Sep 062023
 

It sure seems like the era of “superhero movies” being a license to print money is over. Granted the DCEU flicks have not had  a great track record, but the latest outing, “Blue Beetle,” seems to be shaping up to be a *disaster.*

The production budget was $104 million. The marketing was probably the same, so the cost of the movie was $208 million. As of today, it has taken in $59M domestic, $46M foreign. But the studio only gets half the US box office ($29.5M) and about a third of the foreign ($15.3M), for a total of $44.8M. The movie was released 19 days ago, so it still has time to rake in some more moolah, but unless some amazing miracle occurs I have trouble seeing it reaching $60 in actual returns to the studio. If it does it will have lost Warner bros “only” $148 *million* dollars.

Couple “superhero fatigue” with “Blue Beetle? Who’s that?” and you could have predicted that this wouldn’t do so great. Add in the disastrous marketing (a DC superhero movie that features a prominent character calling Batman a fascist is not a great idea) and this flick was doomed from the get-go.

 Posted by at 11:17 pm
Sep 022023
 

Methane levels in the atmosphere seem to be rising steeply. Since methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2, this could, perhaps, maybe, result in the end of the ice age that we’re currently in… within a few decades. The one good thing is that methane does not have a long lifespan, getting oxidized within a few years. But that’ll only help if the methane release – which seems to be coming from African wetlands – stops. of course, if the climate suddenly gets way hotter, the African wetlands releasing methane via decomposition of dead vegetable matter might turn into desert area, resulting in the eventual end of the methane release. Which means within a dozen or so years of that the methane will have burned out and the climate can descend back into good ol’ ice age status. *Proper* ice age, with glaciers covering continents and land bridges everywhere.  This will be aided by the fact that humans will have been largely wiped out at that point. Doubtless industrial civilization will have either moved off-world or simply been exterminated; and with no easy access to oil or coal anymore, anthropogenic CO2 emissions will be minimal.

Yaaaaaay.

 Posted by at 12:21 pm
Sep 012023
 

A sad percentage of my cyanotypes fail… faded, blurry or spotty. Sometimes these failure are due to bad craftsmanship; sometimes to material deficiencies, and surprisingly often, environmental factors (humidity has wreaked havoc, see the “spots”). Mostly these get simply tossed, meaning a lot of material, time and effort are wasted.

But it occurred to me that while they’d stink as proper blueprints, they might make dandy giftwrapping paper. So I’ll try that. I’m thinking of ebaying this lot of A-12 diagrams. These are all about 24X36 inches. Five sheets; if these were all successful, that’d be more than three hundred dollars worth of blueprints. Obviously not worth that, some fraction. And instead of being mailed rolled, they’ll be simply folded and sent in a padded envelope. If interested, send an email. If I get an offer that overcomes my depression at the failure these otherwise represent, that’d be great. Otherwise, ebay.

 

 Posted by at 8:19 pm
Sep 012023
 

The rewards for August, 2023, have been released. They include:

Document: Report No. ZD-013, “Preliminary Detail Specification for United States Navy Class VP Long Range Patrol Seaplane,” Convair, 1 April 1946

Document: “Space Shuttle: What Will It Do?” A 1970’s brochure describing the Shuttle, with six full-color full page illustrations

Art: McDonnell-Douglas lithograph of “NASA Earth Orbital Space Station”

CAD Diagram: Northrop Grumman Next Generation Long Range Strike

 

If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.




 

 

And as happens far too often, I’ve been remiss in my PR campaign. The rewards for July, released a month ago, included:

Document: “C-5 Galaxy Pocket Guide,” brochure giving info on the C-5

Document: GDIC-64 O29-21, “Alighting Gear Convair Model 48 Light Armed Reconnaissance Airplane,” an illustrated report on the landing gear for Convairs competitor for the OV-10

Document: “Police Department Lecture #3 Effects of Atomic Weapons,” an early-50’s paper describing what NYC could expect int he event of a nuclear strike

Diagram: EMW “Wasserfall,” German WWII surface to air guided missile

CAD Diagram: Boeing 2707-100-derived bomber

 

 Posted by at 1:43 am
Aug 312023
 

It’s well known that a lot of cops are not great people. Ill tempered, quick to anger and violence, ready to smack someone around, break rules, break laws, corrupt, willing to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Why are they like this? Well, part of it is doubtless due to some of them having been not great people before they were cops, and were drawn to being a cop by the allure of power. But then there are doubtless other not great cops who started off as great people, intending to protect and serve. And then they spend years encountering the very worst of society. Murders, rapists, thieves, Socialists, the worst of the worst. This has got to grind a person down. But it seems to me that even more damaging to a cops psyche are the run of the mill scumbags they run into more commonly than TV-movie villains. People who are riding the Dunning-Kruger effect *hard,* marrying stupidity with unearned entitlement. Making every second of the interaction a misery. People like these specimens:

 

And then you get the lunatics, the type who are celebrated by our social betters, but who really aught to be in loonie bins:

Said it before, will say it many, many more times: we need phasers with stun settin

 Posted by at 11:58 pm
Aug 312023
 

Before there was the Budweiser Disaster, there was Gillette. Back in 2019 they released one of the worst ads in history… a company whose primary market was men used an ad to tell men that they were evil for being men. This, unshockingly, did not result in an increase in sales. It did do some damage to the brand and to their stock price, but nothing like what happened to Bud; perhaps this indicates a shift in the culture, with sane people beginning to realize their power to boycott.

