I just… I don’t… gah.

A look into what happened during one part of the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America in Atlanta this weekend. pic.twitter.com/bWekVQxPWV

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 4, 2019

Hmmmm…..

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says first orbital Starship prototype flight debut is just weeks away

An update on the whole program is due August 24, and flights of a full-scale Starship “prototype” soon thereafter.

SpaceX is building *multiple* flight test vehicles, both in Texas and in Florida. They are building them outside, which is pretty much by definition as far from “clean room” conditions as you can get, unless you go the extra step and build them within a malfunctioning and overflowing sewage treatment plant. The Starship prototypes are clearly not space-capable, but seem to be aimed mostly or entirely as subsonic or just maybe low-supersonic aerodynamic “flying mockups.” The skins are far, *FAR* from the smooth, featureless outer mold lines you want to have for something that will deal with hypersonic airflows. Still, if they can demonstrate a death swoop and pinpoint landing with a vehicle with the same aerodynamics as a true Starship, with the same weights, propulsion systems, center of gravity, etc. as the real deal…. they’ll be a heck of a lot closer to a truly reusable large launch system than anyone else ever.

In 1964 Lockheed put forward a design in the US Army’s Advanced Aerial Fire Support System (AAFSS) program that would eventually win and become the AH-56 Cheyenne. But Lockheed was not alone in tendering a proposal: Sikorsky entered their S-66 design.

Both helicopters would have been advanced and fast. Lockheed made the AH-56 fast by adding a pusher prop to the tail, just aft of the conventional anti-torque rotor. But Sikorsky went a slightly different route: the S-66 used the “rotaprop” tail. This combined anti-torque duties with forward thrust in a single mechanism… a single somewhat complicated mechanism that could turn the sideways-thrusting anti-torque rotor 90 degrees to point it aft, providing forward thrust. This would have decreased drag and potentially decreased weight, but at added technical risk compared to the relatively simple solution of just adding a dedicated pusher prop. In late 1965, the Army decided that the risk was too high, and went with Lockheeds design.

The S-66 design got a fair amount of publicity during the contest, but I’ve never actually run across the proposal documentation or design diagrams. A few photos of a display model and a single cutaway drawing are presented HERE. Below are some magazine illustrations of the S-66. It would have been an impressive helicopter had it been built and if it had been successful, looking not unlike a sleeker version of the Mil 24 Hind attack helicopter.

Now that we’re in what will surely be a dull news cycle, let’s all look back at that time we were all *sure* that the world was going to end in 2011:

Ah, good times…

Somebody must be handing out the crazypills today…

A shooting with multiple fatalities and several people wounded has occurred at or near Ned Peppers Bar on East Fifth Street in the city of Dayton’s Oregon District.

Sources are telling us there are at least 10 people dead and an unknown number of wounded. We’re working to confirm some eyewitness accounts that a person who was denied entry into the bar opened fire.

Should be interesting to compare and contrast media coverage of the two events.

So, there was a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Preliminary reports are that the killer, who CNN seems to take great glee in stating as often as possible is a “white male,” posted a manifesto stating his opposition to mass immigration and the replacement of white Americans with Hispanics. So his response to what he doesn’t like was to shoot up a WalMart. Fortunately the cops caught him alive and unharmed; hopefully they’ll be able to pry out of him WTF he was thinking.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. And while sometimes terrorism seem to have a recognizable goal that can be linked to the terrorism (the IRA trying to bomb the Brits out of Northern Ireland, for example), “right wing” or “white nationalist/separatist” terrorism in the US and the West seems to be uniquely pointless. Consider: after these events, when has either society or the government moved in the direction these jackholes would have wanted? Every time a white guy shoots up a mosque, a synagogue, a black church or a bordertown WalMart, any changes that result would be in the direct opposite direction.

After a “right wing” terrorist act, the left-wingers agitate for increased gun control and restrictions on speech and thought. Sometimes they succeed in getting some of what they want. If it turns out this act was based on hatred of Hispanic mass immigration, then it’s a safe bet that it will become *easier* for such mass immigration to happen. The news has already pointed out that the city government of El Paso has told the local police to enforce no immigration laws for the foreseeable future.

In contrast, after “left wing” terrorist acts, such as the BLM murders of cops in Dallas or the cop Christopher Dorner who went on a killing spree to protest the existence of the 2nd Amendment or the many, many attacks by Antifa, free speech rights aren’t expanded; gun control laws aren’t hacked back; mass immigration isn’t restrained and illegal aliens aren’t mass deported. In fact, left-wing terrorists such as Antifa often get what they want in shutting down opposing thought.

