Achievement Unlocked

by doing the refueling rendezvous beyond the point where the tankers would have enough fuel to get home
That is simply stupid unless there is a planned alternate. Mind you, in my days on a strike squadron in Germany many of our allocated targets involved recovering to Copenhagen (or somewhere similar) on the fumes. In retrospect, I’m glad I joined the fighter world by volunteering to go to sea.

an Assistant Adjunct
Ah, the teaboy’s teaboy…

“It’s not just Yale Law School. It’s all the law schools. And it’s not just in law schools. It’s in law firms, courts, and government agencies.”
Not sure where I found this.

In retrospect, I’m glad I joined the fighter world by volunteering to go to sea.
Fighter pilot? American? Ever go on the annual ski trip to Colorado Springs that some such social group organizes?

Stunning and brave #2.
Are we sure these people are for real? Even if a farce that’s pretty sick. I’m not surprised by anything, per se. But that person is obviously mentally ill, not just gender-confused. What sort of monsters butcher these people like this instead of helping them with their real problems? If this is real, the medical profession and/or whomever else is involved needs to be pressed on this crap, prosecuted, sued, fined, and imprisoned just like was done with the “doctors” who abused the American gymnasts. But obviously on a much bigger scale. If not, if this is indeed fake, it should be exposed and some accountability given. Though not necessarily legal/criminal. But something.
This may sound disjointed but…anyway…I’ve never had significant faith in the medical profession as I have been very healthy all my life and ignored most concerns. Ate a normal diet and got significant exercise without going psycho. This recent discovery about how the statin I was taking was affecting my strength and general well-being, especially as I feel better/stronger every day since quitting it, makes me question every damned thing. I never bought into the diet stuff but the general normal health issues I had some minimal faith in. This is now about the third thing I have had to diagnose and fix on my own. Between the COVID crap they were selling (which I mostly dismissed) and now seeing in this way over-the-top tranny BS, especially with the Penn swimmer, how meek and unquestioning the medical profession is on such a BIG issue makes me wonder how the hell they even know what they are doing on the smaller ones. Do they question anything? The last time I spoke with my doctor several of the things he said to me came across as not being his own words. It sounded like some boilerplate text from a manual. Bizarre.

But that person is obviously mentally ill, not just gender-confused.
Hunter/Shepherd – because two names, obviously – has an extensive list of acceptable pronouns.
They include, among others,

He/Him/His
They/Them/Theirs
Gore/Gores/Goreself
It/Its/Itself
Death/Deaths/Deathself
Clown/Clowns/Clownself.

But sshh. You’re not supposed to mention the mental illness.

“Are we sure these people are for real”
Not really. OTOH, reproduction is out of the question, so…

Dindu Nuffin, UK Edition: What is the likelihood that not a single Traveller condemned these monsters, that they all knew they were thuggish criminals, and that they all loudly complained that the prosecution was “unjust”?

by doing the refueling rendezvous beyond the point where the tankers would have enough fuel to get home
That is simply stupid unless there is a planned alternate.

Or you will have more tankers on hand to refuel the refueller which has already refuelled from other refuellers which have also refuelled en route…

TomJ: Thank you. I’d forgotten about the Black Buck bombing mission.
Could it be that in the 1950’s the US did not have a large enough tanker fleet to perform those sorts of relay operations? Or at least not in the event of total war with the Soviets? It’s a shame I cannot track down the man I talked to long ago, as he’d be about 90 by now.

Someone who would do this to a harmless cat will do equally horrible things to a human being.

All we can hope to accomplish with satire is to discredit them in the eyes of the general public.
Speaking of which…

Of course, how could this ever be the case if a few edgy right-wing college students could get published in a premier journal such as Icarus? Our writers are either extremely talented poetry writers (unlikely, as none of them have any experience at poetry writing), or these prestigious vestiges of leftist art are scraping the bottom of the ideological barrel.

