Oleg Zabluda's blog: August 10, 2018

Oleg Zabluda's blog

Friday, August 10, 2018

"""
"""
Total development cost

In 2000, the originally projected development cost was €9.5 billion. In 2004 Airbus estimated 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion) would be added for a €10.3 Bn ($12.7Bn) total. In 2006 at €10.2 Billion, Airbus stopped publishing its reported cost and then provisioned €4.9 Bn after the difficulties in electric cabling and two years delay for an estimated total of €18 Bn.

In 2014, the aircraft was estimated to have cost $25bn (£16bn – €18.9bn) to develop. In 2015, Airbus said development costs were €15bn (£11.4bn – $16.95 Bn), though analysts believe the figure is likely to be at least €5bn ($5.65 Bn) more for a €20 Bn ($22.6 Bn) total.In 2016, The A380 development costs were estimated at $25 billion for 15 years, $25–30 billion, or 25 billion euros ($28 billion).
"""
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
"""
Since the dawn of recorded history, mankind has gazed up at the night sky and pondered: "What if one day the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton, so we could finally elect Donald Trump and he could form the United States Space Force?" For millennia, it seemed like an impossible dream. After all, who would be crazy enough to nominate her? But first America put a man on the moon, and then we kept a woman out of the White House.

And if you're skeptical about the president's commitment to this interplanetary initiative, keep in mind that he's already tweeted about it:
"""
https://pjmedia.com/trending/only-nixon-could-go-to-china-and-only-trump-could-go-to-space/
https://pjmedia.com/trending/only-nixon-could-go-to-china-and-only-trump-could-go-to-space/

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
"""
On August 7, the New York Times ran a story by Rukmini Callimachi about Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple, both graduates of Georgetown University, who decided to quit their humdrum office jobs and go on an epic bike ride and camping trip that would take them all over the world. “I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned.”

So in July of last year, they flew from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town, and from there bicycled through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Malawi to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. From there, they flew to Cairo, and after seeing the pyramids flew on to Casablanca, from which they cycled through Morocco, Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece, to Turkey. From there, another flight took them to Kazakhstan. They biked through Kyrgyzstan and entered Tajikistan. It was in that country that their journey came to an abrupt end this past July 29, when five ISIS members deliberately plowed their car into the two adventurers, killing them along with two temporary cycling companions, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. “Two days later,” wrote Callimachi, “the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill 'disbelievers.'”

Austin, a vegan who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian who worked in a college admissions office, were both 29 years old – old enough, one would think, to have some idea of just how dangerous a route they had mapped out. A number of the countries they passed through are considered either “not free” or “partly free” by Freedom House. In several of them, it's not uncommon for roving criminal gangs – or, for that matter, police or soldiers or border officials – to rob, rape, or kill innocent travelers without provocation and with total impunity. One assumes the two tourists had all their shots before leaving the U.S., but that's not necessarily enough to protect you from all the ailments you might be exposed to while biking along the back roads of southern and central Africa. Other perils include wild carnivores, extreme weather, unsanitary food preparation, and substandard medical care.
[...]
vulnerability on the road, was precisely what appealed to Austin: “With...vulnerability,” he wrote, “comes immense generosity: good folks who will recognize your helplessness and recognize that you need assistance in one form or another and offer it in spades.”

Even before Austin and Geoghegan met their untimely end, they had problems. In Namibia, Geoghegan picked up a stomach virus. (As Austin wrote on his blog: “she curls into the fetal position and rests, eyes closed, fighting chills and nausea and fatigue. There's little that we can do at the moment. I give her some ibuprofen.” Whereupon they resume biking.) Also in Namibia, they were almost hit by a car while bicycling along a highway. In Botswana, they both got sick. In Zambia, Austin had a serious bike crash that sent him flying and left him bleeding all over. In Malawi, he got malaria. In Tanzania, a man tried to bully him into forking over some money. In Ceuta, a driver tried to run him over, and another rear-ended him. In Spain, Geoghegan got conjunctivitis. In Marseilles, she had to be hospitalized for an ear infection that had rendered her deaf. Given the dangers they braved, indeed, they were fortunate to have made it as far as Tajikistan.

But to read Austin's blog is to see no hint of hesitation, on the part of either of them, to keep on cycling – no sign of fear that their luck might run out at any moment. Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted....I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”
[...]
Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative.
[...]
Austin also sneers at Thanksgiving, “a strange tradition built upon a glossy, guiltless retelling of a genocide, [...] When President Trump announces his plans to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Austin and Geoghegan are in Morocco, where the people are outraged. Yes, because they hate Jews.
[...]
The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments. A surprising number were by other people who'd bicycled or backpacked in far-off, dangerous places. Most saw Austin and Geoghegan as “heroic,” “authentic,” “idealistic,” “inspiring,” “a Beautiful example of Purity and Light.” Sample reactions: “Their candle burned brightly before it was extinguished.” And: “Good for them! They followed their dream.” Then there's this: “I only see the beauty of two people taking steps to live the life they envision....The good experienced in their journey far far outweighs any negative.” Easy to say when you're not the one in the body bag. “What is more dangerous,” asked yet another reader, “exposing yourself to the world and its dangers, and living a full vivid life, or insulating yourself in a safe box, in front of screens, where the world and its marvels and dangers cannot touch you? Jay and Lauren understood that safety is its own danger. They are awesome people.” No, they're mangled, decaying corpses. “Safe boxes”? That's what they're both in now: boxes.

Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists....This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.

Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal....But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan....Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”
"""
https://pjmedia.com/trending/death-by-entitlement/
https://pjmedia.com/trending/death-by-entitlement/

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Black Legend - Wikipedia

"""
A "black legend" is a historiographic phenomenon suffered by either characters, nations or institutions, and characterized by the sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting, introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts, with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of it, while hiding from view all its positive contributions to history.

According to historian Elvira Roca Barea the formation of a Black Legend and its assimilation by the nation that suffers it is a phenomenon observed in all multicultural empires, not just on the Spanish Empire. The black legend of empires would be the result of the following combined factors:

1. The combined propaganda attacks and efforts of most smaller powers of the time, as well as defeated rivals.

2. The propaganda created by the many rival power factions within the Empire itself against each other as part of their struggle to win more power.

3. The self criticism of the intellectual elite, which tends to be larger in larger Empires.

4. The need of the new powers consolidated during the Empire´s life or after its dissolution to justify their new prevalence and the new order.
"""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend#Unique_Aspects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend#Unique_Aspects

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Цветочный паук
Цветочный паук
"""
Свою добычу паук подстерегает на цветках. Он может менять свою окраску в зависимости от окраски цветов. [...] При окраске в жёлтый цвет в клетки эпидермиса поступает жидкое, жёлтое красящее вещество, при окраске в белый цвет пигмент переносится во внутреннюю часть тела. If the spider dwells longer on a white plant, the yellow pigment is often excreted. It will then take the spider much longer to change to yellow, because it will have to produce the yellow pigment first.

Добычей цветочного паука являются различные насекомые-опылители, например, журчалки, пчёлы, осы, бабочки или небольшие жуки. Они часто на порядок крупнее самого паука. Паук схватывает свою добычу сильными, широко расставленными передними ногами и молниеносно наносит укус в голову. Паутину не плетёт.
"""
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Цветочный_паук
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Цветочный_паук

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

About Me