Black holes are where spacetime = 0

 Spacetime has a constant positive energy level, plus or minus uncertainty, which I will label ST.  All other fields, including motion, draw their energy from spacetime.  The total energy at any point in space = ST ± uncertainty.  We will ignore the uncertainty, as it has little to do with what follows.

Mass is energy.  No particle with mass can move at the speed of light, because doing so would require more energy than is available (ST).  Photons do not have mass, and only travel at the speed of light.

Gravity is the gradient of ST.

A black hole is the place where total used energy = ST.  There is no energy left remaining.  There is no gravity inside a black hole, because the gradient is zero.  This makes a black hole not a singularity, but a sort of discontinuity.

Each particle in a black hole has mass and energy.  Their velocity cannot be entirely directed towards the center of mass, because black holes spin and move through space.  And remember that there is no gravity inside the black hole, because the gradient, by definition, has been reduced to zero.

They are either a very compact mass or a hollow shell.  It has been shown that all the energy/mass of a black hole can be contained in a shell at the event horizon.  Every bit of energy added to the black hole makes the shell/event horizon just a tiny bit larger.

Karma rule for RPGs

 Karma

Every time a d20 is rolled for combat, saving throws, or skill checks, roll a d12 Karma die alongside it. This includes monster/NPC attacks.  Regardless of the outcome of the d20, apply the Karma result to the player character.

12: Something good for the PC happens. This could be anything appropriate to the situation. DM fiat, but occasionally offering the player a choice can be entertaining. (Would you like advantage on your attack next turn, or advantage on the damage roll right now?)  (Monster hits, but falls prone.  You hit the monster, causing it to drop its weapon.  You unlock and open the door just in time to see the guard leave his post to go use the toilet.  The guard catches you sneaking into the store room, but just nods and mutters "A bottle of wine from the top shelf, and I didn't see anything.")

1: Something bad for the PC happens. This could be anything appropriate to the situation. DM fiat. (PC gets disadvantage, monster gets advantage, drop a weapon, armor or weapon is damaged, break a tool, jam a lock, attract unwanted attention, wandering monster arrives, monster attack cuts off coin purse, the seduction attempt works way too well and you gain a stalker or STD, your dagger gets stuck in the monster, etc.)

A Blessing can increase the "something good" to a roll of 11-12. Blessings can stack to a max of 9-12, but must be from separate sources. Blessings last until removed (however that may happen). Don't annoy the priest!
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A Curse can increase the "something bad" to a roll of 1-2. Curses can stack to a max of 1-4, but must be from separate sources. Curses last until removed (however that may happen). Be careful striking down a witch - only she may know how to remove that curse!

A character can be both cursed and blessed. They do not offset each other.

Cursed or blessed magic items like a pet rock or lucky socks are entertaining. It's even more entertaining if the item has some condition (petting the rock for 5 minutes, not washing the socks) to enable the karmic increase. It's possible for an item to bestow either a blessing or a curse, depending on how the player/PC treats it. (A depressed or angry pet rock is a terrible burden, especially if you try to abandon it.)

As a further option for role playing, roll Karma at dawn each day. That is how the PC's day is going to go. Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of the bedroll. Some days, opportunities just seem to fall into your lap.

Never forget that they hate you, and want you dead

 Presented for your remembrance today.  It's been 20 years.

And on a related note, even though its 30th anniversary was on 9 November 2019.

Laying down the truth

 Almost everything that the government has done in response to Cora-chan is wrong.  Not just wrong, but the opposite of what should have been done.  The only reason the "vaccines" have emergency authorization is because "there's no effective treatment."  Which is why they are denying so hard that Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquin (quinine) (along with zinc and vitamin D) work in almost all cases to prevent serious illness.

This is a video of a doctor laying the facts out to a school board.

https://rumble.com/vkxedl-medical-experts-methodical-deconstruction-of-cdcs-botched-covid-response.html

So there I was compilation 2

 More stories.  Most of these actually happened to me.  Some of them I witnessed.  Some of them I was told by the participants.

• Being young, healthy men, we all wanted sex.  As did quite a few young women our age, who were quarantined in a distant land (one of the companies of the battalion, with their own wing of the building).  But nature... finds a way.

• One of our guys was caught screwing a girl in the chow hall dumpster one evening.  You had to be desperate to even think of that.  It's full of uneaten food.  Granted, it was winter, but still...  I hope the two weeks of extra Fire Drill was worth it.

