Maybe I’m reading this wrong

 Hmm..., news, politics, religion, science fiction  No Responses »
Jan 112021
 

So, we get this article:

Danish proposal on translating sermons gets pushback from Church

It seems that there are sermons in Denmark that are not in Danish. Arabic, as the case seems to be. And that irritates some people, because it is not only exclusionary, it excludes the very people who allowed those sermonizers to come into Denmark in the first place. And so, not have a First Amendment, this law has been put forward.

OK, shrug, that’s for the Danes to deal with.

The line that stood out to me:

Blah, blah, blah said Precious Blood Sister Anna Mirijam Kaschner, general secretary and spokeswoman of the Nordic bishops’ conference.

“Precious Blood Sister?”

Ummm… I *can’t* be the only one to read that and suddenly get an image of an angry woman in power armor wielding a chainsaw sword in the service of the Emperor of Mankind, can I?

 Posted by at 10:09 pm

Can’t stop the signal, Mal…

 Hmm..., news, politics  No Responses »
Jan 112021
 

Well, we’ll see:

Parler finds refuge with right-leaning webhosting service

Seems they’ve signed up with Epik, the webhosting service that Gab also uses. Useful, but I imagine if Parler successfully migrates everything to the same servers running Gab, both systems are gonna be *reeeeaaaaal* slow until a lot more hardware is brought up to speed. And of course if both of these social media darlings are run through the same web host, a single attack on Epik could knock them both out.

 Posted by at 9:58 pm

“Latin Phrases Patriots Should Know”

 blather, Hmm..., politics  No Responses »
Jan 112021
 

Latin Phrases Patriots Should Know: Patriotic Latin Phrases and Their Translations

I guess this is an ok compilation article… has stuff like:

“De oppresso liber”: To liberate the oppressed, U.S. Army Green Berets

“Noli me tangere”: Don’t tread on me, U.S. Army 2nd Infantry Regiment

“Semper fidelis”: Always loyal, U.S. Marine Corps

“Mors ab alto”: Death from above, U.S. Air Force 7th Bomb Wing

“Si vis pacem, para bellum”: If you want peace, prepare for war

“Audentes fortuna juvat”: Fortune favors the bold

“Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem”: I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery

“Scientia potentia est”: Knowledge is power

Those are all ok, I suppose. But what I was really looking for was:

“Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc”: We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

Yeah, yea, it’s not actually Latin, just something made to *sound* like Latin. May I remind you, 2+2=4 is racist, so…

Google Translate says the Latin should be “Non in die festo Parvam piamque dum lubenter eorum non proderunt domare Nobis,” Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

 Posted by at 2:57 pm

I think this is one of the best videos…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Meh., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 102021
 

… showing the unruly, *terrifying* Domestic Terrorist Armed Insurrectionists Storming through the Capitol building. Just watch this, especially with the wise words of Our Betters in the media describing the truly horrific sight of people calmly walking between the ropes, and *brazenly,* *wantonly* and *fascistically* waving the US flag while in a US government building. The horror!

“See stunning video of rioters inside Capitol”

Sigh.

Once more, for those too dense to figure it out: yes, anyone who broke stuff or hurt/killed people needs to have the full force of law dropped on them. But once again I defy you to compare and contrast what we see and hear here, with masses of people who seem utterly uninterested in causing damage – and it’s not like they couldn’t have, had they wanted to – with the tens of thousands who swarmed our cities all this year burning cop cars and businesses, vandalizing memorials and pulling down statues. *THOSE* people were proclaimed as everything form someone with a valid point, to outright heroes. The folks in D.C.? they got the full Sandmann treatment.

I challenge you to imagine what this place would have looked like if these Dangerous Trumpists had had the same respect for law, order, history, property that your average Mostly Peaceful Protester had. I see a looooooooot of statues there that Antifa/BLM would have loved to have toppled.

 Posted by at 6:00 pm

Science Journalism: now with decolonized math

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, news, rockets, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 102021
 

NASA will soon fire up the most powerful rocket ever built

So NASA is planning on a static fire of the core of the Space Launch System. OK, fine, if about a decade-plus behind schedule and maybe a couple dozen billion dollars over budget. But the article goes into WokeMath in order to ramp up the excitement:

during this first ignition, only the liquid fuel engines at the core of the rocket will be tested, without the solid fuel boosters that will one day help carry SLS into orbit.

When the SLS core test-fires, it will become the most powerful rocket ever ignited on Earth.

UMMMMM….

The core of the SLS has four RS-25 engines, thrust 418 klbf each, totaling 1,672,000 lbf. The Saturn V had five F-1 engines, each with a thrust of 1,522 klbf each for a total of 7,610,000 lbf.

I’m not sure I agree with LiveScience’s math. But then, 2+2=4 is racist, so maybe 1.672 is greater than 7.610 these days.

 Posted by at 12:16 pm

XB-46 photos & early F-111 concept

 aircraft, history, models, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects  No Responses »
Jan 102021
 

A few seemingly random (because they are) photos. First: a display model of an early General Dynamics concept for what would become the F-111.

And then… two photos of the Convair XB-46 in flight.

 

 

I’ve uploaded the full-rez versions of these to the APR Dropbox, into the 2021-01 APR Extras folder. This is available to any APR Patron or Subscriber at the $4 level and above.

 Posted by at 12:17 am

Parler

 Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics  No Responses »
Jan 092021
 

Huh.

Parler jumps to No. 1 on App Store after Facebook and Twitter ban Trump

Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email.

I have avoided all social media chatterbox applications like the freakin’ plague, so I’m unclear on how a lot of this works. It has been removed from Googles Play Store and will likely soon be removed from Apples app store. Will this make it unavailable to existing Parler users? Or can they still access it through normal web browsers? I dunno. But it seems to me the most likely outcome is that Big Tech will find a way to either stomp Parler out of existence or force it to adopt terms of service that turn it bland, uninteresting and exclusionary, which would just as effectively kill it. I’ve little doubt that Parler can be taken down by big tech by any of a number of means from throttling access to threatening payment processors and banks and the like.

Conservatives, others claim Twitter removed thousands of followers

It *seems* that tens or even hundreds of thousands of conservative Twitter users have vanished. Hard to tell how much of that comes from a mass banning of people on the right by the left-leaning leadership of Twitter, and how much of it comes from right-leaning Twitter users deciding to bail. In either event, Twitter will now become even more of a left-wing echo chamber, continuing to further radicalize its leftist users. Whether there will be an equivalent right-wing echo chamber in terms of scope and permissiveness remains to be seen.

 

 Posted by at 3:50 pm
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