Wilbur

4 hours ago, ljkeane said:

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It's along the lines of a few other things which have come out in recent years with the fungus controlling the behavior of it's hosts (The Girl With all the Gifts and The Last of Us spring to mind) but it's not particularly well done.

 

You have a good point.  Those plots actually do work, although once you have read The Men of Greywater Station, it is difficult to suspend disbelief long enough to not guess the ultimate outcome.

8 hours ago, ljkeane said:

...plot about an alien fungus which also didn't really work for me...

I laughed aloud at the thought of the challenge a writer would have to make neutropenic precautions a gripping read.  "Quick, apply the antimycotic medical cream!"

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

...I'm not an expert on this kind of insider politics, but from what I've read McCarthy was ousted because he was a liar.  He would make a bunch of promises that were contradictory and when he failed to deliver he would just point fingers at whoever was convenient (the democrats, the far right, the Senate)...

 

Also, he apparently couldn't count, which resulted in bills being brought to the floor with insufficient votes to pass.  Surely that ability is the minimum job requirement of the Speaker.

59 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Funnily enough, Canada provided India with a nuclear reactor (CIRUS) that eventually generated enough plutonium for the latter's first nuclear test in 1974. Mostly without the knowledge of the former of course, but they had their suspicions. There are other nations using Canadian nuclear technology mostly for power production, I think safeguards were put in place to prevent use for other stuff.

I grew up...about 2 miles from where the CIRUS reactor was.

The path to nuclear power and nuclear weapons is not fraught with insurmountable obstacles.  It is a matter of determination to spend the required money and a willingness to commit to the end result.

If you review the Indian road to nuclear capability, this much becomes clear.

I imagine that most US administrations would work to reduce the risk of more nations gaining that capacity, but again, thwarting another nation's nuclear ambitions requires stubborn, persistent efforts.

It is interesting how that report indicates that children were able to come through the pandemic as a group without the big losses that adults experienced.

These two articles about how the nasal cells of children respond more effectively to Covid make for interesting reading to complement that idea.

Young nose cells may help children fight off Covid (bbc.com)

Here's Why Infants Are Strangely Resistant to COVID | Scientific American

There may be good avenues for exploration and research regarding the differences in response to Covid compared to the flu, which is typically more deadly to children.

Chet and Wemby Redux - the best since Larry and Magic?

The Boeing board needs to reload the entire senior leadership team, with a strong focus on governance and motivation to (re-)develop a culture of compliance and control.

Also, the FAA and NTSB need to intentionally step out of the regulatory capture loop.  They need to avoid the fate of the banking regulators and maintain their independence.

John Carter was a very imperfect film, particularly the latter half.  What killed it, however, was the TERRIBLE marketing for the film.

I took my daughter to see it on opening Friday, where Harkins was showing it in the Cine Capri: basketball-court sized, curved screen; massive sound system; over two hundred recliners in a raked stadium seating configuration; tickets that cost 150% of normal price.

The screening we attended had a total of 13 people watching it, all of the rest of them older than me.  On Sunday I went with my wife, where we watched it with seven other viewers.  This was a pretty big spectacle, perfect for the modern movie theater, and almost no one was drawn in to see it.

"What happened to the Suns?"  They fired Monty Williams and hollowed out their roster, that is what.

Did you enjoy John Carter?  It seems like a film that is right down the middle of what you describe.

Some other good ones from the last decade or so that might scratch that itch could be The Endless, High Life, Ready Player One, Edge of Tomorrow, Sunshine, Serenity, Attack the Block, or Source Code.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

...Meanwhile, the Azovproduct oil terminal in Azov was attacked in a Ukrainian special forces operation (which is raising some eyebrows) rather than a drone strike. The pipeline connecting the storage facility to the loading area was severed, apparently something difficult to repair easily. Ukrainian ground special forces strikes on Russian soil (as opposed to Crimea or behind lines in occupied Ukraine) have been rare in the conflict so far...

This strike is very impressive, since that is:

• behind enemy lines in occupied Ukraine, then
• behind enemy-controlled naval area in the Sea of Azov, then
• Inside the borders of Russia itself.

Reaching out and touching a location like that takes some serious skills.

Drive or fly through occupied territory, then possibly across or over occupied sea lanes, then over or across enemy sovereign territory.  Then return home.

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

When a top Republican says Russian propaganda has infected the GOP
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul is the latest to point out such a problem in his party

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/06/when-top-republican-says-russian-propaganda-has-infected-gop/

 

If you ever wanted to know what a real RINO was, just check to see if they are parroting Russian propaganda / cashing Russian checks.

Many years ago (in the early 1990s?), one of the periodicals (Analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction?) had an article about Jack Vance, and in it there was a reference to the writing of Clark Ashton Smith.  I duly wrote it down on the folded 3"x5" card that rode in my wallet with a list of suggested authors, and I bought a slim volume in a converted church in Inverness.  But I didn't read it until this week.

