Hitchcock and Kubrick collide in “The Red Drum Getaway.” Result: ultimate bizarreness.
Note: NSFW. Kubrick, after all.
Oct 292015
Oct 292015
This “display” of a car that got wadded up into a ball by a tornado is outside the Smith & Edwards, a fairly large surplus/hardware store south of here.
Oct 292015
Sometimes a story will hit the news and cause untold levels or Internet Outrage… and be based not on proper journalism, but pretty much outright lies. This seems to be especially common when it comes to “I’m being religiously oppressed” tales. These yarns gin up the outrage among the Fellow Believers, but are very often found to be fraudulent stories. One such story that has popped up in the last day or so:
7th-grader says Texas teacher FORCED students to deny God is real or get a FAILING GRADE
A very brave 7th-grade student decided to fight for her religious freedom last night as she stood before her Texas school board in Katy, Texas and explained to them how her teacher gave them an assignment to answer whether God is a fact, opinion or a myth. This 7th-grader, Jordan Wooley, said the teacher told them that any answer other than ‘God is a myth’ was wrong and they would get a failing grade if they answered otherwise.
Now, that’s certainly a Not At All Good story. A teacher threatening to flunk students for not proclaiming some particular belief system? Why, that’s shocking! That’s unConstitutional! That’s crazy! That’s illegal!
That’s also not what happened.
For starters, the other students in the class are saying that the claimed nastiness didn’t happen:
Students don’t back claim that teacher asked them to deny God exists, Katy ISD says
Secondly, it’s not what the lesson was about:
Note that the word “myth” doesn’t appear here, but instead “commonplace assertion.” A commonplace assertion may be factually accurate or it can be dead wrong or it can be unknown. For something to be a “fact,” it must be demonstratable. Thus “there is a God” is, from the position of “fact, opinion or commonplace assertion” would seem to be an assertion, since it cannot – so far – be factually verified, and since the existence of something is not a matter of opinion. “Chocolate tastes better than liver” is a matter of opinion; “chocolate exists” is a fact.
But by twisting the story into something it very clearly isn’t, a whole lot of people are able to generate a lot of misplaced outrage. Some of this is probably just the desire for clickbait… a lot of websites get ad revenue from visitors (sadly, I do not… say, why don;t you buy my stuff?). But a lot of it – in particular the majority of the people who read this stuff, don’t think too deeply about it (or do not make any effort to research it) – is a sort of catharsis. Their is a mode of thought that seems to be particularly common today that holds that victimhood impart moral superiority… if you suffer, that means you are right. Ideologies that hold that there is something good about martyrdom seem especially likely to trot out inflated tales of oppression. Of course, there are often direct benefits from making stuff up in school…
So, here’s my nugget of wisdom. If you read a news story that seems to put forward a suggestion that *your* cherished beliefs are being trampled by officialdom… do a little research before hulking out in the comments section. The more the story backs up your own biases, the more important it is for you to view the story with skepticism.
Oct 292015
Daily Fail, so…
Shotguns have ‘virtually sold out’ in Austria as citizens rush to buy arms amid fears of a massive influx of migrants, dealers claim
Supposedly there are 900,000 privately owned guns in Austria; 70,000 of which have been sold – largely to women – in the last year. Claim is made that the force driving this is nervousness over the influx of “refugees” from down south.
If I understand the article correctly, rifles have essentially sold out in the Czech Republic.
This seems to be the source of info for the DMs article:
Österreicher decken sich mit Waffen ein
Oct 272015
Walmart is selling a children’s ‘Israeli soldier costume’ for Halloween (toy gun included)
Walmart have sparked outrage by selling an children’s Halloween costume of an Israeli soldier.
And this is a problem… why? I’ve seen kids dress up as astronauts, cops, firefighters, US soldiers. So why would Israeli soldiers be a problem? If they were dressing up as Hamas or Hizbollah or the Waffen SS, sure, I can see how that might offend.
But then, the article was written in the nanny state of Britain; perhaps the writers thinking was that the UK will soon fall to the Caliphate and he’d better get in on some early boot-licking.
Oct 272015
Ok, long story short: yesterday I came into possession of a cat named “Bruce.” I did not seek out Bruce; I just wanted to mail a box at the post office and wound up with a cat. Bruce had been in an apartment, but when the landlords told the people “no cats,” their response was to just kick the cat out onto the streets.
Hrrrmph.
Anyway, I found a new home for him with one of my neighbors (four cats is several too many, realistically)… until her husband came home and nixed the idea. And so Bruce was delivered back to my house.
And then I found another home; slight difficulty in that that home is 1200 miles from here, but that’s not insurmountable. Apparently United and Delta will both transport critters.
So today I took Bruce to the vet for the standard checkup. And as it turns out… Bruce has feline leukemia. Spectacular. This nixes the distant home, since there is another cat there, and I don’t want to deliver a “special needs” cat there.
