SORRY, LADIES:
BREAKING: Imane Khalif, a male, just won a gold medal in women’s boxing.
What a time to be alive pic.twitter.com/2d0IRy0xXx
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 9, 2024
Archive for 2024
August 9, 2024
AND THE BEST NEWS, GUYS, IS IT’S ONLY 15-20 YEARS AWAY! A Simpler Path to Fusion: The Promise of Spherical Tokamak Technology.
It’s not that I’m against fusion power. It’s just that they’ve been saying we’re almost there for my entire life.
SO I FINISHED S.M. STIRLING’S TO TURN THE TIDE last night and quite enjoyed it. Wish there were more of it, but on the other hand I kind of need to get some work done.
That said, I’m going to go back and reread Island in the Sea of Time, another of his time travel series, next.
ONLY ONE? THOSE ARE ROOKIE NUMBERS. Life as MT’s Editor-in-Chief Certainly Had Its Moments—Including One Death Threat.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Labour to ‘Define’ Islamophobia So It Can More Easily Continue Its War on Native Brits.
America’s paper of record:
Russia Sends Troops To Liberate Oppressed British People From Communist Rule https://t.co/kSG40mWfnQ pic.twitter.com/bjaFaC2e8I
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 9, 2024
HE SEEMS NICE: Kamala’s VP Wannabe Tim Walz Levied WHOPPING 95% Tax on Zyn. “The tax on cigars, including premium cigars, smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco, e-cigarettes, and vapor products in Minnesota is also set at 95 percent.”
“EQUITY” IS A SCAM:
The video of Kamala talking equitable outcomes wld play much better if the outcomes of the so-called “public servant” classes were included in all that equity. Somehow living in middle class nabes w/reduced health insurances & police & speech protections is never their outcome. pic.twitter.com/XJwAo2l8cS
— Elizabeth Scalia (@TheAnchoress) August 7, 2024
BAD NEIGHBORS: China’s Long March 6A rocket is making a mess in low-Earth orbit.
US Space Command, which tracks objects in orbit with a network of radars and optical sensors, confirmed the rocket breakup Thursday. Space Command initially said the event created more than 300 pieces of trackable debris. The military’s ground-based radars are capable of tracking objects larger than 10 centimeters (4 inches).
Later Thursday, LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket. The number of debris fragments could rise to more than 900, LeoLabs said.
The culprit is the second stage of China’s Long March 6A rocket, which lifted off Tuesday with the first batch of 18 satellites for a planned Chinese megaconstellation that could eventually number thousands of spacecraft. The Long March 6A’s second stage apparently disintegrated after placing its payload of 18 satellites into a polar orbit.
Space Command said in a statement it has “observed no immediate threats” and “continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain.” According to LeoLabs, radar data indicated the rocket broke apart at an altitude of 503 miles (810 kilometers) at approximately 4:10 pm EDT (20:10 UTC) on Tuesday, around 13-and-a-half hours after it lifted off from northern China.
At this altitude, it will take decades or centuries for the wispy effect of aerodynamic drag to pull the debris back into the atmosphere. As the objects drift lower, their orbits will cross paths with SpaceX’s Starlink Internet satellites, the International Space Station and other crew spacecraft, and thousands more pieces of orbital debris, putting commercial and government satellites at risk of collision.
…
The launch Tuesday began the deployment of China’s “Thousand Sails” Internet network, which will initially consist of 1,296 satellites, with the possibility to expand to more than 14,000 spacecraft. This will require numerous launches, some of which will presumably use the Long March 6A.
Long March 6A seems to be a problem but China doesn’t seem to care. That’s strange because orbital debris is everyone’s problem.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!
Biden: "28 out of every high school students is Latino, we better start figuring it out." pic.twitter.com/Xdp9YjWryu
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 8, 2024
HANLON’S RAZOR MIGHT NOT BE SHARP ENOUGH TO CUT THIS ONE: Did the Secret Service Abandon Trump in Butler? New Body Cam Videos Make You Wonder.
STOLEN VALOR: Tim Walz Thanked Pelosi After She Recognized His Service ‘On the Battlefield.’
C-Span’s Chyron described Walz as an “Afghanistan War Veteran.”
FLASHBACK: Tim Walz thanked Nancy Pelosi at a press conference in 2007 in which she said while introducing him that "we appreciate his service on the battlefield."
