This afternoon a “human caused” fire in the mountains blew up into an 800-acre wildfire. Somebody’s in a bit of trouble.
Photos taken from my place just after sundown began to unveil the fires, but were nevertheless unimpressive shots.
This dark blue unrevealing photo provides some more info with a little bit of “fade correction” added…
But more impressive photos were to be had by hopping in the car, driving closer and waiting for the sky to darken.
Photos after the break…
So, turns out that James Fields is, you guessed it, a Big Government, Anti-Capitalist Socialist:
Ahem:
“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,”
…
he was a member of Vanguard America, which bills itself as the “Face of American Fascism.”
So, he has a fondness for a system that made a big deal out of economic collectivization, of the welfare state, of racial preferences, of disallowing wrongthink and wrongspeak.
So, Dane Peter Madsen built himself a sizable submarine, using crowdfunding to raise the money (around $200,000). He took it for a spin with a Swedish journalist on board, it sank, she disappeared, and now he’s been arrested for her murder as the Danish authorities believe the sub was intentionally sunk.
I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of this sub until it sank. It actually looks pretty spiffy… but reading up on in on Wikipedia, some concerns began to grow:
It was built over a three-year period as an art project by Peter Madsen and a group of volunteers…
An “art project.” A friggen submarine as an ART PROJECT. Oh, no, who needs STEM…
Madsen took the sub out *alone* with the reporter. How is it ever a good idea to pilot a submarine alone?
It seems really unlikely to me that Madsen sank the sub in order to kill the journalist. But maybe he sank the sub for some purpose (Insurance scam? Drama? Art?) and the journalist died in the process. He claims that he dropped her off on shore before the sub sank, and her body hasn’t been found. Could this be some sort of ill-conceived hoax/joke thing, where the authorities are going to spend a whole lot of taxpayer money investigating this only to have her pop up and shout “Ta-Da!’ months down the line?
Late Friday night I went outside to photograph the meteor shower and was presented with a sky full of clouds. While that’s terrible for meteors, it had compensations.
I wound up taking hundreds of shots of lightningbolts. Most were pretty meh, but some were pretty good. I’ve cropped and resized some of the better ones, a small batch after the break. Click to view.
As a followup to the photos of the H-33 display model, here’s a Grumman report from July, 1971, giving a pretty good and well illustrated description of the H-33 orbiter.
The abstract on NTRS can be seen HERE.
The PDF file can be directly downloaded here:
Alternate space shuttle concepts study. Part 2: Technical summary. Volume 2: Orbiter definition
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light!
Country music legend Glen Campbell died a day or two ago. While the tributes are rolling in from the sources you’d expect, here’s one you might not: Alice Cooper.
Additional “HUH?!?!” worthy stuff is Alice here discusses his Christian faith. Huh.
The H-33 orbiter was designed in early 1971 to be launched atop a reusable manned flyback booster, a truly giant supersonic vehicle. The orbiter itself was similar in configuration to the Shuttle Orbiter as actually built, but it differed in that it had internal liquid oxygen tanks and expendable external hydrogen tanks, rather than a single large ET. The NASM has some good photos of a display model of the full system.
The H-33 was a popular design, at least at Grumman. A number of display models were made of it, including this detailed “cutaway” model made – seemingly – of plexiglas.
I have uploaded the full-rez images to the 2017-08 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons. If interested, wander on by the APR Patreon and sign up. Lots of aerospace goodies available.
For what it’s worth:
Some folks associated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists examined the trajectories of recent Nork ICBM test flights, looked at the presumed performance of the motors and propellant, and have concluded that the Hwasong-14 “ICBM” is a “sub-ICBM.” One of the authors of the study is a long-time critic of missile defense systems, so YMMV.
Even if the missile was a full-up ICBM capable of lobbing to New York City the kind of nuke the Norks could actually build, I would not bet large sums on the missile working as advertised in operational practice. That said… Lil’ Kim seems like a nut. Give him a weapon that will probably fail and tell him it’ll probably work (and I imagine his underlings will say what they think they need to in order to avoid the firing squad), and who knows, he might decide that The Stars Are Right and it’s time for his apotheosis via nuclear fire.
I’d be less sanguine about the chances of success for a missile like this lobbing a nuke *over* the US. A few dozen kilotons a few hundred miles up could wreak a whole lot of havoc via EMP.
So Charlottesville, VA, had that latest of fads: fascists protesting countered by fascistic anti-fascists. But things got interesting when a car plowed into the fascistic anti-fascists:
Clearly, somebody here intentionally plowed into a crowd of protestors for the purpose of death and mayhem.
So far as I’ve seen, the local PD hasn’t said who the driver was even though he’s in custody.But the *RUMOR* *MILL* has themselves a suspect:
UPDATE: The link above former went to a site that named names, but now the page is blank. This could mean a whole bunch of things, not least of which is they were wrong.
UPDATE to the UPDATE: A new suspect has been floated:
In this new article, the previously mentioned suspect denies all involvement… which makes a good alibi, given as how he wasn’t actually in police custody at the time, and the driver of the car *was.* Turns out the previous “suspect’ was actually the previous owner of the car, but he sold it. The new suspect has not been officially confirmed as such by the authorities. The new article also suggests that the police think the driver *may* have been driving like a madman out of fear because his car was getting swarmed by violent protesters, but that seems kinda weak.
UPDATE to the UPDATE to the UPDATE:
CNN has confirmed that Fields is the suspect; they’ve shown his mugshot. So far no word about his politicas, but he’s reportedly a registered Republican.
It will be interesting to see the political fallout no matter who this was. If it turns out the driver is a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi, a neo-Confederate or any other scumbag like that, then that will be proclaimed far and wide, and used to smear anything to the right of the fascistic anti-fascists. If, however, it turns out the driver was one of the Antifa dirtbags… well, this’ll make for some interesting spin.
Whoopsie…
A semi got stuck on the tracks near Atlanta, just in time to get bisected by a freight train.