed, and a few dozen billion in punitive damages for being a bunch of hatred- and violence-spewing dickheads.
And there is also this potential source for a massive lawsuit:
If the racist hate crime in Waukesha turns out to have actually been a result of anger over the Rittenhouse verdict, the families of the injured and the dead would seem to have a massive case not only against the perpetrator but also the same news outlets, celebrities and polticians who spent a year lying about the facts of the case in order to gin up hatred.
Can’t speak to the plot, but it sure looks pretty:
Finally gave the t rex some fuzz.
At the end of the last movie, a bunch of dinosaurs were released in the forests of northern California. This would be a problem that would last a very short time: most of the dinosaurs seemed to be lone examples of their species, so breeding will be minimal. In this world, people have known about real live dinosaurs for decades, so there would not be a lot of time lost on disbelief. And once people found out that there are velociraptors and Tyranosaurs running around, every hunter in a 2,000 mile radius would race to the scene.
Dashcam compilations of Exciting Incidents can be entertaining. Up until recently, the great majority of the compilations I’ve seen have featured either largely American videos, or largely Russian/Eastern European videos; random European, Australian and Asian vids tossed in. But I recently stumbled across a channel that seems to be entirely east Asian… I *think* Chinese, but I don’t know for sure. And after having watched far too many of them, I noticed some distinctions from the US/Russian vids.
First and most obviously, these Chinese videos feature a *lot* more direct human involvement. The western videos seem to be largely one machine hitting another, but the Chinese vids have far more pedestrians getting plowed over. And part of the added human element is the presence of *far* more two and three wheeled scooters and bikes. You hit a car, all you see is metal and glass. You hit a scooter, the human is hard to ignore.
More subtly are the differences in the people. In the western vids, you get a lot of reaction from the people in the dashcam car, whether they are actually involved or not. Ranging from laughing at what they’ve just seen to screaming about it, to yelling between driver and passenger to drivers yelling at other drivers, westerners have a lot to say (even if much of it is utterly meaningless in the end). But the eastern videos are shockingly silent. There are reactions of course, things that I assume to be akin to “look at that” and “uh-oh,” but most of the time the driver says nothing at all. At first I thought maybe they were shocked into silence… but now I suspect it’s due more to being quite blase about it. And that I suspect is related to another thing I noticed: many to perhaps most of the incidents are caused by one or more of those involved being utterly oblivious to their surroundings. The lack of situational awareness on display can be astounding. If I was on a scooter surrounded by cars and semi trucks capable of 70 miles per hour, my head would be on a swivel; these people seem to live in their own little worlds, unaware that other vehicles – or rules of the road – even exist. Pedestrians step out into major highways without looking. Bikes blow through *busy* red lights. Scooters stop in the middle of a fast, busy street for no apparent reason. People on bikes and scooters plowing directly into giant stopped trucks. I saw one where someone was driving a scooter with an umbrella open *in* *front* *of* *them.*
Most of the individual clips cut off within seconds of the incident. But those that go on a little longer demonstrate something else: bystanders often don’t seem to care. In the US or Russia, a wreck would be followed promptly by people rushing in to help (or perhaps to take pictures), but in what I assume to be China, the response largely seems to be “that’s not my job.”
So if you want to see people on mopeds getting clocked by cars and tossed all over the road to the complete indifference of their fellow man, this channel is for you.
Stereotypes:
Russian dashcam vids are the result of vodka (and ice). American dashcam vids are the result of assholes. Chinese dashcam vids are the result of obliviousness.
Whenever there is an “unfortunate incident,” the masters of social media scrub their sites of the unfortunate evidence that the perpetrators left behind. But sometimes they are not fast enough, and other people save and archive at least some of that stuff. As an example: the vehicular attack in Waukesha was carried out by a guy with not only an extensive criminal record, but a long record of racist, pro-violence, anti-cop, anti-Trump postings of various kind including a number of “music” videos. That all got scrubbed. But it also got archived, as seen here:
Some “interesting” stuff there. It should be noted that Darrell Brooks is likely not an anomaly… he’d most likely a foretaste of the future. Humanity is getting dumber, and dumber people have lower impulse control and a higher predilection for violence. Dumber people are more likely to believe patently stupid stuff, like the libels about Rittenhouse, and then lash out stupidly and violently as a result. Video taken not long after his massive hate crime showed that he was not whacked out of his gourd either on drugs or insanity; he appears to be rational and planning for the future. This was an intentional act, and it’s certainly reasonable to suspect that he was driven to it not only by his criminal nature but by the drumbeat of lies from the media, politicians, even clergy, all of whom should be sued straight into the poorhouse. Brooks was someone who should have been permanently removed from society *years* ago, but after a recent attempted vehicular murder the local DA let him roam the streets with the very same vehicle he used in his last attack on a mere $1000 bail.
If it was possible to imagine a rational society, we would be planning prison reform, such that people like this would *never* again be released from prison, long before their rap sheets got as ling as this guys. People like this should be weeded out of not just society but the gene pool before they spread not only misery and death but another generation of their idiot ilk. At the same time, immigration reforms to assure that the best and brightest come in, the worst and dimmest are kept out. Welfare programs that discourage the poor from having kids that they can’t, or won’t, take care of; social policies that promote multiple children for those who are successful and useful members of society. But there is virtually no chance that such reforms are even possible. My last remaining hope not only for western civilization but mankind itself is space colonization. Because morons are self-limiting in environments that are infinitely hostile to dumb decision making. On a space colony – Moon, Mars, Asteroidal, Orbital – the stupid and the violent and the criminal are threats not only to themselves but to everyone else, so they would be dealt with in a permanent fashion. Science Fiction often has such types getting tossed out airlocks; this is, of course, also a stupid decision. Better by far to dump them into the waste reclamation system so that at the end they can provide at least some modicum of benefit to the society they would otherwise have harmed.
One less savory solution might be to let the Chinese deal with it. They have announced that they are working on genetic weaponry targeting ethnic groups; the presumed purpose would be to either wipe out or enfeeble every ethnic group on the planet except for the Han. But the same technology could presumably be used to attack people based not on the genetic markers of ethnicity, but genes regulating intelligence. A man-made plague that wipes out or sterilizes people with sub-90 IQ’s would be distasteful… and also almost certain to be apocalyptic as the disease mutates in the wild and begins to target a far wider range of targets. Cows and pigs and birds and fish, after all, all have sub-90 IQs; it would be pretty friggen’ awful if Earth was stripped of all animal life except for some rather startled smart folks.
As we race towards Idiocracy, things are only going to get worse. We now have obviously sub-normal elected officials pushing to empty the prisons, flooding the streets with exactly the sort of people who should rather have been launched through a Stargate with a trebuchet.
And if you were looking for a black pill to dim your outlook, this guy has you covered (assuming you can get through his rapid-fire rather jabbery presentation):
If you are a celebrity with a massive platform, maybe libel and slander aren’t such good ideas. Rittenhouse’s lawyers taking Goldberg’s fortune from her and turning it over to Rittenhouse – along with the fortunes of many other celebrities, media folk and politicians – would be a good way to make sure that not only can Rittenhosue afford the security he’ll need, but also *maybe* put the thought into rich dumb people’s heads that maybe they should learn the facts before opening their yaps.
Took them a while and a few failed attempts to do so… but that “a while” was a historically short period. Five years and change from the founding of the company to the first orbital flight is about two years quicker than any other private rocket company.
They were able to achieve this by disdaining NASA-style analysis paralysis and just designing a good-enough launch vehicle, followed by iterative testing, failure, fixing, testing again. This worked well for SpaceX; it worked well for Astra. Compare with SLS…
