Saturday, December 13, 2025
Friday, December 12, 2025
English Electric Canberra
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| English Electric Canberra |
Put this jigsaw puzzle together this afternoon and realized I had put up a post about the Canberra some time ago. That post pointed to the following video:
Canberra Over Stalingrad - Penetrating Russia's Area 51
Mark Felton Productions
Trichinosis
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| Pork chops in a skillet. (Elena Veselova/Shutterstock) |
I've always stuck to pork that is well done, but I've always kind of wondered about trichinosis. I've made a couple of inquiries over the years, but I never got any kind of a helpful answer. Now we've got a story in Willamette Week that explains the current situation. Seems trichinosis has been pretty much eradicated from the farmed pork supply. It still exists in wild animals, so you want to careful about eating that bear you just shot.
Dream
A young woman comes down from upstairs and tells me there is a problem with the skylight, something about a curtain or a vase, so I go upstairs with her and I see there is indeed a problem - there is a big hole in the roof. I get all the way up and I see that half of the roof along with the upstairs ceiling has been torn off. There is no debris to speak of, it's just all gone.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Down Cemetery Road — Apple TV Series
Down Cemetery Road — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV
This might be a thriller, but it's a bit of a mess, but that is probably why it's so entertaining. We've got a bunch of curious characters, a bunch of villains, and a bunch of incompetence. It's all tied to the Ministry of Defense trying to erase the evidence of a chemical warfare experiment gone horribly wrong, all told in a fairly light-hearted fashion.
Our girl, Sarah, is played by Ruth Wilson, famous (to us, anyway) for playing the psychopath Alice in the series Luther with Idris Elba.
Headliner Emma Thompson plays Zoë Boehm, a private investigator. She and Sarah are the driving forces in this show, i.e. the troublemakers that C wants to shut up.
Adeel Akhtar plays Hamza Malik, or maybe Malik Hamza. In the cast he is listed as Hamza, but in the show he is always referred to as Malik, except for one case when his full name is used, but I can't remember which way it goes. Whatever. We've seen him in other shows, usually as a peripheral character, often as a policeman. In any case, this time he plays a fumbling, fawning toady, totally out of his depth, who has inexplicably been put in charge of the clean up operation. His spectacular incompetence makes me wonder how he got put in charge of anything. I dunno, maybe only incompetent people are willing to work at such jobs because that is the only kind of job they can get. All you have to do is be willing to do whatever you are told.
The title comes from the poem Toads Revisited by Philip Larkin. Kind of a grim little piece.
Cast:
8 episodes 50 minutes each.
Elephant Hunting Returns
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| A pair of male elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana [Mike Hutchings/Reuters] |
Botswana government has increased its annual trophy-hunting quota for elephants:
Botswana, a largely dry nation which is home to 2.3 million people, has more than 130,000 elephants, nearly one-third of all elephants in Africa. The African continent is home to some 415,000 elephants of the world’s 460,000 elephants. The rest of the world’s elephants are in Asia.In 2019, the government lifted a five-year moratorium on elephant hunting to keep the elephant population in check and help generate revenue from trophy hunters for rural communities.A preliminary government draft indicates that the quota for trophy hunting for 2026 has been raised to 430 elephants, up from 410 in 2025.
The move reflects Botswana’s general approach to the conservation of elephant herds.
In 2014, the country imposed a complete ban on trophy hunting but reversed that decision five years later, saying elephant numbers had risen too high and were threatening farmers’ livelihoods.
Now, the government allocates annual hunting quotas for more than a dozen species, including elephants, rhinos, and hippopotamuses.
Other African nations, including Namibia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, also have trophy-hunting quotas to manage their elephant and other wildlife populations.
Strange Days
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| Memorial bust honoring Ivan Kokovin (L) and Michael Gloss in Donetsk, Russia, December 9, 2025. © Donetsk Mayor Aleksey Kulemzin / Telegram |
This is just the strangest thing I have seen in a while.
