The Voice of God

Crazy, Hmm..., science, science fiction, weapons, youtube 8 Responses »

Mar 222018

If you fire off a powerful enough laser that comes to a tight enough focus, you can yank the electrons off atoms of plain old air. This will create a little ball of plasma… a little bright, loud explosion. Handy enough if what you want is a little bright explosion in the air. If, however, you hit that ball of plasma with a second, properly tuned laser, you can manipulate that ball to plasma to explode in specific ways. Thus it need not just go “BANG,” you can – at least in theory, make it go “HI THERE.”

Unsurprisingly the DoD is interested in just such a technology. At a simple level, the ability to create a distressingly loud and unending series of BANGs in the air at a great distance would be a handy tool to harass the enemy. Imagine you’re hunkered behind your wall and all of a sudden a machine gun starts going off directly above you. Ya ain’t gettin’ no sleep tonight!

The eventual goal, though, is not simple BANG, but instead to make that little ball of fire *talk.* Using it for basic communications? Meh. What you want is to get it to say stuff like “Hey, this is God. Guess who’s pissed off at what you’re doing right now…”

The video below shows a series of tests. Most involve the creation of BANG at a distance… certainly of military value. But the two last bits are potentially the most interest. Second to last seems to show the creation of a stable little “ball lightning,” a glowing sphere on the order of a centimeter in diameter that just floats there in space (if I’m seeing it right). The last segment shows attempts to make something like a human voice. There is a series of rotating mirrors involved, which seems a little problematic as I doubt this is something you’re going to find the enemy normally equipped with. But one of those tests does create something somewhat like a human voice. It’s gibberishy and heavily buried in a high-pitched noise, but potentially promising. Even if they can’t make it talk as such, if they could at least get rid of the high-pitched noise, leaving just a ghostly “voice outta friggen’ nowhere” could have an entertaining effect on the enemy. Especially at night. Keep up the “machine gun fire” on them for a week or so, drive ’em buggo, then finally give them a chance to catch some Zzzz’s… then have ghosts start whispering nonsense to them. I can see this driving people batty, perhaps even causing the enemy to turn on each other like psychos.

From HERE.

A Beautiful Dream

politics, weapons 5 Responses »

Mar 152018

There’s a lot of weird in this story, but it’s an interesting read.

Poconos gunmaker’s vision: an AR-15 for every American

Short form: The son of Reverend Sun Myung Moon (you know, the Moonies) owns a firearms manufacturing company, Kahr Arms. They manufacture guns like the Thompson and the K9, and will soon be making their own AR-15 clone. That’s cool and all, but the problem with making sure that more people get themselves an AR-15 is that his AR-15 will cost $700… more than many I’ve seen. So that would hardly seem likely to make much difference. Now, if he was making a quality AR for, say $250, that would be something.

Sometimes they forget themselves and express their true nature

AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, history, humor, politics, weapons 4 Responses »

Mar 122018

So the latest spokes idjits for the civilian enfeeblement movement pooped out their latest fashion concept for all the Cool Kids to wear:

Oddly enough, it was a Hollywood celeb who pointed out that political armbands might not be such a swift idea. Granted it was one of the very few conservative Hollywood celebs, but still…

You might have a little trouble getting Jewish Americans to embrace this look. Do you have some shiny jackboots and brown shirts to go with it? Guessing maybe you skipped history class while you were shilling for the @DNC… pic.twitter.com/WfA4jL9y65

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) March 10, 2018

Heh.

Via Gateway Pundit.

Sadly after getting schooled, the original tweets with the idea and photos were taken down. Much better would it have been had they kept going so that people could see that those who push for gun control are little better than the fascists they emulate in so many ways.

So once again we’re left with the paradox: we’re supposed to listen to these kids on matters of politics… while at the same time we’re not supposed to allow them to exercise their constitutional rights because they’re all untrustworthy emotional basketcases.

Liberal vs. Conservative Prepping

Crazy, Hmm..., humor, weapons, wisdom, youtube 3 Responses »

Mar 112018

I’m sure there’s a *lot* of cherry picking here, but there also seems to be a fair amount of truth:

“Waco”

AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., I'm from the government, politics, weapons 8 Responses »

Mar 102018

Did anyone else watch “Waco” on the Paramount Network? I recorded the series but have only now started watching it. I’m into the third episode and the ATF has launched their initial assault… and *MAN* the ATF does NOT come off well. The Branch Davidians? Yeppers, crackpot cultists. But the ATF is being depicted basically as a pack of blood-thirsty gloryhounds.

