Back before society became afraid of every damned thing, we used to play with lawn darts. Now the damn things are banned. Imagine an alternate reality where the moral panics of the 1980’s never happened, and instead of lawn darts getting banned they got turned back into Roman Plumbata.
These things seem like fun.
Bose Noise Cancelling Toilet
So, we appear to be on the edge of some potentially very dark times. The probable next administration has massively destructive plans and likely the will to carry them out. The only thing standing against them being able to launch a war of aggression on tens of millions of law abiding Americans is the control of the Senate which will be decided in early January in a pair of run-off elections which are sure to be spectacular examples of election fraud on an unprecedented scale. If those go badly, expect to see the Supreme Court get packed and the basic concepts of constitutional limited government go out the window as, in the words of Chuck Schumer, the worst people in the country “take Georgia and then we change America.”
This is the sort of thing that can make a rational feller a tad depressed. Perhaps not to the point of murdering effigies of political opponents in the streets; that sort of thing is for the party of crazy people. But there is another approach to dealing with the craziness… not depression, not lashing out in violence, but recognizing clown world for what it is, and joining in on the laughter. This is the approach that seems right to me. In that regard, I am kinda the opposite of the guy who put the below video together. He has assembled a *lot* of clips showing how modern society is promoting flat-out insanity, making clown world literally real; his message seems to be that we shouldn’t accept it, that we should fight it. There is validity there. But how do you fight people who are quite possibly truly out of their minds, being backed up and promoted by people who are *not* crazy, but simply malevolent? I don’t know. But I *do* know that it would fill me with no end of glee if President BidenHarris’ inauguration was populated by a very large group of people who, once heshe started speaking, whipped out clown horns. If their words were drowned out by a sea of laughter wherever they and their idiot policies went.
If there’s anything that authoritarians dislike, it’s being laughed at. If nothing else, it lets them know that they have not beaten you down, that you retain mastery of yourself. So my suggestion over the next few years is laughter. Let “Ha Ha No” be your motto.
I’d pay to watch this series. note: I recently tried watching some of the Gerry Anderson marionation series. Yeeeeesh.
Now that the tiredest man in American history seems to have been selected to put his sweaty palms onto the nuclear button, one can be forgiven for wanting some escapist entertainment. And Marvel comics is here to provide.
Whether or not you’re interested in comic books in general or the X-Men in particular, even if you have zero interest in them entirely, this is stilla pretty entertaining rant about a profoundly – inexplicably – lazy move.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGXm0VOptgb/
The close-up of the daylit ISS crossing the lunar terminator is particularly impressive.
Scheduled for November 9 to 11, the first cosmetically-complete Starship is expected to make an attempt to reach an altitude of 15 kilometers. This isn’t very high as space launchers go – barely to the edge of the stratosphere – but it will be high enough that the Starship will attempt the “bellyflop” maneuver.
It’s probably rational to expect it to make a smoking hole in the water or the vicinity of Boca Chica. That is of course not a slam on SpaceX… they’re trying something new, and history has show that Rockets Are Hard. History has also showed that SpaceX is willing and, importantly, eager to learn from failures. So, while it is of course to be preferred that the test flight goes off without a hitch, if it doesn’t it’s just a step towards making it work.
So I moved my eyeballs from the CAD computer to the Internet computer for a few minutes to look up something inane to throw onto the TV for background noise and somehow fell down a weird rabbit hole of movies on Amazon Prime. I haven’t seen any of them, but their titles and descriptions seem… interesting:
A Rash of bizarre moose-trampling incidents has the residents of Gangrene Gulch, Alaska, on edge. In an attempt to restore the natural disorder to the quirky little town, newbie park ranger, Zack, teams up with beautiful librarian/coroner’s assistant, Samantha, to solve the mystery. They soon find themselves hoof-deep in supernatural chaos.
A possessed piñata, seeking to avenge the savagery that humanity has inflicted on his kind, picks off a group of friends, one by one, in an unending night of terror.
Horrific Nazi experiments have left a surviving American WWII soldier with a terrifying condition: at the sight of fresh blood, he transforms into a man-sized, blood-sucking killer insect! Refusing to let his affliction destroy him, he instead commits himself to using his “powers” for good-by finding the people responsible and bringing them to justice!
When a female bodybuilder gives birth to a living placenta, she decides to raise it as her human son. The creature, named Luke, is reared in the Christian faith and matriculated into the public school system, where he faces ridicule from boorish males and their girlfriends. But what happens when Luke gets pushed too far?
Makes of this what you will:
I am making these tweets to explain in one place some analysis that was done last night.
1 – I was asked offline about doing Benford's on election data. I explained that this is common and a useful way to detect anomalies in data that are driven by artificial process (e.g. fraud)— Statsguyphd (@statsguyphd) November 5, 2020
Entire thread put into an image! pic.twitter.com/gZWikOeZL5
— Stars and the Moon (@StarsandtheMoo3) November 5, 2020
I gotta admit, this made me cringe a few times.