Obama’s saving the auto industry one explosion at a time

 AARRRGH, blather, I'm from the government, news, Obamazombies, politics, ಠ_ಠ  24 Responses »
Oct 312012
 

Ah, Fisker Automotive, the manufacturer of electric hybrid automobiles that received a $528 million loan from the FedGov, part of Obama’s “green” energy stimulus. What have they produced? Well, the Fisker Karma seems like a snazzy car… it seems to attain a fuel economy of 26 mpg, and has a sticker price of only $102,000. After “Cash For Clunkers,” how is this not a fantastic deal for your average family looking to trade in that Honda Civic for something more economical in these hard economic times?

Anyway, the Karma has another neat trick beyond costing twenty times what most people can afford while getting little better or actually worse gas mileage. For most gas cars, if you make the blunder of driving into water more than a foot or two deep, your car will up and die on you as water gets drawn into the engine and kills combustion. But the Fisker? Being electric, you don’t need to worry about the engine stalling. No, you will have no such worries about that, because you’ll be too busy trying to abandon ship as your advanced new car bursts into flames and burns down to the waterline:

More Than A Dozen Fisker Karma Hybrids Caught Fire And Exploded In New Jersey Port After Sandy

That’s outstanding.

FahrvergBZZZZZZTTT*poof*nügen.

 Posted by at 5:36 pm

War On Science

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, I'm from the government, news, science, ಠ_ಠ  6 Responses »
Oct 222012
 

One political meme that has been popular these last few years is the “Republican war on science.” Because many Republicans don’t believe in global warming or evolution or abortion, that means that Republicans are backwards anti-science trogs who should be more like the enlightened Europeans.

Gentlemen… behold the enlightened European War On Science:

Scientists convicted of manslaughter for failing to warn of earthquake

In short, seven of Italys best geologists have been sentenced to six years in prison for not providing a warning for a 2009 earthquake that killed a bunch of folks. While sad, the earthquake is hardly the scientists fault… and it’s hardly their fault for not being able to predict the currently unpredictable.

It would have been less silly for the Italian prosecutors to put the Pope on trial for this lack of foreknowledge.

 Posted by at 1:35 pm

ಠ_ಠ : Reusable Booster Program Cancelled

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, projects, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  8 Responses »
Oct 202012
 

Color me stunned.

Prototype Reusable Rocket Effort Felled by U.S. Budget Woes

Add it to the pile. The pile of reusable launch vehicles concepts that *could* have worked had they been fully funded but weren’t… and then the idea was discovered two years later and a whole new bag of money gets spent on studying what has already been studied. Rinse and repeat until generations of dreams and efforts are squandered.

 Posted by at 6:33 pm

Abandoned, now destroyed

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, I'm from the government, news  6 Responses »
Oct 122012
 

The Khodynka aviation museum in Moscow had been left to rot after the fall of the USSR. That was bad. But it now seems that that situation has been dealt with… by sending heavy construction equipment onto the grounds to convert the aircraft to scrap metal. Feh.

Here’s a video of the state of the place in 2009:


Abandoned military aircraft museum by cxpiter

And here’s a Russian-language article from today providing photos of the destruction in process… tellingly, this was done under the cover of darkness.

На Ходынском поле уничтожают экспонаты музея авиации

An English translation of the article, almost readable, can be had via Google Translate:

At Khodynka destroy artifacts Aviation Museum

And the inevitable YouTube video:

[youtube ufnTwtpkBnU]

 Posted by at 9:44 am

U.N.Taxes

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, Obamazombies, politics  8 Responses »
Oct 112012
 

Generally when someone holds forth about the U.N. taxing American citizen directly, you can be assured of some real weapons-grade paranoid ramblings. Still, there’s some stuff in this article by former Democrat operative Dick Morris that may be worth some pondering:

On the whole I’m dubious. Signing a treaty that would allow the U.N. to take money directly out of the pockets of American citizens would be political suicide. The question is whether there are enough leftists in the Senate who are either politically dimwitted enough to not understand that this would cost them their jobs or ideologically driven enough to not care (or to believe that this will make them heroes in this eyes of the voters) to support such treaties. Again, I’m dubious. First and foremost politicians of *every* stripe want, above all else, the power to dominate and control the little people… and this would end that power for them.
Lame ducks, however, might just support such things just out of spite.
 Posted by at 12:53 pm

The House Anti-Science Committee

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, religion, science, youtube  17 Responses »
Oct 072012
 

Ugh.

