Thursday, February 9, 2012

Let's Drop the Big One Now

53 comments:

  1. I'm good with that. What's the target?

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  2. Whoa, dude, you worry me when you start to sound like me. A nap might help.

    Where is AllenS to tell you, as he told me, chill! Sometimes we need a wing man to guide us in to a safe landing.

    But if after careful consideration you still want to go all Paul Tibbets, let me know. I am in. Tell me that the flight plan includes targets in WI and CA.

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  3. "Political Science"

    Newman took a shot at W regarding this song, which I thought was cheap.

    But he also did an amusing opinion piece "In Defense Of Our Country".

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OldToIF5ZGs

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  4. HEY! I'm moving to liberal Madison to be among my people, well for the winter months anyway, lake house in Walkershaw County for summers. I say glitter carpet bomb Texas.

    I'm going to ding dong ditch Althouse's house.JK.

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  5. The bomb is rotund because a casing of explosives surrounding a plutonium core must compress the core perfectly symmetrically to get it to go critical. Much of the engineering work at Los Alamos was getting that shaped implosion to happen just right.

    That bomb, dubbed "Fat Man," was a plutonium-fueled implosion device, unlike the uranium-fueled "Little Boy" dropped earlier which was a more cylindrical looking gun-type bomb. We blew our enriched uranium wad at Hiroshima.

    The technology of "Fat Man" was so radical that it had to be tested first and so it was at Alamogordo (The Trinity site) a month earlier. That's where Oppenheimer quoted Hindu scripture: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

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  6. Chickie, scary stuff, did one of those devices sink Bali Hai? The beautiful magical atoll in South Pacific?

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  7. Or was that Gilligans Island?

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  8. No Allie. Fat Man and Little Boy were fission bombs. The 1950s were all about fusion bombs aka, H-Bombs. Completely different technology. Brain child of Ed Teller.

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  9. Opposition to tritium fallout from H-bomb testing led to Linus Pauling's Nobel Peace Prize. It was unprecedented for a scientist to win both a Chemistry and a Peace Prize.

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  10. So don't go fission with Ed Teller, y'heah?

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  11. So, two Nobel prizes, then you can go crazy on vitamin C, right? But not before.

    We all need a security blanket, I guess.

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  12. Pauling's wife Helen was a socialist. She convinced him to stand up. As a consequence, Linus missed out on a lot of foreign travel or was delayed & hassled. There's famous story of how he missed an important meeting in England because of his travel restrictions. Had he gone, he probably would have solved the DNA double helix problem before Watson & Crick did and won another chemistry prize.

    Later on in life, he mused to his wife about all this and she told him: "Why didn't you tell me it was such an important problem?" (or something along those lines).

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  13. Once again proving that commies are clueless.

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  14. Sixty Grit said...
    So don't go fission with Ed Teller, y'heah?

    Teller was part of a Hungarian-born cabal of scientist/mathematicians who fled totalitarians. It influenced them greatly.

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  15. @Sixty: There are a handful of scientist/engineers whose inventions are considered so evil that they are not rewarded.

    Ed Teller and the H-Bomb
    Carl Djerassi and the Pill
    von Braun and the Saturn V

    Then there are those Nobelist's who go postal after winning: William Shockley; Barack Obama; Paul Krugman.

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  16. Shockley was a great guy, in the field of solid state physics. I used to work with a guy who took his class at Stanford.

    Funny thing was, we wouldn't have had jobs, or at least those jobs, if the transistor hadn't been invented.

    But I won't defend him - he cannot be rehabilitated in this day and age.

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  17. And the Saturn V is an awesome rocket - there is a mock up of one at the Air and Space museum. I cannot imagine sitting atop that candle when they ignite that sumbitch. Those guys were men.

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  18. I didn't mean to imply that the Saturn V was evil so I should clarifying in case anyone thinks overwise. The Saturn V was his masterpiece after a long an storied career, some of which made him inhabilitable. Perhaps I should had said von Braun and the V-2. But everyone knows or should know that the V-2 was America's rocket too.

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  19. Randy Newman's song reminded me of this timeless little number from 1959: link.

    When I first played this for my MIL she said: "Who hates the Dutch?"
    "Oh" she said when I told her.

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  20. Where does it say she was a commie, maybe she was just a controlling bitch. Or maybe she was a controlling commie bitch. Controlling bitches come in conservative too.

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  21. Yeah, there was kind of a flip in there somewhere where the conservative controlling bitches got to be hot, warm chicks and the liberals became the shrewish, PC enforcers.

