A fundraiser for the family of Cannon Hinnant, the five-year-old who was assassinated by his neighbor and ignored by the national press until pestered into a grudging acknowledgement. As of this writing, the goal of the fundraiser is $5,000, of which they have so far raised $798,024.
Haner is a guy who was set upon by Antifa/BLM “mostly peaceful protesters” a few nights ago and beaten into a hospital for the crime of driving a truck on a street. The fundraiser there is a more ambitious $120,000, of which $93,084 has been raised.
And remember, kids: it is just as good and proper to refer to them as “mostly peaceful protesters” as it is to refer to a spousal abuser who only one day out of four or five beats his wife black and blue as a “mostly peaceful loving husband.”
In the “Dark Knight” movies, the League of Shadows is busy trying to destroy Gotham City. Partly because Gotham is rotten and corrupt, but also because destroying things is just what the League of Shadows does. The League used means both subtle (economics) and gross (chemical weapons and bombs) to achieve this, but of course Batman was there to stop them and let Gotham keep limping along.
In the real world, New York City has no Batman. But it *does* seem to have its own League of Shadows in the form of Bill Deblasio, Fredo Cuomo, AOC, Antifa and the Democratic Party.
New York (city and state) and its terrible politicians are not at fault for the WuFlu; that would be the Chinese Communist Party. But they are responsible for some of what has happened as a result. Lockdowns were pretty much inevitable. But what wasn’t inevitable were two week quarantines for people visiting the state (which pretty much precludes non-New Yorkers from even contemplating vacationing there), along with checkpoints where the police Ask For Your Papers. And at the same time that these checkpoints are being set up, and domestic terror groups like Antifa are ramping up their criminality… New York City just ripped a billion dollars out of the NYPD’s budget. And New York is releasing prisoners in large numbers in order to empty out the prisons (as a Wu Flu measure) at the same time that the shooting rate is spiking nearly 300% from the same period a year ago, while pretty much all crime is way up.
People and businesses are realizing that a whole lot of jobs do not require you to be in an office every day; you can work from home quite effectively. As a result, there is less need to be in a big expensive city like NYC. And given that the local economy is collapsing due to Commie Cough issues and democratic Party shenanigans, a *lot* of New Yorkers are either fleeing the city or being driven out. As they go, they will take their income tax and property tax with them, meaning that more and more of the tax burden will fall on fewer and fewer people… who will thus be further incentivized to bail the frak out of NY C and S.
It’s unlikely that New York City will become a true ghost town; nor is it likely that it will get bulldozed and returned to a state of nature. but New York city might well turn into Detroit writ large. And the League of Shadows will have won.
But you kinda have to wonder why they want to ruin NYC.
Ever since the feds actually started arresting a tiny fraction of the violent rioters tearing apart cities like Portland, the riot-enablers have started screeching that *this* is the fascist government that gun-nuts have been paranoid about, and that they should charge into the cities to stand side-by-side with the Marxists and black supremacists. This view has even appeared on this blog in the comments section.
Here is a good response to that view, written a month and a half ago:
It’s a somewhat lengthy rant, but it boils down to:
Snort. ᚠᚢᚳk off. 😃
The two main points are:
1) The people whining about the lack of gun enthusiasts coming to their aid are the same ones who have spent their lives whining about the *existence* of gun enthusiasts.
2) Who started this? Wasn’t the gun enthusiasts, but the gun grabbers.
The rioters are using kinetic energy weapons, beam weapons and chemical combustion weapons in an effort to cause damage, injuries and death. A lot of this is aimed at local businesses and local government; the local governments should therefore send in the police and National Guard to quell the insurrections. But in some cases, such as Portland, they’re not. The reasons for this are utterly baffling given that the insurrection would happily behead the local government officials who are protecting and enabling them. But the same Marxist motherᚠᚢᚳkers are also using the same tactics and weapons against *Federal* sites. The United States has seen this before… an insurrection of criminals and villains trying to take down a Federal facility. One time that site was called “Fort Sumter,” and the end result wasn’t so good for the insurrectionists or their cause, and few rational people argue that the Feds were wrong to respond.
So, rather than an army of gun enthusiasts marching into Portland to stand should to shoulder with the same ill-bred, ill-educated ill-thinking morons who have spent generations mocking them, the gun enthusiasts should stand on the sidewalks and wave little American flags as todays General Sherman marches into Portland and lays a beatdown on the Rebs.
For todays average American “right winger,” “conservative,” “libertarian,” etc., privately owned firearms are there generally for the purpose of protecting against criminality. For the far left, though, firearms (and other weapons) are there for the purpose of *enabling* criminality. These are not compatible world views.
For a group that doesn’t exist, Antifa is doing a dandy job of making the case *for* fascistic policing systems. Because what’s really needed here are some of the fictional technologies employed by the Judges in the universe of the Judge Dredd comic book. In particular: “riot foam.” Sprays out like fire-fighting foam, but within seconds sets up into a rock-hard solid that traps rioters in place. Somehow or other it’s “breathable” so that those trapped don’t suffocate. You then chip out rioters one at a time and process them.
