In general you want your opponent to be dumber and less capable than you. In matters of war and serious geopolitics, you want them to believe things that just ain’t so, to be generally gullible. But at a certain point, those who oppose you can start to believe in false stories that are *so* dumb – the “wage gap,” “white supremacy,” ‘trans women are women,” and so on – that they begin to pose an all new kind of threat.
Psychic powers and the supernatural are, on their own, wholly unthreatening. Things that don’t exist can’t hurt you… the Kremlin can have their psychic warrior beam Bozo Rays at me all day long, won’t harm me a bit. But such things *aren’t* on their own. A belief in nonsense could end up with Putin, say, believing a “psychic” who tells him that the United States just launched a thousand cloaked warheads at Moscow, each filled with a Sith lord dolphin powered by Mary Kay brand dark matter. Since the Russians don’t have an anti-Sith dolphin defense shield, their only recourse would be to strike back at the US with a full nuclear barrage.
In general I fully support my enemies spending as much of their time and treasure trying to gain the upper hand in psychic warfare. Every ruble spent on Miss Cleoski is a ruble not spent on an AK-47 or a MiG or an ICBM. But at some point they go a little too far. Hell, imagine if the Russian leadership began to believe that their psychics were capable of stopping a full US nuclear strike on Russia. That might incentivize a Russian first strike.
Finally saw unedited video of the recent shooting of the armed (with a toy gun as it turns out) robber in Texas. With the edited videos, you can’t tell anything about the customer’s shooting of the robber other than at least one shot in the bad guys back. But with the edited video there appear to be *nine* shots, including multiple shots into the guy while he’s down… and a few seconds later, one more shot which kinda seems like it might have been a back-of-the-head shot. Which, you know… maybe a bit much. Do I feel bad that a robber got rubbed out? Not in the slightest. The fact that he had a fake gun doesn’t matter, the *fear* he was determined to generate was real enough. But riddling a dead guy with holes… people are gonna question that. But I dunno: you threaten to kill someone, chances are real good that that *someone* is going to get amped up on adrenaline, and might not be thinking to straight for a minute or three. I know the wokescolds and the prosecutors are going to yammer on about how he shot too many times… but when your life has just been threatened, how rational are you really expected to be?
The greater lesson here: if you don’t want to be turned into Swiss cheese, don’t go robbing people. Seems a simple enough rule of thumb.
Houston Police want to speak this man, but he’s not charged with a crime. HPD says a gunman was robbing people at a taqueria on S. Gessner last night. During the robbery, this man shot and killed the suspect… collected the money, gave it back to the robbery victims, and left. pic.twitter.com/nPtDxw2lQF
The “Enzmann Starship” is named after Robert Enzmann, who “designed” it decades ago. Just exactly *when* has been an issue of some confusion in recent years.
It first came to light in the late 60’s or early 70’s, with claims that he thought it up around 1964 or so. The design is unique: a giant spherical ball of frozen deuterium fuel at the front, followed by a cylindrical ship, ending with a series of Orion-style nuclear pulse engines. It was an *ok* concept for a practical starship, though relatively recent analysis presented in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society argued that it was not nearly as good as imagined. It became something of a sensation in the 70’s after appearing on the cover of “Analog” in 1973.
Nothing has ever been produced, so far as I’m aware, backing up the concept with any sort of detailed design of analysis until that JBIS paper. No reports, proposals, pages of math, from Enzmann seem to be available… just text descriptions of a few sentences and some art. And that’s fine. But in recent years the claims have become more and more expansive. Enzmann, near the end of his life, claimed that the design for a nuclear-pulse vehicle dated not from the time of the Orion program, but back to the *40’s*.
I spoke to Enzmann on the phone a few times over the years. He was enthusiastic, verbose… and baffling. He made lots and lots of claims about having worked on this or that amazing program, but when asked for verifiable details… it was classified. Those who have picked up his mantle and are trying to carry his torch seem to be following in his footsteps there, continuing his claims without much apparent criticism. I’ve recently engaged their twitter contact to get some sort of verification of his claims… but we have now reached the point where not only am I convinced that no such evidence will be produced, I feel no reason to assume anything remarkable is true at all. Behold:
He published nothing on his Starship before NYAS conference #1 other than his own words. ANP aircraft were built in the 50's, and buried deep under a NM mountain, according to Enzmann, who was there. He is the reference.
Claiming that nuclear powered aircraft were actually built in the fifties and then buried in a mountain? Yeah… no. I’m out.
