Mosquitos

Mosquito Pathfinders by Philip West

Started working on a jigsaw puzzle made from this painting last night. This morning this shows up:

Bargain Forklift - Mystery Problem

I Bought a Broken 11 Ton Forklift, Can I Save It?
Watch Wes Work

Big piece of heavy iron that he bought for a scrap sale price. Everything is fine, except it doesn't run. Okay, if it doesn't run, you can't know that everything is fine, can you? But he takes a close look and everything seems fine, except for that one problem, which manifests itself in a very strange way. The starter turns, but the engine doesn't. How can that be? Internal combustion engines typically have a flywheel bolted to the crankshaft at one end of the engine. The flywheel has a set of gear teeth all around its outside diameter. The electric starter motor has a small gear that engages with the teeth on the flywheel to get the engine turning. When the starter motor is running you can hear that electric motor noise. If the gear is turning the flywheel, you can hear that noise as well. If all that is happening and the motor isn't turning, then either the bolts or the crankshaft are broken. A broken crankshaft would probably mean a new engine.

Heavy equipment is funny. I suspect most applications work the machines to death. They are expensive and you need to get your money's worth out of them. Hauling rock for a few dollars a ton means you need to haul a ginormous amount of rock to pay for the machine.

There are other applications (really? You have to say 'applications'? Can't you just say 'uses'?) where endurance is not so important. You just need a machine to do that one really difficult job once a week or whenever. The job has to be done and you need a big machine to do the job. I think that was probably the situation with this machine. If it was one of a fleet of machines being worked to death, they would have mechanics on hand to deal with it. If it was one machine dedicated to a particular role, and it's been there for ten years, and it breaks, it's just easier all around to replace it with a new one.

Rockets Always Blow Up

Koyaanisqatsi - Ending Scene (Best Quality)
RikkiiZ

Cool rocket footage with cool music.

From Wikipedia article:

Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 American non-narrative documentary film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio, featuring music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage (some of it in reverse) of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live." In the Hopi language, the word koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance".

Is that a Saturn 5 rocket taking off? Yes and no. 22over7aintpi explains in a comment:

In case you were wondering there are two rockets featured in this sequence. The first is a Saturn V on the launch pad, the second is the first Atlas-Centaur Missile launched on May 8, 1962. No one was hurt in that explosion and clues to why it exploded are a flapping liquid nitrogen line by the vernier engine and the venting liquid hydrogen some seconds into flight. The failure was determined to be caused by an insulation panel that ripped off the Centaur during ascent, resulting in a surge in tank pressure when the LH2 overheated. Beginning at T+44 seconds, the pneumatic system responded by venting propellant to reduce pressure levels, but eventually, they exceeded the LH2 tank's structural strength. At T+54 seconds, the Centaur experienced total structural breakup and loss of telemetry, the LOX tank rupturing and producing an explosion as it mixed with the hydrogen cloud. Two seconds later, flying debris ruptured the Atlas's LOX tank followed by complete destruction of the launch vehicle. The panel had been meant to jettison at 49 miles (80 km) up when the air was thinner, but the mechanism holding it in place was designed inadequately, leading to premature separation. The insulation panels had already been suspected during Centaur development of being a potential problem area, and the possibility of an LH2 tank rupture was considered as a failure scenario. Testing was suspended while efforts were made to correct the Centaur's design flaws.

Title from The Right Stuff.

As for the quotes at the end, sounds kind of like my theory of dragons:

I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.

I like Graham Hancock, the guy who's always postulating the existence of an advanced human civilization a zillion years ago, except I just now had a thought. What if this advanced civilization actually created humans from the biological material at hand (like all the existing plants and animals)? Created us as an experiment, and when the experiment started to get out of hand, they bailed out. Kind of like the archetypal mad scientist in horror movies. He brews up some mystical stew in a large pot and it reacts too well, starts bubbling over and eventually expands to take over his lab, the building and the town. Yeah, at this point the mad scientist bails out and I suspect a similar scenario prompted our createors to bail out as well. 