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  22. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  23. Uh, she was a socialist, say no more.

    As for who hates the Dutch, I refer you to the timeless National Lampoon article wherein all the sins of the Dutch were enumerated - Dutch Elm Disease, Dutch Treat and so on. We have good reason to hate those low land dyke lovin' bitches.

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  24. And why was he, Pauling, such a pussy?

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  25. Dutch chocolate is the best in the world.

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  26. That's debatable. Better than German chocolate? Where is your nationalism?

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  27. Blake I can barely control myself, I have so desire to control a man. I wouldn't respect him. No need to control anyone, but minor children.

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  28. German chocolate is fashioned after Dutch. I identify more with Hungarians, whose chocolate sucks, but have sausage to die for.

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  29. Hungarian chocolate - you make a good point, it doesn't get a lot of buzz. Japanese chocolate sucked, too. I like much of their cuisine, but their idea of a chocolate bar was sad.

    The beer vending machines on the street is an idea we should consider. Sake to you!

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  30. Allie Oop said...
    And why was he, Pauling, such a pussy?

    He deeply in love with his wife and wanted to use his power and prestige to do something that she cared about but could do nothing about.

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  31. Allie,

    Then you're not really a collectivist, are you? At least not in your personal life. After all, those leftist desires are all about controlling other people.

    Good for you. Seriously, people like that are insufferable.

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  32. Blake I don't know I fit into any one category precisely.

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  33. Most of us don't, really. But that makes the marketing much harder so we're encouraged to be on teams.

    Nothing gets done, but we sell a lot of bumper stickers.

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  34. Chickie, that is a wonderful sentiment, but it did nothing for the greater good.

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  35. Allie Oop said...
    Chickie, that is a wonderful sentiment, but it did nothing for the greater good.

    It's important to distinguish a test ban from an above ground test ban. Stopping the spread of atmospheric tritium and other radioisotopes was probably worth the effort. Tritium essentially becomes radioactive water vapor which can be breathed in (Iodine-131 too). The former has a half-life of a dozen years or so IIRC.

    The Soviets agreed to the above-ground testing ban too and except for the stubborn French, testing went underground. So I think it was worth it.

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  36. The reason the French didn't go along was probably because they had no wasteland to fire off underground nukes, having just lost Algeria around that time.

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  37. No desire to control a man, not so desire, Ooops, Freudian slip?

    Scary.

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  38. I saw that too Allie but I gave you the benefit of the doubt.

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  39. What was more important, the solving of the Double Helix problem earlier than Watson and Crick, OR the above ground test ban( because of Pauling and his wife's influence on banning nuclear testing).

    SO maybe his controlling socialist wife was right after all?

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  40. My head just exploded. It made a mushroom shaped cloud. Hope you are happy, Oopenheimer!

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  41. Whaaaat, whadya want? I'm just a dumb liberal :)

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  42. What is interesting is how my words--"Pauling's wife Helen was a socialist. She convinced him to stand up"--got construed to mean "controlling socialist."

    I didn't even ask anyone to do that. Unfuckinglaublich

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  43. In Steve Urkel fashion, "did I do that??" Hehe.

    I think Sixty did that, not I, well I may have agreed she was controlling.

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  44. I think it's just the prevailing Zeitgeist.

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  45. And now Sixty is dead. All because of Zeitgeist. Well, there are worse ways to go, I reckon...

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  46. Wait, what is the half life of Zeitgeist? How about poltergeist? Weisegeist?

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  47. great thread--in my early army days I was actually a nuclear weapons assembler--great fun knowing I could blow up the world.

    as for hungarians, my lady friend and I took a trip to hungary last fall--wonderful people and a great trip. I think it was Enrico Fermi, when asked if there were extraterrestials, he said yes. They are known as hungarians.

    Hottest women on the planet and my GF opined the men werent bad either.

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  48. Roger J. said...
    great thread--in my early army days I was actually a nuclear weapons assembler--great fun knowing I could blow up the world.

    Troop should front page that just to show people the caliber of people who post here--people with life or death power who choose to let us live despite our shortcomings. It's almost God-like power with more potential than another "shoot-em-up post" from Titus.

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  49. I dropped a few bombs today. Must be something in the air. Threw my delivery guy off the property. Never saw him before. Told the company I never wanted to see him again. Dale Carnegie was a wimp.

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  50. @60

    Once again proving that commies are clueless.

    ...and the Norskies.

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  51. @Allie

    OR the above ground test ban( because of Pauling and his wife's influence on banning nuclear testing).

    That is so charmingly naive.

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