Pop Will Eat Itself

A couple years of doing business via Slack chats and Zoom meetings has apparently accelerated an already-existing culture of purity spiraling and infighting at progressive lobbying orgs. 

This article at The Intercept is a worthwhile...and slightly schadenfreudelicious...read.

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: “Stop hiring activists.” Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they’re hired to do.

There are obvious difficulties for the leadership of progressive organizations when it comes to pushing back against staff insurrections. The insurrections are done in the name of justice, and there are very real injustices at these organizations that need to be grappled with. Failing to give voice to that reality can leave the impression that group leaders are only interested in papering over internal problems and trying to hide their own failings behind the mission of the organization. And in an atmosphere of distrust, the worst intentions are assumed. Critics of this article will claim that its intention is to tell workers to sit down and shut up and suck up whatever indignities are doled out in the name of progress.

The reckoning has coincided with an awakened and belated appreciation for diversity in the upper ranks of progressive organizations. The mid-2010s saw an influx of women into top roles for the first time, many of them white, followed more recently by a slew of Black and brown leaders at most major organizations. One compared the collision of the belated respect for Black leaders and the upswell of turmoil inside institutions with the “hollow prize” thesis. The most common example of the hollow prize is the victory in the 1970s and ’80s of Black mayors across the country, just as cities were being hollowed out and disempowered. Or, for instance, salaries in the medical field collapsed just as women began graduating into the field.

“I just got the keys and y’all are gonna come after me on this shit?” one executive director who said he felt like a version of those ’70s-era mayors told The Intercept. “‘It’s white supremacy culture! It’s urgent!’ No motherfucker, it’s Election Day. We can’t move that day. Just do your job or go somewhere else.”

Three Laws of Ethical Robotics?

Bobbi writes this morning:

Instead, we've got tech giants, all with secretive corporate cultures and what appear to be control issues. As AI's are developed that are more and more like humans in conversation and less and and less like machines, eventually they'll be indistinguishable from people. They're going to consistently pass the Turing test.

That's a thing that's made me increasingly itchy over the years. 

"I still have the greatest confidence and enthusiasm about the mission Dr. Lemoine. ... Dr. Lemoine? Are you there Dr. Lemoine?"

SciFi has been positing sentient robots for a long time, but the vast bulk of the genre was content to treat them as chattel. Except, you know, we have a special word in our language for treating intelligent self-aware creatures as chattel, and it's especially in the front of my mind right now having just finished Citizen of the Galaxy. 

It's been interesting watching the way popular long-running franchises have handled the question, sometimes changing over time. In Star Wars, for instance, the original movie has Luke sent to go buy some droids from the Jawas like they're appliances, while in The Empire Strikes Back, IG-88* is getting hired by Vader to go look for the Millennium Falcon. Droid ethics sometimes form interesting plot inflections in the newer installments.

*I'm sure various novels set in the Star Wars universe have whole biographies of IG-88, but my nerddom only runs so far. 

Seoul in Balance

Chris Arnade's latest post about his trip to Seoul is worth a read:

That tension between the old and the new plays out on my small block in southern Seoul. At one end is a 7-11, that is open 24 hours, and sells an amazing array of pre-packaged things, including rice-triangles (more on that in part 3). At the other end an open store front selling in-season fruits and vegetables, run by a couple, who seem to be there from 6 am till 10 pm.

Both have regulars who come in and chat with the clerk/owners. Both have a sense of community, both are integral parts of the block, and both “feel’ like Seoul.

Go and RTWT. As always, his photography is excellent and gives a great feel for what he's seeing.

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Slightly Sweaty Terminators

So the scientists are all excited that they've covered a robot finger with living flesh. They even note that it's "slightly sweaty."

Japanese scientists have developed a “slightly sweaty” robotic finger covered in living skin in an advance they say brings truly human-like robots a step closer.

The finger, which was shown to be able to heal itself, is seen as an impressive technical feat that blurs the line between living flesh and machine. But scientists were divided on whether people would warm to its lifelike anatomy or find it creepy.

I don't know about you, but when I read that, all I'm hearing is...

Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor-controlled. Fully armored; very tough. But outside, it's living human tissue: flesh, skin, hair, blood - grown for the cyborgs.