The book is The Double Shadow, and it is a collection of short stories, including the specific short story of The Double Shadow, as well as:

• The Devotee of Evil
• A Night in Malneant
• The Maze of the Enchanter
• The Willow Landscape
• The Voyage of King Euvoran

I draw your attention to Clark Ashton Smith, because this guy could WRITE.  I can absolutely see why he was referenced in an article about Jack Vance, as his use of the language is every bit as elevated and his worlds every bit as Baroque.  I have read Lovecraft and Howard, and yet this gaping hole in my experience that is the work of Clark Ashton Smith is quite embarrassing, as these stories are far more to my taste than the former two authors.  Excellent atmosphere, but even better stories.

From the Wikipedia article:

"The theme of much of his work is egotism and its supernatural punishment; his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality."  And boy oh boy, is it ever.  The type of comeuppance that you find in the works of GRRM is absolutely prefigured in these stories.  Furthermore, several of the stories are infused with a sort of black humor that made me re-read them just to check that my burst of laughter wasn't inappropriate.  He apparently wrote in the genre of The Dying Earth, and indeed The Maze of the Enchanter in this volume is very much in that vein.  The story of The Willow Landscape could have taken place in The Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah, if Bramah had possessed a strong interest in fantasy.  I can hardly express how good the writing and characterizations are.

You can also get a copy of the audiobook for a buck, should you be so inclined.  I am off to Librivox to see what other items might be available.

Really looking forward to the "Goal from Every Angle" video of the Darwin Nunez opener.

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Catching up on these trailers, and Downtown Owl is supposed to be set in 1983 but everyone looks like ... now. Like, they made an effort with the clothes, but the hairstyles are mostly all wrong, as are the make-up styles. It's really weird. Them: The Scare, set in 1991, manages to be a lot more evocative of its era.

Isn't hair usually the big historical epic fail?  Very, very few Big Actors are willing to have their do mussed in order to fit the rest of the scene.

If Mathias Rust could fly a Cessna 172 across the Iron Curtain and into Red Square during the height of the cold war, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch for the now-highly-experienced drone experts in Ukraine to rig up a 172 or 152 with radio controls or whatever they are using for their long-range drones.  Russia today likely possesses only a moth-eaten shell of whatever air defense coverage the Soviet Union operated in 1987.

Fill it with a couple suitcases full of explosives, and Bob's your uncle.

Burnley and Sheffied United are going down, but will the FA's Rapid Justice Squad for Financial Impropriety's Negative Six Points be enough to push Everton out along with them?  Hopefully they will escape the drop.

David Squires cartoon in the Grauniad.

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

Don't be suspicious!!!

 

Spring is in the air!

Bucks are mating with the does, stallions are covering the mares, and the Mi-5s are atop the Su-30s.

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Corporate culture is fucking insane.

It sure seemed that way after Relative Performance Assessments rolled out.  Lots of old-line Motorolans - directors, managers, research lab middle managers - just walked away in the mid 2000s.

GE and Motorola had a lot of cross-corporate interactions.  GE took Motorola's Six Sigma and turned it into a quasi-religion; GE adopted the Motorola Leadership Factory model where a high-potential employee who wanted to be a VP needed to spend a couple of years in Internal Audit learning the business, and Motorola took on Individual Dignity Entitlement from GE.  IDE was Jack Welch's baby, and here is a post from a Motorola Alumni group where I am a member:

"Who remembers when stack rating IDE with its Needs Improvement ratings was explicitly implemented at Motorola? GE's Jack Welch is largely credited for the practice.  I came across this quote on reddit: "If you and your teammates are put on a ranking which is required to have a high/middle/low distribution:

• You should stop helping your teammates.
• Your manager should always have a new bad performer who exists specifically to be fired to protect the better employees.
• You never want to go work in a team with great people you could learn a lot from because you'll just be the one at the bottom.
• You should never take responsibility for failure.

And so on and so on. You should be your worst lone wolf self, because anything else is punished by the system. It's basically sociopath training."

I got in a lot of very heated discussions about ranking my employees in this system, since it inherently assumes that you are such a moron that you somehow hired staff who Needed Improvement or needed to be fired.  My argument was that if I did indeed have such ineffectives in my headcount, surely it was ME that needed to be fired.

Anyways, my point is that Boeing's recently-departed CEO was an acolyte of Welch, and Boeing also engaged in this sort of nonsense once he arrived.  Now I know and interact with other guys who were Business, Group, and even one Sector VPs/Presidents from GE, and they are not all bad people.  However, the ones I know are all either retired, BoD types, or run small businesses.  The real sociopaths got out to infect places like Boeing, or else drove the various bits and pieces of GE into the ground.

See this article: Boeing's shakeup and GE's fall: 2 more black eyes for Jack Welch's legacy (yahoo.com)

No company can be successful without good people, and you can only retain good people if you treat them right, and you can only get the best out of good people if you remove obstacles to their success, not add to the stress and burdens of their lives.  IDE rankings made the lives of all the staff hell, no matter how much glee it gave Jack Welch and his ilk.