Republican Representative Paul Broun, Georgia, member of the House Science Committee:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. … You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth… I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them.
[youtube rikEWuBrkHc]
You’re not helping.
Now, don’t get me wrong. People who refuse to believe facts and instead want to believe the most monstrously obviously wrong and silly nonsense have the right to vote, have the right to run for Congress, have the right to win and holds seats if they win a proper election (how else would we have Democrats?). But what in Zarquon’s name are people who explicitly believe that science is not only factually wrong, but instead desperately EVIL, doing on the Science Committee???
Note: you want to believe in God, Heaven, Satan, Hell, Zeus, Tartarus, Shiva, Feklar, Crom, ghosts, souls? Sure, great, whatever. You want to believe that evolution is something other than an established fact? You’re WRONG. You are either intensely ignorant, or you are lying to yourself. In either case, you don’t pass even the most preliminary tests that should be required to be on a “science committee.”
 Posted by at 10:22 am

WHAT

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, eBay, Gah., I'm from the government, news  14 Responses »
Oct 062012
 

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril

It could become illegal to resell your iPhone 4, car or family antiques

The logic: you don’t own the copyright to that old novel or the Iphone you want to sell. Therefore if you want to sell it, you need to get the copyright owners permission.

Crazy? You betcha. But the Supreme Court is going to hear this very argument soon enough. Anything not made in the US may become *illegal* to resell. And since we don’t make much of anything anymore, that means pretty much everything may become illegal to resell.

 Posted by at 7:45 pm

‘Mass Fatality Planning and Religious Considerations Act’

 blather, I'm from the government, news  2 Responses »
Oct 052012
 

Leave it to the US FedGuv to produce legislation that just plain *sounds* creepy…

H.R. 6566

…to provide guidance and coordination for mass fatality planning, and for other purposes.

This Act may be cited as the ‘Mass Fatality Planning and Religious Considerations Act’.

The basic idea seems reasonable enough… people get twitchy about piles of dead bodies lying about, so maybe we aughtta have some sort of plan in the event we wind up with piles of dead bodies lying about. It just comes across as slightly creepifyin’, though.

 Posted by at 10:30 am

The science of “bath salts”

 blather, Crazy, Hmm..., I'm from the government, science  11 Responses »
Sep 232012
 

An interesting and lengthy (by internet standards) article on the “bath salts” drugs that have gained popularity and driven a bunch of users buggo:

The Drug That Never Lets Go

While “never” is likely an extreme exaggeration, it’s one of the features of bath salts that the effects last a really, really long time .

A point to consider: the damage that synthetic drugs seem to be capable of is greater than that brought on by most drugs naturally occurring drugs. So it’s worth asking if “bath salts” would even exist if pot was legal.

 Posted by at 6:49 am

How to ruin a future weapons program

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, projects, weapons  5 Responses »
Sep 122012
 

The USAF understandably wants new weapons for the future. One such is the “High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW),” which is to be an air launched hypersonic ground attack missile. A reasonable enough sort of thing for the USAF to want. well, they’re in the early stages of trying to work out just what they want, in cahoots with the aerospace industry. Behold:

High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW) Demonstration Program Industry Day 1

Included therein is a link to a PDF file of a draft Broad Area Announcement. now, a perfectly reasonable approach would be for the USAF to basically say “We want a missile that weighs less than W pounds, will go X miles in Y minutes and carry Z payload,” and then detail stuff about cost and meaneuverability and schedules and whatnot. What the USAF produced starts off like this:

General Program Objectives: The overall objective of the High Speed Strike Weapon Demo program is to identify, assess, develop (increase the technology maturity level), integrate and demonstrate through modeling and simulation, ground and demonstration flight testing of an S&T technology demonstrator weapon system, technologies for a hypersonic, air-launched cruise missile. The scope of the demonstration flight(s) includes launching the S&T technology demonstrator weapon from either an F-15E or a B-52 at a tactically relevant altitude and airspeed.

Good so far. But then they totally screw the pooch with this:

The propulsion system for the S&T technology demonstrator weapon must include an air-breathing engine capable of supersonic combustion.

Oy vey.

Instead of asking for capability, they are asking for a specific technology… scramjets. A technology that has been in development for sixty years and still doesn’t work.

Who knows, solid rockets or maybe conventional ramjets might have worked, and relatively cheaply. But instead the USAF looks like it’s saddling itself with a science project. Which would be ok… but a science project is rarely a good basis for a production program.

What’s next? Is the Navy going to specify a fusion reactor powered attack sub?

 Posted by at 8:52 pm
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