It is doubtful we would ever find any evidence of such a civilization on account of the ice age glaciers that ground everything to dust. And if we ever did find any evidence, I doubt whether we would recognize it, much less understand it.

Remittance Men

cAvEman TV || Remittance Men
AvE

I love AvE, he's great. Remittance Men is a term I've heard forever, but I never had clear understanding of just what was going on. Actually, I don't know that I've heard it before, I have come across the term in numerous stories that I have read. AvE's story sounds just like Wikipedia's explanation:

In British history, a remittance man was an emigrant, often from Britain to a British colony, who was supported by regular payments from home on the expectation that he would stay away.

In this sense, remittance means the opposite of today's meaning of money that migrants send to their home countries.

Automatic Drumstick

LOST MY JOB PLAYING THIS
El Estepario Siberiano

I don't understand how he manages to keep that drumstick rocking in place. It's just nuts.

Esperanto

This Made Up Language *Almost* Took Over The World
Dis-ambi

Dad burn French, so full of themselves. They are kind of impressive, or at least a large number of people thought so. My parents encouraged me to take French in high school, which led me to taking it in college. I absolutely hated those classes. They were all about conjugation and reading and writing, which I thought was a stupid way to learn a language. Learn something useful first, like learn to speak it. Once you've done that you should be able figure out the reading the writing yourself. Now I know a few French words and phrases, but probably no more than I know of Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish can be summed up in 'uno mas cerveza fria por favor' which means 'one more cold beer please'. I mean, what else do you need to know?

Beechcraft Super King Air

Beechcraft Super King Air 200

I liked this picture so much I uploaded it to Jigsaw Planet.

Distance to the Sun

The Strange Sound That The Sun Makes
magnify

13 years for sound to travel from the Sun to the Earth, if sound could travel in space! Kind of puts that distance in a different light.

Are his numbers correct? Let's check. The sun is 93 million miles away, which translates into about 8 minutes at the speed of light. Since light travels at about one foot per nanosecond, we get:

Time for light to travel from the Sun to Earth		8		minutes
	times	60		seconds	per minute
	times	1	billion	nanoseconds	per second
	equals	480	billion	nanoseconds
	divided by	1		nanosecond	per foot
Distance to the Sun	equals	480	billion	feet
	divided by	5,280		feet	per mile
Distance to the Sun	equals	90	million	miles

My 90 million mile distance is not bad considering I started with 8 minutes which is not a precise time. Now we calculate how long sound would take to travel that distance:

Distance to the Sun	take	480	billion	feet
Speed of sound	divide by	1,125		feet	per second
	equals	427	million	seconds
	divided by	22,791,600		seconds	per year
Time for sound to travel from Sun to Earth	equals	14		years

The difference between his time of 13 years and my time of 14 years can be easily explained by the different temperatures when measuring the speed of sound.

Spreadsheet here.

Kill Me Love Me

[Official Trailer] The crazy scene version of the trailer is here! | Kill Me Love Me | YOUKU
YOUKU English-Get APP now

We finished the 32 episodes of Kill Me Love Me tonight. 

Wikipedia summary:

Kill Me Love Me is a 2024 Chinese television series based on the novel Chun Hua Yan by Hei Yan. It stars Liu Xueyi and Wu Jinyan in leading roles. The series premiered on Youku on October 14, 2024.

Synopsis

Ten years ago, during the war among the kingdoms of Dayan, Xiyan, and Nanyue, Prince Murong Jinghe of Dayan, renowned for his combat skills, led the Weibei army to significant victories against Xiyan and reclaimed Qingzhou city. However, on his return to court to receive rewards, all the civilians of Qingzhou were massacred and he was attacked by the common people who blamed him for the tragedy. The attack decimated all his forces and made him disable.

