Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Starship
2. Manifesto
3. DoD
4. Masks
5. Research
6. Oil
7. Leaks
1. Starship. SpaceX made its first attempt to launch its combined SuperHeavy booster and Starship upper stage Thursday morning. The flight was a mixed success, as the combined stack successfully got off the pad, though not without rearranging it a bit, flew for over 4 minutes before it was destroyed. Depending on your perspective it was either a success or a successful failure. This was the first flight for the combined stack. The count was relatively smooth, with a few minutes hold at the 40 second mark too clear some final issues. For the most part, the flight went well, though by the end there were 5 of its 33 engines out. The test failed when Starship was scheduled to separate from the booster around 3+00 after launch. Separation never took place, and the booster went into what appeared to be its preprogrammed boostback burn resulting in a spiral and eventual loss of altitude. It topped out at 39 km and was destroyed as it sank through 30 km a minute later. After a minute or so of working the lack of separation out, ground control reportedly issued a self-destruct command that shredded both vehicles. The good news is that the entire stack cleared the tower and successfully made it through maximum dynamic pressure (Max-Q). The bad news is multiple, with an increasing number of engines out during the 4+00 burn before the self-destruct was issued. Because of the clean burning liquid oxygen / liquid methane mix, engines were clearly visible from the ground for the flight. Failure of one engine during flight was visible as an explosion, with a bright flash in the exhaust plume, shrapnel, and a bright segment in the inner ring of engines. The second piece of bad news was failure to separate on time at the staging point. Once that failure took place, apparently there was nothing to stop the automatic boost back sequence that was to return SuperHeavy most of the way to the launch site. Final bit of bad news was some fairly significant damage to the launch site due to the sheer enormity of the power of what was coming off the pad, twice the power of anything ever launched on this planet. There is some video of a nearby van crunched by flying chunks of concrete as the launch progressed. Pad damage may very well be related to engine failure during launch. This is not the first time a development flight has damaged a launch pad. For instance, the first shuttle launch also damaged the pad, including blowing loose a steel chunk of pad that managed to lodge itself in the exit nozzle of one of the SRBs. This was discovered following launch at the pad, in the ocean as NASA attempted to recover the SRBs for refurbishment. The nozzle plug did not fit. They sent a diver down and found a chunk of metal lodged where it shouldn’t have been. Solution to this was the water wash system that lessened the blast effects of SRB ignition on the pad. Seeing as SpaceX has an active launch license for the next five years, and at least three stacks in various stages of construction, the biggest problem may end up being toughening up the pad area. As usual, SpaceX critics in NASA threw some shade at them, opining that it would take 7-12 months to repair the pad. Musk said they would be ready to fly again in 1-2 months. We will see who is right.
2. Manifesto. We are over three weeks deep into the FBI-led coverup of the manifesto and other writings by the trans killer in Nashville. Last week’s development had journalist Glenn Greenwald trying to get legal representation in Nashville to file a FOIA lawsuit aimed at forcing the FBI to release the documents. He contacted a pair of Nashville law firms and was dropped at the last minute, likely due to political pressure from the feds. The corruption of the legal system by democrats continues apace.
3. DoD. Corruption of DoD by this regime continues with the participation of military doctors in transitioning children of military members without the knowledge of their parents. Jazz Shaw in Hot Air last week reported a Navy Nurse Practitioner brief in Bahrain that military members with children over 12 could no longer access the medical records of their children online. Children 15 – 16 can make medical appointments for specific issues without the knowledge of their parents. These issues include gender identity, pregnancy, STDs and mental illness. Shaw was unable to find any published guidance supporting this position, though the search continues. In a parallel and supporting story, Legal Insurrection reported that the MO Attorney General was following up on a FNC report of four military health professionals, backed by a civilian one, arguing that children as young as 7 are sufficiently competent to make their own medical decisions about beginning the gender transition process. The MO Attorney General got involved due to Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, whose doctors were featured prominently in the story. And these clowns wonder why recruiting is down. Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley must be very proud (/sarc).