Memorial to slain son of senior CIA official unveiled in Russia
Michael Gloss volunteered to fight in the Ukraine conflict and was killed liberating Donbass
A memorial bust honoring Michael Gloss, the son of CIA Deputy Director Juliane Gallina who died while fighting for Russia, was unveiled this week in Donetsk.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Dream
I was making some repairs to an old, ramshackle, beach front store. I had to get a ladder and nail down half a dozen shingles on the roof of this single story building. When I came down an acquaintance drove up and complained about the way I parked. If I had pulled up behind the car ahead of me, he could have pulled in behind me, but as it was he was going to have to parallel park. Isn't that the way it always is? The situation was complicated by a section of yellow curb. A casual glance gave the impression that there was room behind my car, but if you step across the road, you can see that the restricted area was supposed to be a little longer, but the paint had been flaking off and was no longer clearly visible. Wouldn't make any difference to the meter maid, if one even showed up at this remote location. Anyway, he pulled a U-turn and parked in motel parking lot across the street.
Monday, December 8, 2025
U. S. Energy Consumption
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| Estimated U. S. Energy Consumption in 2023: 93.6 Quads |
Found this on Casey Handmer's Blog. Click to embiggenate. A quad is a unit of measurement equal to one quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units (BTUs). I suspect that Rejected Energy (the gray box in the upper right corner of the chart) is energy that is converted to heat and dissipated, and Energy Services (the block box in the lower right corner) is energy that was used for useful things. So roughly one third of the 93.6 quadrillion BTUs were used to do something useful, and the other two-thirds was was converted to waste heat. This is a bunch, but it is negligible compared to the zillion BTUs the sun delivers every day.
Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript is a hand written book from the 15th century. It is written in an unknown language using unknown characters. People have been trying to decipher it since forever, but as yet there has been no success. There are a couple of theories on what it is, one of which is that it is just gibberish written by a madman. Another theory is that it is an encryption of a text in another language like Latin. Today I found this post on Schneier on Security:
Here’s a fun paper: “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext“:
Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a historically plausible cipher that can replicate the manuscript’s unusual properties. The resulting ciphera verbose homophonic substitution cipher I call the Naibbe cipher can be done entirely by hand with 15th-century materials, and when it encrypts a wide range of Latin and Italian plaintexts, the resulting ciphertexts remain fully decipherable and also reliably reproduce many key statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript at once. My results suggest that the so-called “ciphertext hypothesis” for the Voynich Manuscript remains viable, while also placing constraints on plausible substitution cipher structures.
The first problem anyone attempting to decipher this manuscript runs into is deciding just which symbols are letters, since the symbols tend to run into each other. And then there is the problem of assigning tokens. Only after that is done can you begin trying to decipher it using a computer.
Peace through having a bigger hammer
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| Aerial Refueling the B-52 by Senior Airman Jessica Do |
The above image headlined this announcement:
Valdai Club to Discuss the Results of 2025 in the Area of International Security
I found the combination a little unsettling. I shouldn't, but I did.
Sunday, December 7, 2025
USS Arizona
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| USS Arizona (BB 39) upon completion of modernization at Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, 2 March 1931. |
This was fifteen years after she was launched and ten years before Pearl Harbor.