Mei Lin, an orphan of Qingzhou, swears to take revenge from Murong Jinghe and joins Shadow Works where she undergoes years of rigorous training to become an assassin. Soon the master of Shadow Works assigns her first mission which is to assassinate Murong Jinghe. Mei Lin enters the palace and waits for a chance to kill him not knowing that the one behind the Shadow Works is none other than Murong Jinghe himself.

(Jing=Jinghe) 

We watched the last three episodes tonight. The bad General Mingju has finally gotten his wish: his king has ordered him to attack Qingzhou in order to gain access to a sacred mountain so that his lunatic king can gain immortality. His first act is to order his archers to shoot flaming arrows into a forest next to Qingzhou. This starts a forest fire and General Jing, our hero, deploys his troops to fight the forest fire, which leaves the town sparsely defended, which is what bad General Mingju was hoping for.

While the town is sparsely defended, General Minju attacks, but something happened, I don't recall exactly, and he falls back to regroup. Good General Jing uses this opportunity to mount a suicide attack on Minju's camp in order to destroy his supplies and his siege engines. Qingzhou has impressive walls. Siege engines would be useful if you wanted to attack. 

They manage to sneak into camp and kill a few of Mingju's soldiers before they raise the alarm and now their situation is much, much worse. They are near to getting wiped out and Pingyan, General Jing's sidekick, pulls off the most heroic death scene ever. He gets nailed to a post with some stout looking crossbow bolts. He is shot in the chest with three or four of these bolts, so we know he's a goner. (Yes, I know it's television, and people who we think have died get resurrected all the time, but in this series only the main characters get a second chance. Second string characters die once and they're done.) The bolts have no fletching and the main target of this raid (a big pile of industrial size firecrackers) is within sight. So here we go:

Pingyan pushes himself off the post, leaving big holes in his chest and the crossbow bolts stuck in the post. He picks up a big jug of oil, throws it into the air and then hits with a club or something and smashes it. Now he is drenched with oil. He now takes a couple of running steps, leaps into the air, flies over a flaming torch, which catches him on fire, and now he flies onto the pile of fireworks which dutifully explodes. That has got to be the most spectacularly heroic scene ever.

Tone Matters?

Making an old piano sound new
The Piano Doctor

I am going to assume this guy believes what he is saying. I'm sorry, I can't hear any difference between old and new. Okay, I might be able to hear a slight difference, but not enough for me to say one is better than the other. It might be because I am old, or because my loudspeaker is weak, but I suspect my brain is not as sensitive to sound as some other people.

I was talking to a guy I know about tunes and he tells me he doesn't really care for instrumental music, he prefers singing. That shocked me. I never understood the popularity of opera. I find opera tedious in the extreme. Singing by itself is not my favorite. I like a tune with music, singing and lyrics that are clear. Lyrics don't have to be totally clear, nonsense is sometimes okay, and there are any number of tunes out there I have zero affection for. Rock and roll and jazz are more my cup of tea.

Jaguar Is Dead

Jaguar Is Dead
Albon

You might have seen the new Jaguar ad. Gawd awful if you ask me. This guy goes way back to the beginning and traces the history of Jaguar. I always liked Jaguars, I thought they looked cool. They had big engines, relative to the rest of the European auto industry, and the engines had dual overhead cams, which, to my teenage freakazoid mentality, was the very pinnacle of coolness.

I always knew that some car nerds worshipped the C and D-types, but I never knew why. This video shows us why.

There is an ad for some kind of bullshit that starts at the 4:30 mark and runs for a minute. Later on there is another ad for their T-shirt, but it only runs for 5 seconds. Since I can tolerate it, I am going to assume that you can to.

Christmas in Damascus

Bab Touma's Dandana Cafe is fully decked out for the season [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

Opening paragraphs from an Al Jazeera report:

Christmas in Damascus is different this year, after al-Assad’s fall by Ali Haj Suleiman

Damascus, Syria – There’s something different about Christmas this year, Damascenes say.