And look at Islamist terrorist attacks: after 9/11, in only seven years the US elected a guy who had been raised as a Muslim, had a Muslim middle name, extolled the supposed virtues and beauties of Islam and was believed by a *lot* of people to be a Muslim. After lesser but much more common Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe, Western Europe has not cracked down on or oppressed their Muslim minorities; in fact, just the opposite. Many Western European cities have been effectively ceded to Muslim immigrants, millions more have filled their borders, and horrific crimes are often simply officially ignored so as not to offend the new occupants.

In summary:

Islamist terrorism: It seems to work quite successfully in promoting Islamist goals.
Left Wing terrorism: It works slightly.
Right Wing terrorism: It is massively self-defeating.

Now, nut jobs are gonna nutjob. Right wing or left wing, you can’t reason a whacko into planning things out rationally, taking into account logical cause and effect based on history and an accurate understanding of human nature. Whackos are gonna go lynch somebody or blow something up because God told ’em to, or the neighbors dog, or hidden messages in Beatles songs, or Satan, or the historical dialectic, or whatever other crazy thing that seeps into their consciousness. But if you ever encounter an “extremist” who is thinking about committing acts of violence because he thinks that will help his cause of expanding rights and freedoms… smack his ass around a bit until he realizes that it will do the friggen’ opposite. Gentlemen, behold:

Kamala Harris willing to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms

It took mere moments for a leading Democrat Presidential hopeful to announce that she’s ready and willing to go Gestapo on millions of Americans. A former hopeful “joked” about using weapons of mass destruction on American citizens who refused to given up their Constitutional rights. These sort of views are the sort of things that should, in earlier years, have not only disqualified a candidate from serious consideration for the Presidency, but should have gotten them laughed off the public stage. But every time some whacko hopped up on antidepressants decides that shooting up a public space is a neato-keen idea, the left wingers masterfully leap atop the still warm corpses and start bleating their goals of domination. And every time, they get a little further along. Useful idiots like the El Paso shooter only aid them.

A rat is made out of meat. One would think that that would give them *some* economic value. Granted, turning them directly into ratburgers seems a dubious prospect; difficult to process, filthy, likely filled with disease, toxins and parasites, much like your average filthy hippie. But turning them into fertilizer, or food for some other critters? There’s got to be a way to make a buck off a rat. And by extension, there’s gotta be a way to put Baltimore on a paying basis. Take this bit of footage, for example:

Those rats all seemed to run in much the same direction, which means that with a bit of planning they could have all run into traps. A buck or two a rat (or a buck or two per pound of rat, whatever) is probably well in excess of their strict economic value as plant food, but with the vast sums that have been poured into Baltimore – to no recognizable advantage – it seems that a public-private partnership could pay a bit above market value for home and business owners to make a few hundred bucks every few nights gathering up rats which will be processed into fertilizer for the local “organic” growers of trendy green leafy “food” for the consumption of vegans.

I *really* wish this had audio. I bet that was a fun call back to the office.

The best thing you’ll see all day… a bunch of vegans crash an Argentinian rodeo, and a couple gauchos ain’t havin’ it:

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=uVCD9_1564508614

It seems that Boeing, prime contractor for the Space Launch System, tried to shut down development of orbital fuel depots and orbital propellant transfer. Because if you can stash a lot of fuel in orbit easily and cheaply, you don’t *need* the bloated irrational monstrosity that is SLS.

The SLS rocket may have curbed development of on-orbit refueling for a decade

What’s interesting; if this story is true, Boeing opposed fuel depots because they threaten SLS. But SpaceX, now working on “Super Heavy” rockets with roughly the same capability as SLS, are *actively* supporting fuel deports. Why the difference? Because SLS was never meant to really do anything. Launch once a year, one extremely expensive mission maybe to the moon, call it good. Pretend to be moving outwards again, but the minimum possible steps taken as slowly as possible. SpaceX wants to lob dozens of people to *Mars* in just the next few years. Same launch capability, but fundamentally different goals.

*IF* this story turns out to be true, someone needs to have their ass handed to ’em. Congressional investigations at least on par with the “Trump is a Russian stooge” investigation, because this one has had clear and obvious impacts on the US: Billions spent on a system nobody wants, years wasted that that the US could have used to conquer the heavens. Hell, just imagine what we could have done with SLS money by way of building breeder reactors.