I am trying to get hold of a copy of “Aircraft Design Integration and Optimization” AGARD CP-147, 1974. The usual routes of interlibrary loan, eBay and Abebooks have failed me. If you would be willing to sell, rent or loan me a copy, please let me know.
UPDATE: A downloadable version of the book is available. Woo:
https://ia903101.us.archive.org/23/items/DTIC_AD0783307/DTIC_AD0783307.pdf
Yeesh.
Note: some kinda rough stuff here. A 22-year-old dog sitter was mauled by a pair of dogs. She was bit *800* times. I’m honestly kinda shocked that the cops who responded didn’t plug the dogs on the spot.
The ability to clone *faces* can’t come soon enough.
A remarkable video depicting the last moments of Russian tank, as seen from an overhead drone. The tank looks to take several anti-tank rockets… probably smaller, short-range types, but they eventually get the job done. It gets a track damaged by a hit, and as it backs up it sheds the track; one crewman (looks like the driver) escapes, rolls off the front and runs away. But he doesn’t get far before an exterior explosion (mortar?) knocks him down and sets him crawling. A few seconds later, some *stuff* comes flying into view and crashes down onto the road; at first I thought it was a body, but on review it just looks like… well, stuff. The camera switches view and it looks like there might have been a second tank to get trashed not far away, perhaps it exploded and tossed bits of junk into the earlier view. No infantry support is in evidence. The operation seems to be run on Stupid Mode.
This Special Military Operation sure seems to have one hell of pricetag.
There are three good arguments for homeschooling:
This one is Number 3.
Note that the video news piece says that the school district is cancelling classes and enacting some policy changes. That’s nice… but at least from what’s said here, the response is not just inadequate, it’s wrong. They are banning the use of headphones and cell phones during the day – but this doesn’t seem to have been a cause of the fight in the first place (rather, a student in the wrong classroom, refusing to leave). In fact, the use of a cell phone as a video recorder allowed this issue to come to light. Instead, what the school district *should* have announced is a zero tolerance policy regarding violent students. If you think it’s the height of wit and wisdom to chuck a chair at someone else, you need to no longer be around other kids. Certainly not at taxpayer expense.
So here it’s a case of students you wouldn’t want your child around until you begin them in combat training, and a school board full – apparently – of corrupt and/or incompetent fools.
Earlier today I started seeing people freaking out about this headline:
Such as:
TikTok dances ?? y’all can’t be serious pic.twitter.com/qrUXWSdlqJ
— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) March 9, 2022
On one hand, that sounds insanely and unrealistically stupid. On the other hand, that’s exactly the sort of thing you might expect to see from clueless “influences” and other such ambulatory bipedal cancerous tumors. But before going nuts over how stupid it is, maybe it would make sense to actually try to find where it originates? Turns out it’s not that hard. After about four seconds on Google, the original source is found to be:
Here’s 5 Tik-Tok dances you can do to help Ukraine fight Russia
And what is “Cinch News Network?” From the bottom of their page:
We are a super biased and undependable publication focused on furthering liberal policies in pursuit of a theoretical world where humans don’t act human.
I begin to suspect they just might be a satire site. But to be sure, let’s see what other stories they’re running:
(Note: that last one I actually linked to a couple years ago, not grasping just what was going on…)
So… yeah.
Brandon Herrara goes through some of the firearms of the current conflict. Unsurprisingly, the Ukrainians are using some odd and presumably obsolete weapons; this should be expected from a small military being steamrolled. BUT: there are Russians equipped with 19th-century-designed Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifles. They are equipped with modern rifles set up for optics, but they don’t seem to actually *have* optics. If I was a Russian soldier, I’d be a little ticked off to be sent into battle with an incomplete firearm; I’d be a *lot* ticked off to be sent into battle with a bolt action rifle. Ukrainian soldiers on the whole seem better equipped than the Russians.
And Forgotten Weapons comments on a prior video…
Some videos of interest. First: Ukrainian auto mechanics are busy at work converting captured heavy machine guns from Russian armored vehicles into hand-held weapons to turn back onto the Russians:
Second, a video showing trashed Russian vehicles. *Lots* of trashed Russian vehicles. Turns out lining up your vehicles on roads is sometimes a terminally bad idea. And a lot of armored vehicles in a town, destroyed or abandoned.
And a tank battle in an urban environment without infantry support. The tank you see here is close enough to the cameraman that he could’ve just *walked* up to it and poured napalm onto it. If he’d had *any* sort of rocket propelled grenade or LAW he could have shot from the hip and bullseye’d that tank and turned it into a pyre. One wonders if the video cut off when it did because he reached for his handy anti-tank weapon for an *easy* kill.
I know a lot of people think that Putin is playing some 4D chess thing here, leading the Ukrainians into a false sense of hope. Well, maybe… but if so, he’s taking his sweet time on springing the trap and in the mean time he’s squandering a hell of a lot of Russian lives with *stupid* tactics. One would think that if these sort of videos were widely disseminated among the Russian populace, they’d be pissed off enough to actually do something. It would surprise me exactly none at all if the Russian military has lost more soldiers in the last two weeks in Ukraine than the United States military lost in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last twenty years.
A quote has been floating around for a while, attributed to Voltaire: “Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities.” Like a lot of pithy quotes attributed to historical figures, it’s close, but not quite right. The original line in French is:
“Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde, est en droit de vous rendre injuste.”
This was in “Collection des lettres sur les miracles” published in 1767, available to view on Google Books. Google Translate renders the line as:
“Certainly who has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust.”
Close, but not exactly the same. But the meaning is probably pretty much spot-on. A history of the quote and it’s slow mutation is HERE. Why do I bring it up now? Well, seems relevant on a number of fronts:
1) If you as a Russian soldier believe Putins nonsense about Ukraine developing bioweapons to wipe out the Russian people, he can get you to wipe out the nation of Ukraine.
2) If you can be made to believe that a .223 is a “high power rifle” round, or that a standard capacity magazine is “high capacity magazine,” or that rifles in any way pose some terrible threat to society, then you can be made to support laws that empower tyrants, imprison regular folks and embolden violent criminals.
3) If you as a Star trek fan can be made to believe that Michael Burnham is a good character, that Star Trek Discovery is a well-written show, then you can be made to believe that Star Trek is garbage (see also Ghostbusters 2016, Disney Star Wars, and the forthcoming Amazon “Lord of the Rings” fan fiction), and accept garbage shows with garbage messages as quality worth emulating.
4) If you as an English person can be made to believe the England has always been highly multi-ethnic, or if you as a Scandianvian person can be made to believe that the Vikings/Norse were populated with Africans and that Jarl Haakon was a black woman, or if you as an American can be made to believe that Westerns have nothing to teach us but that Americans are awful people, then you can be made to tear your own cultures down and replace them with… what?
The less said about “Drag Queen Story Hour,” the better… and yet, wholly relevant to this quote.
Whatever it is, it really does a number on this tank, *presumably* Russian.
Some commenters claims to be able to see someone on fire fleeing the tank at 0:22, but I can’t see ’em.
Brave. Whether she’ll ever see the light of day again is yet to be determined.