Yet more on the Democratic Socialists little get together

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., humor, politics, THIS is why Trump won, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 102019
 

I may be running this incident into the ground, but *dayum* is this longer video a hoot to watch. It’s amazing – thought perhaps not surprising – the levels these morons go to to fetishize weakness. A few questions consequently demand answering:

1) How are they going to handle all the firings squads, death camps and gulags they’ll need in order to impose their ideology on sane people if they cannot stand *chatter* without losing their little minds? How will they concentrate on the Five Year Plan when the air is filled with the screams of dying millions?

2) How do these chaotic goobers think they’re going to be able to organize a Revolution if they can’t figure out how to vote?

3) Is the Trump reelection campaign smart enough to use clips from this in their ads?

 Posted by at 2:30 am

BLAMMO goes Russia

 AARRRGH, Gah., Hmm..., news, nukes, rockets, russian empire, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 092019
 

There seems to be something wrong with our bloody Russians this week.

A Russian military ammo depot that blew up earlier this week just exploded again

But wait! There’s more!

‘Brief radiation spike’ after rocket engine blast in northern Russia

Ummmm…

Radiation levels peaked between 11:50 and 12:30 (08:50-09:30 GMT) before falling and normalising by 14:00, the city administration in Severodvinsk said on its website, without reporting how significant the spike had been.

…

“They advise everyone to close their windows and drink iodine, 44 drops per glass of water.”

And…

Is Putin covering up a nuclear disaster? Ambulances covered in protective film transport six Russians who suffered severe radiation poisoning in mystery explosion during ‘test of new hypersonic missile’

UMMMMM…..

The Daily Mail article suggests that this was a “Zircon” hypersonic missile that exploded. The 3M22 Zircon is an experimental scramjet-powered anti-ship/land target missile with  range of about a thousand miles, with the capability of carrying a 600 kiloton thermonuclear warhead. If there was a radiation release, that would indicate that the missile was carrying an actual nuclear warhead… something that seems *really* unwise for a peacetime test flight. it’s unlikely that the warhead actually detonated; that would be Big News virtually impossible to hide. Instead I guess the warhead must have either been blown apart by the chemical explosives, or trashed on impact. in either case, it seems a little odd that the radiation spike would go back down.  You’d think there’d need to be a substantial cleanup. Unless, I suppose, the plutonium actually caught fire and burned and the smoke rifted downrange…

There is also speculation that this wasn’t a Zircon, but a Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile. The existence of a truly nuclear powered Burevestnik is by no means certain, but who knows. In the unlikely case that this what what crashed, then perhaps the burst of radiation came from the engine melting down in flight or on impact; the drop in radiation coming as the reactor sank into mud or a pond or even just the dirt. Shrug.

 Posted by at 5:31 pm

Star Destroyers

 art, awesomeness, models, new products, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 092019
 

We’re in something of a golden age of model kits for the Star Destroyer from Star Wars. NOTE: this applies only to the Star Destroyers form the original trilogy; if you want a model of the Star Destroyer from the sequel trilogy, you’re just plain out of luck. Just as if you’d wanted the sequel trilogy to actually be *good* Star Wars, I suppose.

Anyway, the Japanese model kit company Bandai is soon to release two new SD models.  Bandai mostly seems to focus on kits of those ridiculous anthropomorphic giant robotic “mech suit” things that are apparently overly popular in anime, but their Star Wars kits are usually exquisite.

As always: if you order one of the items from the Amazon link below, or use the link to go further into Amazon and buy other stuff, I get a small pittance. So you can help a brother out while loading up on Star Destroyers.

First up a 1/5000 scale Star Destroyer, complete with in-scale blockade runner and Millenium Falcon. The SD is modeled after the one from “Empire Strikes Back” which is substantially different from the one in “A New Hope” (and “Rogue One”), so the blockade runner is a little out of place, but I don’t suppose too many people are gonna care.

At 12.6 inches long, it’ll be a little smaller and a lot more expensive than the smaller of the Revell kits, but the detailing should be vastly improved.

Also coming soon from Bandai, a dinkyscale model of the Super Star Destroyer. Small, but cheap and very likely ridiculously detailed.

If you want a more sizable (more than 2 feet long) Super Star Destroyer, and especially if you don’t want to have to put one together, this just came on the market. It seems to be well received.

Available for a few years now is the Bandai dinkyscale Star Destroyer. Cheap, but a beautiful little thing. I’ve shown one I built hereabouts before.

