May 222019
 

Here ends the great human experiment.

IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn’t bode well for humanity

This drop in IQ does not seem to be due to a single obvious factor, such as importing masses of dumb people. It seems to be occurring across the board, including within families. It seems that in advanced counties such as France and Norway… people are just plain getting dumber.

This would seem to be due to some mysterious environmental factor. The ones that seem obvious:

1: Modern food, water and air have something in one or more of them that saps IQ.

2: The rise of social media, the internet, and staring all day at screens for both entertainment and employment, along with the omnipresence of truly stultifying infotainment, is causing human brainmeats to atrophy.

3: Perhaps modern medicine and/or hygiene have gone too far in some way. Perhaps by artificially keeping the body clean and healthy, rather than in a constant struggle, entire systems are going into decline.

This rise is stupid can certainly explain the concurrent rise in the popularity of such mind-bogglingly moronic ideas as Antifa and Democratic Socialism, along with the revival of antivax and astrology. The biggest problem here is that the only way to get past it is to have intelligent solutions, and if the trend is towards less intelligence… we have an issue. And even if we cannot currently explain why the current populations seem to be in cognitive decline, there are a few things we *can* and *should* do: don’t speed the process up by importing masses of people who aren’t even as smart as out own dumb selves.

We could perhaps also try to come up with ways to inspire people to have smarter kids. Stop incentivizing stupid people to have kids would be a good start there.

Now this would be a *really* good time to make a solid, good-faith effort at interplanetary colonization. The only people who will survive *that* will be the smart ones. In space, no one can hear you be dumb because your corpse will be immediately fed into the recycler.

 Posted by at 3:36 pm
May 212019
 

The Unwanted Blog and the aerospaceprojectsreview.com blog are both in need of a WordPress update that requires some tinkering at the hosting service level. I’m told that Everything Will Go Just Fine. But… who knows. One or both blogs could evaporate, turn upside down, turn inside out or get transferred to the Chinese military for all I know. With luck, in 24 to 48 hours absolutely nothing out of the ordinary will occur. But if you see something screwy, it’s not *necessarily* because I’ve decided to pack it all in.

UPDATE: it seems to have succeeded, and the WordPress has updated to the latest version. I can see this directly because the editing page is all different and “better.” Bleah. So… everything *should* be good. Should.

 Posted by at 11:44 pm
May 212019
 

It’s tales like this one that do not convince me to listen to artists when they start yapping on about right and wrong.

The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter

On the one hand, the “artist” here gave up her four-year-old kid because… well, just because, I guess. Kids are too much trouble to bother with, I suppose. (These days I guess the “artist” would just feed the kid through a blender and if anyone complained she’d say they were trying to control her life.) That’s lame, shallow and bad. On the other hand, someone that awful probably shouldn’t be a parent anyway.

What’s worse…the article includes a number of pieces of the “artists” “art.” It’s… it’s, wow, it’s sh!tty. Its the kind of talentless garbage that would only be favored by someone who unironically uses words like “cis-heteronormative” and “patriarchy” to complain about things objectively higher quality than what they can produce.

 

 

 Posted by at 10:31 pm
May 212019
 

Color me meh:

NASA’s full Artemis plan revealed: 37 launches and a lunar outpost

Pros:

Manned lunar landing in 2024

Annual manned lunar landings to follow

Manned lunar base beginning 2028

No dependence upon “international co-operation”

Cons:

Requires the SLS

Requires the SLS on time

Requires the SLS on some sort of budget

Requires six SLSs in 2024-2028

Requires Congress to go along with Trump

Requires Trump to win in 2020

So… I’ll believe it when I see it happen, I guess.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 9:53 pm
May 212019
 

A few days ago, a blog reader sent me an advance copy of an e-book he’s going to self publish for my review and comments. Without getting into specifics (no spoilers!) the book is a long poem that points out how long ago the future involved children dreaming of going to the moon, and how now, generations later, none of those children ever could have gone to the moon. Gosh, I can’t for the life of me comprehend why anyone would ever think that *I* would have anything to say on the subject…

Anyway, something that struck me right off was that the book seemed like it would have made a great satire of the old “Little Golden Books” that many of us had as kids. In pondering it, it seemed to me that a whole line of such books could be produced. Now, I’ve got *zero* ability to produce the sort of art that these books use, and I’m almost certainly the absolutely wrongiest of wrong people to try to crank out the rhymes and such for such books. But I came up with a few possible titles. If anyone wants to run with these… go for it. Just don’t forget to give me a cut…

“No, You Will Never Be President”

“The Ugly Ducking Who Grew Up To Be An Ugly Duck”

“My Little Doldrum Book Of Genocide”

“Nobody Loves Little Jonny”