USS Arizona (BB-39), a Pennsylvania-class battleship, was built at the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York, and was commissioned in October 1916, serving in the Atlantic and Mediterranean areas until 1921 when she was based in Southern California. Modernized in 1929-31 at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, she returned to the Pacific after transporting President Herbert Hoover to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. From 1940, Arizona and other Pacific Fleet battleships were based out of Pearl Harbor. On December 7th, 1941, she was moored in "Battleship Row" when Japanese carrier aircraft attacked. Hit by several bombs, her forward ammunition magazines exploded, wrecking the ship's forward hull and collapsing her forward superstructure, which caused her to sink with the loss of 1,177 of her crew. Arizona's hull is now a tomb for those who lost their lives. In the early 1960s, a memorial structure, the USS Arizona Memorial, was constructed over her midship hull. Operated by the National Park Service, the shrine is a permanent memorial site at Pearl Harbor for those who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor and for the servicemembers who lost their lives in the Pacific War. - National Museum of the United States Navy
Modesty
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| An airman inspects his B-25’s four nose mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The .75mm cannon can be seen on the lower right portion of the nose. Note the machine guns mounted in pods on the outside of the cockpit. |
I'm reading Indestructible by John R. Bruning. It's about Pappy Gunn and his experience fighting the Japanese in the early days of WW2 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It's a bit of a slog, about half of the book is repetitive emotional clap-trap, but the actual story is fascinating. I'm a little past half way through and he is the process of mounting eight 50 caliber machine guns to the nose of a B-25. His group is also involved in flying missions out of Charters Towers, Australia, supporting the garrison at Port Moresby, New Guinea. On page 300 we get this report of one flight to Port Moresby:
After work after weeks of working long hours and stifling hot hangers, those flights to Moresby afforded him the chance to air himself out a bit, much to the astonishment of the skeleton crew who ran with him.
He donned an aboriginal loincloth and would stretch his shirt and slacks out behind the pilot seat to let them get some air, too. This cost him dearly once when somebody opened a side window in the cockpit somewhere over the Coral Sea the sudden jet of the slipstream into the cockpit blew his clothes into a whirlwind. Before he could catch them, they spun right out the side window. Normally, that would just have been an aggravation, but Pappy's pocket contained at least $1,000 in pay and poker winnings. The actual amount varied on the telling and retelling by his pals but even worse was his arrival at Port Moresby in nothing but a loin cloth. As they parked at the Airdrome there, a group of females - either Red Cross workers or nurses - showed up with coffee and snacks for the crew. Pappy refused to get out of the cockpit. Always modest, the idea of a woman other than Polly [his wife] seeing him in such a state roused him to panic fury. He demanded that somebody get him a change of clothes, and when his crew wouldn't stop laughing, legend has it he threatened to shoot them. Somebody finally got him a shirt and a pair of slacks he dressed while muttering a constant stream of invectives, then dropped out of the B-25's hatch and stormed off.
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| Charters Towers to Port Moresby |
Update next day replace Darwin with Charters Towers.
Addiction
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| District Attorney Nathan Vasquez. (Nathaniel Perales) |
Oregon has been trying to figure out what to do about recreational / dangerous / addictive / narcotic drugs for a while. We haven't found a solution, but we keep trying different things. Some people say we should just lock up all the drug addicts, but keeping people in prison costs a lot of money, and the prisons are overcrowded anyway, and nobody wants to spend more money on prisons. Anyway, Nathan is going to try tightening up the existing laws. We shall see if that makes any difference. Willamette Week has the story, wherein I found this quote:
Finallynelson50, via Reddit: “Clearly, none of you have ever had an addiction to drugs problem. This new shit on the streets is bad. Starts out delivering an immense high and you love it. Feels like everything in your life has just disappeared. Abused sexually, physically, emotionally, childhood issues, you name it, it’s all gone for the time being. Then you notice that you need more to achieve the same high. You want to quit, but you can’t! No one except an addict knows what it feels like to get ‘SICK,’ you’d literally sell your soul to not get sick! It literally makes everything in your body excruciatingly painful like you can’t imagine. Most users you see out there are looking for the drugs so they don’t get sick. None of you know what you’re talking about. The only thing that this is going to do is keep the jails full! And that, of course, makes the government money.”
I don't see how keeping the jails full makes anyone any money, unless it's a private prison, and I don't think we have any of those here in Oregon.
Saturday, December 6, 2025
Friday, December 5, 2025
Ferrari/Maserati Engine That Lasted 5 Minutes - Quattroporte GTS - PT6
Ferrari/Maserati Engine That Lasted 5 Minutes - Quattroporte GTS - PT6
M539 Restorations
I don't understand why I watch some videos and some I quit after a couple of minutes. It's kind of like reading books. Sometimes I'll pick up a book and start reading it and it will just grab me and I can't put it down. More often I will read a bit and get bored and set it down.
