The German V-1 “Buzz Bomb” was a relatively simple weapon, and one that a sufficient number were found sufficiently intact that the Allies were able to reverse engineer. In the US, copies of the V-1 were built by Republic Aviation by September of 1944 as the Jet Bomb-2 “Loon.” The V-1 was found to be a crude weapons, inaccurate and not particularly spectacular… but it was cheap and unmanned. In late 1944 the US was staring down the barrel of Operation Downfall, the forthcoming invasion of Japan. Nobody was quite sure how that was going to go; the only thing the expert were sure of was that it would be a bloodbath. So a stand-off weapon that could be launched in *vast* numbers to saturation-bomb Japanese targets while putting approximately zero American lives in harms way? It was an easy sale.
The JB-2 was externally nearly identical to the V-1 but had an active guidance system, theoretically making it more accurate than the fairly dumb V-1. But even with a radar-based guidance system the JB-2 was meant to be built in large numbers… the goal of 1,000 units per month by April, 1945. However, by the end of the war only a little over 1,300 had been built. Exactly how to use the JB-2 does not seem to have been nailed down; one reasonable notion was to use it as a “harassment” weapon: on days when cloud cover negated manned bombing missions, the Japanese might be expected to be scurrying around rebuilding and reprovisioning and generally getting stuff done… and then here come the buzz bombs.
Problem was, simple as the V-1 was, getting the thing to work right was not so simple. Testing of the JB-2 continued to about 1950, by which time it was woefully obsolete and was being used as an aerial target. But early on, simply getting the thing into the air, never mind flying stably, was a chore.
Because why not: my SR-71 book currently has seven reviews on Amazon, all of which are five-star. So… huzzah! Now… to sell a million copies. For starters. If people will buy books about sparkly mopey vampires, why shouldn’t books about the evolution of the SR-71 sell like hotcakes? Anyway, Christmas is coming up. Make sure to stock up on copies of the book before the forthcoming collapse in the world transportation infrastructure leaves you flatfooted. “Sorry, little Timmy, but the PlayBoxStation 12 is still stuck in China. But here’s the best book ever written!”
Also: if you click on the Amazon link below (or use the Amazon search box up and to the right) and then continue on to search for and buy other stuff, I get a pittance. Woo.
If you’ve purchased a copy through Amazon, feel free to leave a review for the book there. The more reviews, the more it’ll likely be seen, and the more it’ll likely sell… and the greater likelihood of more books like this down the line. Maybe even a greatly expanded second edition.
Assume for the moment that there is not just an “alternate reality” but an infinite number of them… and that they are accessible. Worlds where the Americans lost the War of Independence, or where the Crusades were successful, or where the Justinian Plague was slightly more powerful and wiped out the entire population of the Old World. Assume further than they can be accessed by some form of technology, able to transfer people across worlds, or even swap bits of terrain. It seems to me that if there are more than just a few accessible alternate timelines, there should be an infinite number of them.
In this sort of scenario, you’d imagine that most of the stories would be something like The Man In The High Castle, with high drama involving agents, scientists, historians going and checking out timelines where history diverged in exciting ways: the Nazis won World War II, or the space race was a rampaging success, that sort of thing. But then I had a thought: what if you could find a timeline where, for whatever reason, humanity simply wasn’t. The Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago successfully wiped out the species, say. The Earth is just like our Earth, just… no people. And if there are in fact an infinite number of timelines, there would be an infinite number of these Earth, virtually indistinguishable from each other.
If these worlds exist and are accessible… *imagine* the land rush. With an infinite number of worlds, you will have individuals escaping to their own private world. You will have criminal justice systems dumping convicts onto their own private worlds. And you might have whole populations deciding that the thing to do is swap their chunk of land here on Earth for the chunk of land on some uninhabited Earth. Your entire city, county, state, nation could find itself, willingly or not, suddenly the sole occupants of a pristine world. For some this would be a nightmare. For others, this would be the answer to a series of prayers.
What brings this up? Recent events:
I can imagine that as societies tear themselves apart there would be a *hell* of a drive to flee to other worlds. There is a hell of an incentive right now for first worlders to flee from incipient societal collapse… but the problem is there is nowhere left on Earth to go. Few enough places in the first world have the room to accept a million South African farmers and shop owners… and even if they could squeeze them it, it’d be right next to a million third world refugees.
The rational thing to do would be to cut your territory off from the world for, say, a year, and see if the resources within the boundaries are up to the task, or if you need more stuff. If it works… flip the switch and suddenly your region ceases to exist, replaced with natural terrain and foliage and some rather surprised critters. Your region appears on a pristine world without outside forces trying to destroy you.
I can see anything from “compounds” of racial or religious extremists out in the boonies wanting to go their own way, on up to entire nations. All of Palestine, perhaps… or all of Israel. At first it would be easy for Earthly nations to simply say “screw ’em, let ’em go,” but if this sort of thing gets *really* popular, some counties or regions might start finding themselves running short on population or wealth. If, say, all of Nebraska vanished, there would be jokes about nobody knowing for a few weeks; but the reality is that Interstate 80 would go with it and transcontinental transport would become kinda challenging.