Where the thread started:
Enzmann Starships refueling at Saturn's moon. Paining by RDE, 1949. “We stand today upon the doorsill of manned inter-stellar flight. It will happen swiftly.” =RDE pic.twitter.com/tgNZYzMoCY
I have been poking away at resuming cyanotype production using the new setup and the old transparency negatives. In order to go forward successfully, I need to be able to print on transparent film up to 2 feet wide by six long. I have encountered a lot of trouble here, which has baffled me. No print shops within a hundred miles seem to be able to do that. I put in an order to buy a roll of the film myself to keep at one of the local shops to print off on as needed… and was informed today that the roll will be delivered no sooner than late *February.* The manufacturers don’t have the raw materials for it.
What’s baffling is that when last I worked with this, circa 2017 or so, getting these sort of prints was no trouble whatsoever. I’d send the files to a local print shop in Utah and within a few days the job would be done at reasonable cost, no sweat. Now, though… it’s just not done. And it turns out there is a reason: up until about 5 years ago, it seems people were still regularly using diazo-type blueprinting for architectural and other industrial diagrams, which required this sort of film. But around five years ago, digital printing finally drove the last nail in diazotypes coffin. Without the market, there’s no supply.
So, hopefully the film will still arrive. But I have a customer who kinda wants his custom job, and that’s an unreasonable wait. So something new is being done. The customers line diagram is being printed not on thin transparent film, but on thin *plexiglas.* I can see this resulting in superior cyanotypes; the plexiglass will be vastly less prone to being anything other than dead flat, so the prints should be sharper. But plexi is *far* more expensive (two full size prints will cost as much as the entire roll of film that’s hopefully coming)… and when not in use, I can’t just roll it up and stick it in the corner. If I get 24 inch by 72 inch prints on these, not only is storing them going to be a problem, I can’t even fit them in my car. Grrr. These are problems that will be solved, but, grrr. Everything is always harder not only than it needs to be, but than it used to be.
A Times investigation based on interviews, intercepts, documents and secret battle plans shows how a “walk in the park” became a catastrophe for Russia.
For no readily apparent reason, YouTube of late has been tossing videos at me that suddenly started focusing on people reading aloud stories posted on Reddit (handy for when I’ve been working on the cyanotypes). In particular, “HFY” stories… “Humanity F Yeah!” stories, science fiction short tales featuring, generally, aliens deciding to attack dumb ol’ weak humanity and getting their asses handed to them by those hairless monkeys who turn out to be *insanely* capable in the art of war. They are generally fun little tales… usually not *great* by any stretch, often fairly bad by the usual measures of such things, but entertaining. And the idea that Plucky Humans could save the day against galaxy-spanning ravening hordes and evil empires is always fun. But then I read stuff like this NYT article describing the state of the Russian war machine and war effort.
Yes, sometimes humans can be spectacularly expert at the art of war. But often we are phenomenally incompetent. If the Russia that launched this war against Ukraine was the standard of human military capability, even the most mediocre and half-assed alien invasion fleet would mop up Mankind in a lazy afternoon.
The legislation prohibits any “import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce” and the breeding or possessing of such wildlife. Possession of big cats and cross-breeds would be limited to wildlife sanctuaries and state universities, as well as certified zoos. … Current owners of big cats will be able to keep their animals but are prohibited from breeding, selling or acquiring any of the prohibited wildlife species. They are also banned from allowing their animals to engage in contact with the public and must register the cat with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within 180 days of the bill’s enactment.
Hmmm.
Big cats are often owned by people wholly unable to care for them correctly. But on the other hand, there are more tigers in private hands than in the wild. On the gripping hand, legislating “you can’t own that” is never a good thing. The passage of this law will doubtless be used by some to say “Well, we can ban the ownership of assault rifles. We can ban the ownership of standard capacity magazines. Internal combustion engines. Bitcoin. VPNs. Books we don’t like.” Etc.
It’s unclear to me what exactly will happen with all the privately owned big cats, especially the ones used in crappy “attractions” for some sort of income. I suspect at least some will be simply driven into the sticks and let go. Which won’t be good for anybody.
Perhaps the thing to do would be to start off by walling off Central Park in New York and turning it into a free-range sanctuary for one particular species of big cats… tigers or lions or some such. Won’t be able to sustain a lot of them, but it’ll be a start. All of those gigantic and horribly expensive sportsball stadia built at taxpayer expense might also serve.
Some years ago I produced a range of cyanotype blueprints of a number of aerospace subjects. The hardware needed for this was disposed of when I left Utah at the end of 2019, so starting again seemed unlikely. However, someone has expressed interest in a special commission. Rebuilding the hardware needed will be an expensive chore, and sadly getting the large format transparencies printed looks like it will be much more difficult here than it was in Utah. Nevertheless, at this point it looks probable that I will restore that capability sometime in the next few months, assuming one further detail can be ironed out.
When I get back to it I will probably focus on the larger format stuff rather than the smaller prints. I have plans on how to improve upon the prior hardware to make things work better and more efficiently. If there are any of the former large format prints you’d like to see returned to production, or you have any prints you’d like to see, let me know. And once this is up and running I plan on trying to take commissions, working with a local print shop to find customers interested in this somewhat unusual and certainly obsolete form of art.
