October 13, 2007
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It should come as a suprise to no one....but most of the Burmese monks seem to be.... gone.
There were a lot of them just 2 weeks ago.
More here.
UPDATE: Oh...
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DATELINE VATICAN CITY:
The order of the Knights Templar has been absolved of heresey!
It now appears that most of the acusations against the Knights Templar were part of an elaborate scam perpetrated by a French King (Phillip the Fair) who owed them money (and later went on to persecute French Jews).
Fortunately the Vatican has gotten to the bottom of this scandal and cleared their names (of that charge at least).
It only took them....700 years.
(Via Instapundit, who points out that it does put the Duke Rape Case in perspective)
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Via a thread on Anthony Williams site comes this interesting web-page devoted to the CJB MS, a Personal Defense Weapon concept built around a new 6.5 mm cartridge.
This round, the 6.5 CJB, is not in the league of the well regarded 6.5mm Grendel....it is a necked down 9mm parabellum that fires a discarding sabot round. The round, less sabot, is 4mm in caliber which does not tend to impress...especially given the issues that have been reported with the 5.56 NATO round.
The penetrator however, is made of tungsten and is quite long, giving very good sectional density. It also travels very fast (2723fps from a 7.9 inch barrel!)
More on this weapon here at Security Arms where it is mentioned that the new round generates around the same level of firing impulse as an average 9mm round making the barrels swap option practical. (this display actually has a 9mm barrel mounted on the weapon! ) For some years this site had been all I'd been able to find about the CJB MS.
This weapon reportedly has better penetrating power than the 5.7mm FN and 4.6mm H&K. It is also CLAIMED to have an effective range of 400 yards (if so, this is a truly impressive round to be fired from a 9mm sized weapon).
Ballistic gelatin pics are halfway down this page and they do look impressive, though there is little data on, say, the MV or barrel length of the weapons that fired the respective rounds. I imagine this round will better than the 5.7 but might still have some stopping power issues. Nevertheless, the ease of modifying 9mm weapons to fire it and the ability to fire common as dirt 9mm ammo in the CBJ MS with a simple barrel swap* would seem to male this a really interesting military weapon with a lot of potential.
I wonder if "spoon-tip" ammo is Geneva legal?
The gun can accept a 100 round drum which seems unrelated to any of the high-cap mags on the market today. It will be interesting to see if it is reliable.It is very compact when mounted but the feed extension is likely to make storage in an ammo pouch awkward. Still, 100 rounds is good to have for suppression.
Keeping in mind that my tactical experience consists of crawling through a mock freighter twice....er....and hundreds of hours of playing first person shooters, I'd say make the foregrip collapsible so it could be holstered. This would be very close to what the Army and Marines need in a PDW. It could be carried by second line troops on the hip, keeping both hands free for their primary duties. This also makes it less likely that their gun will be in the hummer when they need it.
With its collapsible stock and the addition of a collapsible foregrip it would seem to me to be easier to aim and use than a pistol. As stated most 9mm pistols can be converted to fire this round so you have a common ammo for better logistics. The UZI style magazine in grip takes advantage of the "hand finds hand" principal for quick reloading and makes the weapon shorter too. I like the self cleaning action of the sabot, that's cute! 
One final note. A splash of cold water seems in order given the very boosterish nature of the above linked website. This weapon and the round in particular, does seem to have considerable potential, but it is not a wonder weapon. All weapons are compromises and 4mm projectiles, even very long ones, should serve to give one pause at a time that 5.56 rounds are generating doubt. This weapon may well fill a crucial niche and it is certainly very interesting. At the same time it is important to remember how overhyped the 5.7 FN was.
Still, I think it bears testing at the very least.
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October 07, 2007
The Coast Guard's new Long Range Interceptor on sea trials.
They will be operated as daughter craft from larger Coast Guard Cutters.
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Lost Hutch....
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There is certainly a sense that despite everything, we may finally be on the cusp of restarting the adventure that was so foolishly allowed to end after the above picture was taken by the Apollo 17 landing party.