There would also be exciting new industries: just as there are today companies that sell you stuff to help you survive a disaster, there would be companies that would sell you pre-packed Restart Civilization Kits. These would almost by definition have to be a *large* number of intermodal shipping containers filled with various technologies… power, mining, transport, medical, etc. A large empty field could be filled with hundreds of these, then thousands or tens of thousands of evacuees show up and the whole place goes “poof,” replaced by another empty field, ready to be refilled with Restart Civilization Kits and a bunch more refugees.
And then there’s a flip side to this sort of problem: if there are an infinite number of desirable empty Earths all more or less the same, there should be an infinite number of Earths just like ours. For every person planning on fleeing to an empty world, there would be an infinite number of the exact same guy all planning to go. When dealing with infinities, an infinite number of refugees would still all find themselves alone on their own private worlds. But there might be occasional problems: let’s say Israel decides to wander off to their own private world, only to find that they’re sharing an otherwise empty world with North Korea, even though the North Korea from Israel’s original world hadn’t actually left.
And then there’s *this* wrinkle: time travel. Presumably with an infinite number of worlds to go to, you could dial in a world just like ours, but at whatever point in the past (or future). You’d have people gathering together the technology to build the universe shifting tech and going back in time. Neo-Nazis going back to 1935 Germany to translate Nazi Germany to an empty world. Or Imperial Japan. Or the Aztecs, the Navaho, Vikings, Druidic Ireland, you name it.
As we’ve seen this past year and a half or so, there are not only a lot of crazy people out there, they have a surprising amount of cultural and political power. One of the loudest screechings of the Crazy People is to “defund the police,” which, when examined, generally actually means “get rid of the police, and courts, and prisons.” This idea is of course insane. But we live in an increasingly insane world, so it might be worth pondering what might be the eventual result. In a world where the judicial system is gone, what would replace it? Third-world-style warlords are the obvious likely outcome. Murder, mayhem, generalized horror and collapse.
But perhaps there’s a middle ground compromise. Let’s go old school and largely empty out the prisons. What to do with the convicts, though? We used to have a solution: outlawry. If you’re unfamiliar with the actual basics of outlawry, the below video might be helpful, but the summary is this: an outlaw is, in fact, outside of the law. You lose all rights. Someone can murder you, and that someone will face no legal repercussions whatsoever. If someone renders you aid, *they* will face the wrath of the law. Life for an outlaw was bad enough hundreds of years ago; today it would likely be fairly brief as the Internet would spread your face and info around. There would doubtless be online databases of outlaws, and with facial recognition you’d be spotted quickly. You’d be fair game not only for murder… but for *slavery.* Medical experimentation. Organ “donations.” Really unpleasant dark web video presentations.
So… maybe re-institute outlawry? Start small, with tightly focused crimes. Murder and rape, of course. Blocking roads for protests seems like a good one. Using arson for politics.
The McCloskeys were spotted daring to defend their home from a band of racist Marxism enablers a bit over a year ago. They, like the Kenosha Kid, should never have been charged with a crime; the fact that they were shows quite clearly the corruption that stains many district attorneys and prosecutors.
Bad news: continuing ammo shortage. Good news; continuing gun sales.
As the article mentions, the lack of ammo hampers first time gun owners from practicing. A modest suggestion: the US military manufactures its own ammo, and has a pretty massive stockpile; now that we’re bailing from Afghanistan, there is not so much immediate need. Perhaps the US government could do the right thing and start handing out free crates of ammunition to gun owners with clean criminal records. Certainly a better use of government resources than enforcing bans on evicting deadbeats.
I’m no Greenpeace weenie, but I admit to discomfort at zoos. Locking some animals up into small enclosures is downright cruel, and a lot of animal exhibits are simply depressing. The final straw for me was back in the 90’s: my father and I visited the National Zoo in D.C, and there was a lone male rhino in a relatively small enclosure… and it had been driven so mad by loneliness and/or boredom that the path it wore in the dirt as it endlessly circled its enclosure was four or five inches deep.
That said, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium is spectacular, and one of the few things about California that I miss.
Anyway, here;s a piece about a remarkably realistic robotic dolphin. The suggestion is made that some animals – dolphins, orca, tigers, etc. – could be replaced in captivity with robots.
The robots maker says that what he wants to do is replicate extinct sea critters… you know, the *good* ones like mosasaurs and ithyosaurs and pliosaurs and the like. Now, if there was a good sized aquarium that had Jurassic Seas as an exhibit, I’d be all over that like ugly on an ape. But a regular aquarium, where all the fish were replaced with robots? The otters and penguins and such replaced with Nexus Seven replicants? If I *knew* that, my interest would be minimal. A zoo where the lions and tigers were also robots? Meh. But am I an outlier here? If zoos had wholly believable robotic bears and tapirs and pythons and the like… would people pay to see them? Not just initially for the novelty of it, but years and decades down the line. And would zoo patrons start demanding more and more of the robots? Instead of watching a lion lounge around, would people come to expect the robolions to hunt down the robogazelle every quarter hour? Would the kids demand that the robolions put on a song and dance act?
