From The Earth To Low-Earth Orbit

Project HARP

Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) was a joint initiative between the United States and Canada to research the use of ballistics to deliver objects into the upper atmosphere and beyond.

In lay terms, the project was established to create a cartoonishly large gun to shoot things into space. The sole fruit of this partnership, a massive toppled gun barrel, still remains on the Barbados test site.

One of the pictures from the piece:

Now, that's a gun... a 100 caliber monster based off of a  U.S. Navy 16 inch gun. Yes, they started the project with a battleship gun capable of launching two and a half tons 23 miles, and then scaled it up.  Way up.

Wikipedia, of course, has a good bit of information as well: 

Started in 1961, HARP was created largely due to lobbying from Gerald Bull, a controversial but highly successful ballistics engineer who went on to head the project...

Bull's ultimate goal was to fire a payload into space from a gun, and many have suggested that the ballistics study was offered simply to gain funding. While the speed was not nearly enough to reach orbit (less than half of the 9,000 m/s delta-v required to reach Low Earth Orbit), it was a major achievement at much lower cost than most ballistic missile programs.

For more detail - a lot more detail - you can read "A Brief History of the HARP Project" at Encyclopedia Aeronautica.  It's a fascinating story of strong personalities, politics, and engineering.

Unfortunately, after the HARP project was canceled, Bull decided to work with South Africa and Iraq on a successor project.  Needless to say, this did not end well for him.  As noted by Wikipedia:

The March 1990 assassination of Bull (allegedly at the hands of the Israeli Mossad or the Iranian VEVAK intelligence agency) in his Brussels apartment, and the 1991 Gulf War ended the project.

So... Where Can I Find The Soul-Over-USB Spec?

So, last night before I went to bed, I checked my iPhone, just in time to see it pop up a "20% power remaining" warning.  Eh.  More than enough to get me through the day tomorrow, I thought, and tossed it onto my bookshelf before turning in.

This morning, I arrived at work and plugged my phone into my charger, and the display told me I had 98% power remaining.

Hmm.

Either my lovely and wonderful wife put my phone on to charge after she woke up today, or my iPhone is recharging itself by slowly draining my soul while I sleep.

I'm not sure which one is really more likely.

Ask Not For Whom The Audit Tolls...

... it tolls for thee.

By now, everyone knows that the IRS has admitted to targeting Tea Party 501c applications for special scrutiny.  Slightly less well known is that they are also being accused of improperly seizing 60 million personal medical records as well.

Yeah.  It's not been a happy week for the IRS. [1] For the first time in ages, their public opinion numbers have dipped from "slightly more pleasant than a rabid rat gnawing on my face" levels to... well, I'm not quite sure what comes under the whole face-gnawing-rat level.  I suspect pollsters going to have to dust off some imaginary numbers to accurately reflect just how your average American feels about the IRS is at this point.

Particularly since after the initial announcement, details about the IRS audits have been coming fast and furious.  Oh, no, wait - that's another scandal entirely.  Let's just say there's quite a lot of details, then...

• Just as a refresher, this administration has shown no qualms about targeting businesses and other organizations entirely for ideological reasons.
• They're also comfortable with going after individuals as well.  Professor Anne Hendershot, a sociologist, was targeted for an IRS audit in 2010 after she wrote a series of articles, mostly in Catholic publications, that were critical of Obamacare.
• Also targeted, the conservative Leadership Institute
• ...  and Smart Girl Politics.  #WarOnWomen, y'all.
• .... and The Southern California Tax Revolt Coalition.
• Two different pro-life groups were reportedly told that they had to promise to not picket abortion clinics, or even more outrageously, that they would have to promote abortion.  (The later, at least, was overturned.)
• As part of their non-profit approval, the IRS asked the Linchpins of Liberty educational organization to provide them with the names of all of their former students.
• Which is actually pretty tame, compared to asking an organization to detail the contents of their member's prayers.
• In other cases, the IRS demanded that organizations provide "a U-Haul truck’s worth of information" - including the minutes of business meetings, donor lists, member lists, web pages, blog posts and social media postings.
• For an unknown number of conservative organizations, the delays in the aplication process, the expense of providing demanded information, and the threat of possible criminal charges for making a mistake led them to abandon their applications entirely.

Defenders of the IRS initially claimed that a spike in conservative non-profit applications raised red flags in the IRS, and that what followed was nothing more than professional scrutiny.  Really.  Of course, the policies were put in place in 2010, and the "spike" the IRS claims resulted in the policy came in 2011.  I had no idea that Miss Cleo was working for the IRS.

Fortunately, at least the number of cases where the IRS abused their power was limited, right?  Yeah, it would be nice if that were true.

At least the abuses were limited to one particular group of bad apples in the Cincinnati office.  Except that DC and California offices were involved, too.

Geeze.  At least the individuals involved were just a bunch of low-level IRS employees.  Of course, that's only true if in your dictionary, "low-level" means "senior".

Besides, it's not like they did anything egregiously wrong, like fast-tracking progressive applications while delaying conservatives, or turning over private data included in conservative non-profit application to political opponents.  Well, no more than one political opponent, at least.  I mean, that we know of.

Take heart, though.  As soon as those low-level yet senior officials discovered the problem, they immediately 'fessed up.  And by "immediately", of course, we mean "waited until after the presidential election".  Because that's what immediately means, right?