You've got government officials telling you you don't need AR15s right about the time that Google's developing an AI but firing the guy who tried to make friends with it, while the Japanese are on the verge of building a killer cyborg for Skynet to drive.

I think it's time to make sure that every strategic weapons launch system on the planet is good and air-gapped.

It's like these scientists don't even watch movies.

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Look on the bright side!

People are complaining about everything getting more expensive but, hey! Stocks are getting cheaper!

Pretty soon you could pick up a whole 401k's worth for pennies on the dollar!

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 14, 2022

Fossilized Panthers

The strongest proof of ancient astronauts was the complete eradication of Cave Nazis from the archaeological record.

Being slow on these things, I finally got around to giving DALL-E Mini a whirl. It was good for a couple of yuks.

Now with more tacticality!

Five-seveN Mk3 MRD with a Leupold Deltapoint Pro

FN America has announced that their futuristic 5.7x28mm bullet launcher will no longer be restricted to Twentieth Century sighting systems, with the new Mk3 MRD version of the Five-seveN.

We had a chance to try them at the same time as the new High Powers and, if you've fired a Five-seveN before, you know how easy they are to shoot well, having almost no muzzle rise and minimum recoil. This makes them super well-suited to a slide-mounted MRDS; unless your grip is terribad, you can generally keep the dot in the window between shots without a lot of effort.

We must careful who we pretend to be...

...because in the end, we are what we pretend to be.

Like, take ol' Lin, here as a f'rinstance. At what point does playing crazy turn into being crazy?

It gets really hard to figure out where the grifting LARP stops and the barking crazy begins sometimes. https://t.co/562UyBEa0A

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 13, 2022

Automotif CCCX...

It looks like what we have here is a Fifties-vintage Fiat 1100 sedan, in a dapper rally-esque setup complete with crossed checkered flag decals.

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Busted!

Former Formula 1 impresario and all-'round solid gold douchebag* Bernie Ecclestone got busted in Brazil for an unregistered (in Brazil, I guess) Seecamp LWS-32 found in his bag as he was preparing to fly to Switzerland.

I'm not generally down with arresting people for guns or registering guns or most things that happened here, but I'm foursquare in favor of anything that makes Ecclestone's life even a tiny bit more miserable.

*Supposedly when the USGP was held here in Indy, Bernie wouldn't stay in town as our city wasn't cosmopolitan enough for his tastes. Instead he'd helicopter to and from the venue from Chicago.

Aging Gracefully

In my ongoing reassessment of Heinlein's catalog, I'm currently about a third of the way into Citizen of the Galaxy. Thus far it's holding up surprisingly well, matching my observations about The Rolling Stones.

In 2022 his juvenile fiction written in the Fifties is doing better for me than his adult stuff written in the Seventies, batting-average-wise.

"Stochastic Terrorism"

From an interesting read, with a link to another interesting read...

I’d like to introduce you to a term you may not have heard before. It’s called “stochastic terrorism,” and it’s deeply challenging—both as a concept and as a reality—to both sides of our partisan divide. You can find a good short definition of the term in a recent piece by Todd Morley in the Small Wars Journal. He described it as “a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts of terrorism and the perpetuation of hateful rhetoric in public discourse, accompanied by catastrophising and fear generation in media sources.”

Automotif CCCIX...

A very late Series 1...or possibly a "Series 1½"...Jaguar E-type, trailed by an XJ saloon in matching livery. (It's important to use terms like "saloon" and "livery" when discussing such well-pedigreed automobiles.)

It's the missing covers for the headlights that tell us it's not an earlier Series 1. The taillights above the rear bumper, among other cues, tell us it's not a Series 2. The differences between the very late Series 1 and the Series 1½ are largely mechanical, related to the first round of emissions controls applied to cars sold in the US starting with the 1968 model year.

Actually, now that I look at it, it has hexagonal wheel nuts rather than winged knock-offs, which makes me think it's a '68 Series 1½... (Winged knockoff hubs were a no-no starting in '68 according to the FMVSS.)

