Jan 202021
 

Not a complete story, just an idea. Lemme know if this sounds promising. Perhaps more importantly, lemme know if it has been done adequately by others.

 

An alien spacecraft or entity of immense size and power suddenly appears (emerges from hyperspace, pops in from another dimension, whatever) in the outer-ish solar system. It promptly wanders over to Jupiter and tears the planet to bits, stripping it of deuterium and leaving the rest in a slowly condensing cloud. The planet is chop-shopped down to the rocky core, with an expanding cloud of protium, helium, ammonia and such around it. The Jovian moons all now orbit the sun freely… the ones that the aliens didn’t eat, at any rate. Once done with Jupiter – a process taking at most a few weeks – it turns Saturn into a blinking traffic signal, a light easily visible over substantial interstellar distances. The rings are stripped away, the moons are melting. and drifting outwards. The alien dumps a Mars-mass of fabulously radioactive trash out beyond Neptune and then moves on, back into hyperspace. Doesn’t physically harm us, doesn’t communicate with us, gives no indication that it even notices us… just refuels on a scale we can’t quite deal with. Cultural hijinks ensue on Earth.

 Posted by at 1:07 am
Jan 152021
 

Seems we’re running headlong into the Crazy Years. What with the very worst people in the last hundred years of US history getting ready to take over the Senate and White House, after having already taken over the House, Media and universities, we’re likely due for some extreme unpleasantness. The incoming administration is promising to turn seventy million or more Americans into overnight felons and the Big Tech companies going overtime into making sure that the conversation is distinctly one-sided, it’s understandable that a lot of people have a lot of things to say. Some of it rather uncomplimentary about those on the totalitarian side of the aisle… and sometimes what people say slips over into expression of threats of violence.

We may have ourselves an honest to Odin civil war on our hands before long. Up until recently I’ve thought that such a thing was the stuff of fever dreams… but here we are. And while a civil war might be inevitable, it would be *bad.* I know there are some deluded fools actually salivating over the prospect, but the only people who would benefit from another American civil war are our enemies. No good will come of it.

So: I invite everyone to refer back to the old blog post “How To Get Banned,” from waaaay back in 2010. The very first way of getting banned? Issuing threats of violence in the comments. Threatening people does no good; all it will do is get the authorities to notice you, and I’m sorry, any government types who are drooling over the opportunity to kick in a million doors and arrest and imprison more people that the Soviet gulag system ever dreamed of will *not* be intimidated by an angry comment. What will happen, though, is that such comments will be used to claim “terms of service” violations for my little website.

Yes, Twitter and Facebook and the like do not seem to give a damn if leftwing extremists, jihadis, ChiComs and other people who wish America ill use their platforms for threats of violence. But Big Tech *does* go after those of us in the counter culture. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, but the fact is that for the moment rational people have to realize that we’re living in a system with different rules for different people.

So… dream up all the fantasies and strategems you like. Plan. Stock up. Prepare. Just… don’t post incitements to violence or criminality here. I will delete those when I see ’em, and start banning those who repeatedly violate. As far as I know, such posts could well be false flags intended to harm the blog and my business. Paranoid? Sure. But these are the times in which we live.

And I am about on my last nerve with the trolls. Feel free to disagree, debate, argue. But those who act the jackass, whose arguments start with insults? Feh.

 Posted by at 6:09 pm
Jan 152021
 

A year and a bit ago some info came out about the then- forthcoming zero-gravity first person shooter “Boundary.” There have been updates since then, including release of the game. The animation, especially in the trailer, is *fantastic*, included slo-mo scenes of a space-modded AK-47 not only firing but flexing in the way actual guns do. This game was produced by the Chinese, so feel free to auto-fill what that might mean. Buy it, your money goes to Hunter Biden’s paymasters. Play it online, Beijing gets to watch. Is there subtle (or not so subtle) pro-CCP propaganda embedded within it? Who knows. but it looks freakin’ *gorgeous.* The USSF should tear the code apart, strip out the doubtless abundant Chinese naughtiness, rework it into rah-rah pro-USSF propaganda. “Fight the ChiComs in space!” “Defend US space assets from space pirates!” Add in things like Dragon and Starship. For extra awesomeness, a USSF Orion. No, not that overpriced capsule… the *real* Orion.

Almost makes me want to try to get back into Pax Orionis… now *that* might make a dandy video game.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 3:03 pm
Jan 152021
 

I’ve long said that what police need more than anything is a truly practical stun-setting phaser. The Taser kinda gets there, but has some limitations such as being single shot, short range and fairly easily defeated. The ability to just hit a “sit your ass down” button and bring a confrontation to a harmless end would be *fantastic* for many encounters. And not just police: it’d be great for home defense as well. But sticking with police, imagine how much less trouble there would be if violent and/or crazed weirdos (such as make a few appearances in the video below) could be simply shut down for a minute or two with minimal risk of harm. It’s people like the guy in the video below that lead to Bad Cops: having to deal with such aggressive, loud, obnoxious and downright evil scumbugs on a daily basis would make *anyone* into a misanthrope in no time flat.