The series starts off with the disastrous and equally stupid raid on Randy Weavers home in Ruby Ridge. That event, coming during the GHW Bush administration and basically approved of and made worse by the Clinton administration, is I think one of the foundational events that led to the current political climate. The Weavers and the Davidians were whackos to be sure… but they were in any rational measure essentially harmless. But the FBI and ATF went after them with a level of force that was wholly unwarranted. Those events led to the the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1990’s militia movement and pretty much the complete collapse in faith in the US government by a great many people who otherwise thought of themselves as patriots. Prior to these events, militia types were a *very* fringe element; after these events they went kinda mainstream. Would we have President Trump today if Randy Weaver had been simply arrested away from his house? If David Koresh had been picked up when he went into town to get some groceries? Would we have the 3-Percenters and Oath Keepers and the like if the government hadn’t actually acted like an organization that people might actually need top worry about? Similarly, I wonder where we’d be today with “ghost guns” and 3D printed firearms, as well as school shootings carried out by lil’ whackjobs obsessed with guns, if the government hadn’t banned modern sporting rifles and standard capacity magazines back in the 90’s, and hadn’t kept threatening to ban them again.

It doesn’t help that prior to the 1980’s or so, a “cop” would look like this:

And seemingly around about the late 80’s, early 90’s, far too often police started looking like this;

And this:

When SWAT teams were first formed in the late 1960’/early 1970’s, their purpose was pretty specific: combating terrorists and heavily armed bank robbers and the like. At the time that was an important function; urban crime and terrorism were on the rise in the 60’s and 70’s. But then SWAT was turned loose on The War On Some Drugs. And then after the crime peak of the 1990’s, SWAT didn’t go away: SWAT teams were used on lesser and lesser criminals, sometimes storming homes on the rumor that someone in there might have a few ounces of weed, for Grud’s sake.

So you’ve got an increasingly militarized police force – ATF, FBI, even the local PD – that has been caught on camera using military tools, weapons and force on American citizens… and we’re supposed to be surprised that some people have concluded that it might be a good idea to gun-up against the day the government turns full-blown fascist?

When i see stuff like this, I have two basic responses:

1: You ask “what does a civilian need with an AR-15,” and I’ll just point to armor-plated cops with automatic weapons. If *they* aren’t safe on the streets without such weapons, why should I feel safe without my own personal General Electric minigun?

2: That’s not a hair question.

PDF Review: Wheelguns in Spaaaace

Hmm..., nukes, Patreon, projects, science, spacecraft, weapons 8 Responses »

Mar 092018

Advanced “space guns,” typically lasers, railguns, coilguns, neutral particle beams and the like, have a problem: power. Nuclear reactors and solar panels can provide power for years at a time, but generally their steady-state power output is only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous power needed when the gun goes off. So to run a weapon that needs many gigawatts for a fraction of a second with a powerplant that produces kilowatts, you need an energy storage system that can convert that energy into power on a moments notice. Things like batteries are great in principle, but their weight is vast and their ability to release power at the high levels needed is generally poor.

Often this has resulted in space weapons that use chemical reactions to provide the power needed. This has meant that the total number of shots that can be fired is strictly limited.

In the 1980’s during the SDI heyday, Westinghouse looked at an alternate approach: rotating hoops. Giant wheels made of advanced composite materials would be spun up over time by a low-power system such as a nuclear reactor, and when needed these flywheels would be electromagnetically braked to generate vast amounts of power as the wheels ground to a halt. The system could be “reloaded” by slowly spinning the wheels up again… assuming the system hadn’t torn itself part.

The weapon shown below is probably largely notional, no masses or dimensions were given. But based on a smaller terrestrial unit (with ten hoops, each 14.5 meters diameter, massing 140,000 kg each, spinning at 1800 RPM to deliver a total of 1 gigawatt for 10 minutes to power anti-missile lasers and such), this can be assumed to be a fairly *vast* construction, far heavier than anything mankind has so far launched into orbit. Obviously such a thing would be impossible to launch as a unit; it would be assembled in space using spools of fibers wound in place. Presumably the weapon itself would be at least somewhat aimable independent of the flywheels… slewing *them* about to aim at a moving target would seem to be an exercise in futility.

This came from the paper “Rotating Hoop, Pulsed-Energy Converter” contained in “Transactions of the Fifth Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems.” A PDF of that can be downloaded if you go HERE and click the “PDF” button.

