The most adaptable thing in nature

Tardigrades can survive an extremely broad range of environments, including:

• Temperatures between -272°C (a degree above absolute zero) and 150°C.
• Pressures between a hard vacuum and 6000 atmospheres (six times the pressure at the bottom at the Mariana trench).
• 10 years without water.
• 1000 times more radiation than any other organism.

It is possibly the most adaptable and resilient organism known to science.

Wernher von Braun: “Hold my beer”.

That’s him with Himmler – and a few years later, with Kennedy.

Little known fact: these two things had the same designer. Can you guess who? Yep, von Braun.

Did you know that? The V2 rockets that rained on London were built by the same man whose Saturn V got Apollo to the Moon. Did your history teacher tell you?

There are currently some high-profile and clearly political attempts to emphasize the role of minorities in the space program, to a degree that borders on rewriting history to redistribute credit to black women.

I would advise against opening the topic, because any honest, factual evaluation of the space program inexorably leads to the conclusion that by far the most credit is owed to … there’s no nice way to put this … actual literal Nazis.

Any attempts at revisionism will backfire.

Von Braun was only one of almost two thousand scientists, technicians and engineers spirited out of Germany after WW2 to work for the US, and their work has been pretty decisive in aerospace (among other fields) throughout much of the Cold War – you can read more in the Wikipedia entry about Operation Paperclip.

Postwar history was complicated and a lot got cleaned up, okay? There’s a lot you probably didn’t hear in school, and a lot you did that ain’t strictly true.

While I understand the reasoning behind emphasizing the role of minorities, it is neither effective nor honest, and neither is sacrificing the truth and rewriting history a good way to do it (or an acceptable thing in principle).

Recently, I tried to explain the concept of representation to my double summa-cum-laude engineer girlfriend, who cuts metal for fun while I do the cooking. It went like this:

Me: “…so you see, the idea is that people will have more confidence when they see others like themselves in certain roles.”
Her: “….”
Me: “…because…”
Her: “Oh I get it, I just think it’s cretinism.”

Frankly, I just don’t trust the wokies that boosting the confidence of minorities is the real reason they’re rewriting history. I think they’re doing it to have a dig at white middle class “Vanilla America” and its admittedly sanitized version of history – but neither could handle the unsanitized version. The application of cultural blackface is clearly motivated by resentment rather than goodwill, much like the socialist policies from the same quarters are obviously motivated not by love of the poor, but by hatred of the rich. It’s glaring and they ooze.

The problem is that the subcommunication of cultural blackface isn’t “Blacks can do it too”, but “Blacks have always been doing it but their achievements were stolen and suppressed”. Besides being factually wrong, it instills not confidence, but resentment. The wokies being mainly concerned with dividing society along all possible lines, I believe that is the whole point.

My message of empowerment to black women would be this: Some people were horrible to people like yourselves in the past. Nothing can change that. But now you can show everyone what’s really in you. Wokeness is patronizing bullshit. You can succeed on your own merit – uncoddled, sovereign. Good luck.

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