Published on 31 Jul 2015
WARNING! Ugly lives here! My Top 10 ugliest warships (Pre 1930’s) This video showcases some of the ugliest warships ever made. From a sunken barn with a gun mounted on top, to a Russian UFO…these ships look better sunk then floating.
May 20, 2017
Top 10 ugliest Warships (Pre 1930’s)
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QotD: Speaking (actual) truth to (actual) power
Nobody should want journalists ever to fear attacking the behavior of the U.S. military when they have actual evidence that it is wrong. Militaries are dangerous and terrible things, and a free press is a vital means of keeping them in check. It is right and proper that we make heroes of those who speak damning truths to power.
But it makes all the difference in the world when a journalist does not have actual evidence of wrongdoing. Especially when the journalist is a U.S. citizen and the claim gives aid and comfort to the declared enemies of the U.S. in wartime. Under those circumstances, such an attack is not heroic but traitorous.
I hope this is a teachable moment. Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is not protected speech; if the speaker has no evidence of actual fire, the consequences to that speaker should be as dire as the risk of death by trampling he created for others. The Holmes test should be applied in politics as well.
[…]
After Vietnam and Watergate, a lot of journalists (and other people) lost the distinction between speaking truth to power and simply attacking whoever is in charge (especially any Republican in charge) on any grounds, no matter how factually baseless. Mere oppositionalism was increasingly confused with heroism even as the cultural climate made it ever less risky. Eventually we arrived at the ludicrous spectacle of multimillionaire media personalities posing as persecuted victims and wailing about the supposed crushing of dissent on national news and talk shows.
Eric S. Raymond, “Lies and Consequences”, Armed and Dangerous, 2005-02-12.
May 19, 2017
Tenth Battle of The Isonzo River – Trotsky Arrives in Petrograd I THE GREAT WAR Week 147
Published on 18 May 2017
The Italian Front has been quiet over the winter and while the Austrians used the time to improve their defences, the Italian Army prepared another offensive near the Isonzo River. At the same time, Leon Trotsky arrives in Petrograd which will ensure the further complication of the situation in Russia after the Revolution.
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“Everything is a potentially impeachable offence or an indication that Trump is mentally unbalanced or both”
Jay Currie says that the ongoing epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome is worse than the 2001-2009 Bush Derangement Syndrome outbreak or even the 1969-1974 media demonization of Richard Nixon:
There was a fair bit of anti-Bush sentiment, and Reagan was often attacked, and, of course, Nixon was vilified long before Watergate; but for sheer, sustained, noise, anti-Trump campaigning by the Democrats and the mainstream media is an order of magnitude or two greater. Everything is a potentially impeachable offence or an indication that Trump is mentally unbalanced or both. The never-Trumpers in the RINO section of the Republican party are having a great time suggesting that Trump is a threat and a menace and needs a good impeaching.
In the hysteria virtually any bit of information, regardless of source, so long as it is anti-Trump, is a page one story. Anonymous sources say Trump revealed super secret stuff to the Russians? Perfect, Wapo is on the job and he’s a traitor or an incompetent or both. Doesn’t matter that the people in the room heard nothing of the sort. Impeach him! Guy phones the NYT with a pull quote from a memo that former FBI Director Comey wrote to file on a meeting with Trump? Quote says Trump said, ““I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump allegedly told Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”” which is clearly the biggest obstruction of justice since Nixon wanted Archibald Cox fired.
At this point, Trump supporters usually say, “but the White House could have handled this better.” I don’t. I don’t say that because there is no “handling” the mainstream media, rabid Democrats and charging RINOs.
Trump and his people have to make a choice between conforming to the norms of a Washington Presidency or simply saying that was what Trump was elected to fix.
[…]
I don’t have any sense that Trump or the White House staff know much about “damage control”; however, they have a good deal of capacity to, in the words of a former President, punch back twice as hard. To do that they need to ignore the storm and fury of the Washington establishment and the legacy media and go for kill shots with live ammunition. The Comey memo archive is a great place to start.
