Brewster, N.Y. – 1/13/2013 – Today Senator Greg Ball (Patterson – R, C, I) announced that a burglary has been reported on Davis Ave. in White Plains, New York that evidently ties into The Journal News gun maps. It is reported that the burglar used The Journal News’ interactive gun map to target a home included on the map.
D’oh.
If the claim here pans out, I think the Journal News is going to be in for some financially exciting times.
The climate is, as it has always done, changing. For the past three decades it has been trending warmer… thus “global warming.” Anybody able to go outside in the middle of summer and notice their skin about to melt off has picked up on the fact. Where the fighting has come in has been the two-sided debate of “why is this happening,” and “what should we do about it.”
For the first part, human activity has certainly played some role, greater or lesser. The real problem is the second part. The general consensus among many on the political Left is that the obvious thing to do is to trash the American economy… make oil and coal so expensive that people don’t travel, that industry falls apart, that the standard of living declines and expectations of improvement in the future transforms into a general malaise about a dismal “new normal.” Well… mission accomplished. Huzzah, I guess.
But while the US has gotten a handle on the increase in greenhouse gasses (largely through the Pelosi-Frank economic collapse causing a decrease in travel and manufacturing), China has been largely ignored. Their economy, while not a strong as it might have been (especially since their customers aren’t as rich as they might have been), is still strong enough that they continue to crank out new producers of greenhouse gases at a truly astonishing rate, cars, factories, coal-burning power plants. Gentlemen, behold:
China passed the US in terms of CO2 emissions back in 2009. Many people try to give them a pass by pointing out that on a per capita basis China is still behind the US; but that is a metric that just doesn’t matter. If global warming is driven by added anthropogenic CO2, then it’s driven by absolute total amounts, not per-capita relatives. And China not only passed the US, it *shot* past the US. It’s growing so fast that you get related news reports like this:
WHO guidelines say average concentrations of the tiniest pollution particles – called PM2.5 – should be no more than 25 microgrammes per cubic metre.
Air is unhealthy above 100 microgrammes. At 300, all children and elderly people should remain indoors. … the US embassy recorded 800.
And exciting satellite photos like this from October 20, 2012:
And yet… who gets picked on? Let’s see:
The US is the world’s greatest economy and a massive emitter of greenhouse gases. Until its political masters act, the planet has no chance of halting global warming or curtailing rising sea levels or dealing with the increasing acidification of our oceans or coping with the melting of Earth’s icecaps.
the United States has an opportunity to take a leadership role in this area. His administration has made some progress in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, most notably with new vehicle emissions standards and proposed regulations for new power plants. But the country has to go further in meeting its commitment to reduce overall emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and much greater reductions in the decades ahead. The best place to start is with meaningful new emissions standards for existing power plants.
Global warming rests on the US. China isn’t even mentioned.
The thing is: the US could have *massively* reduced CO2 emissions while *massively* increasing energy supplies, productivity and standard of living… had it not been for more or less the same people bitching the loudest that the US needs to reduce CO2 emissions. While it’s not a 1:1 mapping, the same people today screaming about the US and CO2 were the ones who have stood in the way of building new nuclear power plants for the last forty years. Beyond that, had NASA had the funding to build solar power satellites starting in the early 1980’s, we could have several of them by now… not only providing entirely safe gigawatts, but also providing a functional space exploration, exploitation and colonization infrastructure. Instead, NASA was turned into a do-nothing organization, and programs designed to trap whole generations into cycles of poverty were gifted trillions of dollars. Gah.
If those who most loudly warn of anthropogenic global warming truly believed what they were broadcasting, then China would be Economic Target Number 1. *Vast* pressure would be applied to the Chinese government and Chinese companies to get them to get their CO2 under control… a wise approach would be to get the US, France, China, Japan and Russia together to brainstorm (and put into mass production) new, better, safer, more efficient nuclear powerplants. But instead what do we see? Al Gore sells his little TV studio for a *personal* profit of around $100 million dollars… to Qatari oil sheiks. Way to live the dream, pal.
SCIENCE FICTION SUGGESTION: Take one part “Beijing on a bad day” and one part “Fringe,” and you have a story about the air pollution, either just on its own or with a little mad-scientist assistance, polymerizing and converting several cubic kilometers of the air in and around Beijing into a brown, nasty aerogel. The whole city gets locked into place in a matter of seconds, and stays that way until it rains good and hard and melts off the aerogel. Yay, sudden panic in the surrounding regions!
The status of SLS configurations, circa April, 2012. Note the combination of manned and unmanned variants, Shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters and all-new liquid rocket boosters.
Demagogues like Piers Morgan tend to follow patterns. As an interviewer who wants to drive public opinion on the topic of disarming the law-abiding, he has generally performed his stategy well: bring on soft-spoken guests like Larry Prat, and shout them down; and bring on raving loonies like Alex Jones and let them go on in order to make gun owners look bad.
But last week Morgan made an error and brought on Ben Shapiro. Shapiro was polite and well-spoken… but would not let Morgan bully him. And that clearly threw Morgan for a loop; instead of a coherent interview, Morgan kept bouncing from one question to another, like a drowning man desperately grabbing for something, anything, to get a hold of.
Heh.