CSPAN then identified Walz as an "Afghanistan veteran." pic.twitter.com/6HaKNyfKsf
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2024
READER FAVORITE: Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream with SPF 30. #CommissionEarned
WELL, NATURALLY:
“Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, on at least five occasions as governor of Minnesota, hosted a Muslim cleric who celebrated Hamas‘s Oct. 7 attack last year on Israel and promoted a film popular among Neo-Nazis that glorifies Adolf Hitler” https://t.co/KzQJz9WVdP
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) August 9, 2024
Note that this tweet is from a “mainstream” reporter, so the story is really out in the open now.
WELL, TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE DEMOCRATS: Harris/Walz Begin Campaign with Lies and an Assault on America’s Gun Owners.
SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD:
KAMALA HARRIS: "We believe in the collective!" pic.twitter.com/xW3G6vLZSl
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 8, 2024
Previously: Now Do You Believe Me That the Commies Are Coming?
LOGISTICS: The Russian Army railway logistics are now in worse shape than when Wagner’s revolt overran Rostov on Don’s railway marshaling yard. A lengthy thread on the Russians’ problem. Of course, the Russians have a history of carrying on when their logistics are shot. But that’s what they’ll have to do, if they are to carry on at all.
JUST THE BEGINNING: The government of the District of Columbia is behind this “Trans Kids” camp on Capitol Hill.
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: One Was a Bridge Too Far. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week, resistance isn’t just futile — it’s soaking wet. Plus the worst roommate ever, how not to make a clean getaway, and Colorado Man’s spiritual journey to… Ohio?”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (MOSCOW EDITION): Ukraine ambushes Russian convoy in Kursk as Kremlin declares emergency.
A video circulated by Russian military bloggers showed a destroyed convoy, with bodies just visible inside some trucks, on the E38 east-west highway at Oktyabrskoe, a location far deeper inside Russia than any previously confirmed fighting since Ukraine’s forces crossed the border on Tuesday.
Commentators said the attack, reminiscent of Ukrainian attacks on Russian troops besieging Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, demonstrated an effective hit-and-run strategy, but the incursion appeared likely to draw an escalating response from the Kremlin, and its overall outcome remains profoundly uncertain.
Russia’s defence ministry said at lunchtime that it was transferring military reserves to the Kursk region, according to the Interfax news agency, including Grad rockets, artillery and tanks. A video released by Zvezda, official Russian military media, showed a convoy of lorries carrying armoured vehicles down a highway.
Ukraine isn’t about to march on Moscow or anything like that. But Kyiv was able to assemble several companies’ worth of mechanized soldiers without anyone noticing for what has turned into an extended and embarrassing cross-border raid.
Assuming the UA can get back out largely unscathed, that ought to have the Kremlin wondering where and when the next attack might come.
At the very least, Moscow’s redeployments have taken some of the pressure off the UA in the East, where Russian forces had been gaining.
UPDATE:
The Kursk Nuclear Power plant just went off line for the Russian power grid.
The 💩 is getting real. https://t.co/V0afSle7YT
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) August 9, 2024
That’s worse than embarrassing.
‘THINK BEFORE YOU POST:’ Britain’s slide into censorship.
Britain has fallen. That’s been the take on the anti-woke chattersphere this past 24 hours, as prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-riots crackdown has taken an Orwellian turn. Alongside coming down hard on the violent racist thugs on our streets, a move no sane person has a problem with, Starmer has also trained his ire on the apparent cause of every societal ill, at least according to our ruling class: too much free speech on social media.
All week, the government has been calling on the Big Tech firms, particularly Elon Musk’s X, to do more to clamp down on misinformation and hate. Of course, we’ve seen plenty of both, online and off, recently. A lurid claim that the Southport child-killings, the spark for nearly two weeks of unrest, were committed by a Muslim asylum seeker swirled in the wake of that horror. But while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is passionately in favour of misinformation or hate, the past few days have reminded us of the sinister territory you enter into when the powers-that-be try to police them.
Since Musk has refused to play ball, even goading Starmer with accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ and feverish suggestions Britain is verging on ‘civil war’, the government has resorted to doing the silencing itself. Yesterday, we had director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson telling us that even a retweet could land you in an all-grey prison tracksuit. ‘You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred’, Parkinson told the PA news agency. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account last night, reminding Brits that ‘content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal’.
London’s chief of police hates free speech so much that he’s already attempted to smash at least one microphone, and now he’s aiming for one of the biggest:
Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley threatens to EXTRADITE and imprison American citizens over online posts.
He does not rule out Elon Musk. pic.twitter.com/AUJhEgTTtJ
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 9, 2024
NOT TOO SOON, I HOPE: NASA’s Mission to Monitor Near-Earth Objects Comes to an End.
NOT A SCRAMJET BUT GETTING US CLOSER: Precooled F-100 Engine Combined with Ramjet for Hypersonic Drone and Jets.