Earlier, Nick Gillespie had pointed out that the people who are screaming for an impeachment bill now are the same people who wanted Il Donalduce impeached even before he was elected:
But let’s get real: At this point in the game, all the explainers about how impeachment works (the 1990s called, they want their sex scandals back!) and adapting the 25th Amendment’s ability to remove the president from decision-making during colonoscopies to the current crisis are evidence-free exercises in ideological masturbation. If we are going to survive not just the Trump years but eventually get around to kick-starting the 21st century, we’re going to have become smarter media consumers and demand more from both our politicians and the press. “The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo,” explains the Paper of Record, “but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.” As Reason‘s Scott Shackford has noted, that’s what Joe Biden would call a “big fucking deal” if it turns out to exist and to be accurate. It’s also a pretty big if at this point.
But even before Comey’s possible “paper trail” documenting President Trump’s demands (which may or may not actually rise to the level of impeachable offense) came to light, his enemies were out in force. For god’s sake, they wanted him impeached even before he was the Republican nominee.
[…]
Needless to say, none of this absolves Donald Trump of any wrongdoing. But impeachment talk this soon and this thick is coming not from a place of seriousness but pure partisanship and ideology masquerading as disinterested belief in the public good. When the Republicans moved to impeach Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, it was the same thing and it didn’t exactly work out that well for many of the main conspirators, or for the country at large. Among other things, the impeachment push indirectly led to the ouster of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, which eventuated in an actual child molester being way high up in the presidential line of succession.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton was one of the major mileposts in the long, ongoing shift of America from a high-trust to a low-trust country, one in which faith, trust, and confidence in most of our major public, private, and civic institutions have taken a massive beating for decades now. Maybe it was the Warren Commission Report that got the ball rolling, or Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “credibility gap.” All the secret wars in Cambodia and Watergate sure didn’t help and the mind-boggling revelations of the Church Commission might have the final nail in the coffin of trust. The Pinto disaster sure didn’t help, nor did other revelations of private-sector fakery. You throw in freakazoid oddness such as the People’s Temple, United Way scandals, and rampant Catholic Church buggery, and, well, what do you expect? Across the board, fewer and fewer of us trust the government, the media, labor, corporations, etc. to do the right thing given the option of doing the wrong thing.
But if you’re still in the “impeach now, impeach often” camp, here’s your game plan:
Published on 18 May 2017
Want to get rid of the president?
There are two ways, basically.
First, find an impeachable offense. According to the Constitution an impeachable offense: treason, bribery, or “Other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” What counts for that last part? Nobody knows. Some people say it means bad things only people in high office can do—like misusing public assets, dereliction of duty, or having sex and then lying about it. Others say it’s any crime or misdemeanor at all, even if it has nothing to do with a president’s position or power. Did you steal a pen from work? Petty theft is a misdemeanor. You should no longer be president.
Once you get an impeachable offense, get a majority of House members to vote in favor of the motion and then go to trial in the Senate, with the chief justice of the Supreme Court presiding. After the highest-rated programming in C-SPAN history, the senators vote. If 67 senators find the president guilty, he’s gone.
There is another way, however, without all that messy legal stuff. But it involves the 25th Amendment, which is used to transfer power to the vice president whenever the president is getting a colonscopy. Seriously. It’s not pretty.
About 2 minutes. Produced by Austin Bragg.
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Common Sense Soapbox #1: Fake News is Old News
Published on 18 May 2017
The term “Fake News” gets thrown around all the time, but what is it?
Sometimes it’s just a phrase people use to to discredit information or sources they don’t like. But there are also people who spread misinformation to further their own agenda. So how do you avoid getting stuck in a bubble without being a victim of misinformation?
We give you 5 helpful tips on how to spot Fake News, and use a skeptical eye to assess information.