I suppose this one sucked me in because we're on the track of a mystery. Near as I can make out, it was running on dirty oil that caused some minor damage that started the bearings down the slippery slope to failure. I wonder if analysis of the old oil might have revealed impending doom. But even if you were alerted, what a pain to pull the engine out of this car. He must have pulled a zillion bolts before he was able to examine the rod bearings.
Remind me never to buy a car with a turbocharger. Nice, fancy jet-age power, but stuffing one under the hood of most any car is going to make any repairs twice as difficult and twice as expensive.
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| 2022 Ferrari 296 GTB |
There might be another reason I watched this video and that is I was reading about Ferrari's merchandising business, how they make more off of Ferrari branded T-shirts and jackets than they do from selling cars, which prompted me to go look on E-bay where I typed in Ferrari and I got back a bunch of Ferrari automobiles. I was expecting the usual kind of E-Bay crap like coffee mugs and planters, but no, there were a bunch of Ferraris on there, and there was a very nice looking one in South Carolina for $20K which got me to thinking about buying one. That is a really stupid idea, I hope I don't fall for one of my whims.
Pipeline Ships
Pipelay process on Allseas' Pioneering Spirit
Allseas
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| Aegir Deepwater Construction Vessel (DCV) |
Aegir DCV lays pipelines across the ocean floor. Unlike the Pioneering Spirit (video above), the Aegir uses the J-Lay technique which involved assembling the pipe sections in the tower and dropping the new sections out the bottom of the ship. This only works in deep water, but there is plenty of deep water out there.
Gorgon Project Overview Producing Liquefied Natural Gas in Australia
ordunsnews
I saw another, better quality video about the construction of the pipelines that serve the underwater wells of the Gorgon Project, but the internet ate it and I cannogh be finding it capin.
Mirage
Aegir Deepwater Construction Vessel (DCV)
Binnenvaart & Transport Nederland
There is something funny going on in this video and I don't know what's causing it. The camera is pointing at a big ship that is some distance away. As you watch the video you can hear the wind blowing and when it does, the towers on the ship seem to wave back and forth. Now I am sure you could create that effect with some fancy video editing software, but I don't think that's what is happening. Is the camera wobbling? I don't think so, if it did, the whole scene would wobble. The only thing I can think of is that the density of the air changes as the wind blows, and that change in density is enough to change the index of refraction and so distort the image. It also explains why only the towers are affected - air that is closer tot he ground is not going to traveling as fast and will not be subject to the same changes in density. Air that is higher up will be moving faster.
Thursday, December 4, 2025
A Man on the Inside | Season 2 - Netflix Series
A Man on the Inside | Season 2 Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
It's a farce, all the dumbest jokes and all the dumbest gags, but sometimes it turns into something very, very funny.
Eight 30 minute episodes.
I was going to list the case, but looking on IMDB I found there were over 100 actors / characters. Ted Danson and Sally Struthers were the only names that jumped out at me.
Rot in Europe
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| Keir Starmer Prime Minister United Kingdom outside 10 Downing Street London July 5, 2024 |
Introduction to story from ZeroHedge:
Clandestine Campaign To Defund ZeroHedge, The Federalist & Breitbart Traced To Kier Starmer Operation by Tyler Durden
Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign 'watchdogs' to inflict maximum damage.
These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates.
Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer's political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America - just in time for the 2020 US election.
Follow the link to read the whole thing.
I Want A New Drug
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| History of US involvement in narcotics smuggling - Aljazeera |
Near as I can tell, the whole point of the War On Drugs is to keep the retail price of narcotics high enough that the drug lords' party fund never faces a short fall.
Aljazeera, like most of the Mideast, suffers from a personality disorder. The farther you get from Qatar, the clearer their thinking. The closer you get, the more deranged.