• One of our guys was married, and had a wife smarter than average.  They had a pickup with a camper back.  Once we got to white phase, we had phone privileges every Sunday.  (This was before cell phones.  Yes, that was in my lifetime.)  The phones were on the ground floor, near the parking lot.  So every Sunday morning, he checked out to go "use the phone", and spent a happy 45 minutes with his wife in the back of their truck.  Lucky bastard.  😁

• Fire Drill.  For those not used to the military, somebody always has to be on duty.  The Army teaches young recruits this by imposing fire watch.  This used to be really important, back when we stayed in tents and used fires to heat with.  (Fires are now banned, as they draw attention and mortar fire.)  Anyways, two recruits in each platoon bay (you never do anything alone) stay up and... make sure the barracks don't float away or something.  You have shift for an hour or two (depending on your unit), and then wake up the next pair of guys to relieve you.  It's also the Fire Guards duty to be on guard, and to challenge anybody showing up in the middle of the night.  (People showing up in the middle of the day must obviously belong, right?)  Heaven help you if you don't challenge your Drill Sergeant when they try to sneak in.  And Heaven won't help you when you do, and they smoke you for not being sufficiently obsequious.

• We had a wide variety of people in my platoon.  (Yes, there were three other platoon in the company, and a total of five companies (plus headquarters) in the battalion.  So what?  They might as well have been on a different continent for all that we interacted with them most days.)  Black, White, Asian, Latino.  Our three troublemakers were white, black, and Puerto Rican.  We hated them all equally, while trying to help out all the other guys who were temporarily our brothers in adversity.

• There was one black guy who was mildly retarded.  A nice guy, but dumb as a post.  He was going to be a cook, if I remember correctly.  He got us smoked almost as much as the three troublemakers, but he never did it deliberately.  (Unlike those three assholes.)  We all eventually worked together to teach him how to do everything, from tying his boots (yes, really), to knowing which foot was his left and which hand was his right, to putting on his protective mask in 5 seconds or less.

• There were three Vietnamese guys.  They remembered escaping from South Vietnam with their parents.  One spoke not a word of English, but seemed to understand directions well enough most of the time.  He did his best, and never asked anybody for extra help.  One spoke broken English and wasn't overly bright, but he had a Bachelor degree in something or other and his daddy was a Viet general, so he was headed to Officer Candidate School right after Basic.  He wore glasses thicker than mine (and that's saying something as I was 20/800), and had buck teeth like the Japs in one of the old WWII cartoons.  The other guy spoke Californian like a native, but acted like a decent person.

• At the beginning of Basic, we all promised our drills that we would work together and not fight each other.  The point is to team up and fight everybody else, you see.  So we did nothing directly to the three assholes who went out of their way each day to make our lives more miserable than necessary.  (This was a valuable lesson that some people are evil, and some are just fuckups.)  We kept our promise, too.  We didn't beat the shit out of them with soap-in-a-sock during a blanket party (you use folded blankets to blind them, hold them down and quiet their screams) until the night after we graduated.  They fell down in the shower, you see.

• I mostly enjoyed Basic.  Marching was almost trivial and boring after three years of marching band in high school.  Basic Rifle Marksmanship was, well, boring.  (The Army makes almost everything boring.)  Except the part where I and another guy accidentally swapped rifles during sighting-in day, and I spent the next two weeks slowly and surreptitiously re-zeroing my rifle.  My drills thought I couldn't shoot at first, but then were amazed when I shot 38 out of 40 on the qualification range.  (I bought the video the unit produced of our time in Basic.  You can clearly hear me ask the previous guy in the foxhole at the shooting range if he had any spare rounds.  "If you ain't cheatin, you ain't tryin!")

• The rifle range was a 300 meter pop-up range.  They have humanish silhouettes that pop up at ranges of 50 (3 seconds, half silhouette), 100 (4 seconds, half silhouette), 150 (5 seconds), 200, 250 (6 seconds), and 300 (7 seconds) meters.  The silhouettes are olive drab. The firing range is either mud (red in South Carolina - the stains never come out) or grass (if you're lucky, mowed sometime in the previous two weeks), or overgrown bushes (that are a year or two past trimming.  You have to aim a bit low at the 50 and 100 meter head-and-shoulders targets, and aim for the shoulders at the 300 meter target.  I shot Expert every time I ever went to the range, with the sole exception of my first time using an M16A2 on a 25 meter paper target range.  They have these weird sights and a complicated zeroing system that was never explained to me.

• In Basic Training, my assigned rifle was an M16.  Not an A1.  I had the only one in the company, I think.  My rifle had a 5 digit serial number (the first digit was 1), and was made by Colt.  It didn't have a forward assist, but it did have the birdcage flash hider.  The important thing to me was that it didn't have the ledge under the dust cover, so I had a hell of a time getting my fingers under it to close it during "Inspection Arms" in drill and ceremony.
  
