Feb 282020
 

If you like the aircraft that applied atomic boot to Imperial Japanese ass – and who doesn’t – then the Smithsonian institution can hook you up. Not only do they have the famed Enola Gay on display, they also have a bunch of photos from 1945 up to more recent restorations available on their website in the form of a couple PDF collections. If you are building a B-29 model or are jsut interested in the B-29 in general or the Enola Gay in particular, this is a heck of a trove.

The first one is 419 pages (313 megabytes), with a lot of photos from what looks like the fifties to the nineties as the Enola Gay was trucked around and variously restored:

https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC20.pdf

The second is 318 pages (77 meg) and seems to be detail photos (mostly of pretty much individual components) from a restoration:

https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC06.pdf

A number of the photos can be viewed – thought not readily downloaded – here:

http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?fq=online_media_type%3A%22Full+text+documents%22&q=enola

 

Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 8:10 am
Feb 272020
 

Watch this:

Short form: during Viet Nam, a project was instituted to send low-IQ soldiers through training and then into combat. The idea seemed to be that by training them and getting them experience, they’d come home with more useful skills and be less of a burden on society. The actual result was that a lot of them seemed to be untrainable for even the most basic tasks; they sucked up resources that could have been better used elsewhere; they were a discipline nightmare; and they got killed at three times the rate of non-morons. Thus, the project was considered a failure.

Consider this, though: the military tends to make a big deal about how the troops are America’s Best And Brightest. Which means that when the fighting starts, the Best And Brightest End Of The Gene Pool gets drained, while the dummies stay home and reproduce. How is this a good thing?

Further: an argument can be made not to send low IQ soldiers because they’re too dumb to really understand what’s going on. But doesn’t that imply that the other soldiers *are* smart enough to understand what’s going on and fully comprehend the horror of the situation they’re in? Couldn’t an argument be made that you shouldn’t send into harms way those who have the brainpower to truly understand the nightmare they’re in?

Obviously soldiers too dumb to know how to operate a rifle or who to aim it at are unlikely to be of much use in combat; they are quite likely to be a detriment. But if there is a war big enough to merit a draft, does being dumb really earn you a ticket out of service? Perhaps the thing to do would be to use such troops as *actual* cannon fodder. Dump them behind enemy lines with a basic set of tools and instructions to just cause havoc. If they get killed… well, that’s a soldiers lot. If they get captured, the enemy will have one hell of a time trying to interrogate them, and will (depending on the enemy) have to devote their own troops and resources to imprisoning them. But between the time they get dropped off and they get killed or captured, they could be wandering the enemies streets stealing their stuff and setting their stuff on fire and trying to convince the locals to vote for Bernie.

 Posted by at 7:00 pm
Feb 272020
 

A *final* solution, you might say:

San Francisco, Orange County declare coronavirus health emergencies

Poop in the streets? Bah. One quick street-clearing pandemic, and San Francisco will be *fine.*

Feh.

There are as yet no confirmed cases of the exciting new coronavirus in San Francisco. But it is a high certainty that if there aren’t any actual cases in San Francisco, with it’s substantial population that travel back and forth to China, there soon will be. And I’m sure that if San Fran uses the same reasoned and logical approach to dealing with an infectious plague that has an identity politics aspect that it used with AIDS, it’ll be *fine.* Everything will be fine.

Feh.

 Posted by at 4:41 pm
Feb 262020
 

Biden Says Over 150 Million Americans Killed by Gun Violence Since 2007, Which Would Be Half of U.S. Population

None of the other Dems called him on it to tell him to stop exaggerating by three orders of magnitude.

 

As an aside, I *really* wanna get me one of these:

Komrad 12- Kalashnikov USA

Something a bit head-scratching about this weapon. It’s a 12 gauge shotgun with a 12.5 inch barrel… but it is *not* an NFA item. (How that can be, when any shotgun with a barrel shorter than 18 inches is supposed to be a “Short Barrel Shotgun” and thus an NFA item requiring a tax stamp and a lot of restrictions, I can’t explain by any logic other than government bureaucratic.  It’s classified as a “Firearm” and not a “Shotgun.”)  But I want one. And listening to the yammering yahoos the Dems want to install as gun-grabber-in-chief, I want one *more.* Anybody got a spare $1050 to toss my way? I promise to say nice things about you at the range.

 Posted by at 6:23 pm
Feb 262020
 

When I first saw the thumbnail and title of the video, my initial thought was “I wish there was a store like that somewhere within a few hundred miles of me.” Having gone through the video… I’m really kinda glad there isn’t.

