Evenin' morons. I'm fillin' in for Maet as he takes care of personal matters. As he is the holder of the top ten lists, you'll have to wait for his return to see how much time you spend on the blog (or the barrel).

For those of you who can't bear the thought of putting on pants and going outside to watch the Perseid Meteor shower, NASA is live broadcasting it here. (I just checked it and it looks cloudy. Way to go NASA.)

Click here if you want to listen to the radar echoes from the space surveillance radar. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:39 PM | Comments (496)
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Ha! This is a real radio commercial put out by Northstar Ford in Alberta, Canada as a way to deal with a recent theft at one of their dealerships:

This was put up sometime in 2012. I wonder if the thieves were ever caught?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:09 PM | Comments (226)
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Entergy is laying off 800 of its 15,000 employees.

Entergy Corp. says it plans to cut 800 jobs — nearly one-third of them in Louisiana, where the bulk of its employees live...

Major layoffs at a major power generation outfit doesn't bode well. Something has to give - ongoing distribution grid maintenance/upgrades, power plant maintenance, customer service for downed lines, etc. Most power companies already run pretty lean.

Might as well open the thread as you open up a can of tasty beans for diner and enjoy the new "SmartGrid". Its so smart, it'll almost run itself.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 01:43 PM | Comments (294)
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The Left's Emotional Anti-Gun Appeals Explained

James Taranto's column had a fascinating revelation about the left's anti-gun strategy this week.

Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner has uncovered a fascinating document: an 80-page "talking points" monograph titled "Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging," written by a trio of Democratic political operatives.

The document, as Bedard writes, instructs politicians and advocates "to hype high-profile gun incidents like the Florida slaying of Trayvon Martin to win support for new gun control laws." Essentially it's a how-to book on inciting a moral panic.

Taranto summed it up thusly:

The booklet explicitly urges foes of the Second Amendment to abjure rationality in favor of the argumentum ad passiones, or appeal to emotion. "When talking to broader audiences, we want to meet them where they are," the authors advise. "That means emphasizing emotion over policy prescriptions, keeping our facts and our case simple and direct, and avoiding arguments that leave people thinking they don't know enough about the topic to weigh in."

And they aren't even obvious about it or anything. Now pass me another high magazine clip.

Gun Crimes Plummet Even As Gun Sales Rise

The NSSF has a great new infographic that could be used to counter the left's anti-gun claims if they cared about facts or logic.

Gun Of The Week

(answer below)
more...

Posted by: andy at 08:52 AM | Comments (121)
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It works like this: 1) He comes up with a big idea. 2) You pay for it. 3) He takes a huge cut. 4) It never becomes economically sustainable.

But that's not the point. The point is putting extremely large amounts of money in Elon Musk's pockets.

Yes, once upon a time Musk started a real business, Paypal, that proved very successful without any government help. That was then, this is now.

Musk has three ventures: Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. All are heavily dependent on government largesse.

Take Tesla for starters. It received the $465 mm loan from DOE, but it also benefits from a $7500/car federal subsidy for electric cars. Moreover, it benefits from the State of CaliforniaÂ’s Zero Emissions Credit program. In its infinite wisdom, CA mandated that all the major auto companies sell a certain number of zero emissions vehicles. If they donÂ’t they have to buy credits from companies that do make them-namely, Tesla. This was also essential in putting the company in the black in Q1, and the company is sitting on $250 mm worth of these credits.

IOW, TeslaÂ’s profits are courtesy of you, the taxpayer-and also courtesy of the shareholders of Ford (F), GM, Toyota (TM), Honda (HMC), etc.

Next consider SpaceX. This venture provides evidence of MuskÂ’s love for Occupy: he has promised that this private space venture will go to Mars, and wears an Occupy Mars shirt to make the point.

It is also touted as a privately capitalized space venture, which it is, I guess, but it is also almost completely dependent on government contracts. The private money is attracted by the scent of public money. Sorry, but a company that is dependent on NASAÂ’s IV for support is not truly a private company: the company is basically a cutout between the investors and the taxpayers. . . .

Elon Musk has a plan to get rich. It involves you. The taxpayer. You pay taxes. The government gives huge dollops of that money to Elon. Elon gets rich. Who could possibly object? Who could deny ElonÂ’s genius?

His Your latest venture? An ultra-expensive pneumatic subshuttle, like the one in Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II. Check out the article and the video at the link.

Mr Musk will not be patenting the design and it will be “open source”, meaning anyone can modify it, or try to build it.

That's nice of him not to patent a design that was essentially created in 1812. Sure, he wants this one to be a maglev (low friction magnetic levitation with magnets and superconductors) and to go much faster, but still...

It's not exactly a new idea. Recall that IBM couldn't enforce a patent for the personal computer, since it was just a collection of other familiar technologies. But Elon Musk has a big heart, and he will generously make this project open source. Just give him lots of money.

You have to give him credit for one thing: selling grandiose dreams to idiots. Maybe we shouldn't give him the money on this one? If it's such a great idea, we will be doing him a favor. We can let him develop it.

Follow me on Twitter.

Thanks to commenter J.J. Sefton for the Beach link.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 07:29 AM | Comments (246)
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Bring It!

Posted by: andy at 03:46 AM | Comments (301)
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After two months and change, Test falls apart at the seams.

Of course I say that while GSF/CFC look to do the unthinkable with renting space to the serfs

Actual gaming crap below more...

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 10:27 AM | Comments (177)
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Score: An American victory. At a terrible cost.

Almost 8000 American casualties, 1700 dead. And it wasn't over. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:50 PM | Comments (90)
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Actually, This Was Only A Test

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the AoSHQ's always-explosive Sunday Morning Book Thread.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

So this week marked the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
we had a couple of threads on this topic (here and here). There were a number of morons who posted comments along the lines of "I had a (father | grandfather | uncle | other relative) in the Pacific theater in 1945 and they were overjoyed when they found out they didn't have to invade the home islands. They probably would not have lived through it." A lot of these brave soldiers were survivors of some of the earlier battles, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and other Pacific campaigns, who knew from first-hand experience what it would take to defeat the Japanese army, i.e. kill every last one of them.

So here are a couple of books that were recommended by morons in those threads:

The first one, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge, has become a classic. It brutally portrays the horror of those Pacific campaigns, and you wonder how the survivors could be whole or sane ever again.

And as to what the American and Allied armed forced were up against, moron commenter Vashta Nerada recommended The Knights Of Bushido by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a history of Japanese war crimes during WWII. Lord Russell was a British judge advocate in charge of war crimes trials. This book will tell you what the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army did to Allied soldiers on the battlefield, to POWs they captured, and civilians who just happened to be in their way. I haven't read this one, but I'm told the accounts of the war crimes are astoundingly horrific. To me, it sounds like a book that you have to read in small doses, otherwise you just get numb to it all as you go on page after page. Solzhenitsyn is kind of like that, too. You just find it difficult to believe that such horrors can possibly exist.

So, there's no question that Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb saved thousands, if not millions, of lives, both American and Japanese.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:50 AM | Comments (139)
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Someone mentioned this.

So the kidnapper is dead, and Hannah is reunited with her father.

I'm sure someone on the left will be along shortly to write a poem about DiMaggio.

Posted by: Ace at 05:05 PM | Comments (128)
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