Although the decorations may have been more elaborate last year, Carol al-Sahhaf says this year’s festive mood is a cut above, less than two weeks after Bashar al-Assad fled and his regime crumbled.

On either side of the biblical Street Called Straight – or al-Mustaqeem or just Straight Street for short – lights and Christmas trees adorn the cafes, restaurants, shops and homes of Bab Sharqi, the neighbourhood nestled up to the Eastern Gate of the ancient Old City.

The alleyways around Straight Street are bustling, with a spring-like feeling in the air as shopkeepers repaint, dust off their shelves, and hang the green, white and black Free Syria flag.

Lights, cookies, and optimism

Al-Assad fled on December 8, and the country erupted into jubilation that lasted for days as Syrians celebrated the fall of the al-Assad family and the end of more than 50 years of brutal rule.

As those celebrations calmed, Olga al-Muuti told Al Jazeera, everyone turned to preparing for Christmas, New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas.

 

Hoser

It's Bob and Doug McKenzie, You Hosers | Letterman

Uniberp reports:

At work today, as the days wind down for me, I was amused to see an email regarding performance of some of my tech team, using the phrase  "... who really hosed that up...". Entirely unacceptable in the passive-aggressive culture that is self-styled enlightened corporate profit gouging, this email set off a flurry of HR involvement, senior management closed door sessions, and gossip enough to choke a goose, which is fittingly appropriate, culminating with the offending party being taken to the parking lot and thrown into a uncovered manhole..

I laughed, said "Finally some plain talk."

I had to explain "hosed" to one person, and looked up the origin, found this:

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/hoser

toward the end... 

"Who, or What, is a Hoser?

Hosers are nearly always white men. A hoser is, to a great extent, the Canadian equivalent of American terms like “hillbilly” and “redneck” – though without the overtly racist connotations of the latter word. A parody of the Canadian public service announcement “Hinterland Who’s Who” states that, “The hoser is often found in clusters, in habitats such as the Tim Hortons parking lot, Harvey’s and hockey arenas. Feeding mainly on a diet of smokes, coffee, poutine and beer, the hoser is a colourful animal — and a slob."

 

Ship Spotting

Terrible picture of MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher

Driving up Germantown Road from St. John a couple of days ago I noticed a US Navy ship and I thought I'd like to get a photo of that ship. Problem with Germantown Road is that there are very few places where you can pull off the road, and it's busy enough that I didn't want to just stop in the middle of the road. Now if I had a proper camera, I could probably have got a shot of the ship just by pointing my camera out the window and pressing the go button. 

Sidebar rant: But I don't have a proper camera, instead I have a fancy-schmancy smartphone. It takes great pictures, much better than my last smartphone, or maybe I've just subliminally modified my phone handling so I am now compatible with the smartphone's preferred method of behavior. Anyway, taking a picture with a smart phone requires, multiple fingers, multiple touches and the patience of a saint. For someone who grew up with mechanical switches that reacted instantly, all these new-fangled electronic gizmos with their multiple milli-second delays are effing bullshit.

Today I thought I would make an effort to try and take a picture of this ship. First I took off driving directly towards the ship. Big fail. No roads come anywhere near the docks. Most of the land is given over to parking lots for imported cars, it's all private industrial stuff, no ger-finger-pokin-tourists wanted.

Cross the St. Johns bridge and head up US Highway 30. Not a tourist friendly area. Cliffs on the south side of the road and tank farms on the north side. Took the first photo from an entrance to one of these tank farms.

Another terrible picture of MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher

Took this from another pull-out a little farther up the road. Not looking good here. Turned around and headed back toward the bridge and found a side road so I pulled over.

NW Hoge Ave

And, oh look, there's stairs going up the hill, maybe I'll get high enough I can get a decent shot. The stairs are something else.

Stout, industrial strength stairs

that go way up the hillside

but ultimately don't go anywhere.