The poem published…”

as I said in posts that are lost either in the aether or spam filter
David, could you, when you return, poke the spam filter? After donning protective gear, of course. (Should Mike Rowe do a Dirty Jobs segment on spam filters?)

Dang.

Someone who would do this to a harmless cat will do equally horrible things to a human being.
Those dangerous animals should be humanely destroyed, and the same thing should happen to their dogs.

[…] a jar of David’s bar snacks […]

A change from the usual fare.
Not necessarily for the good.

Captain Nemo, at a minimum they should face a firing squad.

I’ve just realised they’re juveniles, I’ll take locking them up for as long as the law allows.
Animal torture by minors is a huge red flag for what they may escalate to as adults. I would have them in mandatory psyche eval and monitoring for decades, if not for life.

All “transgender team” hopes to win at least one game.
Good luck, ladies*!
(*I may have misspelled laddies).

I wonder if team A will be 100% on board with sharing a changing room let alone showers with their similarly endowed opponents.

Is this how wars start?

Hard to figure out who to root for here.

I have doubts about this advice.

I like this reference to Tolkien’s “Leaf By Niggle”
I do like Leaf by Niggle. It’s so blatantly an allegory that it drives Tolkien scholars nuts.

Setting aside George R R Martin’s nihilistic denial that there can be heroes and villains, I like this reference to Tolkien’s “Leaf By Niggle”.
I don’t even understand wtf these people talk about anymore. I still like art and I still enjoy a good story but as both/all art descends into intellectual masturbation it becomes quite tiresome. I have two free movie passes for having given blood. I have no idea what to use them on and now they’re bugging me to donate again. Which means two more passes. These “creative” people produce so much schlock that even though I can go to movies for free I don’t see anything interesting to waste (?) “only” my time on. The last thing I saw that was worth the effort was the WWI documentary that the LOTR director did. And yes, I’ve heard enough about what a jerk I am for being so hoity-toity that I don’t “appreciate” blah, blah, blah, boomer alert, blah, blah blah. I’m the kind of snob who likes Pink Panther movies over anything Robert Altman ever did. The Blues Brothers > The Accidental Tourist. I’m Mr. Snobby McSnobface.
Wife related a story about a guy who recently knifed some people at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. I truly wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Then they reported the perp had been a member. Still not sure…anyone seen my revolver?

I don’t even understand wtf these people talk about anymore.
Ideology over everything. And not just ideology, deeply twisted, evil ideology.
I’m not personally familiar with everything George RR Martin has written–I was not impressed by the stories that I read in the 70’s and 80’s and avoided him ever since–so I do not know how much this hatred of heroes pervades all his other stories, but it is a very strange and dark obsession to devote so many thousands of pages and years of life to.
Writers do sometimes write a story as a conscious reply to someone else’s story: Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is a critical reply to and commentary on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, although Heinlein may have somewhat nonplussed Haldeman when he congratulated him to his face. However, most of the literary replies I can recall offhand are affectionate–Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories have inspired many writers.

Somebody just reminded me that Earth Hour is this evening.
We are all supposed to Do Something to honor this Important Event, which is now being sarcastically (or accurately) called National Get Used to Brown-Outs You Filthy Peasants Day. But instead of turning off your lights, I suggest humiliating an environmentalist. (Of course, if your name is Dafarge or Ko-Ko you also have the optionn of quietly adding his name to a little list.)

During this time, I developed an obsession with classic rock, and while searching the internet for photos of young Elvis Presley I found a website called Tumblr.
Sure blame Elvis…

Pre-existing mental health issues, check. A friend group where multiple people began identifying as trans around the same time, check. Decline in mental health and parent-child relationship since identifying as trans, check. Expressing distrust/dislike of non-transgender people and spending less time around non-transgender friends, check. Isolating self from family, check. Only trusting information about gender from pro-transgender sources, check. Increased social media use directly preceding the identification as trans, check.
I was in shock. This was… me! Perhaps more importantly, this was… EVERYONE! All of those young biological females I had been friends with online and offline who identified as trans also fit this exact description.