“Get Ready For A Lifetime Of Student Debt and Social Security Payments”

“You’re Not Special”

“The Bullies Usually Win”

“My First Book of Nazi War Atrocities”

“You’re To Blame For Everything: A Little Doldrum Book of White Guilt”

“We Could Have Had The Stars: A Little Doldrum Book of Anti-Nuclear Activism”

“Mom’s An Anti-Vaxxer”

“The Happy Little Airplane Grounded By The GND”

“Daddy Drinks Because Of You”

“Heat Death or Big Rip: A Little Doldrum Book Of The End Of The Universe”

“Beauty Matters, And You Don’t Have It”

“Santa Clause, The Easter Bunny And Friends: A Little Doldrum Book Of Lies Your Parents Tell You”

 

 Posted by at 5:23 pm
May 212019
 

I’ve recently returned from several weeks of travels. In the process I stopped at the Rock Island Arsenal Museum and took a lot of photos (something like 200) of their large display of firearms. Because why not, I’ve uploaded all of them to Dropbox for APR monthly funders; guns aren’t aerospace, of course, but there tends to be some overlap in interest. One wrinkle: these were taken with my best camera, which means each photo is about 13 megabytes; 200 of which adds up to a lot.  It took a ridiculous length of time to upload them all.

 

I have uploaded the full set of ~200 photos to Dropbox available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

If you’ve been wondering why blogging has been a bit reduced and why emails might not have been answered… well, there ya go.

 

 Posted by at 2:59 am
May 212019
 

This truly bizarre piece came out in January and purports to tell men how to be better. Its suggestions are, in essence, stop being a man and become subservient and freakin’ useless.

Obsolete Man Skills You Should Ditch

So you don’t feel the need to actually click on the link and give them the satisfaction, here are the “obsolete man skills” and their suggested replacements:

1) Hunting: instead learn how to cook
2) Fighting: instead, learn how to mediate
3) Repairing your car: instead, learn how to code
4) Fixing things at home: instead, learn how to decorate (urk)
5) Being a leader: instead, learn how to collaborate
6) Being a disciplinarian: instead, learn how to communicate with your children
7) Holding your emotions in: instead, learn how to talk about your feelings

The thing that stands out immediately is the “instead.” I’m not a hunter… but every hunter I’ve ever heard of has known perfectly well how to cook. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. The closest to mutual exclusivity would seem to be #7, where instead of having self-control the author advocates for constant whining about your feelings.

I suspect that chances are really good that the author no more really believes this nonsense than most of the readers of this blog would. However, by posting outrageously ridiculous “think pieces” about nonsense that he knows will annoy rational people, he knows that people will complain about the piece elsewhere… and link back to it.  An article that suggested truly obsolete man-skills – say, how to shoe a horse or auto-de-fey an infidel – won’t be that remarkable and won’t get that many clicks, thus lower ad revenue.

Which makes me wonder how much of present day outrage culture is driven by the simple desire for increased ad revenue through clickbait. Th more conspiratorial part of my brain makes me wonder if this guy is being paid or otherwise influenced by China in an effort to not only make western men useless in terms of national defense or economic competition, but also useless in terms of being truly interesting to western womenfolk (or at least the women who have not been infected with modern man-hating feminism). Perhaps the author is, unwittingly or not, part of the grand Chinese effort to not only defeat the west but to wipe out its population by driving down the birth rate.

 Posted by at 12:33 am
May 202019
 

Teen killed after crashing motorcycle into SUV at 170 mph in St. Ann

Fortunately, the driver of the SUV was unharmed when the bike hit  the side of the SUV and caved it in. Sadly, the news report does not include photos of the SUV or the bike. Because those would be *really* interesting. The Mitsubishi Outlander, it seems, must be reasonably well built to protect the drive from an impact like this, though it may be that a hypothetical passenger would have been severely injured or killed (and quite possible shot into the driver).

I suspect that photos of the bike rider would also be interesting, though quite possible difficult to comprehend out of context. 170 mph to zero in a couple feet probably did some interesting things to him. (Note: the evidence that he was actually doing 170 mph is pretty weak, but he was clearly going way too fast.)

Ooops, here were go, some footage showing the machinery involved:

 Posted by at 12:57 pm
May 192019
 

I haven;t even seen “They Shall Not Grow Old” yet, and here comes another documentary that uses modern computer tech to boost the image quality of old war films. in this case, “The Cold Blue” will be about the B-17 in World War II.

Take a look at the trailer below and try to convince yourself that you’re not interested. You’re made of sterner stuff than I if you want the video in conjunction with the reading of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and you don’t get a case of the uncomfortables.

Read about it HERE. Irritatingly it’s one of those “showing for one day only” movies.

 Posted by at 2:57 pm