Seriously long stairs that got me high enough up to get the next photo

MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher

VesselFinder reports the MV Bob Hope and the MV Fisher are both in Portland. I only saw the one ship. Looking at Wikipedia's photos, they appear to be identical. I don't know whether the report showing that both MV Bob Hope and the MV Fisher are in Portland is in error, or the Navy obfuscating their ship's locations, or whether I'm blind and the ships are here.

USNS Bob Hope has appeared here before.

Costco Carry

Costco Carry

Went to Costco two days ago and this guy was into front of us at the checkout line. I know you can get a permit for concealed-carry, but I'm not sure what the rules are for open carry. In any case, I don't know if anyone besides me noticed, and nobody made a fuss.

Do-It-Yourself Machine gun

Finnish belt fed .22LR machine gun

Dripper53:

An 80-year old man in Finland created a belt-fed .22 caliber machine gun out of an electric drill. The cam-driven weapon had a firing rate of 420 rpm (for comparison, the US M3 Grease Gun is 450 rpm). The man was not prosecuted, but he had to give up his creation.

 

Visual Word Form Area

The Scribe, Ludwig Deutsch (1894)

The Visual Word Form Area – a brain region that coevolved with reading and writing - Peter Frost

In ancient times, demand was strong for scribes who could write and copy texts day in and day out. Only a small minority had the stamina and ability, and they enjoyed reproductive success.

'Reproductive success', now there's a loaded phrase. Here's the opening paragraphs:

The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is a brain region that helps us recognize written words and letters. Without it, reading requires much more effort. When a man suffered an accidental lesion to his VWFA during brain surgery, he lost much of his ability to read while losing none of his general language abilities. After six months, he had partially recovered, but reading still took twice as long as it had before (Gaillard et al, 2006).

The VWFA is composed of neurons that were once used for face recognition:

Thus, learning to read must involve a ‘neuronal recycling’ process whereby pre-existing cortical systems are harnessed for the novel task of recognizing written words. … [Such areas of the cortex] possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small contrasted shapes that are used as characters, and the appropriate connections to send this information to temporal lobe language areas (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011)

This neuronal recycling seems to have become hardwired, at least in some people. After Swiss preschoolers played a grapheme/phoneme correspondence game for a total of 3.6 hours over 8 weeks, an MRI scan showed their VWFAs preferentially responding to images of strings of letters. Yet only a few of the children could actually read, and only at a rudimentary level (Brem et al., 2010).

Humans may have initially identified words by using face-recognition neurons. As reading became more important, natural selection favored those humans who could free up more of their face-recognition neurons for reading. This selection eventually created a large neuronal population dedicated solely to word recognition, i.e., the VWFA.

He goes for a bit. I tried reading the rest of it but got bogged down. You may enjoy it.

100 Episodes of Gotham

Gotham Cast - Barbara Kean, Penguin, Tabitha, Riddler, Poison Ivy (?), Bruce Wayne, Jim Gordon, Selina Kyle (Cat Woman), Alfred Pennyworth, Lucius Fox, Harvey Bullock, Lee Tompkins, 

We finished watching all five seasons of Gotham (4 x 22 = 88, + 12 = 100) It isn't a great show, but it was very entertaining. The sets and the costuming are great. The characters are all insane, to various degrees, from mildly neurotic to way out there orbiting Saturn. Likewise the criminal schemes that the villains come up with (or should I say screenwriters?) are wildly inventive. 

Penguin & The Riddler

The whole thing is ridiculous, but the characters are great, especially Penguin and The Riddler. In spite of being murderous thugs, they are only slightly crazy and do believe in civilization, unlike most of the other deranged villains.

Although much of the 'science' behind the criminal schemes is not real, enough of it is close enough to real science that you can see a madman could plausibly wreak the destruction they are planning, and in some cases actually do, like blowing up all the bridges that connect the island of Manhattan, er, Gotham, to the mainland. And then we get to see what happens to a city when law & order collapses. Similar, I imagine, to what has happened to numerous cities in the Mid-east and North Africa in recent years.