A long but good read about a transition and de-transition.

Michelle Yoeh plays mousy old woman who discovers the multiverse exists and she can draw on alternative Evelyn powers to, yeah, save the universe
Of all the films to get the Ghostbusters 2016 treatment, Jet Li’s The One was not on my bingo card.
I don’t even understand wtf these people talk about anymore
There’s a kind of generational psychosis where an entire generation of people has regressed to consuming only the media that reminds them of their safe childhood.
As for Martin vs. Tolkien
Martin has been a nasty piece of work forever. He was responsible for utterly sh*tting up the Wild Cards series by drowning it in deviant sex and violence. If you think Game of Thrones was bad, it is Dr. freaking Suess compared to Wild Cards when Martin was writing the books.
A long but good read about a transition and de-transition

One should think of Tumblr, especially from 2009-2016, as a secluded island nation whose people rarely interact with the outside world, and thus have language, customs, hierarchy, and history that is entirely unique and at first incomprehensible to people from other nations visiting the island. There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person

That quote could just as easily describe SF con culture, for the same reasons, and with the same results.

The word hierarchy catches the eye.
Indeed, and in context (my italics):

One should think of Tumblr, especially from 2009-2016, as a secluded island nation whose people rarely interact with the outside world, and thus have language, customs, hierarchy, and history that is entirely unique and at first incomprehensible to people from other nations visiting the island. There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person …

The same author describes typical Tumblr users of the period as “mostly teenage girls, many of whom white and middle to upper middle class” and I have no reason to doubt that that was in fact the case. However, it’s that last sentence (“There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person”) that raises the prospect of a minority of predatory adults there looking to groom the vulnerable and unwary.
Not quite the same, but not entirely different either:

[David] Mason joined the Labour Party in October 1974 after working for Labour during that month’s election campaign. As a young recruit he quite naturally began going to local [Labour Party Young Socialist] meetings in Hull. Soon he came across Alistair Tice, a Militant* member, who sold him copies of the paper and started discussing politics with him. Often after a meeting they would go to the pub and talk, or they would arrange to go out on a Friday evening. Sometimes Tice would bring along friends from other Young Socialist branches in Hull [ … ] From the pub they would often go back to Tice’s home and carry on talking politics well into the night:

After about a month of fairly intensive discussion, Alastair broke the news to me that there was this organisation, the Revolutionary Socialist League. He gave me copies of ‘British Perspectives and Tasks’ and ‘World Perspectives’ and the pamphlet ‘Entrism’, all of which I took away and read. Then we discussed them, and after about a month I was accepted into membership

Reflecting on it now, Mason admits that at the time the arguments put forward by Tice and his friends seemed quite reasonable [ … ] Soon Mason himself became involved in the slow recruitment of new members. He was assigned a small paper round of four or five ‘contacts’. Every week he had to sell each of them a copy of the paper and discuss politics. The procedure was exactly the same as the one through which he himself had gone only a few weeks before. At the weekly branch meeting each member had to report back on how his or her ‘contacts’ were progressing.
[ … ]
Today, ten years later, David Mason remembers that on the whole his life in Militant was ‘unending tedium’:

… one day I suddenly realised that after a year my social circle had totally drifted. I had only political friends left …

*Militant Tendency: a semi-underground Trotskyite-flavoured group of would be socialist revolutionaries whose aim was to take over the UK by infiltrating the Labour Party and taking it over from the inside.

That would appear to account for a good deal of original content coming out of Netflix and Amazon Prime
Heh. See also the most recent iterations of Star Trek, in which even established characters’ personalities and sexual orientations seem to be whatever any writer chooses at any given time, for any given scene. Presumably on the basis that characters are now little more than vehicles for tiresome, ham-fisted political displays, and can be similarly inconsistent.

