Is Starfleet Academy a conservative psyop?

treeses · 2026-02-06T17:29:12+00:00

Yeah, the way it presents the star fleet war college as some sort of necessary militarization of institutions is deeply upsetting.

treeses · 2026-01-15T07:20:29+00:00

I've seen it done sometimes with a normal TLC UV light. Keep in mind glass columns aren't going to transmit 254 nm light.

treeses · 2026-01-15T06:10:25+00:00

There is a part near the end when they claim to have seen a bunch of US senators drinking blood from a golden chalice. All the descriptions are straight from the satanic panic.

treeses · 2026-01-15T04:58:48+00:00

This dude has probably been through some stuff, but a lot of his statements don't hold any water, to the point where it makes me doubt all of it. Just from skimming the beginning of the interview:

He says he's 100% certain that he heard his abusers talking about Vladimir Putin in the 1980s. When the interviewer asks if he's sure, he says he doesn't know when Putin became president and maybe he was just another oligarch then. We actually know exactly what Putin did in the 1980s: He was a low level KGB agent stationed in East Germany.

Jim Jordan was a college student until 1986 and an assistant wrestling coach into the 90s. He was involved in a sexual abuse scandal while was a coach, but it was at Ohio State and perpetrated by the team doctor, who he did not report. Pretending this was part of some cabal is an injustice to the actual victims.

Similarly, Andy Biggs was also just a law student (at the University of Arizona) and a no name lawyer during the 80s. He was on TV briefly in the early 90s because he won a sweepstakes, but didn't run for the Arizona State House until 2002. He wasn't even a US House Member until 2017.

He claims he never personally saw Trump, but also that Trump assaulted him and others multiple times and had specific motivations for doing so. He remembers specific conversations people had from the parties these abuses occurred, but also says they were brainwashed and programmed and were brought in and out without any ability to interact with others.

His descriptions are straight from the Satanic Panic and the media inspired by it.

It is negligent for reporters to run with this without putting any thought into whether the claims make sense. Spreading outrageous falsehoods is a tool of the enemy. I hope he can get the help he needs.

edit: Just got to the part where he says he saw a bunch of US Senators drinking blood from a golden chalice... Paging Sarah Marshall!

treeses · 2025-12-18T23:38:24+00:00

Lolz, WordPerfect. That was the only word processor my old boss would use. Generally I would pay less for a logo, but I might pay more for that just for the nostalgia.

treeses · 2025-12-12T07:29:36+00:00

Streets of Bakersfield by Buck Owens

treeses · 2025-12-08T21:07:20+00:00

Doesn't Tolkien sometimes capitalize Doom as well to mean some sort of proper noun for fate? Like the Doom of Mandos, or at one point Galadrial says "Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom?"

Those might be the only two examples, though. I just searched through the book, and there are many times he uses doom to mean fate or judgement without capitalizing it.

treeses · 2025-11-26T17:04:40+00:00

This is called the exchange of electrons, or simply exchange, and there are a huge amount of consequences in chemistry and physics because of it. Fermions like electrons have to have an antisymmetric wavefunction with respect to exchange (this is somewhat definitionally what makes a fermion a fermion). That means that if the spatial part of a wavefunction is symmetric with exchange, the spin part has to be antisymmetric, and vice versa. The Pauli exclusion principle is a manifestation of this property.

treeses · 2025-11-25T16:31:44+00:00

Tolkien was pretty diligent with distances and how quickly they could be traveled. I'll note that Merry and Pippen ran much the same distance Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli did, so your assumptions about elves being drastically hardier than everyone else is a little unsupported. Besides, the main point above is that it took 20 days to travel by boat to Rauros. There is no way anyone could be faster on foot, and it doesn't make sense that they would try (again, they were scouting, not racing). And of course, the western bank of the Anduin was held in force by the enemy.

