A good explanation of the events of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protests and violence, where big-government collectivists fought big-government collectivists and the press achieved new heights in outright lying:
Sep 052020
Sep 042020
After a long string of flubs, SpaceX seems to be getting on the ball with Starship. SN#6 flew to 150 meters yesterday, transitioned sideways and landed itself, all seemingly without a hitch.
May SpaceX get Starship up and running soon. Sane people may need to flee this planet sooner than even I would have thought just a few short years ago.
Sep 032020
Suspect in Fatal Portland Shooting Is Killed by Officers During Arrest
Kyle the Kenosha Kid walked right up to the police and tried to turn himself in after defending himself from a pack of convicted criminals. Michael Reinoehl, who apparently straight-up executed a Blue Lives Matter supporter for no other reason than he wore Patriot Prayer stuff, ran from the police and his responsibility and in the end apparently opened fire on the police. This from a man who *claimed* that he shot someone in self defense.
“I am 100% ANTIFA all the way!” he posted on Instagram in June…
So this one Antifa scumbag is responsible for at least *two* deaths. Let no one ever say again that “Antifa never killed anybody.”
Antifa accounts in their secret group chatrooms are calling the killing of antifa shooter Michael Reinoehl a police "execution."
Related: Reinoehl said he was in the U.S. Army, but there is no record of that, reports the NYT. pic.twitter.com/ViSDfrPDYN
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) September 4, 2020
Notice the “rest in power.” As someone further down the Twitter thread noted, normal people say “rest in peace,” because that’s what they want… peace. Fascists want power.
Sep 032020
This person is apparently more than just some random whackjob; she’s been published by many a “mainstream” source, such as “Time” and “The Atlantic.” So… huzzah.
Violence is the only way, of course
No votes. No marching. No spots on cable news. No high fashion magazine cover stories. No hashtags. No panels.
None of that is going to bring about the liberation Black folks deserve.
— FJ The REAL Racist (@FeministaJones) August 27, 2020
She wants violence that jeopardize children’s lives.
Huh.
Seems to me there are two ways of looking at this:
1: She’s a racist nutbag who thinks that a race war is a good idea. Both from a moral or ethical standpoint, and from the standpoint of a small minority launching a war of genocide against a better-armed majority that she already believes is out to kill her and her people.
2: She’s a cynical grifter, saying crazy evil stuff for the clicks.
In an important sense it doesn’t matter which she is. Because she alone could hardly make much of a dent if she decided to launch a one-woman race war… but even if she doesn’t believe her own BS, she could certainly convince a lot of weak-minded fools to do what she’s suggesting.
In case the unlikely happens and Twitter actually enacts their “advocacy of violence is bad” rules against her, here’s a screenshot:
Sep 032020
Behold:
Video: pic.twitter.com/GePbtYuQId
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 3, 2020
Biden, of course, is wrong. Now, it is true to say that Edison did not invent the light bulb alone; numerous other inventors made important steps along the way. But Edison took prior designs, his own ideas, ideas from his team, and business sense to make practical and long-lived light bulbs, turning them from rarities to commodities that flooded the world. The black man Biden is talking about, Lewis Howard Latimer, was one of those important contributors… but a *late* one. Latimer contributed an improved carbon filament, one that burned much longer, in about 1880, getting a patent for it in 1882. But Edison demonstrated *his* bulb in 1879. Edison being Edison, he bought the rights to Latimers patent and hired him in 1884.
It’s probably fair to say that Edison invented the light bulb about as much as Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. Which is to say… *kinda,* in that he led a team of people who did the actual work. But being the CMFIC of a project, especially if you’re the MF paying for it and ramming it through, means you get the credit. Werner von Braun didn’t carve the A-4 rocket out of a block of aluminum with a spork; rather a lot of technicians at Peenemunde (and elsewhere, especially later when production ramped up inside a mountain using Socialized Labor) did that for him. And yet WvB rightly gets the credit for the V-2. In contrast, the individual techs who worked on the iPhone, A-4 and light bulb *don’t* get the credit because they weren’t the driving force.
That Latimer didn’t invent the light bulb is doubtless known to Biden, or at least to whoever told him to say that. But re-writing history is important to him for some reason. Presumably for the same reason that George Washington Carver is often credited for inventing peanut butter in 1916, when it had in fact been patented by a Canadian in 1884, and apparently the Aztecs were making it by the time Cortez and some industrious migrants showed up and culturally enriched them.
Sep 032020
Actual fans of Star Trek have been grousing for several years now (since either the beginning of STD, or the beginning of the JJTrek movies, depending) about the lack of quality Trek, how the garbage that’s being cranked out is poorly written, nonsensical and massively anti-canonical. While actual finances and viewership numbers for the streaming shows are impossible to come by, the fact that these shows have made approximately *zero* cultural impact (when was the last time you saw an STD toy, model, T-shirt or any other bit of merchandise for sale at WalMart… or *anywhere*?) indicates that other than hate-watching, nobody much cares about these shows. So, it is in the interests of the brand for those in charge to make good decisions. And by golly, looky here:
Star Trek: Discovery Introduces First Transgender and Non-Binary Characters
Yes, the bios of the two new acting units start off by telling us what their pronouns are, because that’s *all* they are. I’m sure all the fans who complained about Picard being turned into a useless, neutered shadow of his former self, incapable of accomplishing anything but meekly accepting abuse from every female character within a dozen light years, will line the frak up to watch *this.*
Sep 032020
A lot of people don’t like the DC “cinematic universe” movies like “Batman V Superman,” “Suicide Squad” and “Justice League.” I like them… ok. They have flaws, but for the most part I find them entertaining enough that in the Before Times I saw most of them in theaters. But I didn’t go to see “Birds of Prey,” largely because:
1: It just didn’t look good or interesting
2: There was a lot of woke rubbish about it.
It is now on HBO/Hulu. So a few days ago i fired it up while doing CAD work. If nothing else, I have the TV on as background noise; I can binge watch half a season of some show or other while working and, when I finally look up from my screen, realize that X hours have gone by and I’ve absorbed absolutely none of what transpired on the TV. So with that in mind, judge for yourself what it means that I got something like 30 or so minutes into “Birds of Prey” and intentionally turned it off. It’s badness was so overpowering that it blew right through my ramparts of inertia, inattention and indifference. That is, in a way, rather impressive.
Sep 032020
UPDATE: ok, trying another video using the same song:
And some covers of the same song:
Sep 022020
A while back I found two 8X10 glossies in an antique store. The owners had no information on the photos; they had come in a box of photos from an estate sale, the rest of the photos being completely unrelated. The store owners thought that the photos showed a test of a beam weapon of some kind. Not unreasonable for people not familiar with actual beam weapons or ballistic missiles. The photos are certainly evocative of death beams zapping targets in the sky. But what they actually show are missile warheads coming *down,* screaming towards the ground at incredible speed. When the photos were taken, I’ve no idea. *Where,* almost certainly somewhere in the South Pacific… most likely Kwajalein Atoll, a common target for ICBMs and SLBMs. *What* missile was tested, I’m also uncertain. One photo shows a single re-entry vehicle; the other shows three. The Minuteman III lobbed three warheads; the Peacekeeper, up to ten; the Trident, up to 14. This *probably* shows a Minuteman III… assuming that is actually a single test.
I’ve uploaded the full resolution scans of these photos to the 2020-09 APR Extras Dropbox folder for Patrons and Subscribers at the $4 level and above.
Sep 012020
I’d pay good money to see this. Maybe not in a theater right now, but, you know, Blu Ray or Netflix or something.
Enshortened version: