Posts Tagged ‘video’

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Important Safety Tip

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

Don’t attempt to steal a helicopter unless you can actually, you know, fly a helicopter.

Multiple helicopters were broken into and one was operated before crashing on Wednesday morning at the Sacramento Executive Airport, according to the Sacramento Police Department.

Police say that they received several reports of multiple helicopters being broken into early Wednesday morning.

Officers that responded found a helicopter with major damage that “appeared to have been operated,” police said in a statement.

The damaged helicopter was left on its side and is a Bell 429 model, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

A further investigation showed that when the helicopter crashed it also damaged several other helicopters.

Yeah, I’d say there was some serious damage.

I have so many questions about this. Like: What did they think they were going to do with the helicopter after they stole it? Take it for a joy ride and return it? Try to sell it? Just how do you go about selling a stolen helicopter? Did they think regional air traffic control was just going to ignore it? (“Hey, stray helicopter! No biggee!”) Did he not realize Sacramento Police have helicopters to chase you with? (Oh yeah: There was an alert.)

No suspect in custody, so police are looking for a doubly lucky dumbass…

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Posted in Crime, video | 16 Comments »

Huge Brawl At Social Justice Warrior Middle School

Monday, March 13th, 2023

I was involved in the occasional fight in middle and high school, but it never involved more than one other person. When a fight broke out, a circle would gather to watch it, but it never occurred any of us to wade in and join the melee. Widespread brawls with multiple combatants just never happened.

Well, that was then, and this was now. Every year, people post videos of large brawls to social media, and not all of them of them happen at Waffle House. On March 8, a huge brawl broke out at EBR Readiness Alternative School in Baton Rouge, which happens to be a middle school.

How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had to break up the fight:

I can honestly say that I never considered “brawling with police” to be a viable life strategy in middle school. (Or any time.)

I know very little about “Alternative” schools in Louisiana, but this one appears to be majority black.

Oh, they also practice “Social Emotional Learning.”

Remember, “Social Emotional Learning” is a codephrase for “Critical Race Theory.”

Yet more evidence that “social justice” (no matter the disguise) destroys the bonds that hold society together rather than strengthening them.

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Posted in Crime, Uncategorized, video | 24 Comments »

Truckpocalypse Now

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

As I’ve been expecting a glut of car inventory due to inflation, rising interest rates, and all the demand destruction of the Biden Recession, I’ve been paying more attention to the car market just in case dealers had to liquidate new cars at absolute fire sale prices and I could swoop in and take advantage. So far that hasn’t happened, and prices haven’t behaved the way I’ve expected. (Used care prices are rising because inventory is tight despite dealers overpaying in 2022?)

But one thing I have noticed: Pickup truck prices have gotten absolutely insane.

Pickups used to be the steady, dependable, unglamorous vehicles of ordinary blue collar Americans. Lately, car makers seem to have turned them into cash cows by pricing them like luxury goods for rich people.

As the Ford F-series is the most popular pickup truck, I though I would look at the prices there. The average selling price for a 2023 Ford F-150 is an eye-watering $82,395. Given the rule of thumb that you should never pay more than a maximum of 35% of your yearly income for a new car, which means that buyers should be making $235,000 a year to afford a new F-150. That’s not “HVAC Repairman” money. Hell, it’s barely “guy who owns his own HVAC shop” money. And this despite Ford having such quality control problems that they’ve issued a slew of recalls.

Assuming I was insane enough to buy a new Ford F-150 at the average selling price, and no down payment, I would be looking at $1,521 in monthly payments, or more than I was paying for my home mortgage until a few years ago. (Thanks to rising tax valuations and insurance, now it’s just a little more than that. My car has long been paid off.)

Ford and other auto makers are pricing their traditional customers out of the market by making pickup trucks luxury goods. Just as in the 1970s, American car manufacturers are pricing themselves out of the market and are inviting foreign manufacturers to swoop in and snatch market share from them.

Here Zach and Ray of Car Edge on how insane Ford’s pricing has gotten (and the F-150 is far from the only Ford vehicle that prices have soared on).

“What the hell is wrong with you people?”

“That’s not an average price for an average person!”

“That’s just crazy! Those are crazy numbers.”

Indeed.

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Posted in Economics | 22 Comments »

Joe Rogan and Michael Malice On The QAnon Shaman Revelations

Wednesday, March 8th, 2023

By now I assume that you’ve seen or read about Tucker Carlson’s piece on video footage that fatally undermines much of the Democratic Party’s “January 6th Insurrection” dogma.

Instead of rehashing that (Tucker has a wee bit more media reach than I do), here’s a video of Joe Rogan and Michael Malice reviewing the footage.

The biggest takeaway for me is that, while Rogan and Malice are not conservatives, they are far from people who unquestionably accept left-leaning media at face value. For them to be shocked at things that anyone who was paying attention knew no later than, oh, say, January 7, 2021, that there was no “insurrection” at the capital, just a half-assed riot, is actually somewhat surprising.

The mainstream media lies about so many things, so much of the time, that it’s easy to believe one of their narratives about a situation you simply weren’t paying attention to at the time.

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom…and evidently truth as well.

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Posted in Media Watch, video | 6 Comments »

Honest Trailers Slams Velma

Tuesday, March 7th, 2023

Do you think we’ve spent enough time crapping on how horrible Velma is?

Nah.

“That’s all just a framework for jokes that sound like an AI mixed Family Guy with bluecheck Twitter and somehow didn’t kill itself.”

Another reason to slam it: HBO Max has renewed it for a second season, perhaps mistaking hate watching for actual interest…

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Posted in Media Watch, video | 4 Comments »

Ukraine Steps Up Drone Strikes

Thursday, March 2nd, 2023

Ukraine has stepped up its drone attacks against a wide spectrum of Russian military infrastructure targets.

  • “Ukrainians are reportedly attacking objects from St. Petersburg to Krasnodar, which is a 2,000-kilometer front line in the air.”
  • “Ukrainians have also reportedly accompanied the drone attack with a cyberattack on the Russian regional missile detection system.”
  • They also hit an oil depot in Tuapse, for which Suchomimus has a video:

    That’s way beyond the Kerch Strait Bridge. Back to the first video.

  • “The Russians have also closed the sky near St. Petersburg. After Russian detection systems were set off, Russians reportedly used interceptor jets to eliminate the threat.” That’s more than 1,000km from Kiev, which must have Russian air defense planners freaking out. (Or drinking even more heavily than usual.)
  • The hit a number of targets in Crimea, though many of the drones launched there were shot down, and some were hijacked by Russian electronic warfare countermeasures. (Cue a Cory Doctorow-esque rant about the need for strong encryption.)
  • “Some analysts are saying that Ukrainians are just testing Russian air and electronic defense systems, and are creating an elaborate map for building more sophisticated trajectories. After they finish, these analysts are predicting a much larger scale attack, which would cause a lot of destruction of the airfields, as well as oil refineries and factories producing military equipment.”
  • “The second camp of analysts is saying that the goal of these attacks is to disperse Russian air defense that has been greatly concentrated on the fronts.”

    • Reporting from Ukraine is usually pretty solid and seems to have sources inside Ukraine’s defense ministry.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 4 Comments »

    The Tank Isn’t Obsolete, Russia Is Just Using Them Stupidly

    Sunday, February 26th, 2023

    Here’s a video from Samir Puri and the Imperial War Museum that echoes something Nicholas Moran said ten months ago, namely that the tank is not obsolete on the modern battlefield, it’s just that the Russians are using them wrong.

    Takeaways:

  • Russia, despite a century of data, isn’t using tanks properly in combined arms operations in concert with infantry, artillery and close air support.
  • Ukraine is, though much of their close air support has taken the form of drones. “These unmanned aerial vehicles have proved very effective especially against slow-moving Russian armored convoys.”
  • “We don’t really see this kind of tight combined arms operations being mounted by the Russians. They really struggled to do this. Instead, what we saw were quite disconnected Russian elements, and that meant that often the Russians were moving into positions it was still very well defended that hadn’t been softened. Which is why as the war has moved on sixth, seventh, eighth month [this video came out two months ago], the Russians have changed tack very much to I guess quite brutal indiscriminate bombardment of the cities they want to take.”
  • “There are no massed tank battles for which the Cold War T-72 was designed. In fact, engagements in Ukraine are on a much smaller scale with platoons and companies clashing together rather than divisions and corps.”
  • “There has also been an absence of close air support, a crucial tool for supporting tanks as part of combined arms operations. There was a lot of aerial activity, there was a lot of dog fighting as well, early on in the in the invasion. But the aerial defense systems that both sides have gotten and can deploy to cover their their more fixed positions are effective enough that the attrition rate amongst combat aircraft has risen. And the Russians interestingly appear to be husbanding the resources of their air force.”
  • “In the early months of the war, Russia had little infantry with which to protect its tanks, particularly in urban settings. That that allowed small groups of Ukrainians to mount what almost seemed like guerrilla operations. Getting in close to Russian armor and taking them out with anti-tank guided missiles before they knew what was happening.”
  • “Russia has now launched a much larger mobilization of manpower to try and fix this problem, but with many of its best troops and equipment already expended, there are questions about the quality, supply, and morale of these new soldiers.”
  • “The fact that the Ukrainians are actually able to capture intact or largely intact T-72s is a testament to the Russian logistics. Meaning that you find in captured Russian equipment low supplies, some Russian PWOs complaining of a lack of lack of proper support from their headquarters and have simply given up or run away.”
  • Drone warfare has also made it much harder for Russia to use tanks in a traditional defensive role in static positions on systems of defensive trenches.

    • Though Russia’s forces have shown some small signs of increasing technical competence in various areas, the fact that they lost so much armor attacking Vuhledar shows that they still have a long way to go when it comes to staging competent combined arms operations.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 30 Comments »

    The Tank Museum on The Tanks Going To Ukraine

    Saturday, February 25th, 2023

    The Tank Museum has a video up covering five tanks being sent to Ukraine (Challenger 2, T-72, Leopard 2, Leopard 1, and the M1A2 Abrams).

    Some of this will be familiar to regular readers, but I did learn a few new nuggets:

  • Despite previous reports that we were sending M1A1 Abrams to Ukraine, we’re actually sending more modern M1A2s. No word on which SEP level, but I would bet against the most modern SEP3 package, as not all America’s own active armor has been retrofitted with that yet.
  • I didn’t realize Germany had also given the greenlight to ship older Leopard 1s to Ukraine. The 105mm rifled gun is probably undergunned vs. T-72 and newer Russian tanks, but should be able to punch through older tanks and pretty much all Russian BMPs. They’ll be useful for second echelon and infantry support roles. (And we might consider demothballing older 105mm gunned M1s to ship to Ukraine as well.)
  • I didn’t realize that only some 440 Challengers had been built.

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    Posted in Military, video | 2 Comments »

    Rifle Bullets vs. Steel At 250,000 FPS

    Sunday, February 19th, 2023

    Here’s some spectacular slow motion footage of various rifle calibers hitting a steel plate at 250,000 frames per second. Rounds tested include .223, 5.56 NATO, 300 Blackout, 7.62×39 (the AK-47 round, but out of an AR pattern rifle), 7.62×54 (Mosin–Nagant), .308, and our old friend, .50 BMG.

    A few notes:

  • 5.56 NATO seems to pack more punch than 300 Blackout, which is strangely unimpressive.
  • You can actually see the shadow of the shock cone from the 7.62×39, which is pretty cool.
  • The fireball from the Mosin–Nagant is huge!
  • The .50 BMG is shot from a Noreen 50, which I don’t think I’ve seen before (on video or in person).
  • The .50 BMG punches through the ballistic steel plate and destroys the wooden backstop. You can see the shockwave distortion pass in from of the camera.
  • The fireball from the .50 BMG muzzle break is a lot more noticeable at 250,000 fps compared to 33,000 fps.

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    Posted in Guns, video | 5 Comments »

    Peter Zeihan Thinks We Won The Great Balloon War

    Monday, February 13th, 2023

    After talking to his government sources, Peter Zeihan thinks that we won The Great Balloon War, having gained valuable insights by capturing Chinese tech, and that the entire episode is another symptom of high level CCP dysfunction.

    Some takeaways:

  • “What the Chinese were technically trying to do: They were doing overflight of a lot of our military bases, specifically our ICBM launch facilities, because the Chinese are new to having a nuclear deterrent.”
  • “Remember that as early as the 1970s, the United States had over 30,000 nuclear weapons, about one-third of which would have been deployed by missile. Now, with arms control treaties and the post-cold war environment, we have slimmed that down to just a few hundred.” Here Zeihan is wrong. The declared number of nuclear warheads the United States possesses is 3,750, but those numbers don’t count tactical nuclear weapons. Including those yields an estimate in the 5,500 range, though some 1,800 of those are slated for dismantlement.
  • “But the United States has a deep bench of experience in building and maintaining these things and the Chinese simply don’t.”
  • “Balloons are big, they’re slow moving, you can’t maneuver them very well, they’re obvious.”
  • He reiterates his theory that Xi has purged any possible successor and surrounded himself with slavish yes-men.
  • “It just never occurred to me that they could be that dumb. Well, turns out the rampant stupidity that is taking over decision making in Chinese policy has now reached a bit of a break point.”
  • “The Chinese have lost the ability to coordinate within their own system.”
  • “The Americans were reaching out to the Chinese, and the Chinese refused to take the call because they didn’t know what to say, because they couldn’t get directions.”
  • “The bureaucracy is seized up…there’s really only two types of people left: Those who will do nothing unless they are explicitly instructed to do something, or those who are True Believers.”
  • He doesn’t think that the Chinese got anything from balloon observation of our missile silos they couldn’t have gotten from satellites.
  • “The whole time U.S. hardware was tracking that balloon, tracking its emissions, taking digital renderings of the entirety of the structure, and, oh yeah, yeah, just just so we’re, clear this one’s not a weather balloon, this thing was 300 feet wide. That’s a big ass balloon. That’s like an order of magnitude bigger than weather balloons.”
  • “The equipment that was hanging from the bottom of the balloon, the payload was bigger than an Embraer [jetliner], and there were long range antennas and listening devices and computing capacity and solar panels on this thing, along with some propellers.”
  • “The diplomatic system seized up because the truth was so obvious, but the Chinese diplomatic corps had no idea that this was going on.”
  • He asserts that it we shot it down over Montana, there’s a good chance people would die, which is simply not the case, since there are vast stretches of Montana with very minimal population. (See also: the Columbia explosion.)
  • “We’re getting a better look at spy equipment out of China, and their capabilities, and their emissions, and how they handle information, and what they’re looking for, as a result of this incident than normally you would have gotten after a one or two year probing effort using more traditional methods.”

    • Zeihan and his sources either missed or omitted a more likely explanation for China’s spy balloon, mainly that they were more interested in signals intelligence and threat response communication than photographing ICBM silos (though they might well have done some of that too). Because radio waves bounce off the ionosphere, that’s the sort of information you can’t get from satellites. Maybe the point of the exercise was intended to see what sort of signals they could capture when we scrambled assets to take a look at them.

    Still an incredibly stupid thing to do, but more purposely stupid than Zeihan gives them credit for.

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    Posted in Economics, Media Watch, Military, unions, video | 11 Comments »

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