As an alternative to phasers: truly practical “robocops” like “Chappie.” Run by AI with open-source programming that can be downloaded on command (but not uploaded without a complete physical overhaul), given super-human strength, super human ability to not give a damn and super human ability to simply stuff a looney into a crazy bucket, such robots would be *fantastic* backups.

Bonus Round: phasering the CNN crews and left-wing extremists who were leading the “insurrection” would have been handy as well.

BLM activist, Antifa, anarchist or FBI asset? What we know so far about John Sullivan, who was spotted instigating mobs at Capitol Hill

 Posted by at 8:52 am
Jan 112021
 

Latin Phrases Patriots Should Know: Patriotic Latin Phrases and Their Translations

I guess this is an ok compilation article… has stuff like:

“De oppresso liber”: To liberate the oppressed, U.S. Army Green Berets

“Noli me tangere”: Don’t tread on me, U.S. Army 2nd Infantry Regiment

“Semper fidelis”: Always loyal, U.S. Marine Corps

“Mors ab alto”: Death from above, U.S. Air Force 7th Bomb Wing

“Si vis pacem, para bellum”: If you want peace, prepare for war

“Audentes fortuna juvat”: Fortune favors the bold

“Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem”: I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery

“Scientia potentia est”: Knowledge is power

Those are all ok, I suppose. But what I was really looking for was:

“Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc”: We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

Yeah, yea, it’s not actually Latin, just something made to *sound* like Latin. May I remind you, 2+2=4 is racist, so…

Google Translate says the Latin should be “Non in die festo Parvam piamque dum lubenter eorum non proderunt domare Nobis,” Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

 Posted by at 2:57 pm
Jan 072021
 

So for the last 24+ hours I’ve been listening to news outlets such as NPR and the Bbc hyperventilating about the events in Washington. It seems the talking points memos got out, as there has been incessant repetition of phrases like “armed insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorism.” The action of people walking up to and then into a building is inevitably referred to as “storming” the building.

And then today, the pervy corrupt scumbag nice old gentleman who will be the next President said:

what we witnessed yesterday was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters — don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob of insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.

Now, to be fair Biden *did* actually say something true, though I suspect he didn’t mean it the way reality interprets it:

No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view. And I hope it’s sensitized them to what we have to do.

Yes, the American people saw it. The American people saw the  better part of a year where “Black Lives Matter” protests turned into cities on fire. Government buildings utterly trashed, police cars set ablaze, sizable sections of cities simply ceded to *actual* insurrectionists. The American people saw this chaos being lauded by the press and many in government. We saw the gaslighting on a scale not seen since the Commies and the Nazis.

So what will the American people take from this? Compare and contrast protestors who set cities on fire, who continued their hijinks for weeks and months, and were praised and rewarded for it, with protestors who broke a few windows, wandered around a building for a few *hours,* and THEN LEFT, all without starting *any* fires, and are getting called domestic terrorists by the press and the next President. Cities set on fire by the left are, at worst, attributed to ‘a few bad apples among mostly peaceful protestors.” There is no such attribution of “only a few are bad” for the right wingers actions.

The lesson to learn here is that one side really is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want without a whole lot of official pushback. The other side finds that any protest at all will get them called domestic terrorists by the media and the government. One side is allowed to behave as badly as they like. The other side is being pushed into a corner.

Yeah. This will end well.

 

At least we’ll get some good memes before the end.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 3:19 pm
Jan 062021
 

Oddly enough, this one is nothing about politics.

Sometime in the 1980s, a very young version of me came across a then-current magazine article on the OSS “Bigot,” a modification of the 1911 pistol to fire darts rather than bullets. The point was that this WWII-era weapon would be very quiet compared to the standard 1911 and could be used for taking out sentries and the like. Problem was it apparently didn’t work all that well and a suppressor was a lot more sensible. Still, the vague memory of that magazine article has irritatingly stuck with me for decades. As memory serves it had a number of large, possibly full-scale photos of the hardware. Repeated efforts to find it again have failed. It might have been in something like “Soldier of Fortune” or some similar terribly 80’s sort of magazine. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone?

NOTE: “Forgotten Weapons” video about the Bigot with extra audio awesomeness. Go on, guess what it is…

 Posted by at 9:30 pm
Jan 062021
 

David Bowie’s “Heroes” is a song about the triumph of the human spirit. Written in 1977, it is about two lovers separated by the Berlin Wall. Lots of people love this song and are cheered by it:

 

A lot of singers have covered it. And then… Peter Gabriel released his own version. Same melody, same lyrics, and at least to me it seems utterly flipped into a lament. To me it comes across not “we can be heroes” in the sense that “we have this great potential,” but “we could, but we’re not.” It almost sounds like someone who had the chance to be a hero and failed and is now living with the failure.

I gotta say I find the Gabriel version far, FAR more evocative.

 Posted by at 7:03 am
Jan 042021
 

Let me get this out of the way: flying cars are a COOL IDEA that, when the rubber meets the road and the math hits the calculator, generally doesn’t make much sense. You end up with a car that isn’t that good married to an airplane that isn’t that good. More expensive than either a car or a light airplane should be, with the performance of neither.

