i know that face pic.twitter.com/3Bc8mBevES
— nate zed (@NathanZed) October 8, 2020
Oct 092020
Oct 092020
I saw a commercial a little while ago where Gropey Joe said something along the lines that he will only raise taxes on people making more than $400,000 per year. But as mentioned yesterday, he wants to make rifles and standard capacity magazines NFA items. This means that you will need to pay a tax on each one of these that you own. And that tax is $200. Per item.
Do you have an AR-15 with three magazines? That’s a $200 tax on a $500 rifle… and a $200 tax on a $12 magazine, times three. You owe the government $800. But do you also have a Glock with a half dozen magazines? That’s an extra $1200 for the magazines. Maybe you also have an AK-47 clone with a dozen mags. You now owe a further $2600. Maybe you have a Beretta with six mags. That’s another $1200. That’s an extra $5,800 you owe, just for the privilege of exercising a Constitutional right.
Maybe you’re an enthusiastic collector. You have a dozen rifles, each with forty magazines. This is not so many for someone willing to buy a gun a year, say. But you now owe the government $98,400. Otherwise it’s ten years in a Federal prison.
Biden/Harris: not even once.
Oct 092020
Hmmm.
Singapore introduces ‘cruises to nowhere’ for travel-starved locals
In short… load half the number of passengers onto a cruise ship, set out to sea, pull into no ports, return home. All passengers and crew to be tested for Commie Cough prior to boarding.
I’ve been on a grand total of one cruise, an Alaskan coastal cruise some years ago. It pulled into several ports for excursions, but it seemed to me that the cruise itself was the main point of the exercise. I imagine that a cruise ship around – but not quite to – interesting locales, complete with notably fewer passengers, could sell quite well, even at a substantial markup. Close off the interior cabins, sell only the exterior cabins – the ones with good views and lots of fresh air – test the crew *daily,* go bonkers with the luxuries, and these things seem like they’d do quite well.
Oct 092020
Back in the 50’s the idea of lobbing troops and cargo around the world with rockets seemed not altogether unreasonable. US Transport Projects #1 illustrated a battlefield troop transport based on the Redstone missile; US Transport Projects #2 illustrated a scaled-up project for the same sort of thing using a Jupiter missile. In the 1960’s, Douglas scaled up the idea to use a ROMBUS SSTO to launch 1,200 fully equipped Marines halfway across the world (as seen in USTP#4), and Convair studied a similar idea at the same time based on work done on their NEXUS/Post Saturn designs (as seen in Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N3). In the early 21st century, “HOT EAGLE” was a spaceplane concept for hypersonic rocket-launched troop transport (seen in USTP#5 and USTP#6).
It turns out that the idea is still alive, thanks in no small part to SpaceX.
Pentagon wants SpaceX delivering cargo around the globe — and a live test could come next year
The goal isn’t small… 80 tons delivered anywhere in the globe inside of an hour. Falcon 9 could not do this; this would seem to be a job for Starship/Superheavy. *If* SpaceX can get that system running for their hoped-for cost of only $2 million per flight for an orbital launch, then this would seem entirely practical. $2 million to transport 80 tons seems a bit steep, but given that it would be used for special operations, it might be a bargain. It’s quite possible that the Starship to be used would have to be quite different from the standard Starship, even from a Starship used for point-to-point commercial cargo and passenger service. The landing gear would need to be improved, so the craft could land on uneven and unimproved terrain; it would need defensive systems from ECM to flares to chaff and perhaps even powerful defensive lasers. Given the likelihood that the Starship would not be recovered, it might make sense to split it into two parts: a stripped down propulsion section and a cargo lander that is basically just a low L/D payload shroud that comes screaming in and lands with chutes and braking rockets, splits apart and spills out all the goodies. Nothing of value left for the enemy to scrounge up, just sheet metal.