Given that the insurrectionists here are using deadly weapons (thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, clubs, etc.) as well as using green lasers for the purpose of causing permanent and irreversible retina damage, locking them up in riot foam for a few days while they are processed and sentenced to ten to twenty years in the FedPen, followed by deportation to their masters in China/Russia/wherever, seems like a good approach.
Antifa, like the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea, is not only a fascist movement, they are actively agitating *for* fascism. When they gain power, such as in the CHAZ, they promptly set up authoritarian systems largely indistinguishable from fascist systems; and they have intentionally worked to make police-state tactics the *only* tactics to use against them. In places like Portland where Antifa has running dog lackeys and useful idiots in the local government who have held back the local police, Antifa and their Burn Loot Murder accomplices have simply run wild. Being nice to them, letting them have their way, has not worked.
Police state systems are never nice things to have and are generally to be avoided. Unfortunately they are sometimes necessary. Using them here is sadly becoming inevitable. The trick, of course, will be in reigning in the police state tactics after the insurrectionists are removed from society. Sadly, there isn’t much alternative, given that Antifa and their ilk are trying to burn civilization to the ground across the western world. They are traitors to mankind, and such people have never been well managed by rational discourse and reasoned debate. Some of them, perhaps even most of them, could be deprogrammed by those skilled in the art of extracting young idiots from cultish ideologies… but before you can remove someones cult thinking, you have to physically remove them from the cult.
The Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of African American History and culture has a page on “Whiteness.” As expected, it is portrayed as bad to be white, with the usual fraudulent claims of “white privilege.” But… then they trot out a convenient graphic of what “white culture” is in the United States and… you know, more than 90% of it, I can fully support.
Behold the horror of whiteness: Rugged Individualism! The nuclear family! The scientific method! Actual history! Work ethic! Planning for the future! Respect for rule of law and property rights! And, gasp, politeness!
Once again I’m left to wonder if some of the “woke” people behind this might not secretly be people who *aren’t* actually ashamed about being white, don’t actually hate western civilization. Because what they describe is, on the whole, the secret to success and prosperity, not some horrible racist dystopia. I read that infographic and rather than feeling shame about white privilege or white supremacy or white nationalism, I think, “yeah, those are the ethics that in just a relatively few centuries ended slavery, taught Man to fly, gave the vote to everyone, learned what the stars truly are, made smallpox extinct, put Man on the moon and just in general made life on Earth vastly better than in all the many millenia that preceded it.”
The big news – apart from whatever Trump is tweeting about, Bidens handlers are telling the press to ignore, and the rise of the fascist Marxists – is the Commie Cough and how the United States is doing such a monumentally, criminally bad job of handling the pandemic that the ChiComs dumped on us. To buttress that narrative, the data generally pointed out is new cases per day, which does indeed look bad (per http://www.91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/):
And the *total* number of cases normalized by population:
In both cases, the US looks *really* bad. We are right near the top of the chart in terms of the percent of our population that has caught the Pinko Pox and continues to come down with it. We looks like the freakin’ third world. But then… there’s another metric that seems kinda important that doesn’t seem to get mentioned so much… the mortality rate. BEHOLD:
The US has a current mortality rate of about 4%, with a max near 6%. That’s bad…. but it’s also the lowest one on the chart. Canada is 8%. Sweden more than 7%. Italy is above 14%, France above 15% and Britain and Belgium are pushing 16%.
The data seems to indicate that more Americans are catching WuFlu, but fewer are dying. I suspect the truth is more along the lines of differences in testing and reporting. But if it’s therefore not accurate to say that the US is doing better than everybody in the mortality sweepstakes, then it’s equally invalid to ramble on about how bad we such in preventing the pandemic in the first place.
Several recommendations have come in over the years to set up an APR Discord server… which has now been done. I’m still in the process of configuring it and figuring it all out, but once it’s up and running it will serve as sort of a backup to the APR blog. It is something that seems to be available solely via invitation, so there will be some other little features it’ll have… such as, probably, even more restricted discussion forums specifically about Book 1 and Book 2 (“Book X” and “Book XX,” whatever) where I will describe them and post preview images such as representative diagrams, lists of vehicles to be illustrated, possibly early stabs at cover art, etc.
Subscribers to the APR Patreon and the Monthly Historical Documentation Program will all get invites when the time comes. I’m thinking of inviting the higher-level patrons/subscribers into the Book1 & 2 subforums. At the moment it’s pretty bare… there are channels for “Aircraft projects,” “spacecraft projects,” “aerospace news,” “aircraft – built” (as opposed to “projects), “general” (which is just for discussion of the APR Discord server itself) and “US Aerospace Projects,” which will go into further detail about the USxP issues I’ve released and plan to release.
If anyone has experience with such things, feel free to leave recommendations and suggestions in the comments.
After the occasional blog problem and a few days ago actually losing access to my email, I’m wondering if I should sign up for something like Twitter. It’s a cesspit of insanity, to be sure. But it would be an alternate way to maintain some sort of contact the next time some irritating technological flub takes out one or more of my existing systems. My thinking is that it would simply be used to post, say, one aerospace image a day, harvesting them from my blog, except for times when I need to communicate “I ain’t dead” or some such.