If you have a diagram you’d like me to turn into a cyanotype, contact me. Commissions aren’t going to be restricted to aerospace subjects; naval, architectural, movie props, whatever you’ve got, so long as it *can* be blueprinted, once things are in place I should be able to do it.
That time was before beloved franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings were converted into garbage message mechanisms for garbage ideologies. Now… anything that *might* be good is now viewed initially with skepticism, and more often than not finally with contempt.
So will “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” be any good? I have no reason for optimism. There are rumors that the plot involves time travel, and that the end of the movie has Harrison Ford’s Indy being erased from the timeline and replaced with Phoebe Waller Bridge as a female Indy. “The REAL Indy was a woman, all along!” This could be utterly wrong… but things have gotten so predictably bad that I won’t discount the distinct possibility.
Several news reports (example) have come out in the past few days saying that stockpiles of weapons such as anti-tank missiles, MANPADS, artillery shells, etc. are running low in NATO countries. We have apparently sent a *lot* to Ukraine, which has spent the last nine months using those weapons to grind down the Russian military. The result is that NATO may soon run out… meaning no more for Ukraine, and little enough left for us. This is, perhaps naturally, portrayed as a Bad Thing.
But, utilized correctly, it’s not. It is in fact a Good Thing. Why? Because the war in Ukraine is, comparatively, a small one. Compared to Russia invading NATO, or China invading Taiwan or Japan, this war is dinky. And if we’re running low on ammo now… that is one hell of a bright shiny message that we need to stock the frak up. Doing so will take time of course… and we’d better start that clock *now* rather than waiting for when the Big One actually comes. Some of these weapons will take two or more years just to ramp up production… often, the last time these weapons were made was before the soldiers likely to use them were even born.
This will of course cost a lot. But the war in Ukraine has shown that western weapons are pretty damn effective, certainly compared to the Russian systems; it’s not just NATO and Ukraine that will want them, but *everybody.* It’s conceivable that the costs involved in restarting production could be paid for by export sales. Hell, just avoiding the insane student loan forgiveness idea would save the funds needed; perhaps those student loans could be paid off by said students working in the arms factories. Put those gender studies degrees to good use running lathes.
A day or two back I posted about “Established Titles.” In short… nah. I had wondered if the recent surge in interest in ET being less than entirely above-board might have some effect on any of the YouTubers who have been raking in sponsorship money from them… and lo and behold, one of the more entertaining YouTubers, “Casual Geographic,” posted this:
So as many of you have made me aware, a brand I’ve promoted twice has been exposed for pretty much being a scam (or at the very least, incredibly misleading). That’s obviously a massive failing on my part and on me and me alone. I can see now how the brand was meant to be intentionally misleading. For example, their website claims it’s a “fun, novelty product” but explicitly had us say things like “the first x people will receive a plot right next to mine” (which ,not gonna lie, should have been a red flag). Clearly implying that you’d be purchasing a physical plot of land, which clearly is not the case. So the two videos where I promoted them have been archived and I’m in the process of returning the money received from the partnership as well as cutting ties contractually. As soon as I can be sure I’m not in a position for the brand to come after me legally, I’ll repost them with the sponsored segments removed. I’m sorry for promoting what is essentially a grift and apologize to anyone that gave this brand money because they trusted me. Obviously it doesn’t really matter what my intentions were because either way I promoted it but I hope you all understand that I’d never willingly push a dishonest product and am genuinely sorry that I did.
Well done.
I don’t have much animosity towards those who were paid to promote this; the YouTube business model, much like the pre-Musk Twitter model, is seriously broken. Videos that could and should earn the makers *substantial* sums could and often did get demonitized on a whim, sometimes regularly; YouTubers who should make a good living by being entertaining and informative could find their incomes slashed due to false flagging and simple incompetence, with a heavy dose of shady politics. Thus it’s not unreasonable that they’d jump at the opportunity to sign on lucrative sponsorships, and the “buy a plot of land and be called a Lord” thing is sufficiently both weird and mundane that on first glance it probably seems fun and harmless.
If you’ve bought into Established Titles, or you “bought and named a star,” don’t feel bad. If you did so for the entertainment value, for the conversation value… then it’s worth what you feel it’s worth. If you bought in as an investment… well, that’s kinda dumb. Your financial planning is bad and you should feel bad. But speaking as a guy with a surprising number of toy spaceships and a vast number of model kits that will certainly never be finished, I’m not gonna knock someone for buying objectively useless stuff just because you want to. Where I get twitchy is when they sell it to you dishonestly.
Anyway good on Casual Geographics. I heartily recommend this feller. He talks about critters in a way that’s both informative *and* incredibly entertaining. A fair amount of nature red in tooth and claw, so be advised.