 Posted by at 10:12 am
Feb 262020
 

Speculative fiction time.

Let’s say some new virus springs up on the world stage. It is frighteningly transmissible and extremely fatal. Let’s say… one infected guy boards a plane in London, having been infected the day before and feeling naught but a slight twinge of a headache; when the plane lands in Los Angeles, everyone on board is infected, and two days later they’re all dead except for one or two. Further, assume that the virus is a natural disease, not the product of a biowar lab… or at least, it *looks* natural.

However: the disease is not exactly unknown. The CDC, say, has been aware of it for several years and has been freaking out about the possibility that it’ll blow up, and, shockingly for the glacial and bureaucratic US Government, they’ve been preparing. However, they’re not *entirely* prepared. So as the pandemic jumps up and goes “boo,” the CDC has 100 million vaccination doses ready to go. That’s less than a third of the US population. The question becomes: who gets them? Seems to me that the first people to get them should be the first responders, cops, firefighter and soldiers… AND THEIR FAMILIES. Not only do you need to make sure that the medical professionals survive to take care of the public, but that their families do as well in order to keep the doctors on the job and working. The cops and firefighters need to keep working to keep society from eating itself.

Who’s next? Seems like those required to maintain the infrastructure… nuke plant workers, farmers, air traffic controllers, etc… AND THEIR FAMILIES.

This will still leave a whole lot of folks SOL on getting the vaccine.

But here’s the better question. If the US has a hundred million doses of vaccine against a disease that is otherwise an extinction level event, where else does it get sent? The virus, it seems, is entirely too nasty and fast for other nations to ramp up vaccine production before their populations would be effectively wiped out. There are only a few days before world transport simply ends. Those nations that don’t get the US vaccine will simply be erased from existence except for a few scattered survivors.

Obviously it would seem like the thing to do would be to share the vaccine with our allies. Some to Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, etc. But for every NATO survivor, that’s a dead American. So of those 100 million doses, how many get split off to go elsewhere?

And here’s where it could get *really* tricky: If our adversaries find out that the US has this vaccine, it’s a safe bet that they’ll get pretty damned twitchy. How many to Russia, China, Pakistan just to keep them from deciding to nuke us? Maybe the US decides to spread the vaccinated to rural areas and just accept that the cities are going to be lost? Probably a safe bet anyway… 250 million Americans coming down with the plague and realizing that they’re getting squat are going to get kinda rioty and will burn the cities to the ground. Those Russian nukes might be hitting cities that are already flaming pyres filled with dead folk.

One can also look at it from another viewpoint: the Russians are the ones with the vaccine, or the Chinese, or the Indians. In those cases, it seems a lot less likely that the government in question is going to devote a whole lot of cogitation to the heartache of deciding how many people in which other countries will get the vaccine.

 

NOTE: I have the niggling suspicion that I posted this same idea a year or four back, but a quick search didn’t turn it up. If so, chalk it up to me being a forgetful old fart.

 Posted by at 2:11 am
Feb 252020
 

A computer generated voice does a *kinda* passable job of sounding like JFK reading an expletive-laden bit of ridiculousness. It is far from perfect, but it’s not *too* bad. I suspect people who know what they’re doing could link this to a deepfake system to perfect the lip synching to replace not just the face but the voices of actors – or politicians – in videos.

I expect that unless the coronavirus takes me or civilization out, I’ll live long enough to hear about how the courts no longer consider video evidence to be usable.

A somewhat less convincing bit of fake audio, Arnold Schwarzenegger reading the Gettysburg Address:

And here’s one that is altogether too appropriate… Comrade Bernie reading the Communist Manifesto:

 

 

 Posted by at 10:37 pm
Feb 252020
 

The Iranian deputy health minister gave a televised press conference where he claimed that the corona virus outbreak was under control. During the press conference he was seen to sweat like an Illinois politician seconds after the FBI show up… and shortly after, it was confirmed that he had tested positive for the disease.

Hollywood, take notes.

But at least the economy is ok…

 

Dow tumbles nearly 900 points as coronavirus fears continue

 Posted by at 5:43 pm
Feb 252020
 

It’s more likely than you might think!

The Hu Band, previously extolled hereabouts, created a tune for the recently released “Star Wars: Fallen Order” videogame. Apparently they’re not singing in Mongolian but in some made-up alienese language (reported in some quarters at Huttese, but I dunno). Gentlemen, behold your next soothing lullaby, “Sugaan Essena:”

 

 Posted by at 2:21 pm