For some reason, a Chinese construction company was hired to do highway work in Serbia. For some reason, the Chinese construction company decided to demolish a war memorial.
Lots of WTF in this story. The first being: “Why is a European nation using a Chinese construction company?” The second being “Why can’t a European nation do this sort of work themselves?” Third being “What exactly did you expect?”
When you hire people who are not of your nation, culture or people to do your work for you, don’t act surprised when they don’t value your nation, culture or people. And hiring ChiComs? That’s just asking for trouble.
It shall prove interesting when the ChiComs start paving over Russian cultural locations.
Brandon Herrera covers some initial memes about the Nashville mass shooting:
Donut Operator did a breakdown of the bodycam footage of the sweep of the school and the takedown of the transurrectionist. *THIS,* as many have pointed out to the Uvalde police, is how you do it: get it done quickly and efficiently, before the badguy (or badgirl, in this case) has time to prepare and before they can turn a mass shooting into an absolute massacre. The shooter got shot by two copes, one with a carbine, the other with a pistol… essentially the weapons *she* had.
A case can be made that mentally ill people should not have access to firearms. I’m all behind a legal approach that takes care of this… not those BS “red flag laws” that allow the authorities to strip you of your rights without a proper review or anything resembling due process. Self-harm would seem to be a giant sign that someone is a danger to themselves or others; a woman pumping herself with testosterone, or anyone chopping their bits off, would seem to apply. Men, who are designed and built to be full of testosterone, can go buggo if they are pumped full of the stuff; I can only imagine how whackadoodle it would make a woman to be loaded with the stuff.
Russia and China have been making lots of noises about joining forces, ostensibly to knock the USA, and the American dollar, down a peg. This feller has an interesting view on the topic; in his thinking, somebody gonna stab somebody in the back, and the only question is whether the Chinese or the Russian get stabby first. Is he on to something? Is he huffing the copium? I dunno.
I honestly can’t tell if the people referenced here are trolling – which is entirely possible – or if they’re really that fookin’ weird. I guess it comes down to this: do people *really* wash their chicken with dish soap and/or Clorox? It’s not something I’ve ever heard of. I would’ve assumed it to be a joke. But I just can’t tell anymore.
After watching these videos, I’m glad I passed on buying into the Mars Industries 1/18 scale “Airwolf” kit. There are a lot of problems with it. A *lot* of problems. There are design issues, uncured resin, quality control issues and, most shocking to me, problems with the vac-formed transparencies. The problem with *those* was that the forms were themselves 3D printed, which is fine… but the prints with their substantial layer lines were not sanded smooth. Thus the transparencies have layer lines. AAAARRRRGH.
“Zipline” is an American company specializing in drone delivery systems. While package delivery via drone has been promised in the US for some years, Zipline has been operating successfully in Rwanda since 2016 as a medical supplies (meds and blood) delivery system. And it seems to work *really* well… something like 90 seconds from receipt of order to launch of the drone, which flies at 60+ mph at a radius of up to 50 miles, delivering up to 4 pounds of payload via parachute. Since startup, Zipline has made over 20 million miles of flights. This system seems not only remarkable successful, but remarkably efficient to run; their main distribution center launches 500 drones a day, and they’ve made this Really Neato System as run of the mill as SpaceX is making launch vehicle recovery.
While this is great for emergency deliveries in rural Africa, it would not be a great system for package delivery in American cities and suburbs… you want your package *delivered,* not dropped, and delivered accurately, not somewhere in a dozen yards radius. A big enough quad/octocopter could over course do this, landing right on your porch and dropping off the box. This type of drone delivery has been proposed for years, but there are obvious problems. First, the things are *LOUD.* Second, all those blades spinning about would pose a hazard to people, pets, property. Third… have you *seen* city folk? Chances are real good that in the half second it takes to land and drop off, some “youths” would spring upon it, not only stealing the package but beating the drone to death with baseball bats. Because that’s where we are now, I guess.
Zipline has what looks like a decent answer to those, though. They still use a big quadcopter, but it lowers a “gondola” up to 400 feet. The gondola has some basic maneuver capability, but no more than needed for translation; all the lift is provided by the main drone. This keeps the “loud” and “dangerous” far overhead. And with the “loud” further away, there’s less chance of Cultural Enrichment spotting it and ambushing it. Additionally, their 50-pound drones are *really* quiet due to special props.
Below is an interesting video on the topic, covering both systems. There is definite cringe… the YouTube goes to Rwanda to see it in action, which is fine; he somehow finagled his way into the operations system, working to get an order processed and launched, which is fine, but his “I just saved a life!” schtick gave me a headache.
The military applications for this are obvious, but somehow were left completely out of the video. Never mind the dullsville of dropping off medical supplies or even ammunition… Zipline has figured out how to make a nearly silent drone delivery system. An inherently quiet drone with a sensor platform/bomb pod suspended 500 feet below it? You could likely drift along over a trench at night, the gondola maybe only ten feet up, dropping off small care packages as you go. The drone itself would be virtually silent, and so far up that it would be virtually impossible to shoot down with small arms. Ordnance that was set to go off via timer or remote activation would allow this to scatter bomblets around and set them all off at once. Or, heck, just pack the gondola with high explosives, napalm, thermite, WP, drift it right up to somebody or something your really don’t like and BLAMMO. Won’t hurt the drone none.
This video from at least 7 years ago lays out some of the reasons why the Russians may well have gotten rather adventurous of late: they are running out of Russians, but they’re not running out of routes to invade Russia. So rather than cultivate good relations with the surrounding nations or get on about the task of making more Russians, they seem to have gone the other route of trying to seize all the invasion routes while they still have a military with which to do it. As the last year of their little two-week “military operation” has shown, that hasn’t gone so well.
Note the “demographic pyramid” he shows here. It lays out the population of Russia by age; a growing population has a wide base of young people, but back when this video was made (circa 2015) Russias base was looking kinda weak. However, it did seem to be growing somewhat:
So how is it looking today?
Oh, dear. It looks like baby-making fell off a cliff right after this guy made his video, so instead of things maybe getting better they’ve gotten much worse.
“Population pyramids” are interesting things to consider. Nations like this with shrinking young uns are in serious trouble; the pyramid for South Korea looks especially dire:
China’s not looking so good:
Nor is Japan:
Iceland, in contrast, looks kinda ok:
but if you really want to see where the population of the future is coming from, you need pyramids that look like this:
Or this:
The nations with wide bases will have greatly increased populations, with greatly increased pressures for those populations to leave and colonize low-population regions. The dying nations will, like Russia, likely try to defend themselves with constantly diminishing human resources, or they will, like much of Europe is currently doing, simply allow themselves to be colonized and replaced, culturally, religiously, ethnically.
