The President of the United States has at least one absolute power: the power to declassify secret documents. There is some discussion about the process, but is *seems* that all he needs to do is say “this document is declassified,” and that’s that.
The Vice President does *not* have that power.
Here’s your new “zombie apocalypse writing prompt:”
In an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications on December 16, researchers said they had developed new technology that can turn a mosquito into a flying vaccine carrier to immunise animals in the wild.
Oh, goodie. Commie scientists studying ways to deliver vaccines, drugs, plagues, manmade horrors beyond your comprehension, etc. via skeeters.
The ChiComs have already announced that they are working on genetic weapons to target specific ethnic groups for everything from death to dumbing-down. This seems like a decent enough way to deliver such a weapon in certain geographic regions.
Now, is the idea of immunizing wild animals against pandemics a good one? Quite possibly. Is the use of skeeters to do this a good idea? Possibly. Would I trust anything produced by people who think that Mao and his policies were good ideas? Not a chance in hell, Skippy. If you buy into socialism, you’ve demonstrated a sufficient lack of critical thinking skills and judgement that you should be kept far away from anything more scientifically complex than a wooden block.
This is from a while back, but the video is *damned* entertaining if you are into spectacular engineering failures.
In short: Cantilever has it’s issues. Especially when, seemingly, you’re using glass window panels and compression members.
Finally saw unedited video of the recent shooting of the armed (with a toy gun as it turns out) robber in Texas. With the edited videos, you can’t tell anything about the customer’s shooting of the robber other than at least one shot in the bad guys back. But with the edited video there appear to be *nine* shots, including multiple shots into the guy while he’s down… and a few seconds later, one more shot which kinda seems like it might have been a back-of-the-head shot. Which, you know… maybe a bit much. Do I feel bad that a robber got rubbed out? Not in the slightest. The fact that he had a fake gun doesn’t matter, the *fear* he was determined to generate was real enough. But riddling a dead guy with holes… people are gonna question that. But I dunno: you threaten to kill someone, chances are real good that that *someone* is going to get amped up on adrenaline, and might not be thinking to straight for a minute or three. I know the wokescolds and the prosecutors are going to yammer on about how he shot too many times… but when your life has just been threatened, how rational are you really expected to be?
The greater lesson here: if you don’t want to be turned into Swiss cheese, don’t go robbing people. Seems a simple enough rule of thumb.
Houston Police want to speak this man, but he’s not charged with a crime. HPD says a gunman was robbing people at a taqueria on S. Gessner last night. During the robbery, this man shot and killed the suspect… collected the money, gave it back to the robbery victims, and left. pic.twitter.com/nPtDxw2lQF
— Joshua Rodriguez (@Joshuajered) January 7, 2023
The title of this YouTube video claims that “Chrome Lords” was a 1988 movie that ripped off “RoboCop” and “Terminator.” But in fact “Chrome Lords” never existed. The video is ten minutes of “stills” from a movie that never was… all the images were produced by an AI. And other than places where it looks like AI/CGI, it *does* rather look like one of those schlocky 1980’s crapfest movies. So, well done. But here’s the thing… give it a few years (5? 10? 20?) and someone will have an AI take a few text prompts and spit out a full script, feed these images and the new script into another AI… and shazam, “Chrome Lords” will exist as an actual 90 minute horrible movie. But who – if anyone – will own the copyright?
A lot of people think that the US is simply throwing money away. These people are wrong.
The majority of the weapons that the US is giving to the Ukrainians are old stock, stuff that would have gone to the incinerator or the scrap heap pretty soon anyway. If you expend a million-dollar weapon that you were otherwise going to simply throw away, you haven’t lost money. But if you expend that weapon for a practical purpose, you not only affect the course of the conflict, you also *learn* things.
The last ten years or so have seen massive denigration of long-established fandoms. Star Trek, Star Wars, LotR, etc. These fandoms have deep and beloved lore, and many of the modern producers simply don’t care. Why respect the canon, when there is a message to deliver?
