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BobMunck commented on the blog post Bush’s Greatest Sin Was Telling America to Be Afraid
technological it is not even possible to put a nuke in a suitcase.
Yeah it is. We built about 400 of them in the 60′s. They were 11 inches in diameter and 16 inches long, weighed 50 pounds.
However, they wouldn’t need suitcases; a U-Haul van or small boat would do equally well. That said, it’s nothing new; we’ve always needed to worry about that. The right wing doesn’t want us to, because then we wouldn’t fund Star Wars.
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BobMunck commented on the blog post Politics, Coonskin Caps, and the Stories That We Are
My wife was chairing a technical meeting at a sea-side hotel in Santa Barbara sometime in the 80′s when Fess Parker stuck his head in the door. Somehow they ended up singing a duet of The Ballad of Davy Crockett, much to the amusement of the other attendees. He owned the hotel. I’ve been to conferences there also, and remember the fancy vintage car he kept parked out front, a Duesenberg or something like that. We’re fans of his wine.
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BobMunck commented on the diary post Asteroids, Dinosaurs, and the History of Physics by E. F. Beall.
I heard Velikovsky speak at Brown in 1963 or thereabouts, in the form of a debate between him and Leon Cooper (my physics faculty advisor) and a member of Brown’s excellent Geology Department (can’t remember who). To say they wiped the floor with him would be an understatement. Nowadays, of course, he would be up [...]
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BobMunck commented on the blog post The Polite Society
The Heinlein quote is from Beyond This Horizon (Astounding SF, 1942). Wingnuts would be aghast at the other points it makes. For example, the book speaks admiringly (and the plot centers around) a government that controls the genetics of the population, to the point of sterilizing and even killing individuals who have genes that officials don’t like. Another important point is that when you die, you are immediately reincarnated in a fetus that’s about to be born. At the climax, a high official who has guided the development of a “superman” strain arranges to die such that she is reincarnated in the best product of that line.
In the course of the book, an armed revolt by citizens dissatisfied with the government is casually and effortlessly put down, with 100% fatalities for the revolutionaries.
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BobMunck commented on the blog post Denny’s new ad celebrates the right to bear arms in true form
Bit of a nod there to the Forth of July scene from Moscow on the Hudson.