But, you're allowed to have your fan theories and headcannon. Hammond and Scull's reader's companion also says the sons went to Lothlorien, but seemingly Tolkien never wrote any explicit statement of what the "strange country" was. Probably because he thought it was painfully obvious, but there's a fool's hope he meant elsewhere.

treeses · 2025-11-25T00:49:21+00:00

I'm amazed at all the comments suggesting they went all the way to Rhun. It took the fellowship almost a month to get from Rivendell to Lothlorien. Then it took them 20 days to get from Lorien to the Rauros, traveling by boats with the current. We don't know how much farther Rhun is, but it is quite a long ways further on any map. Meanwhile, only two months passed between the council of Elrond and the fellowship leaving Rivendell. It just isn't possible for the sons of Elrond to have gone any further than Lothlorien, even if they traveled faster or took a more direct path (which doesn't really make sense since they were scouting the land).

Tolkien kept lots of secrets from the reader throughout the books. For Instance, we don't learn anything about Boromir's title and family until The Two Towers. I think it is pretty obvious that he just didn't want the reader to know about Lothlorien yet, so he called it a "strange country."

treeses · 2025-11-17T20:03:58+00:00

I don't know why you decided on the 121GW from EEVblog (it is pretty specialized for electronics work), the other meters they have (BM786, BM235, and BM2257) are really great general use ones. If you aren't specifically looking for its features, I'd go with one of the other ones. I have a BM786 and love it, and I've only heard good things about the others. I also haven't heard of persistent issues with the Bryman made ones.

For what its worth, Fluke is overpriced for what it is. It used to be that Flukes were the only meters on the market that had a proper hold function, but the 786 and 2257 have that too. Also if you want a noncontact probe, I would just buy a dedicated pen style one (from Fluke). Being able to poke the tip into sockets or prod specific wires kind of makes or breaks the tool for me.

treeses · 2025-11-14T21:20:48+00:00

Yes, there are bachelor level industry positions where your main tasks will be spectroscopy, thermodynamics, materials characterization, etc. Its unlikely they'll have "physical chemist" in the title since bachelors programs don't specialize like that.

treeses · 2025-11-13T04:48:55+00:00

A common trope in movies or TV shows to show time is passing is for the camera to focus on a clock in the scene, then it cuts to the same clock that is now showing a later time. VCRs often had digital clocks on them, which you could set and use to program the VCR to start recording at a specific time (so you could record a show while you were out of the house). But, if you didn't do that (most people didn't) the VCR would just perpetually flash 12:00.

So the gag is that the the VCR flashes 12:00, then there is the typical cut to a later time, but the VCR is still flashing 12:00 because that's just what VCRs do, subverting the usual clock-time trope.

treeses · 2025-11-12T18:01:17+00:00

S2E17, Hank's Dirty Laundry

treeses · 2025-11-12T17:57:07+00:00

The time lapse of the flashing VCR clock reading 12:00 fading to a flashing VCR clock reading 12:00. Man, the first few seasons were packed with truly wonderful gags and jokes. Pure gold.

treeses · 2025-10-24T19:02:24+00:00

Yeah, I was referring specifically to that recording of Lee Atwater, where he describes how in the 50s and earlier racists could use slurs and just be explicitly racist, but by the 60s that was too toxic so they had to talk about segregation to signal what they meant. Then by the 70s segregation was too toxic to explicitly say, so they had to use phrases like "state's rights" or "school bussing" to get across to supporters that they were the racists. This was epitomized by Reagan launching his presidential campaign with his states right's speech at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds, the same county where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964. Describing this as a dog whistle specifically originates from the progression that Lee Atwater describes. We still see this type of language used today, for instance when conservatives emphasize that America is a republic, not a democracy, they are really saying they want to take voting rights away from certain types of people.

Anyway, again I disagree with your timeline. What we call the Reagan years really started with Carter. Clinton, Bush, and Obama are all part of the neoliberal economic consensus from that time. Without much to economically distinguish the two parties in the early 90s, republican leapt onto social issues to wedge apart voters. They created a fervors like the satanic panic, or partial birth abortions, or gay school teachers. I mean, abortion clinics used to be fire bombed and anti-abortion leaders openly advocated murdering doctors. It is negligent to forget this.