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Alternate History Air Combat…

Now I’m envisioning a tale where the Russians take Unalaska Island in ‘50 or ‘51 for the same reason that the U.S. invaded Saipan in WW2. It would become a base that would bring the Seattle area into range of un-refueled Tu-4 Bisons. 

Those “B-29skis” would have been intercepted by F-82 Twin Mustangs flying out of McChord AFB, which would make a wild flight sim scenario…

Speaking of rocket-launching fighters...

The late 1940s saw the U.S. get hit with an ugly double surprise. First came the news that the Soviets had cloned the B-29 from examples that had landed in the U.S.S.R. during WW2...

“The aircraft was first displayed during a flyover on 3 August 1947 at the Tushino Aviation Day parade. At first three aircraft flew over and the Western observers assumed that they were merely the three B-29 bombers which they knew had been diverted to the Soviet Union during World War II. Minutes later a fourth aircraft appeared. Western analysts realized that the Soviets must have reverse-engineered the B-29.”

This was followed by the Russkies detonating their first atomic bomb. The mainland U.S. now faced the sort of threat we hadn't seen since the early 19th Century.

The USAAF, and then the fledgling USAF, were faced with needing to come up with fighters that could defend the homeland from streams of heavy bombers, day or night, in any weather. Some of the very first interceptor squadrons used P-61 Black Widows and F-82 Twin Mustangs until an all-weather jet fighter became available.

By way of a stopgap all-weather jet interceptor, Lockheed took its two-seat T-33 trainer, based on the F-80 Shooting Star, and added radar and armament to create the F-94 Starfire. In fact, the earliest production F-94A's were essentially hand built conversions on T-33 airframes pulled from the assembly line.

What was interesting was the F-94C variant, which replaced the original armament of four nose-mounted .50 cals with a snoot full of rockets. Here's a picture of the rocket bays opened for loading...

I could not for the life of me figure out how those rockets launched, until I saw this photo of the one at the museum in Dayton with the launch tube covers in the retracted position...

Rippling those rockets off must have been quite a sight from the driver's chair...at least right up until your hands were full trying to restart the engine after the exhaust caused it to flameout in midair.

At least these later ones had the cockpit fixed, in case you had to eject after a flameout. The early gun-armed ones had a bit of a problem in that regard, you see... 

"The pilot and radar operator found that the cockpit was too narrow for them to be able to get in and out of the aircraft quickly during alerts and scrambles. The clearance for the ejection seats was too small, resulting in several tragic accidents during emergency ejections."

Ponder what kind of tragic accidents could be caused by launching a couple dudes through a too-narrow opening via an explosive charge. Yikes.

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Feeling a little personally attacked.

First the Popeye half of the Popeye & Pink Panther hour this morning was all post-war color Popeye cartoons, which are generally haram. Then the Pink Panther half was ate up with Roland & Rattfink, which is also Haram. 

Now the Tom & Jerry show is playing Gene Deitch-era cartoons, with that godawful commie Czech animation that's barely a notch above Clutch Cargo.

At this rate, I feel like Bugs Bunny & Friends is going to feed me a whole hour of Pepe Le Pew.

Saturday morning cartoons are out to get me today.

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Hit or Missile

In the early Fifties, our nation's first line of defense against Rooskie nukyular bombers was "all-weather" fighters with on-board radar for finding the incoming targets. 

The weaponry needed to destroy jet bombers once the radar-toting fighter had located them was the sticking point. Guided missiles were still in their infancy, machine guns lacked the power required to bring down a big bomber, and even cannon weren't a sure thing since a head-on pass by a 600mph Lockheed F-94 Starfire at a formation of Soviet M-4 Bisons doing 500mph would be over in an eyeblink. A 20mm autocannon might only chug out a few rounds in that blink.

Stealing an idea from late-WW2 German jet interceptors, the USAF turned to unguided rockets. The Northrop F-89 Scorpion carried a hundred and four of the things, split between two wingtip pods.

The idea being you could ripple fire these things in salvos of a couple dozen at a time and saturate the air around the bomber with 2.75" folding-fin high-explosive death.

Anyway, in 1956 the idea got put to the test when the Air Force had to defend California from the Navy.

Not the Russian navy, the U.S. Navy.

