o o o o o
Options here to donate to help victims of the Turkey/Syria quake.
The tree got its revenge.
What was that Chinese balloon really carrying?
Doggie time.
Compare these two film trailers.
Have a few Biblical cartoons.
Things are jumpin' down at the disco.
Nice sunflower field.
Catify your house.
Don't try this at home.
It's a better job, anyway.
I don't have time for your bullshit.
Ricky Gervais prefers old-fashioned women (NSFW).
See a cigarette lighter in slow motion.
Useful cleaning tips here.
Yeah, these are clouds.
He's being careful not to damage the walkway.
This must be the most haunted hotel in the country.
See the stop-motion LED art of Darren Pearson.
Tip here on recovering a lost pet.
Imagine if Star Wars and 2001 had swapped directors.
This gadget looks useful, if it works.
This is the ocean.
In Giza, history is just down the street.
This is the Gateshead Millennium bridge near Newcastle UK, which can tilt 45 degrees to let ships pass underneath.
Respect the original scapegoat.
Christmas in Kyiv has changed.
Berating people is not "educating". Everybody has biases.
So who's going to actually make all these movies? And enough with the %$#@!# sequels already.
Don't leave the broken window unfixed.
Tips here on improving your foreign-language skills.
Never be ashamed of what you like to read.
Jenny-Jinya says goodbye to an old friend.
Here's what can happen when you don't get enough sleep.
Shaming people out of their boundaries is predatory.
Retirees should not be nagged to return to the workforce to contribute to the economy. We've already done our part.
Name-calling isn't debate.
Don't take movies as a guide to dealing with life, especially if you're autistic.
This person exists.
Lies can get out of control.
Matriarchy is not just a mirror-image of patriarchy.
This winter's covid surge was much milder than expected, probably due to vaccination and built-up immunity from earlier infections.
So far, the covid explosion in China has not produced any new virus variants.
Electricity can affect the behavior of water.
Weather shapes the human world.
This image shows the tectonic plate shift from the Turkish earthquake.
Renewable energy should generate 35% of the world's electricity by 2025 (it's now 29%).
Atrocities are the product of ideology, not of psychopaths.
Atheists, secular humanists, etc are not all the same, although there's overlap.
Rewarding kids with status trinkets can be bad for them.
"Misgendering" is bad, except when it isn't.
Elon Musk is just going bonkers (found via Hackwhackers).
This doctor needs to lose his license.
This judge needs to lose his job.
This person exists. Would you want him around your kids?
Many Americans are confused about the country's demographics.
You're not just imagining things -- the quality of most consumer goods really is getting worse.
Quick (less than two minutes) primer here on why the Fed is full of shit.
If abortion isn't a women's issue, what is?
After three months, the HarperCollins strike has succeeded.
The failed boycott of the new Hogwarts Legacy game epitomized sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Here are some details of the accusations of fraud against Trump.
They were talking about women like this as recently as 1973.
Helping people is "demonic".
This proposed gag rule for scientists is disturbing.
Don't count on God. Or thank him.
Workers at NBC hold a warning strike against management abuses.
The obsession with "inclusion" ultimately leads to idiocy.
Elon Musk is shitting on the Ukrainians again.
The Great Resignation may have tapered off, but workers aren't happy.
Media companies must beware the trust thermocline.
Women of the suffragette era could never have imagined what things are like today.
Dr Frankenstein has nothing on this ghoul.
Responsible leaders understand nuclear weapons.
There stands a monument to the children of Lidice.
Salman Rushdie speaks out about the attack on him, from which he has made some degree of recovery.
This woman's life was ruined by her husband's delusions.
Railway understaffing and cost-cutting contributed to the massive train wreck in Ohio last week, causing a release of toxic chemicals that forced the evacuation of thousands of people. So long as such management practices continue, such disasters will recur.
Who is more prone to conspiratardia?
Boeing isn't what it used to be.
Seven million "prime working age" American men have opted out of work, much to the alarm of the bosses' media toadies.
Minnesota plans to transition to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 -- and North Dakota is considering suing them for it.
Critical race theory is a reversal and betrayal of decades of progress against racism.
If extremist Republicans aren't lemmings, what are they? (Read the comments too -- they went off in some interesting directions.)
Inflation is not being caused by workers' pay, which is why the Fed's efforts to strangle the economy are useless.
Work harder to understand "rural resentment".
The US suffers from high functional illiteracy because too many teacher-training schools are teaching outdated, non-phonics-based methods.
65% of Americans say that House Republicans are wasting time by obsessing over Hunter Biden's laptop; 73% want them to focus on solving actual problems. This is how you lose future elections. Phony investigations and gun-shaped lapel pins are just posturing -- they don't solve problems.
"If voting were fair, we would lose."
Is Islam a feminist religion?
The New York Times is still garbage, apparently.
Claims that gender identity is innate in the brain are junk science.
Despite huge profits, BP (yeah, the same guys who brought us the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster) is cutting back its commitment to fight climate change.