Heh. See also the most recent iterations of Star Trek, in which even established characters’ personalities and sexual orientations seem to be whatever any writer chooses at any given time, for any given scene.
I wonder how many of them wrote K/S pornography before they went pro. A very strange and disturbing segment of the fan world.
* Kirk/Spock/McCoy/Sulu/Alien

…a semi-underground Trotskyite-flavoured group of would be socialist revolutionaries whose aim was to take over the UK by infiltrating the Labour Party and taking it over from the inside.
A tactic embraced by the American New Party. Not clear how active they are now, but they were big in the 90’s on infiltrating the Democratic Party and running commie candidates disguised as presumably ordinary Democrats.

pst314 New Party: Looks to me like they were successful.
Yes. Although the process had begun in the early 20th Century and was well underway by the 1980’s.

Their illness is curable with reality therapy.
Sometimes. A sad tale of the “transgender” crap, and how it is infesting way too much, including the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, not that I expected anything better from California bureaucrats.

Deemed too old to be a threat […]

Deem no man harmless ’til dead & forgotten.

[Martin] was responsible for utterly sh*tting up the Wild Cards series by drowning it in deviant sex and violence.

Stopped reading Wild Cards after the original series concluded but considering the number of authors involved in that shared universe I don’t think Martin deserves all of the credit (or blame if you prefer) for the more . . . outré elements.

Thanks, UTF. The “Everything Everywhere All At Once” looks like it is only playing in IMAX, and not yet in this area. The Cage thing looks interesting but release is April. Hopefully can check it out before we go back to the mountains. Not that they don’t have a theater there but things get rather limited.
So yes, that’s the problem in a nutshell – too many people’s lives revolve around fiction.
Taking it a bit more broadly…and maybe a bit narrowly sideways…What is most jarring is that to even suggest, or back up someone else who suggests, that the written word has its limitation is to invite scorn and derision. No matter how well you try to qualify suggesting such a thing. On a FB group I FINALLY saw someone else make this broader point, that just because the information is written in a book it does not make that information sacred. And while books, and in much of the context of the discussion books of fiction, are well and good, with today’s technology there are far more useful and efficient ways to both communicate and receive higher quality information thanks to the feedback loops, when enabled. Ooh, boy. “let’s just burn all the books and forget history. Those guys writing books didn’t know shit”, “Say you hate to read without saying you hate to read”, etc. Why it’s almost as if at some point reading too many books starts to make you dumber. And goes double if most of those books are fiction. Of course convincing anyone of THAT is certainly a bridge too far.

To illustrate my point about mental illness being conceptual: If you pretend that communism is wonderful because it sounds good but you ignore all the bodies, this leads you to actions that pile on more bodies.
If you believe that men are oppressive pigs and part of the patriarchy, your marriage is doomed.
If you believe in “systemic racism” and therefore engage in crime and go to jail, you will achieve the self-fulfilling prophesy of failure.

It doesn’t elicit any particular mood in me. Apart from the annual, slightly farcical struggle with the microwave.
It’s annoying to, every year, try to remember how to reprogram numerous devices. I miss the days when I’d just turn a wheel on the back to advance or retard the hour hand.
What’s more unpleasant is how long my body takes to adjust to the shift.

Honest question. Why was this necessary?
Like the oven clock, it doesn’t automatically reset to seasonal time changes. And having several clocks telling different times would make my eye twitch.

