We are pleased to announce that Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be a featured keynote at our #FireEyeSummit in October! Secretary Clinton will engage in an intimate Q&A keynote discussion with Kevin Mandia.
An interesting and informative video describing some of the creepier volcanic disasters that have struck the Earth. These incidents made even a Yellowstone Supervolcanic eruption seem meager in comparison.
Ron Moore, he of “Deep Space Nine” and “Battlestar Gallactica” fame, is coming out with another new series that looks pretty fantastic: “For All Mankind.” It’s an alternate history show where the Soviets make it to the Moon before Apollo… and as a result, the US doubles-down and, seemingly, goes for the “let’s conquer the whole damn universe” approach.
Downside: it’ll be on Apple TV+, yet another streaming service I ain’t gonna pay for.
I have often wondered if the Soviets succeeding would have led to the US either expanding Saturn/Apollo, or just giving up.For Apollo to have gone on to greater things, I suspect history would have required a different, better President than LBJ who squandered Apollo in favor of micromanaging Viet Nam and in bloating the budget with the Great Society programs.
On May 31st, APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers were sent emails containing links to the May, 2019, rewards. This months set of documents and diagrams included high-rez copies of:
Document: “Manned Lunar Vehicle Design,” a General Electric paper from 1962 describing a direct-landing Apollo concept
Document: “AP-76 Project 1226,” a highly illustrated Republic Aviation report from May 1955 describing their design for the X-15
Diagram: “DNI-27C, VFX Design Study Fixed Wing/Buried Engine,” September 1968 North American Aviation fighter design
CAD Diagram: three-view of the Dandridge Cole/Martin Aircraft “Aldebaran” giant nuclear powered launch vehicle notional concept
If this sort of thing is of interest and you’d like to get in on it and make sure you don’t miss any of the forthcoming releases, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
All prior “back issues” are available for purchase by subscribers. Recent months rewards have included:
Venice, Italy, isn’t exactly at the top of my news feed, but I’ve heard numerous times that the city is full to overflowing with tourists, and the locals are sick of it. I have to imagine that this sort of thing will only raise the visibility of the issue.
I’ve virtually no interest in going to DisneyWorld, in no small part due to the fact that everything I’ve seen or heard suggests that the place is massively overcrowded. from Disney’s perspective, this is fine…the more people they can cram in, the more dollars they can get from them. But Disneyworld is a place *designed* for that specific purpose. Venice, on the other hand, is a city. People live there. If Disneyworld wanted to thin out the numbers, they could easily do so, since they control the entrances. They could limit the number of people allowed in. They could jack up the entrance fee even higher until people self-select for exclusion. But how would a city like Venice reduce the number of tourists? I suppose they could do something to stifle the flow of cruise ships, but tourists as a whole? When Europe cannot even seem to figure out how – or even if – to stop the flow of millions of colonizing invaders, it’s hard to see how a single city could legally keep people out.
Right now it’s not official, it’s “sources say.” But Stratolaunch never made a lick of business sense, and going belly-up has seemed inevitable. As an ego project for a bajillionaire… sure. It’s no worse than a Russian oligarch or a Saudi prince splurging on a yacht the size of a battlecruiser; but once that bajillionaire is out of the picture – in this case, dead – the driving force behind it evaporates. And without a sound business case… shrug.
Here’s an interesting thing… Ford has built a roughly humanoid robot to be used for package delivery. It would be carried in the back of an unmanned, self-driving delivery van and would walk your package up to your door while avoiding obstacles. I suspect that no matter how good the vehicles and the androids are, though, that there will be certain neighborhoods that these things just won’t go to. This thing doesn’t look like it would well tolerate either spray paint to the Lidar or a baseball bat to the legs.
At the same time that Sikorsky was working on the S-65 passenger helicopter (1967), The Budd Company (a manufacturer of rail cars) had their own idea… the Skylounge. It was a “people pod” to be carried by the S-64 Skycrane, but while the Skycrane did carry passenger pods from time to time for the military, the Skylounge was to be more “refined.” Along with being more civilian-friendly in terms of style and comfort, it was also intended to be carried on the ground by some form of truck, turning it into an actual bus. The bus would pick you up in the middle of your busy city, drive you to a convenient heliport and drop off the pod, which in turn would be picked up by a helicopter which would then fly you to the major airport on the outskirts of the city where you’d board your intercontinental jet and spend the next eight hours getting trashed on skybooze and harassing the stews.
Presumably, at some point someone likely asked the question “wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier and cheaper to just use regular buses and have passengers take a few seconds to step off the bus and onto the chopper?” and the idea evaporated.
First up, DeWayne Craddock. Right now he’s Big News, because he went buggo and killed ~12 of his former co-workers in Virginia Beach. Since he shot them, this should be Big News for days or weeks. But like the recent Colorado school shooting (do you remember that? The news media sure seemed to forget it in a hurry), there are a few details about Mr. Craddock that make him problematic for the narrative.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: information on Mr. Craddock came out last night before midnight… name, photos, screenshots of social media posts, etc. He was no mystery when I made the original post. But due to a (presumably) cold virus deciding that today would be an excellent day to take up residence, I’ve spent much of the day in something of a haze of discomfort, plopped in front of the TV. Because illness sapped my enthusiasm for so much as changing the channel, the TV was on CNN most of the day. And I noticed something interesting:
1) Around noon CNN posted an infographic on the shooter with some basic info including name, but where there should have been a photo there was just a silhouette, as if CNN couldn’t find a picture of the man.
2) Around 2, one of the talking heads started discussing the shooter, but not only did they not show a photo, they announced that they wouldn’t be saying the shooters *name.*
It’s almost as if CNN thinks there might be something inconvenient about the shooter in this case.
But hey, that’s depressing. Instead, let’s all gaze in wide-eyed wonder at a type of crazy that’s probably not terribly dangerous, but is sure damned entertaining. Some NSFW language here and you have to get through a commercial, but it’s worth it.
The rise of this sort of whackadoodlism with, for a few generations, harm the western worlds ability to reproduce itself. But if (and, sadly, it’s a big “if”) we can get through it without dying out or being taken over, the gene pool and the *cultural* pool will be stronger for having gone through the winnowing. Who wins the future? Those who show up. And people like this are unlikely to contribute their genes to the future. Fortunately.