Written by Seamus Coughlin & Sean W. Malone
Animated by Seamus CoughlinCheck out FEE.org: https://fee.org/articles/fake-news-is-old-news/
Marijuana use promotes incoherence … on the part of non-users
Chris Selley rounds up some of the less-than-realistic concerns of the anti-legalization folks:
The move toward marijuana legalization is … still not as coherent as it could be, let’s say. The Liberal legislation, unveiled last month, would establish rules around THC-impaired driving that may well prove unconstitutional: science has yet to establish a solid link between a given level of THC concentration in a driver’s blood or saliva and his level of impairment. Frustratingly, there are still those who use this as an argument against legalization — as if it would create pot-impaired drivers where there are none today.
Last week on CTV’s Question Period, host Evan Solomon asked former U.S. ambassador Bruce Heyman what would happen if someone showed up to the border with his car or his clothes smelling of marijuana. It’s a variation of a question that’s been asked often: As it stands, Canadians who admit having smoked marijuana in the past are sometimes turned back. What would happen after legalization?
The de facto answer is, as always: Whatever the hell the U.S. border guard in question wants to happen. (It amazes me how many Canadians haven’t yet figured this out.) And furthermore: “Don’t rock up to the U.S. border reeking of pot, you utterly unsympathetic tool.”
The de jure answer: Well, who knows? Why would Canada’s decision to legalize marijuana have any bearing on the admissibility of foreign pot-smokers to the United States of America?
Heyman’s answers were more, er, nuanced than mine. Bafflingly, he started talking about sniffer dogs and their performance limitations: They won’t care that pot’s legal, so they’ll still detect marijuana, and that will bog down the border.
Now, marijuana legalization certainly might lead to a bogged-down border — if humans, not canines, decide to bog it down. For example, one can imagine Donald Trump thinking legalization necessitated much more aggressive screening of incoming motorists, and not caring too much about the trade implications. Whether that makes any sense is another question.
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Diana Rigg on Farts, Knickers, Breast Size and Stage Nudity
Published on 6 Nov 2015
Portions of a fun interview with Mr. Cavett (America’s best interviewer) from years gone by.
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QotD: Outpatient psychiatry
Now I am halfway done with my residency. I will be switching to outpatient work. Everyone who sees me will be there because they want to see me, or at worst because their parents/spouses/children/friends/voices are pressuring them into it. I will be able to continue seeing people for an amount of time long enough that the medications might, in principle, work. It sounds a lot more pleasant.
I have two equal and opposite concerns about outpatient psychiatry. The first is that I might be useless. Like, if someone comes in complaining of depression, then to a first approximation, after a few basic tests and questions to rule out some rarer causes, you give them an SSRI [Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors]. I have a lot of libertarian friends who think psychiatrists are just a made-up guild who survive because it’s legally impossible for depressed people to give themselves SSRIs without paying them money. There’s some truth to that and I’ve previously joked that some doctors could profitably be replaced by SSRI vending machines.
The second concern is that everybody still screws it up. There’s an old saying: “Doctors bury their mistakes, architects cover theirs with vines, teachers send theirs into politics.” Well, outpatient psychiatrists send their mistakes to inpatient psychiatrists, so as an inpatient psychiatrist I’ve gotten to see a lot of them. Yes, to a first approximation when a person comes in saying they’re depressed you can just do a few basic tests and questions and then give them an SSRI. But the number of cases I’ve seen that end in disaster because their outpatient psychiatrist forgot to do the basic tests and questions, or decided that Adderall was the first-line medication of choice for depression – continues to boggle my mind. So either it’s harder than I think, or I’m surrounded by idiots, or I’m an idiot and don’t know it yet. In which case I’m about to learn.
Still, if it’s a disaster, it will be a different type of disaster.
Scott Alexander, “Reflections From The Halfway Point”, Slate Star Codex, 2015-06-29.
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May 18, 2017
You Can’t Trust Employment Statistics
Published on 17 May 2017
There is no truly good way to measure unemployment, which makes it pretty easy for successive administrations to claim that unemployment is consistently improving. But when we do our level best to include all of the unemployed in the numbers, what we learn is that unemployment levels now are higher than they were at the beginning of the Great Recession. That’s the bad news. The good news is that things actually have been getting better over time. In this week’s episode, James and Antony take a look at the actual unemployment numbers to get to the bottom of what they really mean.
