May 232019
 

So there I was, driving along and minding my own business, when NPR had to go and crush my day. They had a piece on “wildlife tourism” that included an interview with a Swedish conservationist who is working on a documentary about tiger farms in Asia. There used to be 100,000 tigers in the wild, now there are 4,000 or fewer; but there are more than 12,000 in “farms.” Normally I’m all in favor of farming… it’s a dandy way to preserve a species. Cows, pigs and chickens sure ain’t going extinct anytime soon, for instance. But tigers ain’t chickens. They are a fundamentally different sort of critter, and while eating pigs and sheep and the like is a perfectly fine thing to do, the uses made of tigers are pretty much all freakin’ ridiculous. The nadir of the story comes in the link above at about the 38 minute mark. A Chinese shop owner in Laos has some pink items that caused curiosity due to their color; the description for how they’re pink made me want to punch the radio to make it shut the frak up, then pull over, rip the radio out of the car, throw it onto the pavement, jump up and down on it, set it on fire and toss the smoking remnants into a deep dark pit, then drive to my nearest congressman and demand that the world withdraw from east Asia the right to use modern technology until their culture has grown up enough to be allowed to have things like electricity and the internal combustion engine and antibiotics and the Haber process.

Clearly, I was a tad annoyed. Listen at your peril.

Farming tigers for useless trinkets and fraudulent medicines is a ridiculous notion. Farming them for their meat, just as much so… predators make terrible farm animals because you have to feed them, you know, meat. Cows can get by with grass and weeds, but predators need many times their own meat-weight in food-meat, which is clearly stupid economics.

Still, there are more tigers in farms than there are in the wild. Soon, wild tigers will likely be extinct and will only exist in farms, zoos and the homes of a few crazy people. A great idea would be to get people to stop hunting them in the wild, but the same economics that makes farming them profitable also spurs people to hunt them, and there’s bound to be several jackholes who have an itch to be the guy to bring down the very last wild tiger.

I’ve honestly few ideas about how to save the species. Other than an east Asian zombie apocalypse, the best I have is a series of planetary terraforming projects to create continent-sized wildlife parks, something that relatively tiny orbital habs are sadly insufficient for. Creatures like lions and tigers require relatively vast herds of prey animals, and vast herds of water buffalo and antelope and the like require a whole lot of open area. The total sustainable population of tigers in an Island Three would probably be far below the safe number needed for decent genetics. So maybe we can get the animal rights activists behind the idea of terraforming Venus and Mars? Doubtful, I suppose, but probably easier than convincing two billion Chinese to knock it off with the powdered rhino horn-based boner pills.

 

 Posted by at 3:07 am
May 232019
 

As previously mentioned, the blogs required some updating of various things. One big update was to the WordPress version. It all seemed to work out well until, rather suddenly, whenever I’d go to create a new post all I got was a blank screen. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Completely empty.

Turns out the problem  was the new “Gutenberg” editor. It is, frankly, a pain in the ass to use, and now it sorta crashes the program. Fortunately there is a “Classic Editor” plugin that restores the old, *simple* post editor, and clearly allows me to create posts again. So if you have a WordPress blog and encounter this problem, installing the “Classic Editor” may well be the fix.

Until the next issue comes along, anyway…

 Posted by at 2:38 am
May 222019
 

One hopes that that time is now, at least for Sweden. Via Google Translate:

The government wants to ban runic script – asatroende and heritage enthusiasts rage

In short, the Swedish Minister of Justice wants to ban runes, because Nazis.

Runes.

You know, the script used by Nordic people. In Scandinavia, including Sweden. For hundreds of years.The best outcome for this kind of insanity would be the rise of a Swedish nationalistic movement that permits and promotes Swedes to take pride in their heritage, rather than trying to erase it and their people. I guess tomorrow we’ll see if UKIP and the Brexit Party make a dent in British electoral politics; it would be nice if the Swedes would grow a pair and take their own country back from the insane PC whackos who seem bent on turning it into a UN backwater experiment in trashing European cultures.

 Posted by at 6:13 pm
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