So now I have cat number five. He will be permanently quarantined in the basement, what with the transmissible fatal virus and all. This is not terribly fair to him, but it’s the best I can do. I’m going to try to find him another home, but I’m foreseeing some difficulty there. It seems to me that any household that loves cats enough to take in a cat that a few years from now will start requiring extra medical care will probably already have cats. So, uhhh… anybody want a cat?
Bruce is an astonishingly friendly cat – with humans. With other cats he is extraordinarily antisocial; under the circumstances, that’s just fine. So unless I can find him a good home, he’s going have his own apartment in my basement. It used to be one of my computer rooms; it will be again so that he won’t feel like an abandoned cat… again. This can only last a little while. Eventually the leukemia will kick in, and I’ll be forced to do something I really don’t want to do (again).
The AMC series “The Walking Dead” has repeatedly made a point of showing awful consequences of characters showing any sort of soft heartedness. While I have so far managed to avoid being consumed by zombies, here, once again, an attempt to do A Nice Thing for an abused animal leads to a gut-punch.
Oct 272015
Future temperature in southwest Asia projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability
By 2100, the region of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Iran, and Saudi Arabia should have normal summer temperatures of 113 degrees; but due to increased humidity, the temperature index should reach 170 degrees with some regularity.
Note to Europeans: you *really* need to get ready. Where do you think all these people are going to go? If you think they’re *not* heading for Russia or India, ask yourself why that might be, and if there are any lessons to be learned.
Oct 272015
Northrop Grumman Wins Air Force’s Long Range Strike Bomber Contract
Presumably this will be the “B-3,” but who knows. Supposedly they’re shooting for an initial operational capability of 2025, some 70 or so years after the B-52, 39 years after the B-1, 28 years after the B-2. Assuming that it somehow doesn’t suffer delays.
Boeing and Lockheed lost the competition. I would expect them to sue; this seems to be the standard response to a loss. Unless the contract gets yanked from NorGrum, this will leave only them and Lockheed as manufacturers of new manned combat aircraft; Boeing hasn’t built a new fighter since the unsuccessful X-32 or a bomber since the B-1 (in the form of Rockwell). The F-22, F-35 and the LRSB/”B-3″ are very likely to be the last manned high performance combat aircraft designed in the US for the next… what? Twenty years? By that point there’ll probably be nobody at Boeing left alive who had a hand in designing a combat aircraft that actually entered service. Few enough at Lockheed; the F-35 was designed circa 2001
No data on the configuration or performance.
Oct 272015
As religion declines, Norway turns to ghosts to fill the void
In Norway, the native population is quickly losing its religion, turning to agnosticism and atheism. While this would seem a triumph for rationalism, at the same time the Norwegians are losing their faith in the Christian God, they’re glomming onto a belief in ghosts. Anecdotes include the popularity of the Norwegian TV show “The Power of Spirits,” now in its tenth season and watched by approximately ten percent of the country.
It seems that humans may well just be built to assume the supernatural. If not a god of some kind, then some other spooooky critter. My guess is that this is an evolutionary holdover. The *vast* majority of humanity’s time on Earth was spent in pre-history, living in “stone age” conditions. During that time, life was a constant struggle for survival, where ever rustle in a bush was potentially a predator going to jump out and eat you. So mankind must have evolved certain responses such as a mix of curiosity and fear. These would, it seems to me, potentially lead to the development of the belief in the supernatural as a way to explain an incredibly complex world in a way a smart-yet-primitive human could accept. Some Weird Event occurs; blaming it on the spirit of an ancestor really doesn’t explain it, just pushes the explanation one step down. But that one step is something that people can accept as a sufficient explanation: “Dead uncle Ogg did it.”
Make that way of thinking sufficiently useful as a way of letting people accept the world… it won’t take too many thousand generations before it’s ingrained into the gene code. And so you can take a modern enlightened and educated westerner and show him that his religion is bunk, he might accept that… and simply transfer his religious feelings to something equally scientifically invalid.
Interestingly (to me) a lot of the religion-replacing spiritualism being discussed sounds a *lot* like the sort of spiritualism that arose in the Victorian era and reached its peak in the years just after WWI. Not really sure what to make of that.
Oct 262015
All through the 1960’s – or at least up until the last few years, when “Great Society” spending ate into NASA’s budget – the assumption was that NASA would soon have numerous space stations in orbit and some preliminary lunar bases, with Mars missions soon to follow. In order to support those, NASA would have to have a cost effective means to launch sizable crews into orbit. A number of approaches were proposed, including Big Gemini and, in the end, the Space Shuttle. One approach that probably would have been quite workable was to simply scale up the Apollo capsule into something capable of holding more than three; a slight scaleup seats six, a further scaleup seats twelve. These would have been launched atop the Saturn Ib and/or Saturn V boosters, and would come with their own basic orbital maneuvering systems, and could carry up some amount of cargo in the conical transition/propulsion sections. At the end of the mission, the capsule would return to Earth for recovery, refurbishment and reuse; the propulsion module would be allowed to burn up.
Of course, none of these were ever built.
The full resolution versions of these artworks have been posted into the 2015-10 folder in the APR Extras Dropbox. Please check out the APR Patreon!