Get the facts here:
https://fee.org/articles/you-cant-trust-unemployment-statistics/
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World of Warships – HMS Hood
Published on 17 May 2017
Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No don’t be silly, it’s HMS Hood. Bugger off with your Superman jokes, Jingles.
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If you subsidize art, you’ll get more [bad] art
I missed this when it got posted initially … Theodore Dalrymple on an Irish government initiative to actually audit the art they’re busy subsidizing:
Like most governments these days, the Irish government is a patron of the arts. The problem is that most governments know as much about the arts as I know about how to select camels for a camel race.
Naturally, therefore, governments rely on advisers to advise them on artistic matters, in effect delegating to them the disbursement of funds. Here the problem is that the art world is now so corrupt morally, intellectually, and aesthetically that the advice it gives is more likely to resemble Mr. Madoff’s advice to investors than Lord Duveen’s to Henry Clay Frick. There has always been bad art, of course, but rarely has it been so heavily subsidized; and when we see work of which we are inclined to ask, “But is it art?” we should perhaps be asking instead, “Is it government-funded?”
The Irish Arts Council, however, recently came up with a novel, even transgressive idea (“transgressive” is the highest term of praise in current art criticism, incidentally), namely that the artists they subsidize should show some sign of artistic endeavor. It is true that the council’s choice of word, audit, was an unfortunate one, as if artists were accountants having their accuracy checked; and the eminent Irish writer Colm Toibin said that the council’s terminology — for example, “working artists engaged in productive practice” — had a North Korean ring about it; an exaggeration, no doubt, given that the North Korean regime subjects its artists to something more severe than mere audit, but one knows what he means. These days it is increasingly difficult to distinguish, stylistically, between an official circular and a page from The Selected Works of Kim Il-sung. (The only one of those communist leaders worth reading, by the way, is Enver Hoxha, who had a wonderful natural gift for poisonous invective and insult. As by the end of his life he had fallen out with everyone, he also had a lot of practice at it; his principle was never to speak well of the dead, especially if he had killed them himself.)
But Mr. Toibin was exercised about the very idea of demanding of artists that they actually produce something in return for the money they receive. After all, many a great artist in the past has had a fallow patch in his life, sometimes lasting decades; you can’t just go to an artist and insist that he be inspired, any more than a photographer can insist that his subjects be natural in front of the lens. His logic appears to be:
Great artists a and b had fallow patches
Artist c is having a shallow patch
Therefore artist c is great and indefinitely worth subsidy
Now, I’m not against patronage as such; sometimes I even wish I had had a patron who had relieved me of the necessity to earn my daily bread (and jam). Then, surely, I would have written an imperishable masterpiece; I would have had time for le mot juste instead of having to make do with the le mot approximatif that mere journalism, as against literature, requires. But the government doesn’t have the taste or discrimination to act as patron. It can’t even choose its advisers well.
The Avengers On Location (1966)
Published on 13 Apr 2014
Beaulieu, Hampshire.
At Lord Montagu’s Motor Museum we see the filming of the ‘tag’ pieces for episodes of The Avengers television series, where Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee drive off in a vintage car – a different one each time.
Several shots of the cast and crew in the grounds of Beaulieu; Patrick Macnee chats to Lord Montagu. Patrick and Diana get into a veteran car; Diana puts on a groovy kind of face/eye shield and they drive off; they stop and the director gives instructions to Diana; as they start off again funny business ensues as Diana puts her feet up, then jumps from the car, leaps back in, clutches her head and so on.
Diana, in an evening outfit of a chiffon over harem pants, has her make-up touched up. Another sequence is shot with a different vintage car; when it doesn’t start, Diana gets from the back seat into the front and prepares to drive while Patrick goes to the rear to push, and ends up with a blackened face from the exhaust. He gets in; Diana drives off.
Commentator says the crew are trying to complete all these end sequences in one day’s shooting. Diana, in a blue cat suit, chews gum while receiving direction. In this sequence, Diana and Patrick start to push the veteran car which zooms off without them as they chase after it.
