USA

The Beach Pneumatic Subway System

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From the Steam Geek archives-

The Beach Pneumatic Subway System was an early rapid transit plan for New York. For various reasons it failed and only a few hidden mementoes and original documentation remain to remember it by.

Joseph Brennan, the sort of steam geek I want to be when I grow up, has researched the history of the Beach Pneumatic and produced a book about it.

via BoingBoing

US Republicans want to teabag the White House!!??

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And they’ll probably find some sort of Goatse imgery when demanding openness in law making.

I’ll assume my audience is as perversion literate as Jon Stewart’s. (If you don’t know what any of these things are I highly recommend remaining innocent of them. Really.)

Give a poor robot a hand

This entry was posted in New York Robot on by

Kacie Kinzer wanted to test human/robot interaction, so she invented the Tweenbots, little smiling robots capable of only trundling along in one direction. To get to their destination, advertised on a flag, they would need human help. Surprisingly, in several months of testing in New York all the robots completed their missions through the kindness of strangers.

It would be interesting to run this experiment in other cities and see if they are any less friendly than the Big Apple.

via BoingBoing

Drunken Twitter arguments are always fun

This entry was posted in idiots politics Spinneyhead Twitter USA on by

I guess I’m a trouble maker. Not in any malicious way, it’s more that I think sometimes people need to be mocked. And I’m the person to do it.

I noted around the inauguration of Barack Obama that there are a few American blogs determined to pile on the hate. I subscribed to the RSS feeds of a couple for entertainment.

One of the more loony of the bloggers- the guy who posted lots of “Obama = Hitler” rants with bad photoshops of the new President in SS garb- has stopped taking comments on his site because so many people pointed out the weaknesses of his arguments. However, he’s on Twitter so, when I got home on Friday night a little drunk and still slightly timeshifted, I sent him links to blog posts that took apart a few of his assertions on climate change. He didn’t take it well.

I sent him a few replies then went to bed.

In the morning the nut had taken his offence and turned it into a blog post. I won’t bother linking to it because he’s blocked my IP, or possibly the IP of anyone outside the States, and doesn’t merit any Google juice. If you’d like to know just how stupid the post was, Kevin Beck at Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge has assessed the bile for me.

I’m thinking of naming a bad guy in Sounds of Soldiers Gribbit. What do you say?

I, for one, welcome America’s new Marxist-Nazi-Muslim-Liberal Hive overlord 3

This entry was posted in Barack Obama football Godwin's Law idiots US Election USA on by

Today Barack Obama becomes US President. Unfortunately, he’s not the Messiah, just a politician with far better ideas than the guy he’s replacing. Even given two terms he probably can’t completely clean up the mess left by Bush and friends, but at least he won’t try to make it even worse.

A post on Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge pointed out that today would be a great time to take another look at the rightwing sites I followed during the election and see what sort of idiocy their self pity generated. There’s the post linked in the article, which suggests that any “liberal” success is down to some sort of Hive mind. Because like minded people working together for a common goal is a Socialist invention somehow. The same guy Godwin’d (again, I’m sure he did it multiple times during the election) a few days ago, because trying to sort out the banks is the first step on the road to the concentration camps.

Stop the ACLU jumps on the too-tired-to-do-any-original-thinking bandwagon with a similar post and tries to stop global warming by quoting a guy who doesn’t seem to know what he’s rebelling against.

Michelle Malkin has an open thread for people who want to moan about living in a democracy.

Little Green Footballs tries to place the blame anywhere other than the Worst President Ever and the stupidly dangerous pair that wanted to carry on his good work.

You know, I sort of miss these idiots, but I don’t know if I have enough time to follow all of them. Maybe just one RSS feed, to sample the madness? They are, after all, embodiments of the sort of beliefs I’m giving to the bad guys in Sounds of Soldiers.

Update Take nine and a half minutes to learn why these people are so wrong and deluded-

This is why Barack Obama got elected 1

This entry was posted in Barack Obama idiots The McCain Wreck US Election USA on by

Or one of the reasons, anyway. People like this were against him–

Congratulations, moonbats. You finally have your revenge for being forced to look at all those flags after 9/11. This is a day of celebration for everyone hostile to America and the principles of individual liberty for which it stands. Enjoy it while you can.

There are people lowdown enough to know in advance who and what was elected yesterday, and to have voted for the Moonbat Messiah anyway. What they have done to this country is beyond forgiveness.

But an ultra-radical leftist like Obama could not be elected in a center-right country, or even a center-left country, without a great deal of deception. Thanks to a radicalized liberal media willing to sacrifice its own long-term credibility to put a leftist in power, Obama was never publicly vetted. Moderates did not vote for a real person, but for a two-dimensional phantom temporarily conjured into being by hype.

The opposition made the swindle easy to pull off. After eight years of a lousy incumbent, it presented a still lousier replacement, an inarticulate, uninspiring centrist universally reviled by the conservative base. Now the Republican Party knows it must either purge itself of RINO mediocrities like Bush and McCain or go the way of the Whigs.

Bush’s subpar performance will soon fade from memory, as Obama’s malignant collectivist ideology and lack of qualifications become impossible for the media to hide. One way or another, the full extent of his radical past and associations will become public knowledge. As promised by Plugs Biden, Obama will be tested, and he isn’t likely to pass.

We’ve had awful leaders before. New York’s atrocious affirmative action mayor, David Dinkins, gave way to Rudy Giuliani. Jimmy Carter gave way to the only great president of our lifetimes, Ronald Reagan. America will turn toward greatness again, once it realizes it has been tricked into temporarily embracing disgrace and decline.

Can you say bad loser? And then laugh at the poor pathetic fool as he rages against a sane electorate.

I shall probably now unsubscribe from the right wing blogs, at least until I feel nasty enough to laugh at stupid people again.

Oooh look, Godwin!

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Paraphrased, but only very slightly, for some right wing idiots blog-

“You know who else promised change? Hitler, that’s who. Congratulations America, you just elected Hitler. And Fidel Castro. Yes, Fidel Castro promised change too. Congratulations America, you just elected Hitler AND Fidel Castro all rolled into one.”

For the benefit of Sarah Palin, and plot development, the Bush Doctrine

This entry was posted in George Bush NaNoWriMo research Sarah Palin US Election on by

The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush. The phrase initially described the policy that the United States had the right to aggressively secure itself from countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups, which was used to justify the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a potential or perceived threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate; a policy of encouraging democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism; and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way. Some of these policies were codified in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States published on September 20, 2002.

Click through for the full wikipedia entry. I have an idea for a bastardised version of the Doctrine causing the events that kick off my NaNoWriMo tale’s backstory.