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Another Morgan interview mistake was to former Marine Joshua Boston, who calmly and politely owned Morgan:
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WASHINGTON — NASA has awarded a $17.8 million contract to Bigelow Aerospace to provide a new addition to the International Space Station. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module will demonstrate the benefits of this space habitat technology for future exploration and commercial space endeavors.
Irony time: in the late 1990’s, NASA spent a fair chunk of change to develop the “Transhab” inflatable module to be attached to the Space Station, providing a large volume. But NASA rather suddenly abandoned the whole effort. Bigelow snapped up the technology and the rights, to form the basis of first-generation “space hotels.” Now it looks like NASA is paying Bigelow to study adding a Transhab to the Space Station.
Garver and Bigelow Aerospace Founder and President Robert Bigelow will discuss the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module program at a media availability at 1:30 p.m. EST (10:30 a.m. PST) Wednesday, Jan. 16, at Bigelow Aerospace facilities located at 1899 W. Brooks Ave. in North Las Vegas.
I wish ’em luck. Back in early 1999, I flew to Vegas for a job interview with Bigelow; it turned quickly surreal, and was not only disastrously unsuccessful, I later found out from side channels that I was seen not as a prospective new hire but as a spy. Yeah. I didn’t get the job.
Those of you who read this blog regularly enough for long enough probably notice that there are some topics I visit regularly, other I visit rarely or perhaps never. “Fashion” is, I should think, in the “rare” category. Because fashion *bores* me. Let’s face it: socks, undies, pants, t-shirt, shoes, cel phone, wallet, keys, knife, firearm. Apart from whatever you might need to deal with whatever weather/environmental factors you might plan on running into… that’s it. If you’re a guy and you go in for “fancy,” from my perspective you probably have screwed-up priorities.
And to help make my point for me:
Go ahead and take a look at what is being touted as “men’s fashion.” Go on, I dare you.
I have difficulty seeing more than three real possibilities here:
1) The “fashion designers” are trolling the “fashion press.” They crank this… stuff out, watch the press fall all over itself, and stand in the shadows and have a good laugh.
2) Fashion designers are insane.
3) Western civilization is going straight to Niflhel. We’ve peaked, and we are now deep into decline, and long-accepted norms of what it is to Be A Man have been turned on their heads in favor of…who knows what.
Seeing stuff like this makes me want to slaughter a bear with an axe and wear its still steaming skin to a PETA meeting… kick in the front door with the axe over my shoulder and yell out a challenge: “What is best in life?”
I probably won’t do that, though. Sadly not that much of an extrovert.
Some interesting stuff at the link, along with the usual hand-wringing.
The person who took this photo would have been among the first to look out there and realize that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill bomb. It wasn’t the air raid that the citizens of Hiroshima had been anticipating for months. This was the beginning of a new world, one with a bomb unlike anything anyone had ever experienced before, something so new and fearsome that at first no one could understand what it was.
China and Japan are rattling the sabers over the oil-rich Senkaku islands. These small uninhabited rocks are roughly halfway between Taiwan and Okinawa, and were apparently of relatively little interest to anyone until the 1970’s when it became known that there was oil to be had there. Now the Chinese want to take it from Japan, who annexed them in 1895 (it’s not clear from my minimal reading that anybody really gave a damn about them before this).
Taiwan must be thrilled to death about this. If Japan and China tangle, it’ll be right at Taiwans doorstep; if China winds up in control of the islands, Taiwan will be flanked.
I, of course, have a solution to this problem: NUKE ‘EM. The islands are small… the biggest, Uotsuri-jima, has an area of 4.32 square kilometers. Easily reduced to a steaming hole int he water. Problem solved. Now quitcherbitchin’.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers. It’s been true for fifty years; if you want to go to space, you have to have lots of money. So for commercial space tourism companies, getting paying customers who are willing to book before the vehicle is even in service is vital but difficult.
XCOR seems to have snagged a pretty good customer:
A seat on the Lynx Mk II goes for $100,000, so this would seem to be $2,200,000 for XCOR. Plus it seems to be a part of a bigger publicity drive, so that should help gather interested parties.
Of course, they still need to fly.
I wandered up to the print shop to put in an order. The 1/72 Saturn V, the Lunar Module layout, the Skylab cutaway and both versions of the 1/72 Saturn Ib. The 1/144 Saturns and the Convair Nuke Bomber received far too little interest (the 1/72 Saturn Ib’s technically came in under the bar I’d set, but whatever…). I also ordered one print of the brownline V-2 at two different sizes, to see how they come out. The prints should be ready Monday. Once I have them, made sure they meet code, and have the proper shipping supplies, I’ll make ’em, available to those who emailed interest; once *those* have sold, I’ll get another print run of at least the 1/72 Saturn V and LM diagram (the only ones that really seemed popular) and make ’em available.
BTW: The trip *to* the print shop was uneventful. The trip *back* was all kinds of exciting. As in “hey, neat, my brakes don’t work in those road conditions, but I shouldn’t feel too bad cuz neither do anyone elses including that car slithering through the intersection right at me.” Fortunately, the drive never got *really* exciting.
BTW2: This is what the finalized Skylab cutaway looks like. The callouts were added in, the “Skylab” title similar to “lesser” versions of this diagram was added, and what the hay, a little Saturn V/Skylab diagram was added to fill in some of the blank space.
And because absolutely nobody has asked for it, here’s what the Skylab diagram looked like after assembling the photos, but before the major cleanup and “blueprint conversion” operations.