Nevertheless, it remains an evocative notion. And from the standpoint of an aerospace engineer, an interesting engineering exercise. And one of the more recent, more interesting flying car concepts is the “Firenze Lancaire.” This design says “to hell with making a flying car for the masses” and goes straight for the “hypercar” market. The end result is a carbon fiber bodied vehicle with Tesla motors and batteries for getting around on the roads, and two turbojets for getting around in the air. The car is quite large and would be difficult to park, but if you’re paying five million dollars for a car you’re probably not taking it to WalMart.

The website is filled with snazzy images. It just looks sci-fi-cool. But it also looks… kinda incomplete. There are no control surfaces; the wing structure is largely undefined. The wing folding mechanism is interesting and all, but the wings do not appear to have a good structural attachment to the car. They look like a modest G-load and they’ll snap right off.

Is this for real? Is it a serious engineering effort… or is it just someone’s demonstration of their ability to make spiffy CAD models? I don’t know, though I have suspicions. There are enough moving parts on this thing to get it legally qualified as an Autobot, and that worries me some.

 

 Posted by at 1:32 pm
Jan 012021
 

This bit of whackadoodle nonsense dates all the way back to March… almost to the Before Times. But it is worth looking at and laughing at… and perhaps wondering about.

Welcome to Equiterra, where gender equality is real

It is a description of a fictional land of cliches and leftist talking points, illustrated with a particularly childish image of a “city” populated with a bunch of badly rendered people. At a half-hearted count there seem to be about 82 individuals shown. Of that 82, six are shown in wheelchairs (approximately 1% of the US population uses wheelchairs), one (possibly two) are shown as blind, one shown with an artificial leg. Hard to tell how many others are deaf or retarded or crazy or loaded down with STDs. But it is pretty clear that in order to attain their “gender equal” society, a whole lot of people had to be broken.  And of course there will be more: the article points out that in “Equiterra,” nobody questions the wisdom of a girl becoming a professional football player. When she gets plowed over by the 400-pound opponent and snaps her neck… one more for the wheelchair.

Also:

If you ask a little girl walking along Unstereotype Avenue what she wants to be when she grows up, she could tell you I can be anything: a scientist, an engineer, a supreme court judge, an Olympic champion, an artist or astronaut — not even the sky is the limit when it comes to dreaming big.

Huh. How many of these little girls are just waiting for their chance to join the ranks of the garbage disposal specialists? How many are lining up to be ore miners, sewer workers, construction workers, factory workers?

There is no such thing as femicide, women are valued and respected here.

But men? Screw them, the manicide rate is through the *roof.*

“Equiterra” is the sort of place that can only exist through brainwashing. Everyone has the same opinions and goals, the same views and the same… well, everything. The people of Equiterra are *broken.*

People yapping about “equality” set my teeth on edge. Because people *aren’t* equal. Most people are filler; a few people are at either end of the bell curve, being either extraordinarily horrible (your psychos and thieves and murderers and SJWs) or extraordinarily useful (by, say, building rocket ships to get the hell *off* this planet). And between individuals there are inequalities. Some are attractive. Some are bland. Some are butt-ugly. Some smart, some dumb. There is no shame in this. There is no shame in the recognition of this. Where shame comes by truckloads is the pretense that people can somehow be made equal. Aktion T4 and the Lebensborn tried that crap. Not mankinds finest hour.

The one good thing about Equiterra: it won’t last. It is shown with a fair number of children, about thirteen… two of whom are in wheelchairs. More of the rest doubtless have other severe deformities of body or mind. These kids likely won’t reproduce… hell, from the looks of it they won’t make it past puberty (and many who do won’t make it past puberty in a form capable of reproducing, their reproductive bits having been surgically altered when they were seven in order to conform to the kids – or the parents – preferences of the moment). And will they be replaced? Of the adults, there are shown at least three same-sex couples, with an unknown number of trans. They are unlikely to reproduce except through adoption. It seems the birth rate of Equiterra is likely to be low, with the next generation being a substantial mess about as likely to breed like bunnies as a convention of Japanese anime fans.

If things stay as they are, the next country over, Meriterra, only needs to wait a generation or so and they’ll be able to simply move into the abandoned, empty buildings (given that STEM in Equiterra will be more along the lines of newage than rigorous engineering, care should be taken in examining any physical infrastructure prior to occupation and use). However, in all likelihood the wise leaders of Equiterra will simply import the next generation from Refugeeistan. Sure, the new imports won’t have any use for the “equality” the country is so proud of; “Violence-Free Alley” will likely become a hotbed of grooming gangs, “Climate Action Street” will be littered with flaming garbage, “Education Boulevard” will be the no-go zone surrounding the new religious center, “Freedom Avenue” will be where the bodies land when they are thrown off the rooftops for being deviants. You don’t want to know what will happen in the “Toxic Masculinity Recycling Center.”

But the thing is, the people of Equiterra will continue to believe that they are the Good People because they will refuse to talk about how things have changed for fear of being called out and cancelled.

 Posted by at 7:15 pm