Also available for some years now is the smaller of the two Revell models, a “Snaptite Build and Play” kit. Low on detail, but reasonably accurate, with a built-in sound and light system. Designed more or less to be built by kids, assembly is easy and quick, and the parts thickness is such to make it pretty rugged.

Last is the gigantic 1/2700 kit, originally released by the Russian model kit company Zvezda, re-released by Revell. Pricey, but since it’s about twice the size of the new Bandai kit while being only 25%or so more expensive, it’s a pretty good deal. Assuming, of course, you have someplace to put it.

 Posted by at 1:31 am

SpaceX: A challenger rises

 awesomeness, news, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Aug 082019
 

Rocket Lab is, it seems, planning on recovering and reusing the first stage of their small Electron launch vehicle. The means of recovery is a lot lower tech than that of the Falcon 9… the Electron will pop a drogue ballute to stabilize, then open a parafoil to slow down and drift in the direction of a recovery ship. Before splashdown it will be air-snatched by a large helicopter then flown to the ship. Should be doable; the small size of the booster makes recovery of the entire first stage via this method practical, while Lockheeds Vulcan is, last I checked, only planning on recovering the engines and avionics.

This is of course no threat to SpaceX, which is going increasingly Bigger And Bigger. Still, it will be good to see yet more space launch systems working towards reusability and truly low cost.

On the other hand: no matter how capable Rocket lab gets with future boosters, their choice of launching from new Zealand will be a limiting factor. New Zealand has been since 1984 a “nuclear free zone,” excluding from its territorial waters any ship powered by nuclear reactors. While this would not necessarily seem to exclude nuclear powered spacecraft… why would  someone with such a payload risk it?

 Posted by at 3:29 am

Manufactured Outrage

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 082019
 

The right is every bit as capable of manufacturing fake outrage as the left. Anybody remember the 1980s, with the “Satanic panic,” people freaking out about Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal, the Proctor & Gamble logo being Satanic imagery? Silly stuff. Today the left has *almost* a monopoly on manufacturing outrage, but the right can still get in a few moments of oddness. Take, for example, the presumably-forthcoming movie “The Hunt.”

Hollywood blockbuster that satirizes killing of ‘deplorables’ causes outrage: ‘Demented and evil’

From everything I’ve seen, the basic plot is one we’ve all seen before: rich people paying to hunt humans on an island somewhere. The twist here, apparently, is that the rich people are coastal liberals paying to hunt down kidnapped flyover country MAGA-types. That’s different, I suppose, but not really all that unbelievable, especially in a day and age when Twitter bans memes about “learn to code” but leaves unsuspended rich leftists calling for the eradication of Trump supporters.

Some right wingers, and even left wingers, are outraged at the idea of Hollywood depicting leftists hunting down Trump supporters, as they suppose that this is an attempt to celebrate that urge. But… I dunno. Granted I haven’t seen the film and I don’t know how it turns out, but from the trailers it certainly looks like the rich lefties are very clearly the *bad* guys,* and it’s very likely that while most if not all Trump supporters wind up dead, so will the lefties. That’s how this plotline always seems to go. In the end, from the looks of it the flyover-country people will be portrayed as the sympathetic characters on the right side of ethics. So, you know, like in reality.

Not only is this particular “The Most Dangerous Game” plotline old and oft-used, so is the depiction of left-wing power being directly dystopian. Only a few years ago the box office and popular culture were dominated by “The Hunger Games.” What was the basic world depicted there? The United States had collapsed some centuries before, and the society that rose in its place was a totalitarian dystopia run from “The Capital.” Most of America was depicted as a bunch of poor working-class “deplorables” toiling their lives away under the domination of the “elites in the capital… who were depicted as the sort of effete, hateful fashion-obsessed weirdos that we see all too often trying to dominate political discourse. The elites in “The Hunger Games” overdressed in ridiculous impractical clothes and slathered themselves with makeup like an entire mega-metropolis desperately trying to live every day like it was Drag Queen Story Hour. They would not sully their hands with dirty evil guns, but they’re more than happy to surround themselves with faceless armed goons to protect them from the jeans and leather wearing country bumpkins who have been barred the use of arms. “The Hunger Games” depicted an America where the left won and imposed its will… and it showed it to be evil and unsustainable. Even Hollywood seems incapable of dreaming up a world when leftist ideology wins and *doesn’t* become truly horrific. See also “Equilibrium” where everyone is forced onto drugs in order to stop “hate crimes.”

