Nov 262021
 

This critter in some ways reminds me of Raedthinn… color, fuzziness, looks like size. But Raedthinn *never* got this stoned.

Nevertheless, this made me laugh *real* hard, one of the few TikTok videos that isn’t clearly part of the ChiCom plot to destroy the west.

@felinefunnies

Duncan says this is what it chews like to feel 5 gum on catnip! 😵‍💫😼🍃 #catnip #cats #5gum

♬ original sound – kohlmann

 Posted by at 5:38 pm
Nov 252021
 

A few days ago i posted some Chinese dashcams and noted that it seemed to me that the people in these videos seemed indisposed to rendering aid. A commenter pointed out that this in fact the case, a result of Chinese law on the matter. Well, here’s support for that position:

China’s Bad Samaritan Crisis

Until 2017, however, China had no national law providing legal protection to good samaritans. Instead, the law made being a good samaritan extremely risky, allowing people to sue their rescuer to recover medical bills, and scammers frequently took advantage of this rule. Under the eyes of the law, the assumption became that you would only help someone if you were responsible for hurting them, resulting in a bad samaritan crisis. According to the South China Morning Post, this was something that happened frequently. In 2006, for example, a university student was required to pay the medical bills of an injured elderly woman whom he helped, because she sued him and claimed he pushed her. If a good samaritan is painted as evil, it is no wonder so many people are unenthusiastic about helping those in need.

Yikes. Once again, this shows that there’s no situation so awful that getting Communists involved can’t make it worse.

In 2017, the Chinese law was changed to provide protections to good Samaritans. But being Communists, they don;t know how to pass *sane* laws, an the new law goes overboard, saying that a rescuer can never be held liable for *anything,* no matter how stupid the rescuers efforts are. Still, that’s preferable to making sure that nobody ever tries to render aid. But the fear of reprisal has been ingrained into the Chinese people; it could well take many years before the culture changes substantially.

But there’s more:

In fact, there’s even a saying in China that translates to, “It’s better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.” This is because of a terribly convoluted law requiring motorists to pay for the care of the person they injured for the rest of their life, while the payment required for killing someone outright is a one-time fee, usually associated with the cost of burial.

Spectacular. There are several gruesome tales of people repeatedly rolling over pedestrians they hit in order to make sure they’re dead in this article. Coupled with a culture of corruption, where the cops and courts are readily bought off, this legal nonsense seems to have made a whole of lot regular people into wholly heartless monsters, as thoroughly devoid of empathy and conscience as supporters of Antifa riots. This is the culture in charge of manufacturing all the electronic devices that have infiltrated our lives and which are at this very moment watching you.

 Posted by at 9:13 pm
Nov 252021
 

You don’t see these too often…

I hope that civilization will last long enough for 3d metal printing to advance to the point where entire aircraft such as this can be produce at the push of a button (and the loading of bins of various metal powders, and the firing up of a small nuclear reactor to provide the juice to run the lasers and CNC cutters).

 Posted by at 8:50 pm
Nov 252021
 

Kyle Rittenhouse *should,* if this was a rational world, emerge as one of the richest men in America and a media mogul, owning several news outlets outright, after all the lawsuits are done. Of course this *isn’t* a rational world, so who knows. Celebrities, media corporations and politicians *should* be held financially to account for slander, libel and outright lies… but how about “lesser” folks who still have followers? For example, Bearing tears apart a doctor who repeats several lies about Kyle *after* the verdict came down. It’s an entertaining ripping apart of a man (there is some question about that; any man who feels the need to include his pronouns seems likely to be uncertain about it) who could benefit society by shutting the hell up, but would it be possible or practical for some lawyers to look at folk like this with a critical and lawsuit-happy eye?

Behold this little bit of “alternative facts:”

At the very least his license to practice medicine should be under serious question. A man who lies like that seems unlikely to make for a reliable and safer doctor.

 Posted by at 6:38 pm
Nov 242021
 

A few weeks ago SpinLaunch managed to spin up their demonstrator and lob a projectile into the sky. I did not give it a whole lot of thought; it just doesn’t impress me a whole lot. There are easier ways to accelerate a projectile to the speed of sound.

However, Thunderf00t *did* give the concept a lot of thought, and he’s anti-impressed. One detail that I’d noticed was that the projectile emerges from the “muzzle” of the launch tube crooked. One thing I *didn’t* do was closely examine the faint and blurry in-flight footage of the projectile. And I should have, because the projectile is *tumbling.* In retrospect this makes sense: while attached to the rotating arm, the projectile is rotating at about three revolutions per second. Once released, it will retain that angular momentum; since it’s not touching anything – it’s not riding rails, or sliding down a barrel, nor at its fins reacting against air since it’s in a vacuum – there is nothing to arrest that rotation. So it leaves the “barrel” tumbling. This would be *disastrous.* Even if the fins could stabilize the projectile in flight, a massive amount of launch energy would be wasted in the process, the trajectory would be virtually randomized, accelerations would be massive and all over the place.

In short, this thing seems to be a whole lot of nothing as far as being practical.

 Posted by at 10:49 pm
Nov 242021
 

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…

 

 Posted by at 4:44 pm