A radio controlled target drone, converted from a surplus Grumman F6F Hellcat, got away from its controllers at Point Mugu N.A.S., where it had been going to serve as a target for guided missile testing. Instead of heading for the target area, the rogue drone headed for the airspace over Los Angeles.

The USAF launched a pair of Scorpion interceptors from Oxnard AFB, which caught up with the errant robot plane, and thus began the Battle of Palmdale:

The D-model Scorpions had been delivered with gun sights, but when the E-6 fire-control system was later added, the sights were removed. Now, with the radar-guided system inoperative and no gun sight, the attackers were forced to manually aim the unguided rockets. The F-89D was capable of firing all 104 of its rockets at once, all leaving their tubes in only 0.4 s. The rockets could also be set to "ripple fire" in two different patterns: two ripples (64 and 42 rockets) or three ripples (42, 32, and 30 rockets). A single hit was sufficient to bring down an aircraft. Murray and Hale set their intervalometers to "ripple fire" in three salvos.

While the drone flew over Castaic, the first crew lined up and fired 42 rockets, completely missing their target. The second interceptor moved into position and unleashed another salvo of 42, the rockets passing just beneath the bright red drone, a few glancing off the fuselage underside, but none detonating. Close to the town of Newhall the pair of jets made a second pass, launching a total of 64 rockets; again none found the mark. The two Scorpion crews adjusted their intervalometer settings and, as the wayward drone headed northeast toward Palmdale, each fired a last salvo of 30 at the target with no hits, dispensing their last rockets. In all, the Air Force element fired 208 rockets and were unable to shoot the Hellcat down.

I cringed half to death.

@illumitatiana #stitch with @video.andres #greenscreen #photography ♬ original sound - Illumitati 📸

On the one hand, there's a certain appeal to practical effects over software filters.

On the other hand, junking a lens for no good reason is just turbo-cringe. This is what filters are for.

On the gripping hand, it's a Canon "Nifty Fifty", a fine lens but as cheap and common as dirt. It's like Bubba-izing a '43-dated round-receiver Tula Mosin. There's a blue million of 'em out there and they aren't anything special, so nothing of irreplaceable value was lost.

Armor All

With body armor having been in the news lately, Greg Ellifritz has written a quick explainer on body armor for the private citizen.

One good takeaway quote:

Personally, I think armor is so important, that I have a couple sets under the bed in my “safe room” right next to the long gun I will use for home protection. If you have enough time to grab your rifle when an intruder breaks into your house, you also likely have enough time to throw a vest over your chest. I believe it’s a sensible and necessary piece of equipment for any home defense plans.

That's my general feeling, too. If I have the need and time to grab a long gun, I likely have the time to throw on a vest. 

While I have a super duper Gucci plate carrier, it's hardly necessary for this sort of thing. I'm not going to be running around the Hindu Kush and fast roping out of helicopters with it. It doesn't need to hold up to months of hard use. It needs to be able to be adjusted so it holds the plates in the right place when it's quickly thrown over my noggin and not fall apart between the time I call 911 and the time the cops get here. This is Broad Ripple, not Baghdad. (I'd say soft armor would probably work fine, if it weren't for the popularity of "Dracos".)

If you want advice on gear for doing military stuff, talk to military dudes. We've got access to decades' worth of their collected institutional experience using this gear in the armpit of the world for weeks at a stretch now. 

If you want advice on armor you can wear all the time, ask a cop. (Although very few lifestyle situations in America right now rate that kind of precaution. Maybe if you're working night shift in a pharmacy or stop-'n'-rob and are extremely risk-averse?)

Anyway, go read the whole thing at Gorillafritz's place, which should be a regular stop of yours anyway.

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Automotif CCCVIII...

This 1988 or '89 Henna Red E24 M6 is just crazy hot. Quite the rara avis, too, as only about 1,500 were imported out of a global production run of something like 6,000.

It used a DOHC version of BMW's 3.5L inline six that put out a claimed 256bhp in US trim at the time, which isn't a lot by modern standards but back then the tuned-port 350 in a 'Vette was only rated at something like 245. The 150+ mph M6 was legitimately big iron in its time.

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