So, hold off on the outrage. Granted, “The Hunt” is produced by the same politically subtle folks who gave us “The Purge,” which is based on the idea that the Religious Right takes over the US and promptly sets about convincing the poor to murder each other, somehow profiting from this. So it may well be that they’ll *try* to make “The Hunt” something to ultimately appeal to the murderous lefties who, like the Dayton shooter, are radicalized and set off by the dangerous rhetoric of extremists like Bubbles Cortez. Perhaps it will end with everybody killing everybody else at the hunting resort… but then it pulls back to see that the Real Head Honchos are still fine, send in a repair/cleanup crew, and kidnap some more deplorables for the next set of rich leftie hunters to go murder. But even if so… Hollywood will still be depicting the lefties as the villains, even if in the course of the movie someone cranks out some nonsensical rhetoric about how right wingers are evil because of this or that leftist talking point.

 Posted by at 12:06 am

SPECTRE Bird One Booklet of General Plans

 blather, drawings, Hmm..., rockets, science fiction  No Responses »
Aug 072019
 

I’m putting the finishing touches on this one. My hope, if I go into production with a number of these BoGPs, is to release at least two at a time: saves on shipping costs. But the “SPECTRE” BoGP will be a test case of sorts. If it is popular, more will come. If it tanks… well…

I’m still tinkering with the diagrams, but you can see below what I’m planing on including. Along with the diagrams will be a mess of explanatory text. Some will be on the diagrams themselves, as you can see; others will be on a separate cover page. For the science fiction designs, the intent is to describe the vehicle as if it was real, with an in-universe  description. Sometimes from the people or organizations involved (which will be the case for SSV), and sometimes from the viewpoint of outsiders trying to describe them (such as is the case with the SPECTRE vehicle). Consequently, there will be more than just the dry statistics of length and weight, but also history and analysis from someone who may or may not understand the thing, and may or may not *like* the thing, and who may or may not be the sort of person you’d *want* to understand the thing.

For the SPECTRE, I have about three pages of text. To me it seems god, but I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before. So I’m looking for three (3) people willing to give the cover pages (*just* the cover pages, not the mess-o-diagrams) a look, and then review in the comments section below what they think. Undoubtedly there’ll be spelling and grammatical errors, but what I’m interested in is… was it worth reading? Did it keep you interested? Make you more interested in the full booklet? Basically… was it good?

If you are interested, leave a comment expressing interest below, and if you’re one of the first three to do so I’ll send along a PDF of the cover page. This:

But not yet this:

Thanks.

Note: the in-universe text will be for different universes. The SPECTRE Bird vehicle isn’t from the same reality as the War Rocket Ajax or the Helicarrier or the Messiah. It might be interesting to try to create a Grand Unified Theory of Fiction slapping everything into the same continuity but… nah.

 

 Posted by at 5:50 pm

In/Out-group bias

 blather, Forward!, Hmm..., politics  No Responses »
Aug 072019
 

It is a natural result of a billion years of evolution: people prefer “their own kind” over what they perceive to be “the other.” This is not a value judgement, simply a statement of fact. It can be seen in virtually all areas of life; in fully integrated schools, kids will tend to ethnically self-segregate in who they sit with at lunch; adults will self-segregate in where they choose to live or who they choose to hang out with.

But there are some differences in rates of preferences. And according to some surveys a few years ago, in the US, there is one group that confounds this generality: “white liberals.” They are the only ones who actually have a pro-out-group bias. In other words… they are to some degree “self hating” and suffer from the psychological condition of “white guilt.” This would go far towards explaining a lot of recent left-wing media coverage of politics: they have a natural bias towards assuming that whites are naturally evil. An interesting summary of the findings on this this and related matters is HERE (and HERE).

One might assume, at least based on the media, that white conservatives would be the polar opposite: pasty-faced Republicans should be just massive racists, with a distinct and invincible preference for Their Own Kind. But that turns out to be in error. Whether Liberal, Moderate or Conservative, whites seem to generally have a lower in-group preference than other ethnic groups of the same politics.

According to this, conservatives as a whole – except for conservative Asians, have a lower in-group bias than liberals…and much less so than moderates. This is a head-scratcher of a result, honestly.

The true validity of this data can of course be questioned; polling and statistics are hardly bulletproof. But it does go far towards explaining a lot of what’s going on these days.

EDIT: Case in point. Take a look at this tweet from a Hollywood actress and try to imagine anyone *other* than a white liberal saying the same sort of thing about themselves and their ethnicity. It is a phenomenon and a psychological disorder virtually unique to that one group.

 

 Posted by at 10:05 am
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