This story has been kinda all over the place, even though:
1) It’s Britain, not the US
2) It’s soccer, not a real sport
3) It’s someone I doubt one American in ten thousand had ever heard of.
Anyway, the story goes that a mural was painted of a black soccer player. The soccer player apparently played badly in a recent game of “let’s watch paint dry,” so some fans were upset. One fan painted negative graffiti onto the existing mural. The police were called and are making a big deal out of finding who did this dastardly deed (seems fair to ask if the the British police leap into action *every* time there’s graffiti. Or a burglary. Or arson. Or an assault. Or a grooming gang.). News media around the world lost their minds yapping about the racist graffiti. But, interestingly, finding out what the graffiti actually said is a little challenging. The New York Times article linked above decided that that wasn’t News Fit To Print. But it is possible to find what the graffiti was:
To deny African Americans autonomous regions in DC, would be denying us our basic human rights.
I have little doubt that there are ethnic nationalists of all kinds – black, white, Asian, Hispanic, whatever – who will watch this with great interest.
That line was followed by these:
African Americans have the right to have autonomous regions because we are indigenous people.
The United Nations defines indigenous people as: “the descendants of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived. The new arrivals later became dominant through conquest, occupation, settlement or other means.” (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues)
Huh. Once again, I’m sure there are lots of people watching this. Like… I dunno, a lot of English people in London. Or, hell, pretty much everybody everywhere. Jut about anybody is descended from somebody who got conquered at some point.
These shows are, in retrospect, kinda silly (and often rather cringy… acting, stories, ham-fisted plotting, cardboard villains, over-reliance on stock footage, etc.). But the theme songs… they kick ass. Fight me.
Yeah, the 80’s weren’t perfect. But I dare you to suggest that any decade before or since has or will have such a plethora of pop culture monsters.
One of the more imaginative and incredibly unlikely concept cars was the Ford Nucleon, a 1950’s idea for a nuclear powered car. Apparently this was pretty much a complete art and sales project, without much actual engineering; it was based on the notion that not only could nuclear reactors be scaled down small enough to fit in a car, they could be made not only wreck-tolerant, but that lightweight and virtually magical radiation shielding would be invented that would allow said reactor to hum away at full power mere feet from paying customers without roasting them or giving them explosive ass cancer. It was, let’s face it, wholly ridiculous… and entirely awesome.
Photos of models of the Nucleon have been available since the 1950’s, but diagrams have been lacking. An article posted online a few days ago included a few specifications for the proposed vehicle, finally nailing down some of the dimensions. And for reasons that seemed good to me (and which are probably obvious), I slapped together a quick side view. I think my side view is *reasonably* accurate based on numerous photos of the scale model Ford built and the dimensions given. What I’m not certain about is whether *Ford* truly understood their vehicle.
Here’s the side view using the 200-inch (16.7 ft) length specified by Ford, accompanied by two normal-sized humans:
The driver doesn’t even come *close* to fitting. So I scaled the Nucleon up until it seemed to look right, with the end result being that the car is now about 26 feet long:
That’s by no means a small vehicle… but then, it’s nuclear. Scaling it up by a factor of about 1.55 makes the cab big enough to fit actual full-size humans. But scaling it up that much makes the 77.4″ width (6.45 ft) into 120 inches, or ten feet. Good luck squeezing *that* onto the road; the Hummer H1, known as an uncomfortably wide vehicle, is a mere 87 inches wide.
Does anyone have any information to contradict and correct the Ford specifications? Or is it just another case of the art department kinda ignoring reality?
There are lots of “movements” that are kinda nutty. But outside of the religious or occult, it’s hard to get more downright delusional than “sovereign citizens,” especially the ones who base their bad behavior on patently ridiculous re-writings of history.
Short form: a member of a “Moorish” sovcit group broke into a woman’s home in New Jersey, changed the locks and claimed that it was *his* because, as a “Moor,” he has ancestral rights to all the lands in the US and doesn’t have to obey US laws. He apparently thought that that would be the end of it, that the rest of society would accept his actions and let him keep the house. This is not just wrong, it’s loopy and stupid; anyone with a functional brain would have told him:
The local police responded correctly: a bunch of guys with guns showed up to convince him of the errors of his ways. Fortunately they got him out without shooting up the joint.
I can easily see a lot of other homeowners being a whole lot less patient with this nonsense. It’s your home; I can’t imagine that there are legal issues with you breaking down your own door. If you break down your own door and find someone unwanted in your home, Castle Doctrine would now be in play, I would expect. If said homeowner is a popular person, gifted with many friends and family given to muscles and enthusiasm, the home invader may find himself in a spot of bother.