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I’m not sure how this supports the cause

Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 9 Responses »

Mar 032018

After the school massacre in Parkland last month, the Civilian Enfeeblement Movementarians started yammering on about how this was proof that we need to ban standard capacity magazines. Uh… huh. Yeah, about that…

The “weapon and bullets were not high quality and were breaking apart,” one of the legislators, state Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, told the Herald.

Cruz went in with only 10-round magazines because larger clips would not fit in his duffel bag, Book said.

It seems the shooting stopped when his gun jammed, a feature of crappy ammo and poor maintenance. Not because he ran out of ammo, or had a sudden change of heart, or someone else stopped him. he was able to do what he did with low-capacity magazines.

Do the Russians have themselves a Pluto?

aircraft, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., news, nukes, politics, russian empire, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 56 Responses »

Mar 012018

Pentagon confirms that Russia is testing a cruise missile powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor

Uh-oh.

Russia’s new cruise missile has crashed in testing: US

Putin is claiming that the Russians have a nuclear powered cruise missile capable of defeating all current missile defense systems. Something like Pluto would very likely be able to do that… if it works. Mach three at a thousand feet altitude would be incredibly hard to shoot down, and would make a hell of a mess over the entire flight path; shock waves from the passing craft would cause structural damage and injuries, radioactive particles spat out by the reactor would leave a trail of waste behind.

It’s a little difficult to imagine what advantage such a system would *really* provide. Missiles like this would cost a lot more than simpler ICBMs, and it’s not like the US has an effective defense system against a massed ICBM attack. A nuclear-powered cruise missile is the sort of thing that the Russians can’t use *a* *little* *bit* against the United States; any use of such a weapon would result in a full-blown nuclear response, so it would only be useful in the context of a full-up war.

All that said: the news should be interesting over the next few weeks. It’s entirely possible that Putin is full of crap and they don’t have a Pluto; or there was a translation foulup somewhere, and the Russians never meant to imply they have a Pluto. But what if they *are* claiming to have a Pluto? Go ahead and imagine the unholy sh!tstorm that would result if the US announced that it had a new cruise missile with a nuclear reactor as a power source, a missile that would leave a 10,000 mile path of radioactive waste behind it. The press would go *insane.* It would be the biggest news of the day, and would lead to outrage and protests and all kinds of trouble. What will a Russian Pluto lead to? We shall see, I suppose.

School shootings and safety since the 90’s: research

history, Hmm..., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 6 Responses »

Feb 282018

The public opinion certainly seems to be that school shootings have become more prevalent in recent years, that schools are more dangerous places. Studies, however, indicate something quite a bit different. The major change, I think, isn’t that school shootings have become more common; rather, its that the media cover them more and social media allows them to be more “immediate.” A study by Northeastern University puts some numbers onto the subject:

Schools are safer than they were in the 90s, and school shootings are not more common than they used to be, researchers say

Things were *not* better during the years when the Clinton “Assault Weapons Ban” was in effect. Columbine, the sort of Ur-School-Shooting, was right smack in the middle of the AWB.

A related story from Northeastern U:

How did the media get the number of school shootings so wrong?

After the Parkland school shooting, the claim hit the press that already in 2018 there had been 18 school shootings in the US. But by any rational definition of “school shooting, there had been no such number. One was a kid who committed suicide in the bathroom. Another was an adult who shot himself in the parking lot of a school that had been shut down for seven months. At least two were shootings in the parking lot hours *after* school. Only eight of the eighteen “school shootings” actually involved injuries.

The author suggests that the cause underlying this sort of bad reporting is a desire to be First with the news coupled with laziness. This is undoubtedly true… but do not discount the importance of simply not giving a damn about the facts when it comes time to promote a political narrative.

And here we go: the “Assault Weapon Ban of 2018”

AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 48 Responses »

Feb 262018

House Democrats introduce bill prohibiting sale of semi-automatic weapons

The Assault Weapons Ban of 2018 will prohibit the sale, transfer, production, and importation of:

· Semi-automatic rifles and pistols with a military-style feature that can accept a detachable magazine;

· Semi-automatic rifles with a fixed magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds;

· Semi-automatic shotguns with a military-style feature;

· Any ammunition feeding device that can hold more than 10 rounds;

· And 205 specifically-named and listed firearms.

This would basically make everything more modern than a revolver eventually illegal, since “transfers” would be illegal. Which means you could not leave your pistol or hunting rifle to someone in your will.

This is the dream of the civilian enfeeblement movement: the eventual removal of the means of defense from all of the little people. Keep this in mind the next time someone lies to you and says “nobody wants to take your guns:” this bill may not make confiscation plain, but it makes it plain that theydon’t want to let people keep them.

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