The sex angle was kind of curious. In the first season we see Jim Gordon getting into and out of bed with various beautiful women. All that stops in the 2nd and 3rd seasons, though there is period when Bruce Wayne is out partying with his peers and I seem to recall a couple of scenes with him in bed with various young women. Then in season 4, necklines on all the leading ladies plunge to the navel, but that is all there is, I don't think there is so much as a kiss. Season 5 goes full soap opera with the evil Barbara Kean getting knocked up by Jim, who then turns around and marries Lee Tompkins.

Just so you know this is comic-book land, nobody ever really dies. Oh, extras like henchmen and civilians get knocked off left, right and center, but the main characters never really die, even though they suffer grievous wounds. Sometimes it is a miracle of modern surgery combined with an iron constitution. Sometimes it's mysterious fluids acting in magical ways.

The most annoying villain might be Jervis Tetch and his hypnotic spells to which everyone seems to be susceptible. Some of cases are implausible, at best, but his mass hypnotism seems an awful lot like real-life cults, like the Democrats.

The worst part was the ritual promises and advice exchanged by the heroes, like not killing anybody, but then killing any number of non-essential characters, but failing to kill villains when they have the opportunity and the villain obviously needs killing.

Dance On Your Piano

Toccata And Fugue - Johann Sebastian Bach, Floor Piano
Piano Sheet Music

Wonderful. I presume they rehearsed this beforehand, which makes me wonder if this might be their own floor piano, or did they come in at night to borrow it. 

I have a couple of posts I'm working on, but they require having a clear-ish head and some energy, which are in short supply. I hope to get there eventually, but meanwhile I have YouTube Shorts to keep me, and possibly you, amused.

Syria

al Assad - Dasha Zaitseva/Gazeta. R

The sudden departure of Assad seems to have caught everyone by surprise. The situation seems to be chaotic at best. Don't want to speculate what's going to happen, but this might be good time to review what led to this situation. Here's some stories I can across today:

• Assad’s collapse was coming – everyone just looked away by Vitaly Ryumshin
• Families search Syria’s Sednaya Prison for loved ones after al-Assad’s fall
• The Syrian mess - Bayou Rennaissance Man
• Syrious Change - The Assad Regime Falls - The Shekel

I do wonder why most every country outside of North America and Europe seems to be run vicious thugs. Is that the only way they can keep a lid on things? Are their populations just more naturally fractious? Are they stupid? Has the heat fried their brains?

Or maybe I just haven't seen the light. If I had, I would know in my heart of hearts that the Grand Poobah of Lower Elbonia was the voice of God and that I should kill all the infidels. I'm sorry, I can't. I am too indoctrinated with the liberal ways of the West. Christ almighty, my wife not only drives, she has her own car.

Funnies

Tu-160

Russian Tupolev Tu-160

This is like a scene out of a science fiction movie. I know airliners routinely fly over the Arctic and snow-covered mountains, but they don't fly so low (unless they are landing in Switzerland), and airliners aren't supersonic. I dunno, it's just a heck of a picture. Also, I spent a couple of hours putting the puzzle together.

Previous posts that mention this airplane.

Tam has a nightmare

Well, that was an awful dream...

Little Dieter Needs To Fly

Little Dieter Needs to Fly - Werner Herzog (1997) [Documentary] Watch Free Full Length Online
Josep Svęnnan

This is an amazing film. It's just over an hour long. It chronicles the life and times of one Dieter Dengler, German immigrant, US Navy pilot and Vietnamese prisoner of war. He escapes, which is obvious from the opening scene.

I originally watched the copy posted by YouTube Movies & TV only to find it age-restricted, so you can't embed it. Well, you can, but it won't play anywhere but on YouTube. Then I found this copy and it is not age-restricted, though who knows, YouTube may catch on and slap a restriction on it. Anyway, going by the title and the run time, it's probably the same video I watched. I haven't watched this one yet so I can't say for sure.

