I had this image in my head of what London, England, looked like. Tea and crumpets, eh wot, and all that. Terribly civilized people, high culture, a bunch of, well, English people. Behold:
Sadiq Khan's London 👇 pic.twitter.com/C5Oiws2fN6
— Dan 🏴 (@DanTheMan5043) June 12, 2022
There is a bit of a thrill in the last moments of any auction. I suppose it’s like gambling or sportsball-watching, neither of which I’m into, but I guess there is a similar result. Anyway, this afternoon saw the end of an Ebay listing for a lot of McDonnell manned lifting body + ASSET documentation & blueprints; this is exactly the sort of thing the APR Patreon/Subscription was created for. Having seen such auctions go for *stupid* sums in the past, I expected the same here, so I had a group of people together to crowdfund it. I was prepared, with crowdfund backing, to bid a *stupid* amount for it. And in fact I did bid a *stupid* amount (well above what I’d gathered via crowdfunding) in the last few seconds. Fortunately, the final cost was not so tragically high, so the funders only got charged a smidgeon and my tragically over-stretched credit card didn’t get demolished.
Still, those last few moments were troublesome. Because as it turns out, my cardiopulmonary system ain’t over the Pinko Pox yet, and my system *really* didn’t like that at all. That aspect of the exercise sucked.
But hey, manned lifting body. Woo.
Bringing fists to a gunfight? Stupid. Squaring off against a guy with a gun and telling him to shoot you? Double-plus stupid.
The first video may be “potentially sensitive,” but it’s worth watching, especially if you want to see how *not* to behave.
background for the video, the guy with the gun is outside his house and had put a restraining order on a neighbor and so at 5am he waits for him wanting to "scrap" as he pulled his shirt off he had a knife in his pocket following with the "imma take that gun from you". justified pic.twitter.com/M8C1NDE0S4
— 𝙱𝚕𝚡𝚌𝚔𝚂𝚡𝚐𝚎👺 (@SickSagee) June 18, 2022
A YouTube video of the same incident, same videos. Explains that this was adjudicated a legal self defense shoot, as well it should be. If you’ve drawn a firearm on someone and they advance on you… that alone is evidence that they not only mean you harm, they’re out of their fricken’ minds.
You can listen to the shooter’s story HERE.
Amphibian Aerospace Industries, an Australian company, says they are going to start manufacturing new Grumman “Albatross” flying boat amphibians. The Albatross was last manufactured in 1961, so it has been a little bit of a while, but the Albatross was a good, rugged design and sixty years have not seen many fundamental changes in amphibian design or technology. The G-111T will have turboprops rather than the original radial piston engines, and modernized avionics and such… but it’ll be made out of good ol’ aluminum rather than modern composites.
I fully support this. Unless you’re flying extremely high, close to the speed of sound or trying for VTOL performance… civilian aircraft from the 1940’s and 1950’s remain perfectly valid design choices. Subsystems such as engines have certainly improved, but the overall designs have not improved by leaps and bounds. It’s not like the C-130 isn’t still in production…
Does AAI have the staff, funds, infrastructure to manufacture this sizable aircraft in a production line capacity? I have no idea. Won’t surprise me if they fall on their faces and nothing comes of it. But if they pull it off, I would kinda demand that the US Coast Guard, US Navy, USMC and SpaceX buy a bunch of ’em. Load them to the gills with anti-landing craft missiles and sell them in vast numbers to the Japanese, Taiwanese, Philippines, South Koreans. A new UK government could make considerable use of craft like this to take out the ongoing invasion flotilla. If need be, land next to the boats and rafts, scoop ’em up, fly ’em to Utah Beach.
Because why not.
Two weeks ago yesterday I started displaying symptoms of covid, a coughing fit came on *very* suddenly Friday afternoon and lasted all through the night. Temperature stayed normal until sometime early Saturday, at which point it went up about five degrees F from my baseline and the day became *really* awful. Sunday was bad, but not quite as horrifying. Monday saw a test and confirmation that the ChiComs had got to me with their little pandemic. Since then it has been a general even improvement; temperature fluctuations disappeared within 4-5 days. Coughing has remained, though it’s at the “kinda annoying” level now.
I have, however, noticed some things that continue to hang on: physical exertion results in almost complete systems collapse, and my brain remains a little fuzzy. I can do CAD drafting no sweat; I can bitch and moan online just fine. But fiction writing – which I’d typically engage in to the tune of about a page or three a day – has dropped to an average of two sentences a day at best. And non-fiction writing remains challenging: I start writing, then need to refer to source documents… and I just can’t maintain focus. And there remains a general indefinable *weird* feeling, akin to fatigue but… a little different.
So, nothing at all like the disease I was promised, what with ventilators and hospitalization and death in a forgotten corridor. But it’s dragging on well past the point when it has lost its novelty.
The Babylon Bee is at its best when you read one of their satirical articles and realize that if you didn’t know it was satire, you’d accept that it was a real, if perhaps disturbing and/or insane, article. Well… here’s a website that doesn’t seem to say anywhere that it’s satire, and I can’t tell if it’s satire or complete insanity:
There are a hundred pages of content, with about ten articles per page. A thousand articles of satire is a hell of a commitment to cause… but then, so is a thousand articles of utter nuttery. There are articles such as:
And so on
The site seems to just take whatever “articles” get written and submitted to it. So it may be a fully serious site (a lot of the articles seem fairly normal) that is either:
1) Being bombarded by articles written by loons
2) Being bombarded by articles written by trolls pretending to be loons
3) Being bombarded by both trolls and loons
Either way… I’m all for people paying attention. A bunch of leftwing lunatics who want to tear down civilization? That sort of thing should be noted. Insane trolling proves indistinguishable from honest insanity? That should also be noted.
Recently sold on eBay was a display model for a vehicle labeled “SIPS.” No other data was available. However, this appears to be an upper stage modification for the LIM-49 Spartan surface-to-air anti-missile missile. Which suggests that the first “S” in “SIPS” standard for “Spartan.” Perhaps something like “Spartan Integral Propulsion System” or some such. However, this seems to appear to be a complete vehicle…. the very large first and second stage motors, as well as the warhead section, *appear* to have been replaced with a new, small booster with fins. Perhaps this was meant to test the third stage of the Spartan… or perhaps it was meant to be a way to find some use for the Spartan third stage after program cancellation, as some sort of scientific test vehicle.
The other photos from the ebay auction have been uploaded to the 2022-06 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patrons and Subscribers.
The diagram below shows the complete Spartan missile.
Trump had a tenuous relationship with hard facts. When he told the American public things that were untrue, it *tended* to be in the form of “I will make everything awesome.” Exaggerations, self-promotion and feel-good propaganda, that sort of thing. But Trump was a piker compared to the Biden administration when it came to bald-faced lying directly to the American public. Biden and his lackeys will look you in the face as your house burns down around you and tell you that your house has never been in better shape.
Keep it up, Joe. November can’t get here soon enough.
Is it *really* that hard to keep it in your pants while you have open, weeping sores? *Really?*
For half a billion years *something* has been making more or less the same fossil, largely unchanged. Hexagonal net-like patterns in soft underwater sediment have been appearing since the Precambrian… on up to and including the present day. Whatever these things are, they’re still alive and we don’t yet know what they are.