  (Picture from Wikipedia)
  
  

• We had a blast (literally!) on the Night Assault Course.  It's a simulation of goin over the top from the trenches, like in WWI.  It's done at night (duh), and features machine guns firing above you r heads and star shells exploding in the air an illuminating the "battlefield" as you low crawl across 100 meters or so of open ground to the objective on the other side.  There are sandbagged pits scattered about.  These contain artillery simulators, which are basically a quarter stick of dynamite that emits a shrieking, descending whistle just before they detonate.  I got pick up and thrown several feet when one went off near me.  Oh, and I got kicked in the face by the guy ahead of me, because I was a bit too close to him when we went over the top of the concrete trench wall.  My face was a bloody mess when I got to the other side of the field, and I scared the hell out of the other guys because I was grinning ear to ear.  It was great.

• When we finally go to the live fire assault course near the end, I got yelled out because I ran out of ammo just before I assaulted the final bunker.  They only gave us 60 rounds, and the team ahead of us was really going slow, so the targets just kept popping back up, so I just kept knocking them back down.  I even found a "misplaced" full magazine along the way, but I still ran out of rounds before the finish.  So when I assaulted the bunker, I just stuck the muzzle in and yelled "Bang!  Bang!  Bang!"  I was hilariously stupid.  At least I got the grenade simulator into the bunker on the first try.  (Against all odds, I was an Expert on the grenade range.  I can't throw for shit, but grenade technique is really weird, so it all evened out, I guess.)

• We didn't get to throw live grenades in Basic.  A couple days before our turn on the range, some other unit found out the hard way that we had a batch of zero second fuses.  People die in training.  It just happens.  We didn't get to use the rappelling tower, either, because of an ice storm.

So there I was compilation 1

 A friend wanted story snippets to make his upcoming novel feel more realistic.  He's welcome to use some, none, or all of these.  By the way, they're from my first enlistment, way back when Communists strode the earth with boots of nuclear steel.

So there I was...

• The low grade moron going through induction next to me was too dumb to be infantry (yes, that's a thing), and too weak (couldn't lift 40 pounds) to be anything useful.  They assigned him to be a dockworker, on the theory that he could get stronger without needing to be smart to move crates.

• During inprocessing, you basically wait around with very little to do.  So one of the idiots who would shortly become the bane of my platoon's existence decided it would be hilarious to poop in a paper bag, take it into the next bay (large, open barracks room for about 60), set it on fire, and run.

• There was another guy who went crazy during inprocessing.  I mean seriously nuts.  Screaming, crying, bouncing off the walls, tearing out his hair (this was even before the buzz cuts).  He couldn't handle the stress of, well... Waiting around with not much to do?

• We finally got assigned a task one beautiful winter's day!  Something to do!  We had to clear a bunch of old, decrepit, disgusting mattresses out of an unused bay.  This bay happened to be on the third floor, next to a passage to the next building over, which created a breezeway.  So I, the intelligent and mature one (at age 19), told them it would be easier to toss them out an open window (there was no glass in the passage) than to carry them down the stairs.  But I then said that we needed to post somebody as a guard on the sidewalk, to keep us from dropping a mold-streaked mattress onto some poor, unsuspecting, higher ranking (basically anybody) person's head.  Blank stares of incomprehension.  So I told them to wait for me to get down there, then toss down the mattresses once I said it was OK.  I hustled down the hall, down the stairs, then around to the breezeway, where of course the morons had already started tossing mattresses.  Luckily, nobody else was there.  The idiots had a great time trying to hit me with dirty mattresses.  The Lieutenant who ambled by a few minutes later was a little less enthused about the experience.

•  Basic training does weird things to people.  So many young people somehow aren't used to obeying arbitrary orders and working hard all day.  These people didn't grow up in my family.  To me, Basic was some sort of minor paradise.  Compared to life at home, I got less sleep, but I also got a lot more to eat, and the food was the best I'd ever had.  (Army chow halls are, in general, really not bad places to eat.)  I also got my own boots (two pairs!) and, for the first time in my life, I got to wear clothes that were new, not hand-me-downs!  Best of all, I got yelled at less, and the insults were hilarious!

• You're a waste of a good fuck. The better part of you ran down the crack of yo mama's ass!

• Your daddy would have been better off jacking off in the woods!

• If the Chaplain (military priest) asks, "Does you Drill Sergeant curse at you?" tell him the truth.  Look him straight in the eye, and say, "Fuck no, sir!"

• You have to pay for the buzz cut.  They take it (and several other things) out of your pay, automatically.  You aren't expected to leave a tip for it, though.

• After what felt like a year or two of inprocessing (two weeks), we finally shipped out to Basic Training.  They do this late at night, so you're tired and confused when you get there.  I remember the yellow footprints painted on the cement, and the drills yelling at everybody.  We were sorted out into platoons, given initial orders, and escorted up to our barracks.  Open, 60 man platoon bays, with little nooks for four man teams separated from each other by wall lockers.  The bunks were doubles, and being slightly taller, I got the top one.  Right under the air vent.  Which was blowing cold air.  In January.  These were the "starfish" barracks, and were new at the time.  Heat pumps may be energy efficient, but they still blow cool air at you all winter.