There isn't anything visually offensive in the video, but his verbal descriptions of his experiences are horrific.

Dieter flew a Skyraider, which has appeared here before.

Yellow Submarine

Brian Betten stands in front of his “yellow submarine” — a propane tank painted yellow and decorated like the marine vessel in the Beatles song. - Messenger photo by Bret Hayworth

This 'submarine' sits by the side of US20 not far from my wife's hometown of Rockwell City, Iowa. The Messenger is the Fort Dodge newspaper. Got to wondering after I wrote 'newspaper', do they still print a real paper newspaper? Yes, they do. 

You can see an older version of the submarine on Google's Streetview:

Yellow Submarine, Google Streetview

It even has a placemark on Google Maps now.

The Beatles - Yellow Submarine
The Beatles

Here's the song that started all this. I really liked the Beatles music back then, but at some point I kinda got burned out on it, and kind of tired of McCarthy's relentless cheerfulness, and I quit listening to them. Probably happened about the same time that Lennon was shot.  Well, I didn't stop listening completely, I still listen to them occasionally.

The Proxy War in Ukraine

I could be completely wrong, but I don't think Russia is bent on world domination, they just want a secure place in the world. The war mongers in the White House seem to think that Russia must be destroyed and if we destroy Western Europe along the way, well, that's just too bad.

Deception, manipulation, sabotage: What the UK does to keep the Ukraine war going by Tarik Cyril Amar

Leaked papers expose a secret military operation that includes planning attacks, suppressing media and brainwashing the British public

A couple of excerpts:

[Lieutenant General Charlie Stickland] – boasting of his pirate ancestors and in charge of “UK-led joint and multinational overseas military operations” – and his motley crew have just been the object of an investigative exposé by Grayzone reporter Kit Klarenberg. In, for now, two articles, the Grayzone has detailed how, in 2022, Stickland set up a below-the-radar network of “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech.” Under the name Project Alchemy and overlapping and liaising with another group of wannabe keyboard Ninjas calling themselves – I kid you not – “the Elders,” this conspiratorial group has worked on, in essence, keeping the Ukraine war going at any price and by means foul and fouler.

. . .  

Doing what exactly? All kinds of things, really, and all based on one stupid yet once immensely popular assumption: that the proxy war in Ukraine could be leveraged to defeat Russia, reduce it to geopolitical insignificance, impose regime change on it, and even break it up. Some, including the new de facto foreign minister of the EU, Estonia’s Kaja Kallas – imagine Annalena Baerbock, but without the brilliant intellect – still seem to be on that political equivalent of an LSD trip gone terribly wrong. What a hangover it will be one day, probably soon.

People mentioned here: 

• Lieutenant General Charlie Stickland - British Army
• Kit Klarenberg - Investigative reporter
• Kaja Kallas - Prime Minister of Estonia
• Annalena Baerbock - Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany
• Tarik Youssef Cyril Amar - Historian

Now it may be that the gangsters in the White House are right to be afraid of Russia. If Russia gets their act together and can get other 'enemies of the West' to cooperate with them, in five or ten years they might be able to bring serious pressure to bear on the USA. 

I don't think we should be wasting our resources on screwing over the rest of the world, we should be working to make the USA as strong and powerful as possible. Of course, when you are a gangster, you don't really know how to bring out the best in people, all you can do is frighten them into submission.

P. S. It seems like I am seeing more stories critical of Biden and his minions lately. Has Trump's victory caused the more people to stand in the light, or has it just improved my outlook?

Mick Jagger introduces The Beatles to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Mick Jagger introduces The Beatles to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Alejandro Suarez Basso

1988. Cool. Jagger would have been 45.

The Hand That Keeps the World Informed

The Hand That Keeps the World Informed

This image shows up in the Linotype video and I thought it was pretty cool. I want to hang a copy on my wall. It comes from the book The Manual of Linotype Typography, which is available online. There are a couple of copies for sale out there.

