“National Garden”

 art, history, Hmm..., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won  No Responses »
Jul 042020
 

Trumps latest executive order:

Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes

In short, two things:

1) Rebuild statues torn down by the recent spate of crazed freaks

2) Build a “National Garden” of statues to honor some of the greatest Americans in  history.

As for the “National Garden,” a list of names was provided. Presumably this isn;t meant to indicate the total and complete set of statues; it would make sense for the Garden to contain space to add more over time.

The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

It’s an ok list (a few are pretty “meh,” but nothing to get in a twist over), but I would make some suggestions for others:

Neil Armstrong/Buzz Aldrin/Michael Collins; Albert Einstein; Werner von Braun; Sam Clemens; Edgar Allen Poe; Robert Heinlein; Kelly Johnson; Tom Edison/Nikola Tesla; Henry Ford; H. P. Lovecraft (fight me, ya mooks); Fred Rogers; Sam Colt; Moses Browning; Alexander Bell; Bernie Goetz; Norman Rockwell; Andrew Carnegie; Sequoyah; Thomas Sowell; Lewis & Clark; William Tecumseh Sherman; Ulysses S. Grant; The Amazing Randi; Houdini; Richard Feynman; Carl Sagan; Isaac Asimov; Jonas Salk; Norman Borlaug; Hyman Rickover; Edward Teller.

Feel free to add to the list. I suspect that if this goes forward – and if the depraved doddering dementist wins in November, it certainly won’t – there will probably be some sort of way to make suggestions and/or vote on them.

 

Statues should depict historically significant Americans, as that term is defined in section 7 of this order, who have contributed positively to America throughout our history. Examples include: the Founding Fathers, those who fought for the abolition of slavery or participated in the underground railroad, heroes of the United States Armed Forces, recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor or Presidential Medal of Freedom, scientists and inventors, entrepreneurs, civil rights leaders, missionaries and religious leaders, pioneers and explorers, police officers and firefighters killed or injured in the line of duty, labor leaders, advocates for the poor and disadvantaged, opponents of national socialism or international socialism, former Presidents of the United States and other elected officials, judges and justices, astronauts, authors, intellectuals, artists, and teachers. None will have lived perfect lives, but all will be worth honoring, remembering, and studying.

 Posted by at 5:21 pm

Disappearance of a blue hypergiant

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, science  No Responses »
Jul 042020
 

One of the biggest and brightest types of stars known is the “blue hypergiant,” a young and extremely massive star. Dimensions and luminosity can be damned impressive, with individual stars visible across many millions of light years. Such stars have very short lifespans, just a few million years. They either promptly supernova, or transition to red supergiants and then supernova. The end state of such stars after going kerblooey is often a black hole.

So it’s kinda odd when such as star just up and vanishes.

A Massive Star Has Disappeared From a Distant Galaxy, And No One’s Sure Where It Went

Between 2001 and 2011, this star visible in a dwarf galaxy some 75 million years away was repeatedly observed. But in 2019, it was apparently utterly gone. Had it gone supernova it doubtless would have been noted. One suggestion is that it just slipped into black hole status without first going to the bother of exploding; this would seem to indicate that it must have been *reeeeaaaaalllllly* massive (on the order of 100 solar masses) in order to simply collapse under its own weight.

The universe is magnificent in it’s majesty, scope and potential for terror.

Woo!

 Posted by at 4:53 pm

Playing in the street. At night. UPDATED

 awesomeness, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 042020
 

Well this was pretty much  inevitable… two protestors struck by a car moving at high speed and flung a comically high distance up and out with resounding “thumps” both up and down. This was made possible not because the car was on the sidewalk, but because the protestors were on a darkened Seattle freeway at night.

Edit: original tweeted video seems to have been yanked.

 

The driver will of course have to answer a lot of questions. But as to whether the driver is at fault here? Dunno. Lots of possibilities:

  1. Driver saw what was up ahead and maliciously plowed into them
  2. Driver was drunk
  3. Driver simply didn’t see what was up ahead until too late to avoid (cars don’t exactly stop on a dime, especially when moving at freeway speeds).
  4. Driver saw what was coming at the last second and decided not to be Denny’d

My guess based on nothing is Number 3, with a dash of Number 2. But then I read THIS ARTICLE which indicates that the highway was already closed down and that the driver came onto the freeway by way of an *OFF* ramp. Considering that the car in question is a Jaguar and probably costs a fair chunk of change, my thinking transmogrifies into wondering if what we have is a car thief out joyriding.