(Picture from icthomasson.com)

(Picture from Woolpert.com)

• We didn't have gun racks in the barracks back then.  Rifles were kept locked in the arms room.  And rounds were counted somewhat carefully.  And you weren't allowed to take your rifle into the porta-john with you, lest you shoot yourself in privacy.  Yes, the drills really did keep loaded rifles in the control towers at the range, and would shoot you if you turned around with a loaded rifle.

(Picture from pinterist.com)  (Note the line of death on the floor.  "Toes on line!")

• Basic is separated into three phases - red (drill & ceremony), white (basic rifle marksmanship), and blue (common skill training).  The color of your platoon's guidon (small, triangular flag) shows what phase you are in.  To us, the victims, it indicated a slight lessening in the hostility of the drill sergeants.  Oh, yeah, the guidon bearer is the tallest guy in the platoon.  Until he fucks up sufficiently to get fired, jsut like the recruit platoon sergeant and squad leaders.  We rotated through those fairly rapidly.  I was lucky/clever enough to never get volunteered into any of these positions.  My goal in Basic was to have a good time and be invisible.  The trick to that is to, like Forrest Gump, do whatever the drill sergeants tell you to do, when they tell you to do it, to the best of your ability.  I knew I achieved my goal when, on almost the last day of Basic, while inspecting our dress uniforms for graduation parade, my senior drill sergeant stopped in front of me, got a puzzled look, and asked me, "Who the fuck are you?"

• We had three drill sergeants - an old (38?) black Sergeant First Class, who was on his last rotation as a DI before retirement, a middle-aged (27?) white lady Staff Sergeant, and a young (22?) black Buck Sergeant.  (Buck Sergeant is slang for Sergeant (E5), to all the leftist morons looking for an excuse to unperson me.)  The Sergeant went away on TDY (temporary duty) for five weeks in the middle of basic, so we didn't see much of him.  (He came back from Master Fitness Trainer school with the most inventively unpleasant exercises, and a plethora of truly obscene Jody calls.)  The SFC spent most of his time in his office, doing paperwork or something.  He came out for mail call, special occasions, ass-chewings, and smoke sessions.  (Smoke session - physical exercise as punishment until the sweat steams off your bodies and pools on the floor under you.  Then you have to mop it up and clean the floor.)  That left our poor, miserable female SSG to handle us all day, every day, without breaks.  After the first week of that, she made some sort of deal with the other platoons of our company, and they handled us for PT and morning chow.  She didn't show up until 0800 (8:00 AM), four hours into our daily routine.  Oh, how she grew to hate us.

• Jody calls - anytime you march, you have to keep in step.  You do this by chanting (one, two three four...) or singing.  These little ditties are collectively "Jody calls".  Some of them are about Jody, the asshole back home who is driving your car and banging your girlfriend, Suzy Rottencrotch.

• Near the end of red phase, my bunkmate apparently decided that enough was enough, and went AWOL one night.  He was caught in the swamp, a quarter mile from the fence line.  He didn't have any rank to take, but the Article-15 (nonjudicial punishment, routinely done in lieu of a Court Martial) didn't leave much of his meager pay for the rest of Basic.

• Payday!  Oh, how awful it was.  We got paid cash back then, direct deposit being almost a thing.  Well, not cash, precisely.  We got paid in traveler's checks, because Basic Training is full of morons and assholes who will try to steal anything and everything.  There was a whole ceremony to this process, which we practiced, money being (of course) handled by officers.  We had to sign each check right there at the table, and then record all the check numbers and amounts to use against whatever asshole decided to try to steal some of them.

• Pay - Recruits back then really didn't get paid much, about $630 per month.  On the other hand, your total expenses for the month amounted to less than $20, so essentially all your pay was gravy (unless you were married, you poor, deluded fool).  Except that there was nothing to spend it on, not that you had time or the privilege to go shopping for anything other than soap, shampoo, and shaving gear.

• I had to be taught how to shave.  (My stepdad always used an electric razor, which I didn't have, and they don't work on me anyways.  The steel wool that grows out of my face destroys them in just a couple of weeks.)  I had no idea that a razor blade was only good for a few days.  I was still using the same disposable razor after being there and shaving every day for two months.  My face was a bloody mess every morning, and I had no idea why.  Being me, with a ridiculously heavy and fast-growing beard, my drills thought I wasn't shaving until they watched me the next morning.  That day, the Sergeant took pity on me, took me (alone!) to the shoppette while everybody else was doing something boring, helped me pick out a blade set and handle, and explained to me how to use them properly.  Wow, DIs are people!  Whoda thunkit!?

To be continued...

Is it still a conspiracy theory?

 Is it still a conspiracy theory when the conspirators wrote a book about it over 50 years ago?