Nord Stream

Another take on the whole Nord Stream debacle:

Merkel blows a hole in Washington’s Nord Stream narrative by Rachel Marsden

I like this bit:

“The United States argued that its security interests were affected by the building of the pipeline because its ally Germany would make itself too dependent on Russia. In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies,” Merkel writes.

“The United States was chiefly interested in its own economic interests, as it wanted to export to Europe LNG obtained through fracking.”

This pretty much establishes that it was by premeditated design that Washington leveraged the Russian military operation in Ukraine as a convenient pretext to turn economic competitor Germany – and the EU more generally – into a vassal. But Merkel’s successor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the rest of the German and European establishment, acted like Joe Biden was just coming to their rescue out of benevolence when he offered to sell them LNG to replace Russian gas – which turned out to cost several times the price, to the ongoing detriment of German and European industry and citizenry.

While Trump and Biden are both promoting America, Biden is acting like a gangster and exploiting anyone he can get his claws in, while Trump promotes good business. 

Thanksgiving

Entertaining story about the origin of Thanksgiving. Socialists might not enjoy it.

The Great Thanksgiving Hoax by Richard J. Maybury

The early American colonies were just disasters - half the people died. I dunno, maybe that was par for the course. But reading this story makes me wonder just who were these people who signed up for this adventure to a brave, new world. I suspect malcontents from the lunatic fringe, malcontents with money, ships are expensive. It sounds like a movie trope - band of misfits thrown into a dangerous situation with people getting killed off right, left and center.

Linotype

Linotype
YouTube Movies & TV

Kind of long, but totally worthwhile. One of the projects I worked on at my first programming job was a data entry / data base system for a check printing company. They were using Linotype machines to set the personal information that was printed on each check (name, address, what-not). Someone had converted the linotype machines to get their keystrokes over a wire instead of from the mechanical keyboard. They had a room with several of these machines, but no operators. Instead they had a separate room full of girls sitting at computer keyboards typing away. You had to be careful out on the floor where the Linotype machines were because even though they were converted to work with electrical inputs, they still cast hot lead into lines of type, and every now and again there would be a hiccup, and a spurt of hot metal would squirt out of the machine. Those 'hiccups' were referred to as squirt codes on the premise that a bit of code sent down the wire from the computer would cause the machine to hiccup. Actually, it was just the nature of the Linotype machine. Hiccups happened before computers were even a concept. Molten lead is not that hot compared to some things, like molten steel, but it will still burn the hell out of you if you come into contact with it.

I look at the computer systems we use for text these days and while it looks clean and simple from the outside, they are several orders of magnitude more complicated. Construction of the Linotype was dependent on the whole industrial infrastructure that existed back in 1900. Construction of a modern computer needs all of that with a whole additional level of much more complicated machinery and organization.

Given a supply of metal and a machine shop, it ought to be possible to build a new Linotype machine. People have made simple integrated circuits in their garage, but what would it take it make a flat panel display? I have no idea.

European Power Grid

European Power Grid

The link goes to an interactive map.

Via Detroit Steve

F-4 Phantom

Turkish Air Force Phantom

No camouflage here, he wants you to know he's coming for you.

Exercise Bright Star - Egypt 1983

U.S. and Egyptian aircraft over the Pyramids during Exercise Bright Star '83
Click to embiggenate

I came across this photo while skimming the news this morning. It was at the top of a story on Geopolitics about Egypt. I glanced at it and thought 'cool, a bunch of jet fighters flying over the pyramids', but then I looked closer and realized that all of the airplanes were different. Left to right we have:

• McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom
• General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon
• Dassault Mirage 5
• Grumman F-14 Tomcat
• Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21
• Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-19
• Vought F-8 Crusader
• Grumman EA-6B Growler

This photograph is phenomenal. Whoever managed to get all these aircraft to fly together and then managed to capture this photo as they flew over the pyramids deserves a medal.

The Bright Star exercises started in 1981 and are still going on every couple of years.