We often hear about parallels between Space and the American Frontier, but we aren't the only pioneering culture with aspirations to space. This Aussie article looks at the similarities that may come out between the colonization of their continent and the settlement of the heavens. (HT: Clarke Lindsey)
Finally, the new Carnival of Space is up!
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more...
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...after reading this.
Of course I have known men who are evil and passive-aggressive and who have tremendously hurt some of my female friends who's only crime is to have trusted them. I've known women who's husbands lied to them about every single thing...from their ambition to their occupation. I've known other men whose every action was calculated to manipulate, control and isolate the women in their lives and when the girls in question washed their hands of the parasitic jerks found themselves bearing a terrible cost financially and professionally. I know of 4 cases in particular that could almost be out of a Stephen King novel or Satoshi Kohn movie....but they are so off the wall the women might be identifiable if I elaborated.
Evil knows no gender.
So why am I a bitter angry misogynist?
A college professor told me so.....
(Hence it must be true. 
Thus, I must occasionally do misogenyblogging.
ergo....
When a guy does something like I mentioned above, the universal response is to "Kill it with fire!!"
(This is good and proper of course.)
However when women go a bit farther, it seems that the cult of Clytemnestra will give them fabulous prizes!
Winkler said the community has reached out to her, giving her everything from a five -bedroom home to live in for $150 to a car she's traded in for a sports utility vehicle.
Of course after there was a stink raised the murdering wench got custody of her kids... that was blocked, at least temporarily but the difference in standards is frankly scary...she HAD custody by default until a huge stink was raised.
The difference in cost of relationships is now at least as bad as it was in the pre suffrage days, but in the opposite direction. A guy who gets married is utterly at the mercy of the good faith of the woman in question to avoid financial ruin, the loss of his kids and have a domestic court-order put on him (which will put him on a list and ensure he can never own a gun).
The heartbreak endured by many (no means all) 1st wives is well documented, but "Starter Husbands" are seen as progress.
I could go on and be terribly bitter and hateful but I'm satisfied that my recognition of the problem fuffills my duties as a bonified Misogynist.
None of this decreases the hurt or injustice suffered by women who are the victims of abuse, stalking or ungodly creepieness (or, in many parts of the world terrible oppression from clitorectamies to murder). Horrors they endure simply because of their sex ....but these developments I'm talking about are not excused by those injustices either.
Anyway, as I'm officially a misogynist, rather than denying it I hereby embrace my cultural identity.
As such, my first official act shall be to call all those evil, manipulative, parasitic guys I mentioned....effeminate.
My next misogynistic act will be to watch Chobits.
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October 06, 2007
Given the fact that there are professors that wear Che' shirts on campus, links that point out the real face of this murdering, antisemitic, racist, waste of skin are always a welcome dose of reality.
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I have no idea if this is real or not. It was on one of the "Chans" last night.
UPDATE: In the comments, uber commenter JP Gibb debunks the Geek Waffelizer as a "shop" and correctly credits the .gif below to Tales From the Bully Pulpit. Which is going for....$74 !!??...on Amazon as I post this.
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October 04, 2007
Its not even the edible portion!
whaaaa!
ahem
Update: You fixed it...or the Duck just left....anyway all's well!
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October 03, 2007
An excellent overview of the events leading from WW2 to Sputnik1's launch can be found here in a recently added page at Encyclopedia Astronautica.
Also, is a good overview of several official PRE(!) Sputnik designs from the US and Germany, going back to 1947 which were quite technically feasible for the day and would have worked too if not for a lack of vion in the USAF...and interservice rivalry which inspired the USAF to kill a navy program they didn't want to do themselves.
feh...
Nor was their a cornucopia of foresight on the USSR's end, for despite official propaganda to the contrary, the Soviet leadership was very unenthusiastic about the whole endeavor. The only thing that caused it to happen was the persistence of several visionary engineers and the fact that they convinced the leadership that the size of the R4 launcher would enable them to throw a small satellite into orbit with no additional development cost....and right it off as an extreme range test. Almost as an afterthought a scientific satellite was designed but it was not completed in time (that was Sputnik 3) Indeed the Sputnik 1 itself contained no scientific instruments, it just beeped....(HT Lileks
But it beeped from space, where no manmade thing had ever been and it
caught the imagination of the world....and scared the Bejeezus out of the US, as the ability to reach orbit implied global reach...with atomic weapons. The US began a crash program to catch up to the Soviets....that program was Vanguard.
