Two high-rez photos of the Convair XB-46 have been added to the APR Extras Dropbox folder for 2020-07. This folder should be available to all $4 and up APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers, both available HERE.
The Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of African American History and culture has a page on “Whiteness.” As expected, it is portrayed as bad to be white, with the usual fraudulent claims of “white privilege.” But… then they trot out a convenient graphic of what “white culture” is in the United States and… you know, more than 90% of it, I can fully support.
Behold the horror of whiteness: Rugged Individualism! The nuclear family! The scientific method! Actual history! Work ethic! Planning for the future! Respect for rule of law and property rights! And, gasp, politeness!
Once again I’m left to wonder if some of the “woke” people behind this might not secretly be people who *aren’t* actually ashamed about being white, don’t actually hate western civilization. Because what they describe is, on the whole, the secret to success and prosperity, not some horrible racist dystopia. I read that infographic and rather than feeling shame about white privilege or white supremacy or white nationalism, I think, “yeah, those are the ethics that in just a relatively few centuries ended slavery, taught Man to fly, gave the vote to everyone, learned what the stars truly are, made smallpox extinct, put Man on the moon and just in general made life on Earth vastly better than in all the many millenia that preceded it.”
Some “celebrity” name of Nick Cannon rambles incoherently some loopy racist theories. He is quite clear that he thinks me subhuman… I find this monumentally amusing. My response to this is to laugh, point and mock. Oddly, it’s not to burn, loot and murder. Make of that what you will.
Below is, at least for the moment, the full thing. Skip to 12:30 to see an enlightening discussion with “Professor Griff” of how it’s impossible for them to be antisemitic, because they are Semitic, not those nasty Jewish white people. There is whackaloon-level discussion of secret societies like the Illuminatti. And then at 48:20, we learn the most important scientific truths of our age, about how melanin levels determine how much of a soul you have and how much compassion you have. I’m sure the Nobel committee will be along any moment now. At 52:50 you hear the startling truth that by 2050 everybody will be a “person of color.”
Hard to tell whether he’s Nation of Islam or Black Hebrew Israelite. In either case… this feller and the von Danniken-level gibberish he trots out are infinitely entertaining. I know some people are getting outraged, but that seems to me to be an inappropriate response. As with anyone who believes woo and rubbish, he hobbles his ability to progress. If he believes that melanin determines much of anything other than skin color… it’s no skin off my ass. Let him rant and rave, and I’ll stand and point and laugh with the same glee as I’d laugh at the loon shrieking about reptilians and crop circles.
In 1963-64, NASA was looking forward to a very bright future. Moon landings within a handful of years, a serious space station or two in the early seventies, manned missions to the vicinity of Mars and/or Venus probably by the early eighties, manned Mars landings not long after. Moon bases, Mars based, nuclear rockets, missions to the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter… in 1964, the rest of the 20th century must’ve looked *fantastic.*
In order to pull all that off, it was clear that NASA would need to launch a *lot* of astronauts. Consequently, a request for proposals went out to the aerospace industry to design the capability to do just that. Boeing, North American, Martin, Lockheed… a great deal of interest was shown and work accomplished. One design produced is illustrated below, a Lockheed design for a two-stage fully reusable spaceplane capable of transporting ten tons of payload or ten passengers to an orbiting space station. The booster stage had a cockpit about where you’d expect; the spaceplane, conversely, had an offset spaceplane so that the crew would have *some* sort of forward view during landing. Both stages used advanced rocket engines; the first stage also had turbojets to get it back to the launch site. As with all pre-Shuttle designs, estimates of turnaround time and minimal launch cost are impressive and a bit depressing in just how fabulously optimistic they were.
An earlier three-stage concept was shown in US Launcher Projects #5.
The future looked bright. And then… LBJ.
The New York Times was formerly recognized as the “newspaper of record.” of course in recent years it has become recognized as merely another mouthpiece for the far left, where the rare appearance of a centrist or right-wing opinion is struck down as heresy with subsequent lob losses and struggle sessions. In that environment, it’s not surprising that people of good will just plain give up. And so Ms. Bari Weiss has decided to quit the opinion department. But rather than just quietly gathering her things and slipping out the back door, she published a resignation letter for all the world to read. And it probably should.
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.
…
The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
Yeesh. The sooner Twitter goes away, the better. Sadly, it’ll probably be replaced by something even worse… the outrage mob.cancel culture rot of Twitter merged with the social credit nightmare the ChiComs dreamed up, probably.
South Africa: not even once.
Forty-nine, huh. Well, damn.
Larmarckian evolution, or Lamarckian inheritance, is a discredited, obsolete idea that the traits parents pass on to their offspring came not from genetics, but from physical exertion that the parents carried out. The usual example given is that if the giraffe, which, under Lamarckian thinking, got its long neck because generations of giraffes stretched out their necks real long to reach treetops. Lamarckism arose in the decades before Darwin and was largely discredited by the end of the 19th century…. but Stalin was enamored of the idea due to Trofim Lysenko. Lysenkos ideas became Soviet policy with regards to agriculture, and as a result the USSR suffered crop failures and famines in the 1930’s when they should have been getting fat and bloated on glorious harvests.
By the 21st century, anyone buying into Lamarckism is a dull-witted as someone buying into Flat Earth or evils spirits rather than germs. So imagine my complete lack of surprise to hear that the latest bit of idiocy being promoted is the Lamarckian concept that since American slaves prior to the 1960s were usually sleep deprived, their ancestors 150 years later are sleep deprived as a result and deserve to be given all the time off they might possibly want for naps and vacations.
What’s especially hilarious is that the people behind this are claiming that they aren’t getting the sleep they should because they’re spending so much time out in the streets protesting.
We really are not only in the Crazy Times, but the Stupid Ages. People are strenuously and often violently demanding that they be given things that with even a moments cogitation they’d realize will only harm them. Demands that an entire racial group be given the ability to go on permanent vacation will not lead to the betterment of that group. Betterment comes not through relaxation, but from hustle.
If you get fired for your religion, race, sex… you can sue the bejeebers out of your former employer, and chances are good you’ll win settlements painful enough to make them not do that again. In fact, the legal protections are strong enough that if a mob of activists protested your employer to fire you because of your religion or race, even the weakest-willed of employers will probably stand strong at least for a little while. But if you are guilty of expressing politically unpopular opinions and the woke mob shows up… chances are quite good that your employer will eject you more or less instantly. But… what if political views had the same protection under law as religious views?
One might argue that “political viewpoints are nothing at all like race or disability.” That’s true. But political viewpoints are a *lot* like religious viewpoints. They are, in fact, pretty much exactly the same, just with different labels.
So CBS All Access released the first trailer for the new Star Trek animated show premiering in August…
I remain unconvinced that spending money on CBS All Access makes any kind of sense. Sure, *finally* CBS made a Star Trek show that looks like the designers have actually seen an episode or two of Star Trek before… the ships and shuttles and tech all look like they’d fit into the TNG timeframe. But CBS does not yet seem to have figured out how to *write* Star Trek. This is a trailer, so it should contain some of the best stuff… and since the show is supposed to be a comedy, the trailer should be funny. But yet…
Pass.
Sigh. Used to be a time when “This new Star Trek Movie or show looks not good” would fill me with righteous indignation that the franchise was being degraded and squandered. Now it just fills me with a gray nothingness.
Cancel all the Trek. Collect all the rights back into one place, let Trek sit fallow for three to five years… then give it to Seth Macfarlane. It’s the only way to be sure.