Ah, well.  Even if it their policies violate causality; even if there was a large number of cases where they abused their power; even if it spread across several different offices; even if senior officials knew about the situation; even if they did share information illegally; and even though they supressed information about their abuses for political reasons... well, you know that the White House was completely in the dark, because otherwise the Most Transparent Administration In History (TM) would have been all over the problem.

Or not:

I’ve been told today by several reporters that President Obama’s White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, knew for several days — perhaps weeks —that some Internal Revenue Service officials were engaging in political targeting of conservative groups, and that she did not tell the president as soon as she knew even partial reports about the story.

Sigh.

Hey, now - don't let all this get you down.  How about some good IRS news for a change?

Even as the politicized tax enforcement scandal expands, the Internal Revenue Service continues to expand its political powers thanks to the Affordable Care Act. A larger government always creates more openings for abuse, as Americans will learn when the IRS starts auditing their health care in addition to their 1040 next year... 

To monitor compliance with these rules, the IRS and HHS are now building the largest personal information database the government has ever attempted. Known as the Federal Data Services Hub, the project is taking the IRS's own records (for income and employment status) and centralizing them with information from Social Security (identity), Homeland Security (citizenship), Justice (criminal history), HHS (enrollment in entitlement programs and certain medical claims data) and state governments (residency).

Well, yeah, I lied.  At this point, really, you should have seen it coming.

So the IRS is building a single database of all the personal information it has about every person in the country.  On top of that, it's not only their information.  They're going to include data from a whole bunch of other government agencies, including the DHS, the DoJ, and even your state government.  I'm sure they're going to turn up quite a lot of interesting correlations once they get all those data sets together in the same room.

All told, this is going to give those consummate professionals at the IRS - you know, the ones who have been systematically abusing the power they already have - the ability to audit anyone, anywhere, for any reason that might catch their fancy.

I'm sure that's going to be just peachy keen.

Well, yeah.  That's sarcasm.  At this point, really, you should have seen it coming.

[1] Still better than Jay Carney's, though, so they've got that going for them.

Blowing Up The Space Station

Honey, I BLEW UP the International SPACE STATION - in full 3D

A few years ago the idea of accelerating a BlueArc filer would have seemed bizarre; it's got its own hardware acceleration. But now media special effects processing can be so mind-blowingly intensive that the hardware accelerated filer itself needs accelerating.

Yep, that there's us again.

Wait, Not Even Industrial Grade Sandpaper One Ply?

Venezuelan Officials Plan To Import Millions of Toilet Rolls

First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper.

Snerk! 

Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.

Oh.  My.

Seriously?

Let's play a game of "what's more likely":

Eeeeeevil conservative and capitalists hate you sooooooo much that they spent thousands of man hours and millions of dollars to deprive you - yes, you - of toilet paper,

... OR ...

Your tenuous grasp of basic economic theory has produced an economy that sucks so badly that you can't even manage to produce a simple consumable product that everyone wants and will use... Every.  Single.  Day.

If I were a betting man, my money would be on option #2.  As it is, I suspect that severe food shortages and rationing can't be far behind, as food is just slightly harder to produce, ship and store than rolls of thin paper.

Who?

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explains how the Obama administration plans to investigate the allegations of misconduct within the IRS.

Yeah.  I'm sure that'll work out just fine.

REDACTED

From Kevin Siers, the staff cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer.

In The Box

A fascinating article about a visit to the U.S. Army National Training Center:

Fort Irwin is a U.S. army base nearly the size of Rhode Island, located in the Mojave Desert about an hour's drive northeast of Barstow, California. There you will find the National Training Center, or NTC, at which all U.S. troops, from all the services, spend a twenty-one day rotation before they deploy overseas...

Units are deployed to Fort Irwin for twenty-one days, fourteen of which are spent in what Fort Irwin refers to as "The Box" (as in "sandbox"). This is the vast desert training area that includes fifteen simulated towns and the previously mentioned tunnel and caves, as well as expansive gunnery ranges and tank battle arenas.

Following our briefing, we headed out to the largest mock village in the complex, the Afghan town of Ertebat Shar, originally known, during its Iraqi incarnation, as Medina Wasl.

Lots of amazing photos, plus a description of one of the realistic training exercises:

The afternoon's action began quietly enough, with an American soldier on patrol waving off a man trying to sell him a melon. Suddenly, a truck bomb detonated, smoke filled the air, and an injured woman began to wail, while a soldier slumped against a wall, applying a tourniquet to his own severed arm. 

In the subsequent chaos, it was hard to tell who was doing what, and why...

A friend who's associated with the State department noted that they have similar, though smaller, training facilities.

When The Vacuums Came For Me

Nightmare Number Three - Stephen Vincent Benet

We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking--
But there’s no dice in that now...

For a while, I thought
That window-cleaner would make it, and keep me company.
But they got him with his own hoist at the sixteenth floor
And dragged him in, with a squeal.
You see, they coöperate. Well, we taught them that
And it’s fair enough, I suppose. You see, we built them.

Definitely RTWT.  (H/T to Jerry Pournelle.)

"I Shave."

The original Doonsbury cartoon was published on 7 April 1974. After some very minor modifications, is is - sadly - still usable nearly 40 years later.