There are so many amazing things going on politically at the moment — amazing good, amazing bad, just plain gobstopping — that I figured, hey, let’s do an open thread before we’re all blown up in World War III or something.
No trolls!
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Politics Open Thread! Special Election O’Reilly Downfall Wandering Aircraft Carrier Edition
Just to wrap a big bow around all the shenanigans going on, I think it’s worth it to bask in the schadenfreude of recalling that this was supposed to be the ascendancy of the so-called “alternative” right wing in America and around the world (which is still conservative boilerplate, just with more open racism and misogyny). We’re still not even 100 days in and Trump’s already cratered, Milo’s toast, O’Reilly’s toast, Glenn Beck’s getting sued, Alex Jones had to all but admit he’s a fraud as part of his divorce proceedings.
None of this is surprising to anybody who has a functioning memory or the wherewithal to Google the Bush years, but it’s worth putting a pin in this moment to illustrate just how much of an obvious scam modern conservatism really is. They have just abdicated any semblance of governing entirely once they took on their “government is evil” mantra. That their marks are now starting to look around asking about when they’ll actually start “winning” should be the first clue that they’re unfit to cast a ballot. It won’t be, but it’s our job to hold them accountable for it.
Redsilkphoenix – I like to use dried cherries everywhere* raisins are called for cuz I don’t love raisins. I make a lovely muesli with rolled oats, dried cherries, and chopped hazlenuts with a bit of brown sugar. Mmm. My other dried cherry go-to is a lovely dressing for a roast chicken or duck:
One English muffin, roughly chopped
One small onion, roughly chopped
One apple, cored and chopped
1/2 cup of dried cherries
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
Pepper to taste
Toss in a bowl, then stuff your bird. If you don’t cook dressing inside the bird, add some chicken broth (a quarter cup or so) or an egg and bake alongside in an oven dish. (this is my own recipe, so no worries about unauthorized copypasta)
*Okay, almost; I don’t like cherries and cinnamon together, so they don’t go in raisin bread. ;p
This is sort of politics (in the “war is an extension of…” sense)
http://natoassociation.ca/jegertroppen-norways-all-female-special-forces-unit/
Tried to get a nice pic for the above. Found this whilst searching. Roosh V Minions do not approve.
https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-62301.html
Aaand like clockwork, Bernie fuckin Sanders decided to open his fuckin mouth again, this time about Ossoff:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/19/1654428/-Bernie-Sanders-Says-He-Doesn-t-Know-If-Jon-Ossoff-Is-A-Progressive
He really can’t help himself, can he?
@Axe, yikes. I thought he would be more pragmatic than that.
@Viscaria
I very much didn’t think that. Every week or so, it’s some fresh bullshit. Just go home, Bern. You’re embarrassing yourself and demonstrably not helping
How did Bernie gain his own cult of personality, again?
(Rhetorical eye-rolling, we all know the answer is “Cishet white penis.” Also, “Cult of cishet white penis” sounds like something from Zardoz.)
What goes around comes around.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39656340
The judge would certainly side with Trump, why would he have a vested interest in being against him /s
This isn’t politics related, but can anyone here help me figure out what kind of bike chain I need? My chain broke. The bike is a 3 wheeled Schwinn Meridia(?). I know it’s a Schwinn. It’s a one speed bike.
@PaganReader
This one. Or any other 112-link 1/8th inch chain, if you’d rather get it at your local bike shop. (If you can, I recommend it; knowing a good bike shop is essential)
So, there have been another terrorist attack in France.
Nothing “horrible” but there is still two dead, including the madman doing that. I am more concerned by the impact on the election.
Thank you Dalillama ?
Hey, who wants to throw up forever?
[insert swearing here, I’m too tired in every sense of the word to be creative]
@Alan Robertshaw Re HMS Nottingham
A quick google search for information about that (“HMS Nottingham wolf rock”) turns up a Telegraph article saying Wolf Rock is 400 miles from Sydney, so apparently it’s still moving. The Telegraph in another article mentions that Wolf Rock is close (2 miles) to Lord Howe Island, which is apparently 480 miles from Sydney. They do all agree that it’s North-east of Sydney. Nice to know that the Rock is 415 +- 65 miles from Sydney. According to Wikipedia, it was named Wolfe Rock originally, because a ship named the Wolf or maybe Wolfe hit it.
Note to (possible) future readers of the Telegraph: Do not get your map information from Telegraph articles.
@ js
Plate tectonics, faster than you think.
Re the Democrats, nice to see the Bern, the most popular politician in the US according to some polls, is still getting up the noses of business as usual apologists
Earth to Democrats, things won’t improve for you electorally with the same stale neoliberal politics
@Everyone,
Thank you for the suggestions. I’ll definitely be trying some of those out, since I have a bunch of those things to play with. Though on one of the recipes it looks like I’ll have to do some conversion math from Celsius to Fahrenheit, and from grams to ounces, but nothing undoable, ultimately.