Has the CIA been involved in smuggling narcotics? I dunno, but we've hearing these stories since forever.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Shadow Economy
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| Cryptocurrency by Brian Penny |
Stolen entire from The Geopolitics:
The Algorithmic Shadow Economy by Boecyàn Bourgade
Over the past decade, governments across Asia have modernized surveillance systems, tightened financial regulations, and expanded cross-border policing. Yet beneath these efforts, an entirely different kind of economic structure has taken shape, one that doesn’t resemble a criminal network or a hidden marketplace. It looks more like a loose, fast-moving ecosystem made of automated tools, fragmented payment channels, and digital platforms that operate with little human coordination. Together, they form what is increasingly becoming an algorithmic shadow economy.
This transformation wasn’t engineered. It emerged gradually as simple automation tools, crypto-based financial rails, and low-cost AI systems became widely accessible. Activities that once required skill, coordination, or risk can now be reproduced and scaled with almost no expertise. Illicit markets have adapted not by becoming more sophisticated, but by becoming more distributed and more routine.
The automation layer
The most visible shift is happening in Southeast Asia, where fraud mills, scam compounds, and small opportunistic groups now rely heavily on off-the-shelf software. Identity fabrication, voice clips, spoofed documents, and targeted messaging campaigns that once required technical operators can now be generated through inexpensive tools. Many of these tools run in the background without much oversight, making the operations feel less like coordinated schemes and more like automated routines.
Officials in the region describe situations where automated systems have been used to test border procedures or probe customs vulnerabilities. In the past, this sort of experimentation was slow and risky; it needed planning and expertise. Today, much of it can be executed continuously, at scale, with minimal human input.
These operations haven’t grown more innovative. They’ve simply become easier to replicate. When one operation is shut down, others continue without disruption. There is no central structure to dismantle. The infrastructure keeps running, and new operators can plug into it whenever they choose.
The financial layer
Crypto doesn’t appeal to illicit groups because it guarantees anonymity. For many, it doesn’t. What matters is mobility, the ability to move funds quickly through platforms that follow different rules and respond at different speeds. A transfer might start on one chain, split into smaller segments, jump across several services, pass briefly through a mixing pool, and land on an exchange governed by completely different regulatory expectations. It all happens before authorities finish their first request for information.
This pattern appears across online gambling schemes, investment scams, trafficking-adjacent networks, and freelance fraud operations. The common thread is not a particular token or blockchain; it’s the infrastructure that surrounds them. The way it fragments, recombines, and accelerates movement creates its own form of protection.
A shadow economy without shadows
What makes this moment unusual is that much of the activity doesn’t take place in hidden spaces. Transactions often unfold on public exchanges. Coordination takes place on common messaging apps. Listings circulate through commercial platforms meant for ordinary use.
The illicit economy isn’t going underground. It’s dissolving into the same spaces where legitimate activity occurs. Small groups can amplify their reach through automation. Large groups no longer need rigid internal structures. The ecosystem becomes fluid, easy to enter, difficult to map, and nearly impossible to slow down using the tools that governments relied on in earlier years.
Why Asia?
Chinese super-apps and cross-border payment infrastructures also play a structural role, creating parallel financial rails that can be exploited faster than regulators in neighbouring countries can coordinate. Southeast Asia sits at the intersection of several forces that accelerate this shift. Digital adoption has been extremely fast, and millions of people have entered mobile finance without passing through traditional banking systems. Regulatory frameworks differ sharply from one country to another, often between neighbours. Informal economies were already strong. Enforcement resources vary widely, from jurisdictions with robust oversight to others stretched thin.
The result is an uneven terrain where capital, data, and digital labour flow freely. Activity doesn’t need to hide from enforcement; it only needs to move faster than enforcement can react.
Targeting actors misses the point
Most government responses still focus on the visible offenders, raiding compounds, freezing accounts, taking down communication hubs. These steps are important, but they strike at the wrong part of the system.