I thought the ad was simply bad planning married to bad marketing. But then, I don’t spend my time trying to analyze propaganda techniques (perhaps if I did, I’d have better sales). However, this feller seems to have a channel devoted to such things, so, perhaps somewhat delayed, he went through the ad almost frame by frame. He came up with some interesting discoveries and conclusions, both about what was done and what was done wrong.

 Posted by at 8:16 pm
Aug 252023
 

J. Robert Oppenheimer is justly famed for his role in developing the A-bomb. He is considered to be something of a martyr for what happened later… during the “Red Scare” he was stripped of his security clearance. But was it actually wrong to do so? Was his interest in the Communist Party some minor childish dalliance from his earlier years… or was it more serious? The recent movie, and most modern depictions, portray him in a positive light.

But he *was* a Communist. What’s worse, there’s good evidence – lots of it from the actual Soviets –  that he actively worked for them. He apparently slipped them heaps of data to help their bomb program, and then once the Soviets had the bomb, he worked to sabotage the American bomb program.

It’s probably well past time that Oppenheimer be re-examined. And if it’s finally concluded that he was a traitor, which there’s good evidence that he was, his name needs to be appropriately blackened as any Communists should be. We tear down statues of people who supported slavery 250 years ago; we tear down statues of people who supported the CSA for *whatever* reason 160 years ago; we would tear down statues of anyone who supported the Nazis 80 years ago. We should tear down statues and monuments and hagiographies of anyone who supported Communists a hundred years ago, fifty years ago or today.

Hollywood Rewrites History Again: What the Oppenheimer Deification Movie Didn’t Tell You

Communism is every bit as bad as Fascism, and arguably worse; Communists *today* are universally terrible people because they have a century of blood-soaked failure that they *choose* to ignore. Communists, their supporters and their wishy-washy Socialist wannabes need to be called out for the monsters and morons that they are. And that includes historical figures.

 Posted by at 2:00 pm
Aug 242023
 

First, good news from the world of medicine:

UK’s first womb transplant deemed ‘massive success’: ‘Over the moon’

One woman (40) donated her womb to her sister (34) who was born with a malformed womb. So both women can have kids. This is good news. The first uterus transplant was in 2013 in Sweden, so this has been going on a while, if not widely.

 

But since we can’t have anything nice, here’s where this will go:

Trans womb transplants ‘10 to 20 years’ away after UK’s first successful operation on cis patient 

Weird enough that some people want to transplant wimminbits into biological dudes. But it gets weirder:

 

Taxpayers should fund $300,000 UTERUS transplants to help transgender women get pregnant, suggests authors in AMA Journal

 

The curious thing is that the Venn Diagram of “people who support taxpayer funding it so guys can get pregnant” and “people who thing we should reduce the population if western nations” probably overlaps a *lot.*

 

Besides the basic insanity of using surgery to affirm delusions, there’s the issue of what it’s gonna do to the prospective offspring. At the least they’ll know that they’re the product of Mad Science; they will also be raised by someone claiming to be their mother, but who does not have the upbringing of a woman. *THEN* there’s the issue of… even if the womb works, what’s going to happen to the fetus? DudeMom won’t produce the same hormones a woman does. HShe’ll doubtless have to spend the term of the pregnancy constantly getting shot full of drugs and hormones in a desperate attempt to give the embryo a hope in hell of gestating correctly. And then, there’s the end: the new womb probably didn’t come with a new pelvis. The male pelvis does not have space for a proper birth canal. So any offspring resulting from this will, like French Bulldogs, likely have to be brought about via C-Section.

 

And then there’s this to consider: in the second article above, it’s suggested that it’ll be 10 to 20 years before transplanting wombs into males becomes a reality. But… in 10 to 20 years, chances seem decent that bespoke organs can be produced via 3D bio-printing, cloning, etc. Use the “mothers” own DNA to create a womb with “moms” own DNA.

And then there’s this: in 10 to 20 years, the United Kingdom will be a fundamentally different place. When the UK becomes London writ large, the culture will be upended. It seems a bit unlikely that these sort of surgeries will be performed in a Britain, any more than they’ll be performed in Uganda or Saudi Arabia.

 

 Posted by at 9:29 pm
Aug 242023
 

US Justice Dept sues SpaceX over hiring practices

 

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.

 

How about No. SpaceX is building the future of national security. I say let them be as got-dayum picky as they want to be *especially* when it comes to hiring people of dubious loyalty.

The next time we get a President who is non-insane, non-senile and pro-America, they need to go through the halls of the Federal Government with  leafblower hooked up to a backpack full of pink slips.

 Posted by at 8:18 pm