Neutron Jack loved the idea of wasting the headcount, working the corporate accounting posture to its most aggressive position, and especially taking any action that the Wall Street investment banker analysts liked.  Calhoun took that same stance at Boeing, and the company is lucky to be getting rid of him, before utterly destroyed and sold off the parts like Flannery and Immelt at GE after Welch, or like Sanjay Jha and Ed Zander did at Motorola.

9 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said:

 

 

You just knew that after the success of Oppenheimer, these type of historical epics of the 20th Century's key global events would flood into theaters.

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I got blocked by an Evangelical Trump supporter last night who refused to believe I was Christian because I stand firmly behind the idea that the “Free Exercise” clause necessarily protects the right of people to be free from compelled religious beliefs.  

He seems to believe it means he should be free to force people to worship as he does because that is his “belief”.  The idea that it protects all beliefs went right over his head and really pissed him off.

This is a widespread criticism of many Evangelical Christians, and indeed is the driver for the seminal work, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind".  William Gross says that the causes are threefold: cultural, theological, and institutional, and I recommend the first link as a good summary of why so many otherwise seemingly good Christians are fooled by Trump.  If you think that Trump's turn towards Bob Tilton's hawking of trinkets via Prosperity Gospel and supporting appurtenances is just a coincidence, think again.

Anecdote:  I came back to the States for college, and naturally the school assigned an insular kid from Ohio to be my roommate.  He was devoutly Christian and fully patriotic, but could not wrap his head around simple ideas.  For instance, he did not believe that a Russian person could be patriotic toward Russia and also a Christian at the same time (this was during the Cold War).  He felt that the Russian person who was a Christian would need to hate Russia and love America.  I could never convince him that this idea lacked intellectual consistency.

This mental inflexibility seems to be a hallmark of Trump supporters.  Bob Tilton would send you a prayer hanky if you sent him a donation, and Donald Trump will sell you a Bible if you send him a donation.  They both work the same audience / customer base.

The film Jacob's Ladder left me with terrible feelings of horror and sadness and despair.  It is a really well-made film with excellent performances, and Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars out of four, but what an intense aura of sorrow.  I was not at all surprised when the local theater took it out of rotation after a single week - who was going to go back and watch that a second time?

My request queue pulled up another book by Vincent B. Davis II, The Noise of War, which is an historical re-telling / historical fiction of the life of Quintus Sertorius, including the period from the disastrous Battle of Arausio through the reforms of Marius, the Battle of Aquae Sextiae and climaxes at the Battle of Vercellae, when Rome vanquished the demons of all the defeats at the hands of the Cimbri.

Davis is clearly a fine writer, and the audiobook read by Joshua Saxon is very good.  If you enjoyed Miles Cameron / Christian Cameron's books, then this might be right on target for you.  Davis is a little more interested in the effects of war on the soldiers who do the fighting, and the story spends quite a bit of time exploring Survivor's Guilt and the way PTSD would have worked itself out in the ranks and minor officers of the late Republican and early Marian army.  ASIOAF fans will also enjoy the political maneuvering that is shown to go on in the background, along with an unreliable narrator who is clearly still naive in this key facet of life.  The protagonist's Stoic religious leanings allow modern readers to identify with him easily, as he expresses views moderns would applaud, such as abhorring slavery.

Drawbacks to enjoying the story include the fact that the narrator has PTSD and survivor's guilt, and no one will really enjoy living in the head of someone suffering from these ills.  On the positive side, the character works his way through these difficulties, and the development is satisfying as a result.  Secondly, this book includes the current trope of the Inappropriate Beneficial Jewish Side Character, who appears in the story to dole out anachronistic psychotherapy and plot-driving utilities to the protagonist, disappears when unneeded, and then re-appears to applaud the protagonist in the denouement.  I don't understand why editors aren't chopping indulgent nonsense like this latter item out of works published today - it injures the suspension of disbelief.

Davis walks the line between immersing the reader in the world of the late Republic and moving the story along at a brisk pace with great success.  I could very easily have withstood more information about the process of adopting a dead brother's children, or the trade in horses and slaves in the wake of Roman victory, or the settlement of the Po valley by Roman veterans.  But I also appreciate the way the story makes its way efficiently between these key battles that settled the form of the later Roman Empire and the usages of the Roman Army and at the same time the home life and political life of the denizens of the Italian cities.  This isn't a giant book, but the reader gets enough insight to empathize with a number of different people living various lives of the time.

Despite the rawness of the PTSD and the annoyance of the persistent trope, the story works successfully to draw the reader into the time and place and concerns of the time, covers the political disturbances that would shortly end the Republic, and gives the reader a look into the life of the Germanic nomads who threatened the existence of Rome for so long.

I will now intentionally and actively seek out more of Vincent B. Davis II's works.

An interesting motivation for France to more strongly support Ukraine is the way that Russia has supplanted the France neo-colonies in the Sahel across Africa.