Further Third Worldification of American cities…
You’d think they’d at least try to clean up the area around the White House. Maybe even try to mask the damage caused by the anti-Trump insurrectionists several years ago. Nope.
Oct 272022
Oct 272022
Russia warns West: We can target your commercial satellites
Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for non-proliferation and arms control, told the United Nations that the United States and its allies were trying to use space to enforce Western dominance.
“Quasi-civilian infrastructure may be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike,” Vorontsov told the United Nations First Committee…
It is impossible to know how much of that is bluster and how much is legitimate threat. It is the sort of risk that the DoD has known about for decades, every few years running some program or other to develop low-cost fast-reaction satellite launch capabilities in the event that a surge in replacement satellites (communications, recon, navigation) is needed. These studies blow a bunch of money, chew up a great many man-years, then get cancelled, resulting in paper and incomplete hardware. It may soon prove that the repeated lack of followthrough over a span of decades just might have been a mistake. SpaceX could doubtless throw up a number of replacements satellites, given time… but there would still be a span of likely months with a gap in capabilities. And who knows if there are warehouses of replacement satellites ready to go in the first place.
Bonus round: an attack on space infrastructure could be legitimately seen as an act of war. Loss of space superiority would be disastrous in case a full blown war breaks out, so a strike on satellites could easily result in a full retaliation.
Neato!
Remember just a few years ago, when the worst thing we had to worry about was mean tweets? Ah, good times.
Oct 262022
There’s lots of awful in this story. One aspect of awful: a man hunting mushrooms stumbled across a suitcase and found a dead five-year-old in it. That’s gotta leave a mark.
“Lil feller.” This guy, a pretty good replica of Wilford Brimley, seems like a good man.
The kid was killed by his mother who believed him to be a demon. We *really* need to start mass producing loony bins and crazy buckets.
Oct 262022
The most recently finished diagram took several days. The references were clear and detailed… and difficult to suss out in some ways, a common issue with aircraft that had deployable bits.
Oct 262022
It’s a long video, but it’s interesting to listen to an artist rail against AI text-to-image art generators. The guy knows that his field is as endangered as a factory workers; even if AI never get *quite* as good as human artists (doubtful), the sheer volume of art – images, music, videos, whole movies – will simply overwhelm the pitiful output that a finite number of humans can produce. Hell, my “War With The Deep Ones” stories, currently something like 400 pages, could be overwhelmed by ten thousand pages of adequate AI-generated content on the same subject in a matter of seconds. Once AI “writers” are there, I stand no chance of making a dime off fiction. I suspect it won’t be too long before “US Supersonic Bomber Projects” could be written and fully illustrated by an AI, with a thousand-page tome full of readable, factually accurate descriptions and beautiful general arrangements and inboard profiles and full-color 3D renderings. Humans like myself have some current advantages due to the fact that most of the archives are not scanned and available online… but *that* probably won’t last long. On the other hand… as AI start taking history-writing jobs away from humans, these humans will have neither the incentive nor the funds to go to archives or pay archives to scan stuff. So it may be that a number of archives end up closing the doors and turning off the lights due to lack of interest. And thus history that *could* be written won’t be.
Hmmm.
Oct 262022
Yeah… no. It seems that whole swathes of LA have been turned into the Third World. This was not a sad inevitability; this was a result of intentional choices by those in charge of the city, county and state.
Yeeeeeeesh.
You can’t have vast numbers of homeless like this and justify open borders.
Oct 262022
It is hard these days to separate Hitler from the occult. Regardless of how much Adolf *actually* believed in Atlantis or Vril or Hyperborea or Ancient Aryan Supermen or all that rubbish, it is now just accepted that he did, and that those beliefs informed his nutty plans and actions. Did he really think that the Spear of Destiny would lead him to victory? Shrug.
Guess what: we’re here again, this time with Putin and whackadoodle Slavic magical superstitions:
The Crazy Mystical Impulses Sending Putin Wild in Ukraine
Valery Solovey, who’s trained many members of Putin’s ambassadorial corps at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and served as the prestigious school’s director of public relations, either knows a thing or two about the black arts of Russian diplomacy, or is dafter than a borscht sandwich. As the professor tells it, Putin once commanded Kremlin sorcerers to ritualistically kill a black dog so he could drink the blood to ensure a crushing victory in Ukraine. When that dog didn’t hunt, Solovey claimed that Putin ordered all the magicians’ heads cut off and displayed in front of their homes.
Uh-huh.
The article is filled with nutso. How much of it is accurate? How much of it was dreamed up by Putins enemies? How much of it by delusional supporters who buy into the nuttiness and see Putin as divinely anointed? Dunno. At first glance, you’d think that a guy brought up in the atheistic, materialistic Soviet system wouldn’t be superstitious. But the Commies didn’t actually get rid of the human need for magical thinking; they just redirected the need for God to the State, magic for Socialism. It would surprise me none at all to find the the KGB was filled to overflowing with wannabe-wizards making appeals to the spirit realm.
Appeals to the supernatural are hardly rare in politics. The Middle East is built (and destroyed) on that; American politics is full to overflowing with politicians on both sides claiming special status with God or Jesus. But in American politics, the supernatural is usually pretty performative; you don’t often get the feeling that this politician or that actually really buys that deeply into it. But Putin is *clearly* psychologically unsound, and is clearly aggressive in a way not seen in Europe since Bad Mustache Man. Couple that with especially crazy magical beliefs, easily influenced not by a massive, slow-moving and hidebound Church but by random Rasputin-like weirdos… well, it seems like bad times might get worse.
Oct 252022
Bell artwork circa 1983 depicting the proposed JVX tiltrotor, which would become the V-22 Osprey. The cockpit and the sponsons display the greatest obvious differences from the aircraft that would eventually be built, but the design seems to be largely just about there.
Oct 252022
X-chromosome variants help explain autism’s sex bias
A male is more likely to have autism (and a few other “neurodivergences”) than females. There is now a genetic explanation for at least part of this bias.
One possible explanation is that boys, who typically have only one X chromosome, cannot compensate for an altered copy of an X-chromosome gene in the same way that girls, who have two X chromosomes, can.
This might also kinda explain why females with autism often seem less autistic than males with autism… the XX chromosomes can compensate for the issue more effectively than the XY chromosomes.
Oct 252022
So, antiAmerican American Brittney Griner was arrested a long time ago trying to bring illegal substances into Russia. This is not really a debatable point; Griner admitted it. You can argue whether or not its appropriate that hash oil should be illegal or not, but in Russia, it is. And it’s not a profoundly stupid law, like “no wearing purple on Tuesdays” or some such; prohibitions on drugs are virtually universal though the specifics vary. I believe it’s illegal to simply transport it across state lines *within* the United States, so taking it internationally was either profoundly stupid, or profoundly arrogant in the “those laws don’t apply to me, I’m too important” form. Well, she was arrested, put on trial, convicted, sentenced to nine years and just had her appeal denied. So, sucks for her, but at least she doesn’t need to worry about being subjected to the US National Anthem for a while. So that’s nice for her.
Listen to the news piece below. One thing I’ve noticed in the coverage of Griner over the past couple years is you don’t hear her speak too often. Gee… I wonder why.
Huh.