Marjorie Taylor Greene inspires cartoonists.
Most Americans, including most black Americans, don't want a reduction of police presence.
One railway company has finally relented and given its workers paid sick leave. Biden should still issue an executive order requiring the others to do the same. It is now seventy-three days since Congress robbed railway workers of their right to strike over such issues. The fight continues, with Bernie Sanders giving it his all.
Darwinfish 2 assesses the SOTU.
Yes, at least some Republicans do want to destroy Social Security. Don't trust their denials.
The FBI has foiled a planned terrorist attack in Maryland, but these terrorists are an ongoing problem.
A former employee at a "pediatric (!) gender clinic" blows the whistle on what goes on there (found via SilverAppleQueen).
About 60% of Americans oppose the Dobbs ruling, and support expanding Medicaid to cover abortion.
Republicans continue to waste hundreds of millions on border walls which are very easy to breach.
It's unconstitutional to ban marijuana users from possessing guns.
The UK's Guardian newspaper asked women for examples of online misogyny, and the results were interesting. Here's one response.
This rally in London is just one part of the British general strike.
Why would a political party put this obviously deranged misogynist in a high-profile role?
The British would be fools to allow healthcare privatization.
Don't trust the BBC.
Support for Nicola Sturgeon's government has fallen sharply after the latest men-in-women's-prisons uproar.
Ukraine should, and can, take back Crimea.
One of Putin's gauleiters is talking about invading Poland. No wonder several of Russia's neighbors are buying advanced defensive weapons.
Russia can't be allowed to keep any Ukrainian territory.
More links at Angry Bear, WAHF, Fair and Unbalanced, and Elder of Ziyon.
My own posts this week: some truths and inspirations, a valuable resource for mental health, and two videos on the reality of China.
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Elon Musk is a self-important twit who was born lucky. We need to stop thinking he's an expert on things just because he has a lot of money.
Considering the amount of fuss caused by one balloon last week, maybe Nena Kerner's classic 99 Luftballons song wasn't so implausible.
It's the writer's job to express his meaning clearly, using words the target audience will understand. It's not the reader's job to do extra work to understand writing which is difficult because the writer didn't make an effort to be clear, or used "fancy" words to show off.
The idea that humans have a "soul" or that the mind is something distinct from the body, that "you" are not your body but an immaterial entity sitting inside your body and controlling it the way a person sits inside a car and controls it -- this is the main central error of human thinking, from which most other serious errors flow.
Boeing has been a mess since at least the merger with McDonnell-Douglas*
ReplyDeleteThey have essentially shifted from being engineering-led to management-led.
They also shifted their HQ from Seattle to Chicago (due to the merger) and obviously this cost a lot of time and money.
The 737 Max is just a farce. It has a poor safety record but essentially this is due to it being an old design stretch way beyond the sell-by. Their ownly genuinely new commercial aircraft is the 787 and that was not quite as revoloutionary as it should have been and late. Worse the 787 was meant to be the lead-craft in a whole new range - Project Yellowstone. This has not so much been canceled as just evaporated. Yellowstone was needed because Boeing was losing market share massively to Airbus and even Bormbardier and Embraer.
Boeing's "plan" was to go more for the military because the US government has a history of buying crap at ober the odds prices. Hence the merger but even then the F-15 and F-18 aren't the future. Great planes for the '80s-'90s but then the Spitfire was a stunner in 1940. Boeing's other big thing was the SLS rocket for NASA. Enormously late, enormously costly, based largely on re-jiggled Space Shuttle technology and basically much the same performance (and single-use) as a Saturn V. Would you pay top-dollar for a new car that gave the same mpg as your Grandpa's old '69 Chevy? NASA did!
Boeing is a total fucking mess. The only thing I can compare it to is BAE Systems over here and their utter complacency because they just know the MoD will buy anything they make because it's British innit? I am also beside myself with rage at the complete ignoring over here of Skylon. Now that is a game-changer.
I grew-up in Gateshead. Why the Millenium Bridge? You said it, "near Newcastle UK". Gateshead has always been that which is why when the local council got it's act together (basically became Lib-Dem led and not Labour who had become way too complacent along the lines of "pin a red badge on a donkey and it'll win" they thought we need some landmarks. Hence the bridge to Newcastle which is very pointedly named for Gateshead, the Sage concert hall, the Baltic arts centre and the Angel of the North. Now, people actually know what Gateshead is beyond a vague idea of it as a suburb of Newcastle.
See this: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/watch-how-newcastle-united-alan-14279420
*Fun fact about Jim McDonnell. He was obsessed with the supernatural hence fighters called Demon, Voodoo, Banshee etc. The US Navy called him on the F-4. They liked the plane just not the name. JM wanted to call it "Satan". Ultimately it went into production as the Phantom II and the rest is history.
Lots of great little movies. I really liked the broken window parable.