Fortunately, this is not always the case. Sam Witwer is an actor probably best known for voice acting. He’s voiced Darth Maul in the “Clone Wars” and “Rebels” series, and “Starkiller” in the “Force Unleashed” video game, where he also did motion capture. It’s that latter one that’s of interest here. Turns out that he was knowledgeable in Star Wars lore, and knew how to apply that knowledge… and the director of the game knew to respect that. (This was a 2008 release, before the modern age of garbage; but witness Henry Cavill’s love of Warcraft 40K secured him a post-DCU future.) Behold:
Something like 15-20 years ago I bought a 1/18 scale P-47D “Ultimate Soldier” toy. This line of large scale accurate fighter planes was sort of peak Golden Age Of Toys For Adults, even though they sold for a reasonable price at WalMart. They make great display pieces even without structural modifications or repainting, but they are generally screaming for such.
Anyway, the P-47D spent years on a shelf in my shop in Utah. From time to time it caught direct sunlight. This discolored the paint *slightly,* but it turned the originally crystal clear canopies milky white. I’ve left them in the dark for some years to see if that would help… nope. I boiled them… nope. I nuked them, if perhaps briefly, with UV; no change. Anybody got any ideas? Why did this happen? How can it be reversed? Scrubbing has shown that this is not a surface feature, but seems to be throughout the plastic.
At some point, recasting them with crystal clear resin might be the only solution, but it’s not one I’m fond of. None of the other canopies did this, so it would seem these two pieces of plastic came from a bad batch.
The “Enzmann Starship” is named after Robert Enzmann, who “designed” it decades ago. Just exactly *when* has been an issue of some confusion in recent years.
It first came to light in the late 60’s or early 70’s, with claims that he thought it up around 1964 or so. The design is unique: a giant spherical ball of frozen deuterium fuel at the front, followed by a cylindrical ship, ending with a series of Orion-style nuclear pulse engines. It was an *ok* concept for a practical starship, though relatively recent analysis presented in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society argued that it was not nearly as good as imagined. It became something of a sensation in the 70’s after appearing on the cover of “Analog” in 1973.
Nothing has ever been produced, so far as I’m aware, backing up the concept with any sort of detailed design of analysis until that JBIS paper. No reports, proposals, pages of math, from Enzmann seem to be available… just text descriptions of a few sentences and some art. And that’s fine. But in recent years the claims have become more and more expansive. Enzmann, near the end of his life, claimed that the design for a nuclear-pulse vehicle dated not from the time of the Orion program, but back to the *40’s*.
I spoke to Enzmann on the phone a few times over the years. He was enthusiastic, verbose… and baffling. He made lots and lots of claims about having worked on this or that amazing program, but when asked for verifiable details… it was classified. Those who have picked up his mantle and are trying to carry his torch seem to be following in his footsteps there, continuing his claims without much apparent criticism. I’ve recently engaged their twitter contact to get some sort of verification of his claims… but we have now reached the point where not only am I convinced that no such evidence will be produced, I feel no reason to assume anything remarkable is true at all. Behold:
He published nothing on his Starship before NYAS conference #1 other than his own words. ANP aircraft were built in the 50's, and buried deep under a NM mountain, according to Enzmann, who was there. He is the reference.
— Enzmann Archive (@EnzmannArchiv) January 2, 2023
Claiming that nuclear powered aircraft were actually built in the fifties and then buried in a mountain? Yeah… no. I’m out.
Where the thread started:
Enzmann Starships refueling at Saturn's moon.
Paining by RDE, 1949.
“We stand today upon the doorsill of manned inter-stellar flight. It will happen swiftly.” =RDE pic.twitter.com/tgNZYzMoCY— Enzmann Archive (@EnzmannArchiv) January 1, 2023
Really I didn’t:
I would assume that it’s an automated thing, rather than a bagrillionaire giving a damn about my piddly little Twitter posts. But, who knows…