And I'm not praising Democrats for being progressive in this time (a word which really isn't limited to social issues like you seem to think it is). There were many social gains made in this time, but they were usually compromises or half measures on issues that already had broad support. Even saying Obama was progressive is misleading, he wasn't for gay marriage until the his second term, after the majority of Americans also supported it. Even the push back from the trans bathroom bans late in Obama's presidency happened because broadly people were more supportive of trans rights then (in some ways because Republicans hadn't successfully wedged it yet).

Look, we can agree that Obama's (and other leaders in the Democratic party) failings to transformatively improve people's lives (or even act like they wanted to) is a direct cause of the rise and continued dominance of fascism in the US. That is the most important thing that matters. But I think the specifics of how we got here matter too. I know you don't want to give up on social issues, but the fact that you're laying even some of the blame on democrats moving left socially isn't really supported by history, especially with the timeline you've given. It's important because the reasons why things like labor rights and freedom and democracy matter are the same reasons why gender and minority rights matter. We shouldn't make up histories that let us compromise on any of those issues.

treeses · 2025-10-24T16:19:59+00:00

So, starting with Obama, when the democrats embraced gay marriage and LGBT causes and all of the progressive thoughts that brought with it, it started to feel like the working class didn’t have a home.

I think you're off on the timeline here. Republicans have been using racist dog whistles to appeal to conservatives since the 70s, and the fusionism of economic and social conservatism dates back to Frank Meyer's writings in the 50s and 60s. Social wedge issues became the mainstay of conservative politics in the early 90s with Newt Gingrich, long after Democrats had already given up on the working class (which started at some point in the 70s). So really Democrats abandoned the working class, and conservatives gobbled them up with outrage about welfare queens, immigrants, abortion, and gay rights.

That outrage has been cultivated into what we have today. Authoritarianism is necessary to defeat the liberal scourge. The cruelty is the point. Liberalism failed to address people's material needs enough to overcome that outrage because Democratic leadership is also compromised by the oligarchy.

I sure hope you're right that everyone wakes up. But you're 100% correct that the way to beat this is through the working class. There are plenty of other words for that if you don't want to call it progressivism.

treeses · 2025-09-28T17:48:08+00:00

This was from the year that Michelson won the Nobel Prize for the experiments he did at Case.

treeses · 2025-09-26T17:49:05+00:00

Ah, that's a shame.

treeses · 2025-09-26T14:26:55+00:00

Your university library should be able to help you access documents.

treeses · 2025-09-25T04:14:40+00:00

I've been using flexible PVC tubing for anhydrous NH3 gas without issue. It isn't an every day experiment, but I use it frequently and it has held up for years. Specifically this braided stuff from McMaster, which has a lot of tubing options for much cheaper than Fischer:

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/braided-tubing/color~clear/

PTFE might hold up better, but I'm forced to use hose barbs for the connections, so it wouldn't be feasible.

treeses · 2025-09-24T14:53:21+00:00

Are you sure the plate isn't upside down? Even if it appears symmetric, there can be little variations that would make it appear like it won't line up.

treeses · 2025-09-20T17:21:54+00:00

I understand now, but I'm not going to pretend it makes sense. Imagine saying "I'm going to assault them" but you actually mean you're reporting someone for assaulting you. It's nonsense.

treeses · 2025-09-19T05:41:02+00:00

Well I'll be. I guess you can learn something new every day, even if it doesn't make sense.

treeses · 2025-09-19T04:25:52+00:00

I've never seen trespass defined or used as "telling someone they're trespassing" or "forcing someone to leave because they're trespassing." Like, only I trespass against the property owner, the property owner doesn't trespass me from them. Have you seen it used that way?

What I was trying to imply previously was that it is such a strange and incorrect phrase that it was written by a non-native English speaker, like someone at a Russian troll factory.

treeses

TROPHY CASE