A bit later the US decided to embark on a program with rather less "crash" and Explorer 1 (which the Army could have launched in 1956 if not forbidden to) finally made a tardy appearance in orbit. It even managed to discover the Van Allen Belts (as it did more than beep).
The launch of the Sputniks incited a frenzied fit of federal meddling in education from which the US educational system has never recovered, but it also showed that the surly bonds of earth can be broken and opened the way to the stars. 12 years later, inspired in part by this 185 pound beep machine, Americans landed on the moon!
Woot!
Now 50 years on, we don't seem to have made as much progress as many of us would have hoped, indeed we've made negative progress since 1972, but the point of today is to remind us that space was conquered ...
50 freaking years ago!!
So it's not that hard.
The heavens still beckon. It's time to answer their invitation.
There's a great roundup of Sputnik Day posts at Rand Simberg's place.
Some additional perspective below the fold:
more...
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October 02, 2007
I was rear-ended at a stoplight tonight.
The bumper on the pickup of peril is folded under the bed.
I am super sore.
The truck drives...I'm in one piece....just a painful piece.
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October 01, 2007
Richard Fernandez has related dismaying observations on the perspective of those in the third world and their terrible plight.
*************************************************
In the comments to this Scotsman article, (along with unsolicited antisemitic bile) is the stock scream of "why doesn't the US do something" and "If the US wasn't in Iraq they could solve this!"
No words can possibly cut through such a veil of ignorance....certainly not mine as I am neither a particularly good writer nor a person of any stature, but indulge my tilting at this windmill of asshats for a moment...
....or continue to scroll down if you wish.
more...
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Sylvester Stallone and his film crew have escaped Burma where they were filming a new Rambo movie. Stallone reports they encountered what he describes as " ...a hellhole beyond your wildest dreams.." and were themselves brought under fire at times.
"I witnessed the aftermath - survivors with legs cut off and all kinds of land mine injuries, maggot-infested wounds and ears cut off. We saw many elephants with blown off legs. We hear about Vietnam and Cambodia and this was more horrific,'' Stallone told the Associated Press.
The families of several of his extras were imprisoned. He and his film crew have gotten several Burmese survivors (extras and such) out of the country as well. They reportedly filmed a good deal of the aftermath of the atrocities.
None of the news coming out of Burma is good....
more...
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September 30, 2007
Interestingly I just stumbled across this US design from 1884.
US Chief constructor Melville designed the vessel to take account of all the lessons he learned learned during the ill starred Jeannette expedition.
This vessel also has a round bottom and a very similar layout to the Fram.
This was an official USN design (unbuilt) so it's not really likely that the design was pilfered, Archer and Nansen were very talented men after all and they likely didn't go rummaging through USN secret files, but the design is intriguing in that the US did in fact design a vessel nearly 10 years earlier that was very similar to Fram.
Anyway here are pictures of the design.
And here is one of the most important oceanographic ships in history.
Fram is preserved in Oslo Norway.
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September 29, 2007
Babes brings us this Energy Blog post on NRG's application to build the first nuclear power plant in 30 years. Most astounding is the speed with which they expect to get the thing online, just 8 years from now! As James Fraiser points out, this may be due to the new streamlined rules the current administration has put in place recently,but it may also be because the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor lends itself to ease of construction (and has proven this capability in Japan and Taiwan).The comments in the Energy Blog post are interesting. I agree with Fraiser and Kirk Sorensen that thorium reactors are a better idea in the long run as they handle the waste issue better, but the the ABWRs are proven (and safe) designs that can be brought online quickly.
Atomic Insights has related thoughts here.
"Science Babe" is, of course Emma Skye from Capcom's Phoenix Wright game.
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