Note: according to a press release on file, this series was the first in Colour. More details in notes on the clothes worn and the filming of these tag pieces; Diana’s costumes were designed by Alan Hughes; Patrick wore his own suits!
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May 17, 2017
The amazing luck of Il Donalduce
For all the things that Donald Trump does wrong (and you can just reference the headlines of any newspaper or mainstream web site for a long list), he had one thing going for him: the fact that his opponents can be depended upon to over-react to every policy twitch or Twitter update. The cumulative effect of all this outrage is exactly the opposite of what Trump’s opponents actually want:
It wasn’t a good week for President Donald Trump, but it could have been a lot worse. For all his faults – and there are many – the president is blessed with one important thing: opponents so unhinged, so irrational, that even when compared to him, he comes off better.
The ham-handed and, frankly, classless way in which the president fired FBI Director James Comey could have and should have been handled better. The White House can find out where the head of the FBI is at any given moment, so wait until he’s in the office to fire him or pick up the phone and do it right. Instead, Comey saw it on TV.
That said, he had to go. But media reports suggest the White House was shocked at the reaction. If true, that itself is shocking. If Donald Trump saved a puppy, the media and Democrats would complain about it, so firing the head of a department currently investigating the Trump campaign and being shocked about blowback is amateurish.
Luckily for the president, “worse than amateurish” is the perfect way to describe his opponents.
Democrats who days or even hours earlier had been hyper-critical of Comey spun on a dime to proclaim his firing an affront to justice. They declared he had no credibility, then expressed outrage at his no longer “leading the investigation into President Trump.”
Of course the head of the FBI was not “leading the investigation” any more than the CEO of a car company leads the investigation into a faulty brake pad. But why let the facts stand in the way of a good freak-out?
Nearly every Democrat, journalist, and cable news personality clutching their pearls over Comey’s firing has a trail of pronouncements expressing disgust at one or more of his actions in the recent past.
Which leaves these leftists having to argue that a man they repeatedly declared unsuited for the job should not have been removed from it.
But that’s not all. Not even close.
NASA swings for the Moon … and misses
Robert Zubrin is not a fan of NASA’s recent announcement of a planned lunar orbital station as its next major goal, calling it “NASA’s worst plan yet”:
At the recent Space Foundation conference held in Colorado Springs, NASA revealed its new plan for human space exploration, superseding the absurd Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) championed by the Obama administration. Amazingly, the space agency has managed to come up with an even dumber idea.
In the early months of the Trump administration, some lunar advocates spread the rumor that the new president would seek a return to the Moon within his first four years, thereby dramatically making America great again in space. That is not the plan.
Nor is the plan to send humans to Mars within eight years, something that I think we could achieve. Nor is it to send human missions to explore near-Earth asteroids, as then President Obama suggested in 2010, nor is it even to send humans to a piece of an asteroid brought back from deep space to lunar orbit for study, as called for in the ARM.
No, instead NASA is proposing to build a space station in lunar orbit. This proposal is notable for requiring a large budget to create an object with no utility whatsoever.
We do not need a lunar-orbiting station to go to the Moon. We do not need such a station to go to Mars. We do not need it to go to near-Earth asteroids. We do not need it to go anywhere. Nor can we accomplish anything in such a station that we cannot do in the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, except to expose human subjects to irradiation – a form of medical research for which a number of Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg.
If the goal is to build a Moon base, it should be built on the surface of the Moon. That is where the science is, that is where the shielding material is, and that is where the resources to make propellant and other useful things are to be found. The best place to build it would be at one of the poles, because there are spots at both of the Moon’s poles where sunlight is accessible all the time, as well as permanently shadowed craters where water ice has accumulated. Such ice could be electrolyzed to make hydrogen-oxygen rocket propellant, to fuel both Earth-return vehicles as well as ballistic hoppers that would provide the base’s crew with exploratory access to most of the rest of the Moon. Other places on the Moon might also work as the base’s location, because while there is no water in nonpolar latitudes, there is iron oxide. This can be reduced to produce iron and oxygen, with the latter composing 75 percent or more of the most advantageous propellant combinations.
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