NERF guns finally get rid of the foam dart and go for the real thing: 9mm bullets. Sure, it’s a home-printed firearm, but it’s a dandy NERF gun too.
If you want one of these NERF guns of your own, the files are available here:
It’s getting so that anyone can have a gun of their own, no matter how tyrannical their local government is.
The Taliban got this stuff for free, courtesy Joe Biden. but a lot of these things would get an American *arrested* and his life ruined if he was found to own one.
A mind-blowing graphic in today's Times on what $85bn worth of lost equipment means in practice for the Taliban: pic.twitter.com/GDcuNQbb6P
— Will Brown (@_Will_Brown) August 29, 2021
Sixty-four *thousand* machine guns. More than a third of a *million* assault rifles (real ones, not the semi-auto sporters Americans are occasionally allowed to buy). Artillery. Armored vehicles. Hummers. Fricken Herkybirds.
If the US government is giving machine guns to our enemies, their moral high ground for preventing *me* from owning one has evaporated. I have high hopes that this will be used in the Supreme Court to demonstrate that the government *really* doesn’t think that fully automatic weapons are a problem, and thus the NFA should be repealed.
This is hidden camera footage of this very fine gentleman, Gabriel Gipe, admitting to his intellectually corrupt and ethically bankrupt philosophies and goals for twisting childrens minds in his role as a teacher in the Inderkum High School in California. But the thing is… he advertises his communist ideology *openly,* with not only Antifa and Maoist propaganda on the walls of his classroom, they are tattooed all over him (not to mention the Hammer & Sickle shirt). He’s even got the INGSOC logo prominently displayed on his arm. “1984” was supposed to be a warning, not a users manual… but here we are, using taxpayer dollars to fund direct indoctrination and intimidation of our school children into the worst ideology to come around in the last thousand years.
Doubtless there’ll be a minor kerfuffle in the Natomas Unifed School District over this, and he might even be invited to explore new career options. but the thing is… he should have not been in that position in the first place. Other heads should roll for putting someone like that in a position like that. Imagine some other teacher hanging up a Confederate flag or a portrait of Hitler, and you get a fraction of the way towards the level of scumbag this guy represents.
But wait! There’s more!!!
There is at least a glimmer of hope, though:
“Removed during an investigation” is not quite as good as “fired, and we’ve contacted every other school in the country to warn them that this person has been abusing an untold number of impressionable children, and we’ve instructed all our other teachers and staff that this sort of insane and abusive behavior will not be tolerated.” But it’s at least a start.
It’s now “racist” to speak Welsh in Wales. How long before it’s “racist” to speak English in England? It’s already “racist” to expect people in America to speak English. Britain, you should have taken note of Americas failing in that regard. Now it may be too late.
Electric airplanes, like electric cars, currently have the problem of relatively short range, a problem unlikely to be greatly improved until energy density of batteries goes up by an unrealistic amount. Still… some routes seem like they’re be perfect for electric airplanes:
One Point Seven Miles. These islands look pretty windy… this seems like the *perfect* opportunity for electric aviation. Set up some wind turbines, use them to power battery chargers. Plane comes in, does its run, every now and then either charges up or swaps batteries. No need to bring in av gas.
So it turns out that China not only half-asses construction projects while at the same time going really big with them, China also half-asses *massive* building demolition projects. Here are fifteen high rises in the city of Kunming that were never finished and sat abandoned for seven years because they were unsafe, finally demolished in one giant spectacle. A spectacle that ends with one of the building *still* *standing,* just at an entertaining angle.
… in the 40-watt range.
An agricultural robot that uses lasers to zap weeds. Still far from a true general purpose AI, but clear evidence that the US should be spending money on developing this sort of thing rather than spending money on accommodating masses of immigrants to do the same job. The robots don’t commit crimes, require schooling, require feeding, require medical care, take up space in housing or on the road. Developing robots like this advance technology and provide good jobs.
Well, let’s see how this works. The blog will *probably* start looking like it used to, a year-ish or so ago, with more aerospace stuff and longer-form rants and such. This is due to transitioning away from the book projects, at least for a while, and getting back to the pre-book way of life. There are good chances of more books/bookazines in the future (one is already under discussion), but nothing is confirmed yet.
I also plan on taking a photographic research trip (in support for a proposed book a little further down the line) in the near-ish future. It could be of two stages… a day trip that I am almost definitely going to take, and a multi-day trip requiring motels and such that I *may* take. Because such things aren’t cheap, I’m considering pre-selling the full sets of photos that I’ll take. The number of sets I sell will determine whether it’s the short trip or the long one.
Or someone could just send me a million dollars, and I’ll take the grand tour of aerospace museums and archives…
The German V-1 “Buzz Bomb” was a relatively simple weapon, and one that a sufficient number were found sufficiently intact that the Allies were able to reverse engineer. In the US, copies of the V-1 were built by Republic Aviation by September of 1944 as the Jet Bomb-2 “Loon.” The V-1 was found to be a crude weapons, inaccurate and not particularly spectacular… but it was cheap and unmanned. In late 1944 the US was staring down the barrel of Operation Downfall, the forthcoming invasion of Japan. Nobody was quite sure how that was going to go; the only thing the expert were sure of was that it would be a bloodbath. So a stand-off weapon that could be launched in *vast* numbers to saturation-bomb Japanese targets while putting approximately zero American lives in harms way? It was an easy sale.
The JB-2 was externally nearly identical to the V-1 but had an active guidance system, theoretically making it more accurate than the fairly dumb V-1. But even with a radar-based guidance system the JB-2 was meant to be built in large numbers… the goal of 1,000 units per month by April, 1945. However, by the end of the war only a little over 1,300 had been built. Exactly how to use the JB-2 does not seem to have been nailed down; one reasonable notion was to use it as a “harassment” weapon: on days when cloud cover negated manned bombing missions, the Japanese might be expected to be scurrying around rebuilding and reprovisioning and generally getting stuff done… and then here come the buzz bombs.
Problem was, simple as the V-1 was, getting the thing to work right was not so simple. Testing of the JB-2 continued to about 1950, by which time it was woefully obsolete and was being used as an aerial target. But early on, simply getting the thing into the air, never mind flying stably, was a chore.