Oct 092020
So yesterday the news came out that a militia group plotted to kidnap Governor Whitmer of Michigan. This was spun as “right wing domestic terrorism,” which I also bought into. But *of* *course,* that first reaction, as it so often does, turned out to be… well, perhaps not right:
Perps charged in Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plot are anarchists who hate police and Trump…
The available evidence, in the form of videos posted online by a couple of those arrested, is that they are stock-standard *anarchists.* This generally falls more in line with the left than the right. They – extrapolating from a limited selection of self-made videos – hate cops *and* they hate Trump, seeing him as a tyrant. Other members of this pack of geniuses indicate more conventionally “alt-right” or “boogaloo” views. To have such disparate views mashed together into one group is bizarre, to say the least
Oct 082020
Well… except this guy:
The Biden Plan to End Our Gun Violence Epidemic
Ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Translation: common rifles and standard capacity magazines.
Regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act.
The NFA means that you give up your right to not have random, unreasonable search and seizure. You will no longer be secure in your home if you have a standard rifle.
Buy back the assault weapons and high-capacity magazines already in our communities.
Sell them to the government or else.
End the online sale of firearms and ammunitions. Biden will enact legislation to prohibit all online sales of firearms, ammunition, kits, and gun parts.
Not only will he ban the online sale of guns and ammo, he’ll go after things like springs and nuts and bolts.
Put America on the path to ensuring that 100% of firearms sold in America are smart guns.
“Smart guns” are very expensive and unreliable. Which is doubtless the point.
Stop “ghost guns.”
He wants to ban common machine shop tools, the only way to prevent people from manufacturing their own firearms.
There are around 300 million firearms in the US, with 5 to 10 million of those being AR-15’s, millions more being AK-47’s and other “assault weapons.” In Biden’s America, all of those would become illegal. This means that Biden wants to Federally imprison *millions* of peaceful American citizens for no other reasons than they are exercising their Constitutional rights. Would Biden/Harris be able to get away with this patently unConstitutional set of laws if they rammed such legislation througha Dem-controlled Congress? Would they be able to get away with it via executive order? The way the Supreme Court is currently set, you’d think there’d be a chance that reason could prevail and such a tyrannical set of laws would be overturned. But Biden has a solution for that: ha wants to pack the court.
Biden says he won’t divulge position on court packing until after election
When asked if he would pack the court in order to get his way, he could have said “no, of course not, everyone knows that that would be the most transparently tyrannical thing any modern President could do.” That’s not what he said.
Oct 082020
Recent months have seen a lot of histrionics about “right wing domestic terrorism,” including tarring the Proud Boys as white supremacists, while kinda ignoring the fact that their leader is this guy:
Yeah, not exactly standard white supremacist leadership material, but, hey, what are facts doing trying to get in the way of a narrative?
So, after half a year of leftists doing billions in property damage, directly murdering dozens and indirectly murdering hundreds to thousands by:
- Tying up police and fire resources
- Advocating for the defunding of police, in many cases succeeding, leading to greatly reduced policing in many areas
… the media continues to enable leftist violence and mayhem and murder while screeching about nearly universally phantom right wing violence. Until today! Finally, something for them to crow about!
13 charged in plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said:
“The individuals in (state) custody are suspected to have attempted to identify the home addresses of law enforcement officers in order to target them, made threats of violence intended to instigate a civil war, and engaged in planning and training for an operation to attack the capitol building of Michigan and to kidnap government officials, including the governor of Michigan.”
Yes, indeed, bad people planning bad things. But take the first two claims: targeting law enforcement officers and threatening violent insurrection. UMMMMMMM… hello, ALL THE REST OF 2020???
Oct 082020
NASA Detects Nuclear Fusion in Deuterated Metals Irradiated With Gamma Radiation
Boy this sure sounds familiar… sounds like “cold fusion” and “hafnium isomers” got trashed on bathtub hooch at an office party, hooked up in the supply closet and had an ugly baby.
Oct 082020
Neither impressed.
Harris: combining smugness with seeming to be perpetually on the edge of tears? Bleah.
Pence: Traditional Republican… mild, passed up many opportunities to correct Harris’ falsehoods, basically let himself be walked all over.
Gimme Zombie Reagan.
Oct 072020
… that the crew assigned to it are apparently aging out.