Again, thanks for your suggestions.
@Alan Robertshaw
Reminds me of the San Franlulu. The USS San Francisco hit an underwater seamount at speed because they weren’t using their more detailed chart. Wrecked the sonar dome/extreme forward end so badly the Navy cut the front portion of the USS Honolulu (which was being decommissioned due to fuel depletion) and welded it to the San Francisco, therefore San Franlulu. They got another decade out of it and are turning it into a moored training ship now.
@Alan:
Well, we can actively measure it on a year-to-year basis.
I used to work with a radio astronomy group that did VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry): that’s when you take two or more radio telescopes a long distance apart and combine the data from both to get a better image than either telescope could produce on its own. As long as you know exactly where the telescopes are with respect to each other, you can get some incredibly accurate positions for things in the universe.
The thing is, the math works in reverse as well. Once you have years worth of observations to get a very accurate position for something that’s far enough away that it isn’t visibly moving, you can run the calculations backwards and use that to figure out where the telescopes are with respect to each other.
Which means that if you have telescopes on two different continents, and you do observations of the same set of distant quasars every month or so, you can tell each month how much the distance between the telescopes has changed.
So, yeah, we can watch plate tectonics in… well, about as ‘real time’ as plate tectonics gets.
As for real major motion, well, the 2004 Indian Ocean ‘Boxing Day Tsunami’ involved a very large chunk of tectonic plate moving several meters over a matter of minutes. Tectonics can be fast. Things tend to go badly when it is.
@ joeb
I think something similar happened to poor old Nottingham. I seem to recall she ended up cannibalised and they just stuck her top bit on the hull of a half completed existing vessel. Hmm, I’ll have to go look that up.
@ jenora
That was fascinating, thank you.
I have always wondered how they set up telescopes like that. In my head I envisage builders with really long tape measures calibrated in Angstrom units; but I know that can’t be right. Same with the satellite systems. How do they get their relative positions so accurate?
You’ve reminded me of something though. What is now our Supreme Court used to be a regular court. It’s a lovely building but it’s got quite a few disturbing cracks in it. So there’s various lasers around the place monitoring any movement. We got into the habit of jumping up and giving them a whack just to give the engineers something to think about. Unfortunately whilst playing with the lasers we forgot about the CCTV.
@Turtle
While Sen Sanders is getting up my nose about his non endorsement of Ossoff, he’s also running off to Nebraska to endorse, and fuckin campaign with, an anti choice cretin by the name of Mello. When confronted about this, the head BernieBro himself had this to say. Good to know what the lines are between #trueprogressive and the neoliberal establishment. Reproductive rights are just 1 issue after all. Fuck you, fuck Mello, fuck Sanders! ?
@Axecalibur
Yeah, I’ve been a bit disconcerted the last few days, both by Mr. Sanders’ actions and by his supporters.
I’m by no means a super-Democrat, at all. I guess if anything I’m a non-conservative, and that means non-Republican. I usually vote Democrat because we’re a two-party system and that’s the party that more or less aligns with my personal beliefs.
I liked Sanders fine during the election cycle, and if he’d won the nomination, I’d have been happy to support and vote for him. He didn’t, though, and there was no fucking way I was going to stay home or not vote for Hilary.
Still, he seemed like a decent candidate and a decent person, a good Senator for his constituents. But wow, the Bernie supporters I’m running into on social media are kind of…zealots. Like, the language and everything. It’s so over-the-top I wonder if it can be real? Or is this another Russian hacking mission?
Because it’s just very unsettling and disconcerting, they sound a lot like the fervent Drumpfies and I just don’t know…how this can possibly work? I am NOT AT ALL DOWN with this bullshit “we have to work with the forced-birthers” stuff.
@Alan:
Well, one of the key things for telescopes like that is, at the very least, an extremely accurate time source. Pretty much every radio telescope that is part of a VLBI network needs its own atomic clock, all of which have to be calibrated against each other; just like all GPS satellites have their own atomic clocks (which then have to be corrected for general relativity).
In practice radio telescopes often use hydrogen masers as frequency standards. That’s useful because a lot of the interesting stuff radio telescopes watch happens at or near that frequency anyway: hydrogen is everywhere, after all.
Getting satellite relative positions so accurate is a combination of atomic clocks, really detailed models of Earth’s gravity along with every mapped anomaly, general and special relativity calculations, and constant feedback checking between satellites and ‘known’ locations. There will be errors (the Boxing Day tsunami actually changed the gravity anomaly map due to changes in the depth of the sea floor in the Indian Ocean) but people now have decades of experience in knowing what to look for and what correction factors need to be applied.
@dreemr
Indeed. Acknowledging everyone as human beinga with equal rights is not a purity test, it’s a minimum baseline for being a worthwhile person, let alone present a valid political platform.