But whatever the drivers story is, the dumber story is necessarily that of the protestors. What exactly did they plan to achieve by blockading a major high-speed freeway at night? This sort of thing is dumb and malicious enough when done during the day before slow-moving gridlocked or stoplighted vehicles. When done *literally* under the cover of darkness, it’s just…. stupid.

One can always hope that this sort of thing will *finally* lead to new laws, such as “intentionally blocking traffic is now a major felony with a minimum ten year sentence followed by stripping of citizenship and deportation to Somalia,” but I bet it won’t. Idiots and their enablers and co-conspirators will continue to falsely claim that protestors who block traffic are within their Constitutional rights to do so, and will thus be complicit in the injuries and deaths that will continue to mount.

Don’t play in the streets, kids.

UPDATE…

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!!!

Man Who Drove Into Black Lives Matter Protesters In Seattle Is Identified

Not exactly what one might have in mind when assuming the incident was an attack by a white supremacist Trump supporter.

And then there’s this… left without comment.

 

 Posted by at 7:45 am

Arrested for defending herself

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 032020
 

This is a pretty clear case of self defense. And she’s been arrested for it.

Sheriff: Couple arrested, charged in Orion Township parking lot altercation caught on video

In an era when insane “protestors” are attacking people in cars, having a whole family of crazy people screeching at you, surrounding you and then putting themselves in the path of your vehicle as you’re attempting to escape… yeah, drawing down makes a *lot* of sense.

 

 Posted by at 6:59 am

DC-3 orbiter

 aircraft, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 012020
 

The orbiter for the “DC-3” referenced previously. This vehicle had relatively small wings, leading to quite low crossrange. The wings were also simple straight wings, not highly swept deltas; the vehicle could get away with this because it did not “glide” during re-entry, but “belly flopped.” To aid in crossrange and landing, each wing would have a single turbofan in a sealed pod. The payload bay is not shown here, but would be quite small and right behind the cockpit.

 Posted by at 11:47 pm

Ugh. Should I give in and sign up for Twitter?

 blather, Hmm...  No Responses »
Jul 012020
 

After the occasional blog problem and a few days ago actually losing access to my email, I’m wondering if I should sign up for something like Twitter. It’s a cesspit of insanity, to be sure. But it would be an alternate way to maintain some sort of contact the next time some irritating technological flub takes out one or more of my existing systems. My thinking is that it would simply be used to post, say, one aerospace image a day, harvesting them from my blog, except for times when I need to communicate “I ain’t dead” or some such.

And if I do… do I sign on to Twitter? Gab? Parler? I signed on to Facebook *years* ago, but it is frankly a PITA to use. Twitter is someplace that I can’t see lasting too long… eventually I’ll get banned. Parler and Gab seem to obvious alternatives, but anyone there is automatically assumed to be alt-right or fascist or whatever, and there certainly do seem to be a lot of conspiracy and anti-Semitic whackaloons there.

Thoughts?

 Posted by at 11:35 pm

Sometimes the right people get cancelled

 awesomeness, Crazy, Forward!, humor, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 012020
 

“Cancel culture” is a cancer on our culture. But so long as it’s a thing, might as well  cancel the violent extremists who threaten to harm people for their *opinions.*

Example:

She’s a HARVARD GRADUATE threatening to stab people for having the wrong political opinions. Perhaps surprisingly, the British company that had actually hired her prior to this decided that racist threats of murder just might not be the sort of thing they’d want to be associated with. And thus…

Harvard grad Claira Janover says she’s lost Deloitte job over TikTok ‘stab threat’

Her video reacting to getting fired is *precious.*

https://www.tiktok.com/@cjanover/video/6844619909612178693?lang=en

And her followup to *that* video where she doubles down on blaming “Trump supporters” for her getting cancelled (she doubtless would have gleefully supported the cancelling of someone she disagreed with, someone who might have simply expressed a flat opinion or told an off-color joke) is the most schadenfreudalicious thing I’ve seen in a good long while.

https://www.tiktok.com/@cjanover/video/6844625089997114629

Some people are truly delusional. But the young lady here (yes, I’m assuming her gender. Bite me) has her whole life ahead of her… time enough to wise the frak up and pull her head out of whatever liberalhole she has embedded it within.

 

 

 Posted by at 6:39 pm

San Francisco says some races are more criminal

 news, politics  No Responses »
Jul 012020
 

How else to parse this?

San Francisco Police End Common Practice Of Releasing Suspect Booking Mugshots

Police Chief Bill Scott said the department will no longer release booking photos of suspects to the media or allow officers to post them online.

He said the only mugshots released will be limited to suspect who pose a threat to the public. It’s all an effort to stop perpetuating racial stereotypes.

Hmm.

 Posted by at 4:35 pm
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