You say, "Mr. President, this information comes from one of our best-placed sources. Man, this asset is so well-placed, he almost knows what the Russians are doing before they do it." And so on.
That is why the media is falling all over itself to denounce Trump for labeling this budding scandal "Spygate", long before they could think of a snappy name for it that didn't mean their guys were on the wrong side of it. Like Bill Clinton quibbling over the definition of "is", the media is trying their best to contort the word "spy" into something that it doesn't mean...because the way Trump used it is 100% accurate and correct.
You can, by the way, file this horseshit in the same compost heap as that nonsense about how this was done to protect Trump. That one died a quick death; nobody bought it because no one in the US is that fuckin' stupid.
...except for leftist intellectuals.
* * *
Speaking of which! "Yeah, you won't be allowed to own guns, and the government will take away the ones you already have, and you'll be severely punished if you have them--but this isn't confiscation!"
Only a leftist could take that kind of shit seriously. "Oh, he says it's not confiscation, so it's not."
Could have fooled me. Then again, these are the same people who tacitly agree with and support femnsts who insist that "penis in vagina" is rape. I expect arrant nonsense from them three times before breakfast.
* * *
Incidentally, the left and the Democrarts and the press (but I'm repeating myself) (BIRM) this week are all saying that Trump is a failure because his "peace summit" between North and South Korea fell through.
Now North Korea is begging to have the summit they just pulled out of.
The Democrats and the press (BIRM!) all wound up the propaganda machine and started gloating about Trump's failure...a little bit too soon, it seems.
I find it amazingly delicious that the left is stepping all over its collective dick like this. The Mueller investigation is backfiring so badly they're desperate to get it off the front page, and when they finally get something that looks like a failure, a scant handful of days later it turns back into a rollicking success.
Winning: STILL NOT TIRED
* * *
Its like--there really ought to be a word for the feeling you get when you've said for years that what the country really needed in a leader was a successful businessman, because a really successful businessman would have all the skills needed to run the country well...only to have it happen and prove you to be 100% correct.
"Vindication" is simply not strong enough. I want something Scandinavian and about 35 syllables long, with lots of gutteral consonants.
* * *
And this: the NFL just announced that if you're on the field during the national anthem you may not take a knee but must stand for it. And do you know why they made that rule?
Because people voted with their pocketbooks. Last season was disastrous for the NFL. Lest you forget, the left is a minority in this country.
* * *
Local delivery wouldn't be so bad a job, would it? Once again I contemplate getting my CDL, because it would make me lots of money.
But there's a reason those jobs go unfilled: they're miserable fuckin' jobs.
* * *
This is very clever indeed. While nothing can take the place of real flesh-and-bone fingers, this kind of prosthesis would go a long way towards helping those who've lost theirs.
I do believe a person could learn how to touch type with that kind of prosthesis. Maybe not set any records for speed, but bang out intelligible words.
* * *
So, over at Spaceweather.com:
LUNAR ECLIPSES AND CLIMATE CHANGE: Strange but true: You can learn a lot about Earth's climate by watching a lunar eclipse. This week at the 46th Global Monitoring Annual Conference (GMAC) in Boulder, CO, climate scientist Richard Keen of the University of Colorado announced new results from decades of lunar eclipse monitoring.So, how does that compare to the 0.6° of cooling that occurred over the last two years? Eh?
"Based on the color and brightness of recent eclipses, we can say that Earth's stratosphere is as clear as it has been in decades. There are very few volcanic aerosols up there," he explains. This is important, climatologically, because a clear stratosphere "lets the sunshine in" to warm the Earth below.
To illustrate the effect that volcanic aerosols have on eclipses, Keen prepared a side-by-side comparison (above) of a lunar eclipse observed in 1992 after the Philippine volcano Pinatubo spewed millions of tons of gas and ash into the atmosphere vs. the latest "all-clear" eclipse in January 2018.
"Compared to the murky decades of the el Chichon and Pinatubo, the clear stratosphere since 1995 has allowed the intensity of sunlight reaching the ground to increase by about 0.6 Watts per square meter," says Keen. "That's equivalent to a warming of 1 or 2 tenths of a degree C (0.1 C to 0.2 C)."
"In other words," he adds, "over the past 40 years, the decrease of volcanic aerosols and the increase of greenhouse gases have contributed equally to the total warming (~0.3 C) observed in global satellite temperature records."
* * *
Heh.
When I got my first camcorder, in May of 1992, I discovered the effect that they used in that music video: I pointed the camera at the monitor, and when the zoom was adjusted just right it would cause the weird crawling lines you see coming from the outlines of the band members in some shots. I took that video and dubbed Ray Lynch's "Celestial Soda Pop" over the audio track, and presto! My first project with my new camcorder!
...it fucked the CCD in the camera, though. The feedback blew a couple of pixels, though I didn't know it at the time; all I knew was that my brand-new camera suddenly had a very tiny bright spot in one corner of the image--so I exchanged it for a new one. Maybe coincidental.
Modern cameras tend to use CMOS sensors. CMOS sensors are dirt cheap, but they're noisy, so it used to be that pictures taken with them looked like complete ass. CCD sensors are clean and sharp, but making them was a black art, so they were expensive--which is why, today, you can buy a $100 camera that blows away the RCA PRO8 I bought in 1992 for $500 in just about every way.
The next year I upgraded to a Hi8 camera, also RCA, built in the same chassis as the PRO8 but black instead of white. That camcorder was amazing; it had this awesome stereo mic which sounded incredible--I mean, if you listened to the tape with headphones it's like you were there--and it had a crapton of other fantastic features. That one died, though, and Best Buy replaced it under their lemon policy. Regrettably, the one that replaced it--the PRO-884HB--was inferior in many ways. *sigh*
Oh well.
* * *
Just cannot seem to find any information on early '90s camcorders, damn it. What a pain.
* * *
So, driving home, getting towards the point where I57 splits off, and see a motorcycle coming in my rearview. Before I know what's going on, WHIZZ! he's roaring past me like I'm standing still, going at least 45 MPH faster than I am--and my speedometer was indicating 77 MPH! And he wasn't even geared--just a helmet.
"Dude," I said as I watched him weave around semis, "I hope you're as good at riding as you think you are. Because, holy shit."
You may not have ever had an accident, but riding like that, you're only likely to get but one.
* * *
So I was watching this video on YouTube. This guy got a Jeep Cherokee, year indeterminate, for free from a coworker; all he had to do was pick it up. Turns out that it merely needed a fuel pump; these three guys replaced that, then drove it, and it ran and drove just fine. Rusty floorpan on the passenger side, not so rusty floor on the driver's. Needs exhaust from the cat on back. But they put the thing through its paces and it worked just fine. Once they got the fuel system primed it started like it had run last week rather than "a couple years ago". Sheesh.
...but the thing that really fried my shorts about it was when they decided to see if it could do a burnout, which it could, with both rear wheels. Fuckin' posi, which I sorely wish my Jeep had.
*sigh*
* * *
Welp--time to WoW.