An incident from December 2022:
And another MiG 31 comes in for a landing, spewing fuel at a prodigious rate…
There seems to be something wrong with the Russian Air Force lately, lots of planes seem to be having trouble. I’m sure we can all agree that the best thing would be for the Russian Air Force to ground their aircraft for a bit. Probably put them all on trucks and trains and send them to, say, Germany and Poland and Finland for inspection and disposition.
It’s been long enough that “Dr. House” *could* make a comeback (he *might* be getting out of prison about now…). Saddling him with Dr. Murphy could be entertaining as hell. Will it happen? No, it’s about as likely as Disney making a good Star Wars movie. But it’s fun to think about.
Good news:
This is *many* orders of magnitude away from a practical solar power satellite… but ya gotta start somewhere.
And on the other hand, bad news:
Problem one: bits of the parachute system aren’t as strong as they should be. Bad, but readily solvable.
Problem two: the wiring is flammable. This… is monumentally stupid, a problem that has been well understood since the Apollo 1 fire. this may well require that the capsule be largely disassembled so that *miles* of wiring can be replaced.
Good luck with *that.*
And while Boeing continues to struggle to get a capsule not fundamentally different from Apollo flying SpaceX continues to send crews to the ISS in Dragons.
19 years later… pic.twitter.com/2xead0zqaA
— Rare North American Space Koala (@culpable_mink) June 1, 2023
Today I swung by “The Davenport,” the century-plus old apartment building that partially collapsed a few days ago. Roads were closed off for a radius of a block or two around it so I couldn’t get very close in my car, and I didn’t have the time to find someplace to park and walk. Ehhh, oh well. Anyway, a lot of information has come out about it; the city of Davenport has released a bunch of inspection reports and other documents going back several years showing that it has been falling apart for some time. Bricks have been popping out of the face of the building for years. It looks like the sort of place that your average person would have been able to look at and go “Nope” and run to some other accommodations.
Someone’s gettin’ sued.
The City of Davenport website with the documents:
https://www.davenportiowa.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=6481456&pageId=19580321
In retrospect this sort of thing is not too surprising. A lot of the buildings around here are old brick structures, and The Davenport was only a few blocks from the Mississippi river. “500 year floods” seem to happen every few years now; this had *got* to have an effect. Whether water seeps into the ground that far inland I don;t know, but having tens of thousands of tons of new watery overburden from time to time has got to cause the ground to flex at least some. There are also the occasional earthquake; small by the standards of even Utah, but if you have a brick building not built with earthquakes in mind… that’s not so great.
In all honesty, “The Davenport” looks like a *lot* of buildings in this part of the midwest. Built a century ago, having seen better days. Like our roads and bridges, the infrastructure has not been well looked after. I won’t be surprised if the next few years are filled with increasing tales of buildings and bridges falling. Imagine if the dozens of trillions dumped down the black hole of welfare were instead spent on repairs, maintenance and replacements of structures that needed it.
A recent Mexican TV news piece showed a cartel member wandering about with a shoulder-fired AT-4 anti-tank rocket slung over his shoulder. A number of commenters immediately leaped to one or both of two wrong conclusions:
1: It’s a Javelin missile
2: It’s a missile we gave to Ukraine, which they then turned around and sold on the black market.
Number 1 is easy enough to debunk; it’s simply not a Javelin. Number 2 is more troubling: but then there’s a little detail on the launch tube that makes it clear that wherever the cartel got this thing… it’s not something to fret about too much.
It seems obvious by this point that a rational corporation would, when presented with the option of weighing in on politically decisive “culture war” topics, just stick their fingers in their ears and hum real loud until whatever -themed month it is ends, and spend their time trying to sell their normal merchandise to their normal customers. But, no. Due to the insidious and invasive influence of “woke” ideologies and diversity initiatives, companies have been led to believe that they *have* to build up their diversity social credit scores, or else… something.
Target stores are the latest to discover that attempting to appease a small group of weirdos ticks off a far larger group of people who don’t want to sterilize, mutilate and drive insane their children.A lot of customers have expressed outrage; a few by pestering the employees (these are just regular folk trying to earn a paycheck, leave ’em the frak alone); a few others by causing damage (come on, you’re not on the left… the law *will* go after you for vandalism). But by far, from Targets perspective the biggest threat to the corporation are the large number of customers who are simply not spending their increasingly thin dollars there. Apparently Target has lost about nine *billion* dollars so far. So Target has decided to move their displays of child-grooming-friendly products further back in the store where they’ll be less conspicuous. This, supposedly, is in response to threats to the stores, products and employees from customers who don;t like those products.
But now they’re getting threats from the *other* side… bomb threats from weirdos ticked off that Target is now attempting to appease right wingers.
You know who’s not getting bomb threats from *either* side? Companies that didn’t delve into goofy identity politics in the first place. There might be a lesson there.
Funny, though:
Heh.
No, it’s not real. If the clearly non-functional rendering above doesn’t give it away, perhaps some of the people supposedly involved will… Dr. York Hunt and Dr. Michael Lit, for example. And the little detail that when you click on the “Order” button it takes you to a page where you can order a prank package.
But dayum, if such a product were to exist and work as advertised… the ability to strap it onto a screaming child on a bus, airplane or in a restaurant, or to use it on a babbling infantile politician? I’ll take a dozen.
A bunch of introverted dogs were brought together. Ever seen a group of introverted humans forced to hang out with strangers? About the same.
@qilastiktok Imagine putting a lot of introverts in one room 😅 #funnydogvideos #funnytiktok #funnytiktokvideos #funnypetvideos #funnydoggo
Well, here’s a study to shock exactly nobody:
Narcissistic individuals and those with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to strongly endorse left-wing antihierarchical aggression, according to new research published in Current Psychology. Antihierarchical aggression refers to a specific type of hostility aimed at challenging or opposing hierarchical power structures or authority figures. The new findings shed light on psychological mechanisms that motivate some individuals to participate in violent political activism.
You want a “red flag law?” Start here.
The study itself:
This, to somewhat stretch the discussion a tad, argues against the recent notion that “Star Trek has always been woke.” Yeah… no. The original series made it clear that in the 23rd century, the Federation – which of course included Humanity – had basically wiped out mental illness. Crazy people more or less didn’t exist in any meaningful form. Which would argue that far lefties would be rare in the United Federation of Planets.