Month: October 2024

One Shining Moment

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Today I put up a link to that video of SpaceX’s booster rocket returning to the launching pad like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  It was beyond amazing.  It was preposterous.  How could the control system of this rocket have it fall out of the sky like a stone, then brake and maneuver under power and stop in mid-air exactly at the docking station and be caught by a mechanical hand as if it were a ballpoint pen.  It’s beyond technology it’s some kind of black magic.

Well, it did me good to see something positive online for the first time in years.  Sure, it doesn’t really impact my life in any way that can be measured.  I don’t even own any stock in SpaceX.  And I don’t really think that going to Mars has any benefits for humans that could be identified in the next hundred years.  But what I am seeing is men using their intelligence to do things and make things that have never been done or made before.  And every time this happens the side effects from such an endeavor always produce benefits that no one had even considered.  Computers are the side effects that accrued from trying to crack codes during WWII and building missiles and rockets.  We needed machines that could do the ballistic calculations faster than humans could.  If Musk manages to convince the US government to send a mission to Mars, I don’t doubt that the fallout from that project will be more useful than the information we get from going to Mars.

Humanity is a misbegotten collection of mostly psychotic apes.  Every time I look online, I see examples of brutality, depravity and stupidity that should cure anyone of having hope for this world.  But something like this gives me that rush of excitement and reminds me of what seemed possible back in the days when I was young.  Instead of the drab, hopeless world that the Al Gores and Greta Thunbergs try to convince kids to despair about; where we eke out a miserable existence under pathetic wind turbines and solar panels, we could have a world where the world’s energy needs could be completely provided by any number of powerful technologies.  Instead of the phony equity of fake scientists selected by racial and sexual quotas we could go back to a meritocracy where the best would be rewarded by the chance to achieve real breakthroughs in all the STEM applications.

Watching that rocket land on a dime in mid-air was like a shot of adrenaline.  These things can still be done and they should be done.  Hell, I would rather the US government had given SpaceX every penny of the 200+ billion dollars that they threw at the senseless and barbaric Ukraine war that we ginned up.  If we had, we’d probably already be on Mars.

Okay, I know this was all just pure emotion.  I let myself get caught up in that “Right Stuff” rah-rah feeling.  It reminded me of the sense of wonder I felt reading all those science fiction stories that Heinlein wrote back in the stone age.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with present day America.  The land of illegal alien cannibals that we pay billions of dollars to invade our country.  But for one shining moment it felt good.

This is the Validation of Science Fiction in Its Best and Truest Form

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This truly is magic.  Even the booster rocket is precisely controlled by the remarkable technology of Musk’s SpaceX.  This is science fiction come to life.

Science fiction was looking at the world and imagining how humans could use science to push the boundaries of what we could know and do.  This is the fruition of that imagining.  Jules Verne and H G Wells and Robert Heinlein and all the other visionaries led up to this.  And Elon Musk is the one who decided to make it happen.

Well done.

One Small Step in the Right Direction

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As all of the regular readers here probably know from my recent incessant whining, I’ve been horrendously bogged down with work.  Even on weekends, there is stuff I have to get done and it will only get worse for the next month or so.

Woe is me; woe is me!

But at the same time, I’ve been wanting to go see Matt Walsh’s movie “Am I Racist.”  I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to go with me and she rolled her eyes and shook her head.  So that complicated things because just abandoning her on a weekend to trek across state lines and eat up half a day seemed a little selfish to me.  So, I was shocked when on Thursday she asked me if I wanted to go see the movie.  Apparently, she figured it might cheer me up ahead of my marathon work schedule to go to this movie over the weekend.  I guess she really does like me.  So, I went on line to see what hours it was playing.  Well, it wasn’t.  The movie had gone from about a thousand theaters, down to something like four-hundred.  And since Dunwich really is in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t a single theater within a hundred miles of me.

Woe is me; woe is me!

When I stopped shaking my fist at the sky, I looked up the box office history for the movie.  The movie was only banking twenty- or thirty-thousand dollars a day at that point but it had earned over twelve million dollars over the course of its run.  And when you consider that the movie only cost a quarter of that to make, I was quite impressed by Walsh’s accomplishment.

Last year Walsh made a documentary called “What is a Woman” that was very effective at highlighting the insane and dangerous transgender movement that has convinced most of the medical establishment that it’s okay to treat children with puberty blockers and sex hormone therapy as a precursor to amputation of their genitalia.  And this documentary was watched by many millions of people on-line.  But this new movie was different.

This was something that people had to go to a movie theater to watch.  They had to plunk down cold hard cash.  And for that money they expected to be entertained.  And they were!  The reviews and rating by the people who actually went to the movie were extremely high.  It was a hit with the people who went to see it.  But the mainstream media boycotted reviewing it.  And this was after it opened in the top four box office spot.  And not against other documentaries.  This was against all the movies in theaters.  It was a financial success, but they refused to review it.

So, I didn’t get to see it.  Well, eventually I’ll see it online.  So that’s okay.  But the bigger story here is that finally, finally, someone is making movies for our side of the street.  And I hope the Daily Wire makes a ton of money doing it and I hope that gives ideas to a bunch of other “creative” people who want to make money but can’t seem to get people to go to the stuff Hollywood has been putting out lately.  Who knows maybe it’ll inspire Disney to make the imaginative leap and think, “Didn’t we used to make money hand over fist with that traditional stuff back in the stone age?  It looks like people still like that racist, sexist stuff.  Maybe we could do that again and make money for a change.”

Well, calm down!  Small steps, small steps.  Okay, now I’ve got a grip again.

But I have to confess I am encouraged.  This is the sort of stuff I’ve been waiting years for.  With the entry cost for making professional-looking motion pictures at historic lows and good writers, directors, actors and other movie trades unemployed because of DEI it doesn’t seem that it should be that difficult to make a profit if you give people a good story and stick to entertainment instead of hectoring them.

It’s a start.