Shutting down a scam site doesn’t eliminate the automated tools that fed it. Freezing one link in a laundering chain doesn’t prevent scripts from rebuilding a new route an hour later. Arresting operators doesn’t remove the underlying systems that generate synthetic identities or automated messaging flows.
The obstacles are not individual actors but the infrastructure that remains active regardless of who is running it. Enforcement strategies built on identifying key players run into a structural problem: there are no key players anymore, only interchangeable users of the same digital machinery.
A more realistic regulatory strategy
No government can eliminate this shadow economy but slowing it is possible. And slowing it doesn’t require sweeping reinvention, just friction in places that currently operate too quickly.
Short delays for high-risk crypto transfers would give investigators a window to react without burdening ordinary users. Basic provenance requirements for digital identity tools could make the easiest forms of fabrication detectable again. Limited regional coordination, focused on the most frequently exploited routes rather than broad harmonization, could close off the pathways that rely on differences between neighbouring regulatory regimes. Transparent oversight for automated routing and mixing tools, modelled loosely on algorithmic-trading supervision, would bring currently invisible systems into the regulatory frame.
None of these steps would stop the ecosystem entirely. But they would slow it enough to make oversight meaningful.
A system that doesn’t need architects
The most important thing about this new structure is that it doesn’t have leaders. It grows because the incentives built into the digital economy encourage speed, replication, and low-skill experimentation. As long as cheap automation exists, global crypto rails remain fast, and enforcement remains uneven across borders, the architecture will continue evolving.
The question isn’t whether the illicit digital economy can be dismantled. It’s whether it can be contained before it becomes too deeply intertwined with legitimate financial and communication systems to separate cleanly.
For now, it drifts through the gaps, not invisible, but moving just fast enough to stay outside the reach of institutions designed for a slower age. As this ecosystem expands, it will increasingly shape regional power dynamics, forcing governments to confront not only illicit actors but the deeper technological asymmetries redefining influence across Asia.
SS Normandie
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| SS Normandie lies capsized at Pier 88 February 8, 1942 |
Wikipedia:
SS Normandie was a French ocean liner built in Saint-Nazaire, France, for the French Line Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). She entered service in 1935 as the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat, crossing the Atlantic in a record 4.14 days, and remains the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built.
Normandie's novel design and lavish interiors led many to consider her the greatest of ocean liners. During service as the flagship of the CGT, she made 139 westbound transatlantic crossings from her home port of Le Havre to New York City. Normandie held the Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic crossing at several points during her service career, during which RMS Queen Mary was her main rival.
During the Second World War, Normandie was seized by U.S. authorities at New York and renamed USS Lafayette. In 1942, while being converted to a troopship, the liner caught fire and capsized onto her port side and came to rest, half submerged, on the bottom of the Hudson River at Pier 88 (the site of the current Manhattan Cruise Terminal). Although salvaged at great expense, restoration was deemed too costly and she was scrapped in October 1946.
Monday, December 1, 2025
The Heart of the Blob
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| CIA Headquarters Langley Virginia |
I'm pretty sure there is thread, nay a string, a stream, a river of rot running through the CIA. There are probably some upright individuals in there, but when you have so much rot flooding the hallways, being upright likely means you will be swept away.
James Howard Kunstler has A Modest Proposal that starts like this:
You must wonder: what exactly has CIA Director John Ratcliffe been doing over in Langley, VA, lo these many months since things changed bigly in Swamptopia? Does he wander the hallways of that giant black box howling ineffectually. . . sit barricaded in his office playing sudoku. . . or is he doing what needs to be done: methodically uncovering and disassembling the diabolical racketeering operation that the agency has become?
One thing for sure: you have heard next to squat coming out of his mouth all year. Mr. Ratcliffe is playing a close hand in a dangerous game and I tend to think that he is for-real. Very few Americans know what really goes on backstage at the CIA, but just say they try to whack the director — that would be checkmate on them. The agency would not survive the arrests of its personnel. And, anyway, Mr. Trump is moving swiftly now to shut down the engine of its nefarious activities.
