Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
The last humans to leave Low Earth Orbit were the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. Rock band Van Halen was founded in 1973. This means that NASA just missed the opportunity to play Van Halen in the Van Allen Belt.
It’s election season here in Australia with voters shortly to choose between the currently incumbent Labor Party under Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition under Peter Dutton (there are plenty of other parties but the odds of any of them winning enough seats to form government are so tiny as to be laughable). Good old Pete has been campaigning for quite some time on dealing with climate change by building nuclear power stations, which is something so out of left field for Australian politics that it has a lot of people wondering what’s in the water in the Liberal party room. Well, read on and all shall be revealed!
(Note for Americans and other aliens: The Australian Liberal Party is Australia’s major conservative party, with the Nationals their hillbilly cousins. This causes all kinds of problems, most notably when the sarcastic hashtag #imvotingliberalbecause escaped Aussie Twitter some years back and utterly baffled the poor Americans)
Reason 1: The Liberals have spent the better part of the last 30 years arguing that climate change is a hoax, and renewable energy is a scam. The majority of Australians now know that neither of these things are true and are demanding action on climate, but years of denial have painted the Libs into a corner where they can’t embrace renewables without handing the Left a massive propaganda coup. So they’ve grabbed on to nuclear as an alternate ‘clean’ energy source that won’t make them look like they’re caving to the progressives.
Reason 2: Renewable energy – rooftop solar in particular – has massive potential to take energy generation out of the hands of big corporations and put it into the hands of individuals. This is a nightmare for said big corporations, who will see their profits plunge as people switch to making and using their own power. Nuclear keeps power generation in the hands of big business, which is where the Liberals’ corporate donors/masters want it!
Reason 3: Every non-partisan expert says that it will take at least 30 years to get nuclear power up and running in this country. Dutton denies this with vague hand-waving about ‘breakthroughs’, but from the Liberal viewpoint a big delay is a feature, not a bug. The longer it takes for nuclear to come online the longer the Liberal Party’s big business mates can keep on turning a profit from coal, oil and gas. Dutton’s dream reactor is the one that starts operating in the infinite tomorrow – the tomorrow that ticks over a day every day at midnight.
So there you have it, the three reasons Peter Dutton and the Liberal-National Coalition are suddenly crazy for a nuclear future. What a shower of dicks.
An old illustration of a mole or shrew or something. It’s posed on a lump of earth surrounded by water and there’s no indication of scale so you can’t tell if it’s tiny and standing on a clump of moss or hundreds of metres tall and crushing a forest. It has webbed feet and a snake-like tail that doesn’t seem to attach to its body properly and a bizarre elephant-like trunk, and despite being an animal its face bears an expression of terrified desperation as if its family is going to be murdered if it doesn’t remain perfectly still for the artist. The picture is titled Sorex moſchatus Pall. which is certainly the kind of name I’d give to something this bizarre looking.
It’s probably meant to be one of these…
(Turns out it’s a Russian Desman (Desmana moschata) – which is even written on the image in French! – but I’m leaving the video)
Got myself banned from Reddit for three days for speculating that if Elon Musk attempted to do to Australia what he’s doing to the United States he’d be shot. This is apparently ‘threatening violence’ despite no mention of any person – let alone myself – actually carrying out the wholey theoretical shooting.
Anyway, the ban has expired and I have full access again, just in time for the site to be flooded with Superbowl and Valentines posts. I CARE NOT FOR YOUR SPORTS OR ROMANCE FESTIVALS, AMERICA! LEAVE ME ALONE!
I am now also startlingly poor after some embarrassingly unwise dipping into my savings account. As such I am organising a fire sale of various things I have been putting aside for years with the intention of selling them. I am also halting my program of generously bagging up my used cans and bottles and leaving them by the bins for the less fortunate – I’m less fortunate now, and will be reclaiming every cent I can as soon as I figure out how to haul them to a recycling centre. I’m also going to prune my library as there are many books in my collection that – while nice to have – I do not need to re-read or reference. Second hand books don’t sell for a lot, but the last time I counted I had well over 1,000 volumes knocking around the place, so that’s got to add up to a bit of pocket money.
I have made a vague new-years resolution to get all my Warhammer 40k tanks assembled and painted before buying any new ones. This is going quite well so far, although I am starting to run low on spray paint. Buying more may have to wait a while in line with my new austerity measures. I’m very happy with how my kitbashed Banewolf is looking – all going well I’ll shortly be able to show off all three Geneva-Convention violating variants of the Hellhound flame tank. Nothing like bathing the enemies of the Emperor in a high pressure shower of molten Uranium Hexafluoride – that’ll learn ’em!
Had a games day over the weekend with Chae, Liz, Paula, and Paula’s new beau Mark. Very enjoyable, although the heat was a bit oppressive. Liz managed to roll nine 6s in a row, which Google assures me is a 1 in 217,678,233,600 chance, which is rather impressive really. Prep for the games day also saw me break out my brand new knock-off Henry Hoover – it’s amazing how clean you can get your carpets when you have a vacuum that actually works.
To finish off, here is Henry Hoover predicting the pandemic…