And if I do… do I sign on to Twitter? Gab? Parler? I signed on to Facebook *years* ago, but it is frankly a PITA to use. Twitter is someplace that I can’t see lasting too long… eventually I’ll get banned. Parler and Gab seem to obvious alternatives, but anyone there is automatically assumed to be alt-right or fascist or whatever, and there certainly do seem to be a lot of conspiracy and anti-Semitic whackaloons there.
It has become a sickeningly predictable event: someone says something that upsets the unthinking unteachable mob, and then they – and pretty much anyone even tangentially associated with them – issues some sort of public apology. The apology is usually a combination of lame and embarrassing. But does it actually appease the mob?
Overall, the evidence presented here suggests that the effects of an apology are close to neutral or negative depending on the context and the demographic group. If this is the case, we may wonder why public officials do in fact so often ask for forgiveness in the face of controversy. It is possible that they apologize in order to receive better coverage from the media or even to make a story go away. In one experiment, individuals judging performances in a presidential debate were influenced by the nature of commentary they watched after the fact when compared to a control group not exposed to the opinions of pundits (Fridkin et al., 2007). Likewise, if an individual apologizes for a comment that the media finds offensive, future coverage of that individual may be better than it otherwise would be. This requires the assumption that while members of the public are hostile or indifferent to those who apologize, members of the media will provide better coverage of an individual who shows repentance. There may be little reason to assume that this is the case, however, especially considering that most of the media lean to the left (Groseclose & Milyo, 2005; Groseclose, 2011) and that liberals in this study appear to be those most likely to want to punish individuals for apologizing.
Emphasis mine.
Sometimes people do or say some reprehensible things, and in those cases an apology *may* be appropriate… *if* the person in question is actually sorry for what they did. And “sorry” because they realize they did/said something bad, not because they’re being forced into an apology. But then, it certainly seems like the bulk of the calls for public struggle sessions these days are driven not because someone did something objectively bad, but because they did or said something “offensive” (example: the artist who recently groveled because racists were tearing her down for having painted herself as a comic book superhero… with a *tan*). In which case an apology is not just bad for the apologizer, it’s bad for society in that it helps to feed the beast of fascistic cancel culture. Respond some other way.
The SyFy channel just cancelled the show “Vagrant Queen.” The only really surprising things about that are either:
1) “What took so long?”
or
2) “Vagrant what? Never heard of it.”
I watched the first episode when it first aired and it was… half-assed. *Everything* about it was half-assed, from acting to makeup to dialogue to plot to especially production design and VFX, which made it look like a stablemate of “Andromeda.” The first episode was in the end utterly forgettable, and so I removed it from my watch list and promptly put the series out of my mind.
Now, the history of sci-fi TV in general, and SyFy in particular, is replete with crappy shows that last half a season or a full season, then quietly slip into the abyss. That’s just the way it goes: most shows are at best “meh.” You roll the dice and take your chances. But sometimes, some shows seem to be pre-doomed to incompetence and fail. Some shows, the suits should be able to determine to *not* go with before spending a dime. And “Vagrant Queen” is one such. How should they have known to pass on this? Simple… it was based on a comic book. More specifically, it was based on a comic book that failed spectacularly. It began as a six-issue miniseries. The first issue sold only 2,000 issues (“sold” meaning “sold to comic book shops,” not “sold to actual customers,” so the actual number of people who bought that issue is of course lower) in June, 2018. The second issue sold only 1,200 in July 2018. Issue 3 dropped to 993, and issue 4 fell to 769. Issues five and six? Apparently never actually printed, because in the comic book industry anything that sells below 5,000 or so is on the chopping block. Selling in the *hundreds* is laughably low. But the issues got reprinted as a bound “graphic novel” in February 2019… which sold only 200. And *then* SyFy decided “hey, lets spend buckets of cash on THIS property.”
Guh.
I cannot mock the creators of the comic book for their low sales… their lowest sales figures would make me giddy if *I* could reach those numbers. Their high numbers, failures by comic book industry standards? Inconceivable for my piddly ass. Selling two thousand issues of, say, US Fighter Projects #4 would make me thrilled beyond the capacity for rational thought. Might even go out and buy a pizza or something. My issue here is with SyFy, spending money on something that has *already* demonstrated a stunning lack of audience. It’s not just dumb, it’s insane. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. The only thing that seems to justify the decision is the creator: a woke intersectional SJW who seems to have made a career out of that, and little else. Did SyFY think that the SJWs of the world would actually watch the show? Seems they didn’t watch… something that SyFy should have seen coming. SJWs scream for properties created by others to include quotas of inclusion… but when those properties bend the knee, the SJWs still don’t watch or buy. They care about the details of things they don’t care for.
If SyFy wants to spend a lot of money on a property with a very small existing audience, I’d recommend they go after “War With The Deep Ones,” “Pax Orionis” and the Zaneverse stories. I can guarantee these would be better received than “Vagrant Queen.”