The CIA, you understand, is the beating heart of the Deep State (a.k.a. the blob). The Democratic Party and the Never-Trump RINOs are its errand boys. And that is why a ten-year-long coup has been running to smash Trump and Trumpism. “Joe Biden” was a piece of furniture thrown out of the truck that the CIA was driving to escape the scene of the crime. “Joe Biden” was under threat of blackmail the whole four years he haunted the Oval Office, having run his own petty racketeering operation to keep his miserable, extended, sick family in beach houses.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Baby Ideology
A tweet:
Camus
@newstart_2024
Bret Weinstein just said something that won't leave my head:
For the first time in 300,000 years of human evolution, we removed the cost from the single biggest reward nature ever invented - sex and pair-bonding.
Reliable birth control + abortion = you can now cash the evolutionary lottery ticket without paying the 20-year mortgage of pregnancy, diapers, sleepless nights, and college funds.
Result? An entire generation of 18-35-year-olds walking around with the energy, libido, hormones, and protective instincts that evolution spent millions of years calibrating for child-rearing... but with zero actual children. That energy didn't disappear. It got redirected.
Heather Heying's observation is brutal: young women especially began treating ideologies the exact way evolution wired them to treat babies. Climate change, social justice, whatever the cause of the month is - it gets defended with literal mama-bear ferocity, the same neurochemistry that once guarded a toddler from predators now guards an abstract idea from wrong think.
Via Xenophilic
Culture Comes to Foster Road
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| Foster Theater lobby in November 2025 (Foster Theater) |
Foster Road in Portland used to be kind of a rough and tumble neighborhood, but it seems to have outgrown that. The Classical Ballet Academy pushed to revamp the nextdoor Foster Theater.
The Cranial Nerves Song
The Cranial Nerves Song
Chuck Pergiel
I'm thinking I should get Linux up and running on my computer, I mean I bought it a year ago for that purpose. I've been sluffing along on Windows since then so I started looking through my old hard disks looking for a suitable candidate and came across this video, so I thought I'd share. Search on YouTube for The Cranial Nerves Song returns several videos, but they all seem to be just portions of this one.
Strange Game
Strange Game
Mick Jagger
We've almost finished all five seasons of Slow Horses. The soundtrack is one of the best parts of the show, so I look it up and what do I find? The intro is sung by Mick Jagger. Who'd a thunk it?
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Air Loom
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| Screenshot Air Loom Fort Myers |
Air Loom is a 3D Air Traffic Display Program currently under development by Objective Unclear.
Via Detroit Steve.
Friday, November 28, 2025
Black Friday Ladder
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| 18 foot Gorilla Ladder |
Darling daughter decided she needed a ladder and she also decided I should be the one to go pick it up from Home Depot today. I have a ladder I could have lent her, but if I did that, then sure as shootin' something would come up and I would need my ladder back. To forestall that happening I agreed that getting her own ladder would be the right thing to do. As a bonus, me having a ladder on hand reduces the odds of my needing one a hundred fold, which is a very good thing because at my age I probably shouldn't be climbing on ladders at all.
The parking lot at Home Depot was pretty full, but I managed to snag a spot close to where you drive in so I didn't have to spend untold seconds cruising up and down looking for a spot. On the downside, this put me at the opposite end of the building from the ladders, so I got a good little hike in. I took the boss's car on account of I wasn't sure whether the ladder would fit in the trunk of my car. You can see from the pic that it's only about four and a half feet long when it's collapsed and folded. I did have to fold down the back seat to accommodate it, but I could have done that in my car as well. Oh well, better to have extra capacity and not need it than vice versa.
P. S. Amazon sells some Gorilla stuff, but not Gorilla ladders. They do sell similar ladders from another maker.
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Steampunk Submarine
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| Steampunk Submarine |
I seem to fall fallen into a hole lately, I've been spending rather too much time doing these jigsaw puzzles. This one appears to be a rather elaborate depiction of a silly submarine originally designed for a Saturday morning cartoon show.
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