4. Masks. This one is more of a demonstration of the damage done to public health, the medical community and the various governments than anything else. Note that all of it is entirely self-inflicted by lying to the general public for the last three years that we know of, though sadly, likely many, many years longer than that. The unfortunate part of the discussion is that when you decide the entirety of the public health apparat is a self-selected collection of lying sacks of offal, why in God’s Name would anyone ever believe them again? Worse, their perfidy opens the door to believing all sorts of ugliness during the Zombie Apocalypse, every single one of the conspiracy theories associated with the response. Sadly, it serves them right, for who can trust a proven serial liar? Latest example of this comes courtesy of Slay, which posted a piece attributing Long Covid to prolonged mask wearing. Happily, this was a single study, as all meta studies (studies of studies) are by definition garbage. The study documents overlap with all the known effects of Long Covid, fatigue, dyspnea, confusion, anxiety, depression, tachycardia, dizziness, and headache, all of which are in some ways connected to lack of oxygen while breathing, are connected to masking. Do I think this real? Who knows? But both public health and the government have been lying about this every single second over the last three years. Why trust them now? In biblical terms, public health and the rest of the government have sown the wind ad are not poised to reap the whirlwind.
5. Research. From the world of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, alternately Sucks to be You, comes a story out of the University of London which suppressed research documenting feminists who feel they can no longer tell the truth based on fear of backlash from colleagues. The university not only buried the results but they grabbed all the supporting data, telling the feminist prof that the research was a institutionally sensitive issue, that they considered the data collected to be dangerous, and is frightened to make it public. Imagine that, a formerly respected national university refusing to release results because those results did not synch up with what the university now believes Truth to reside. Question for these formerly respected academics is precisely what now constitutes academic pursuit of truth? Note that in the reportedly awful Middle Ages, academia has far more academic freedom than it does today. The frightening part of this how quickly it got from where it began to where it is today.
6. Oil. All wars are fundamentally economic exercises, with the Ukraine war being no exception. The goal of the deep State was to destroy Russia by sucking them into the proverbial Brer Rabbit briar patch where the overwhelming economic might of the west would destroy them. Problem with doing this is that your economy needs to be pretty robust too, which is the problem. While Harris – Xiden is doing everything humanly possible to destroy US oil and natural gas production by shutting down all oil and natural gas exploration and production (outside of New Mexico), Russia’s oil exports are now at the same levels they were before the invasion. By definition, this means that the west lost the war, as Russia will be able to drill, produce and sell oil a natural gas indefinitely to fund their war effort, while the US clamps down on their own previously competitive oil and natural gas production (other than New Mexico), making themselves increasingly noncompetitive in the international oil and natural gas marketplace. The instant we are unable to apply economic pressure on Russia, is the instant we lose the war. How did this come about? Because Harris – Xiden went green. Game. Set. Match.
7. Leaks. Last week’s exercise in double standards was the arrest of MA National Guard enlisted Jack Texiera, the leaker of a substantial quantity of embarrassing classified material on Ukraine, South Korea and Serbia. The media was, shocked, simply shocked at the embarrassing leaks. The kid was a gamer, and released the stuff on Discord, a gamer channel. The kid was immediately arrested and arraigned, demonstrating the double standard in treatment of leaks these days. Those that leak stuff embarrassing to Republicans are instantly anointed and celebrated (Alexander Vindman, for instance), while those that embarrass the current regime are arrested and arraigned. Yet another example of equal treatment under the law. Note that the intel community has been massively interfering in domestic news and elections for decades, yet they get a pass. When civilians or whistleblowers do the same thing (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden) the Espionage Act is instantly invoked and decades of jail time are demanded for the leaker. When a CIA or FBI leaker does the same thing, it is just news, with these meddling clowns getting a free ride. Matt Taibbi notes that where media currency becomes the ultimate power, government wants to be the monopoly on that currency.
More later –
- AG