characters are now little more than vehicles for tiresome, ham-fisted political displays
It always amuses me that people think this is a new thing that Star Trek is doing. Roddenberry used TOS to push his own left-wing political beliefs all the time.
ms penny, who is married to XY, claims to be queer (whatever that means these days)
I suspect “queer” has reverted to its original meaning.
just because the information is written in a book it does not make that information sacred
My old classics prof was fond of saying “we ought not call it ‘history’, but rather ‘historiography’ – because it is not the study of what happened, but rather the study of what was written about what happened.” The point being that all written material had a writer, and writers can lie, be mistaken, omit things, have their own agendas, etc.
I recall growing up that there was absolutely a kind of Cult of the Book, as if getting published somehow, as you said, conferred some kind of elevated status on the information within. I suppose libel laws and the sheer cost of getting a book made had something to do with that, but it’s not as if the 20th century wasn’t already full of examples of deliberate or negligent malfeasance in that area.
Wild Cards
So, the reason most people don’t remember Martin’s turn is that the Wild Cards series was part of that brief spurt of shared-world anthology series in the early 1980s. When the collective authors lost interest, what usually happened was one of them would just take over the whole thing and keep the gravy train running. Asprin for Thieves’ World, Martin for Wild Cards. By that point, most readers had moved on and forgotten the various series’ so the later books are not well known.
To give an example of Martin’s rather disturbed nature, he introduces a group of violent superpowered teenaged punks, one of whom has the ability to “body-jump” – swap consciousness with other people. The leader of the punks is the grandson of the immortal Doctor Who-esque alien who kicked off the original genesis event that created superheroes. He’s also a psychotic sociopath, because everyone in a Martin novel is.
At one point in one of the novels, the grandson body-jumps the grandfather into the body of 16-year-old girl, imprisons, tortures and rapes him until he gets pregnant, and I don’t know happened after that because I stopped reading. And I should point out that superpowered rape happens rather more than you might expect for a series ostensibly based on comic books.

Back in the sixties, “queer” did mean gay/lesbian
Well, yeah. Because back in the sixties ‘gay’ meant ‘happy’.

GoT was interesting to watch
Never watched it but did read the books. Martin was in dire need of a good editor … I got used to skipping pages of mind-numbing descriptions of everything on a banquet table to get to action.
An author can do what he/she wants with their characters – their story, of course. But Martin seems to have a penchant for killing off anyone approaching being a Good Guy for no other reason than to piss off the readers.
And it really plays havoc with his series actually being a coherent story that you can look back over and spot the internal logic in the GoT universe.
I don’t care if he EVER gets around to the 6th book, I won’t buy it, I won’t read it. I have no trust in the hack.

The thing that bothered me about GoT was the lack of technological development: you’ve got a medieval society – they can work iron and steel, they have ceramics, stirrups on horses, agriculture, and sailing ships (although their range is unknown), and some large cities. Taking a guess, it looks like Europe, 1350ish. The in-universe history is that they have existed in roughly their current state for thousands of years.
In our world, we replaced sail with steam-powered, propeller-driven ships in about four hundred years (maybe five, depending on when you count from and to), and to airplanes in another hundred or so – not to mention explosives, projectile weapons, chemistry, electrical energy… Maybe the in-universe explanation is lack of fossil fuels (no equivalent to carboniferous era, perhaps?), but I would’ve liked some sort of comment or explanation for the difference in development paths.
I kept wishing that Neal Stephenson had written the whole series.

I’m glad I do not live under the boot of the NHS and can choose my physician. How long until the NHS starts using the more terminal meaning of “cull”?

Martin never actually gets there but drops some hints.
And yet he goes on and on about everything on a banquet table.

Back in the sixties, “queer” did mean gay/lesbian
Well, yeah. Because back in the sixties ‘gay’ meant ‘happy’.
And even further back. Have just read two volumes of Chips Channon’s diaries and the word ‘gay,’ in its more innocent guise, is thrown around with abandon. Today he wouldn’t dare as it would be, for him, a cause for much self reflection and draw undue attention in high society.

I remember when we had it in the USA during the 1973 gas crisis.
IIRR, we had double Daylight Savings, which meant catching the bus to high school in the dark. Fun times.
Regarding Westeros, I’m fascinated by how technological advances take place and blocked. If “1491” is true and Chinese junks roamed the California coast, we can be thankful the Emperor recalled them and ordered them to stick to their lane.

And the likelihood was that the tank platoons would not survive the battle. Life expectancy measured in days, a USMA graduate told me.

No fucking shit; I would have been surprised to have reached my General Defense Plan (GDP) position. (Since I was in a tank, “alive” is a pre-condition to arriving.)