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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • “Other devices” means manually-emplaced munitions and devices including improvised explosive devices designed to kill, injure or damage and which are actuated manually, by remote control or automatically after a lapse of time.

    It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.

    “Booby traps and other devices” is one legal thing, there’s no legal distinction. Pager bombs are always a war crime regardless of circumstances.






  • They don’t treat launch water, it runs off into the wetlands through open ditches. The SRBs that the Shuttle and SLS use are 100-ton bricks of perchlorates that contaminate and acidify water for miles every time there’s a launch, so treating the direct runoff is deck chairs on the Titanic. Kennedy Space Center is already a Superfund site, so they focus on things like underwater fencing to stop KSC fish full of teflon and cadmium from being eaten by normal fish.




  • It was authorized last time with Chang’e 5. The problem is it’s not just getting a signature, the bureaucracy takes months and China wants to hand out samples quickly, so last time the US had scientists fill out the application to get rocks before they were authorized to work with them, which risked China wasting time on dead-end applications and having to do even more work to re-assign those samples to someone else if it wasn’t authorized.

    China will probably allow US scientists to do that again, but this only works because China agrees to put up with it. They can put a “this research is currently legal” check box on the application and Americans won’t be able to check it until after the deadline.


  • If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

    CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.





  • Sometimes people are assigned progressive by social expectations and start playing that role without really thinking about it. She tried to write an apolitical generic kids book, and everybody’s white, fat people are evil, and bankers are big nosed goblins. Then other people read it and started pointing things out, but she couldn’t detect any of this herself so when she tried to be inclusive she just added Ching Chong the asian and a minstrel slave race. Need to make someone black, I said Hermione has ugly frizzy hair so I guess it’s her. Need a gay, make it the asexual grandpa so it’s not gross. Eventually something comes along that cracks their assumption that they must be progressive and they come out as right wing on Twitter.


  • The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

    “Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.






  • The opposite of woke is random shit boomers happened to grow up with. If your politics are based on some principle you can justify, then if you lose you try again later. If your politics are based on a random collection of historical accidents you can’t justify, and you don’t even like most of them except for a couple, but you think the only way to keep the couple you do like is to defend all of them, then losing is the end. You have to fight to the death, and once you do lose you can’t cope by doing better next time, all you have is revenge.

    Sometimes liberals also want to defend historical accidents that they think fit their idea of liberalism, and then they adopt the same kind of aggressive deterrence strategy, like pro-Israel liberals with college protests or the English with trans people.