ReplyDeleteThe broken window thread is a rare Twitter gem. Deserves greater exposure.
ReplyDeleteFor different reasons, I was captivated by the kitty kat disco. And the puppies.
Lots of good, incredibly diverse stuff. I appreciate your including the lemmings and our enlightening exchange.
And I wonder when you have time to sleep.
The spy balloon was crazy. Now with the other 'object' over Alaska I'm still waiting to see what they say that was.
ReplyDeleteFor easy fun, cat disco and puppies can't go wrong.
ReplyDeleteOn another level, the broken window Twitter thread is a rare gem that deserves broader exposure.
Thank you for including my lemmings piece and the enlightening discussion you were essential to developing.
So much diversity in these roundups, Infidel. One wonders when you find time to sleep.
Annie
similar... yet the clouds made me feel floaty & lovely whereas the ocean waves made me feel seasick lol
ReplyDeletebtw, tx for linking my site!
ReplyDeleteNickM: It's disquieting because most of the passenger planes in this country are Boeing. One wonders how safe they are. I guess we'll have to depend on the airlines' own maintenance people to make sure things are OK.
ReplyDeleteI'd be very reluctant to fly right now anyway, being in a confined space for hours with a random set of people when all these respiratory viruses are going around, plus all the news stories of anti-mask jackasses acting up like toddlers.
To be honest, not being British, I did not know where Gateshead was until I looked it up. I'm not sure how many Americans even know where Newcastle is or why that's significant. I can remember when northern England generally was viewed as a sort of "rust belt", run-down and left behind by the transition to a post-industrial economy. I know it's not like that any more, but it was a bit surprising to see that such a "modern" bridge is up in that region.
Ricko: The broken window was a good story. I think we've all had that kind of experience with some minor task that got endlessly put off.
Annie: Those "disco" cats must have been going bonkers with so many light dots to chase. I hope a few more readers who visit the "lemmings" post will weigh in. Someone may come up with another animal metaphor. Next, maybe we can come up with a replacement for the Republicans' no-longer-appropriate elephant symbol.
I try to sleep, but generally can't do so for more than four or five hours in every twenty-four (probably a contributing factor to some of those mental-health issues). As long as I'm awake, might as well make some use of the time.
Mary K: The way things are right now, I hope the aliens don't choose this moment to show up. We'd undoubtedly shoot them down and maybe start an interstellar war.
Daal: That ocean video gave me a strong urge to find something stable to stand on, like Nebraska. I don't see how people tolerate such conditions.
Thanks for your post!
Thanks Infidel, you outdid yourself this week. Good stuff!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteSoooo ... Elon: wealthy, powerful and used to getting his way (For the betterment of the majority is implied) looks at the Chinese v Taiwan situation and feels the smaller nation should capitulate to the larger. It would 'keep the peace'.
ReplyDeleteHe then casts his beneficent gaze upon the Russia v Ukraine conflict and hints that the larger needs to be placated by Ukraine capitulating to Russia. The 'for the greater good' is implied.
Seems to be consistent, predictable, and something of a pattern. Funny how that works.
Indeed. He's so used to being the big bully on the block who gets his way by overpowering others, he naturally sympathizes with the gangsters in Beijing and Moscow who play a similar role.
ReplyDeleteInfidel,
ReplyDeleteCheck out "bridges across the Tyne". Geordies love bridges. We have been innovative bridge builders for a very long time. We have an exceptional history of engineering innovation.
Lots of excellent links here. Thanks for all of the work you do in providing these, and thanks for linking to my site too. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteNickM: Interesting. Well this is another unusual design and it's almost 150 years old.
ReplyDeleteDarrell: Thanks, and thanks for your post.
Infidel,
ReplyDeleteThe Swing Bridge was built by Lord Armstrong. He had his cannon factories up-river and his ship yards down-river (ships had got bigger). The folks of the Newcastle and Gateshead needed a way to get across the river and he needed a way to get his guns from Elswick to Wallsend (named for being the Eastern end of Hadrian's Wall - you beginning to see a very long-term engineering tradition here?) so the Swing Bridge enabled the reconciliation of the two goals.
Lord Armstrong's home, Cragside, Northumberland was the first house in the World to be electrically lit (hydro) and had all mod-cons. I think he had a dish-washer and stuff.
Note also the Tyne Bridge between the Swing Bridge and the Millenium Bridge. That was the dry-run for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Further South, Middlesborough has the quite odd Transporter Bridge (it's featured in the movie "Billy Elliot".
Every time I go into Manchester by rail I cross the Stockport Viaduct. This is still a vital part of the West Coast Mainline from London to Glasgow. It was the largest brick-built structure ever built when opened by Queen Victoria. It was designed by Robert Stephenson, son of George. I grew-up walking distance from George Stephenson's cottage.
Oh, and don't let anyone convince you that elephant-murdering git Edison invented electric light. That was Joseph Swan of Sunderland. Just a bit further South of Newcastle than Gateshead.