Month: July 2014

This morning, with every intention of writing a short column, as I’ve been promising myself, I sat down to a bowl of leftovers for breakfast and finally started to read through the latest issue of AOPA Pilot that’s been sitting on the counter gathering dust.  Too much work, too little time.

This issue was particularly interesting to me because it features seaplanes and years ago (like back in the 1970’s) I did the voiceover work for Kenmore Air’s seaplane flight training series.  This was back in the days of cassettes, mind you.

Seaplanes and I have some very fond memories:  The first one I flew was a J-3 Cub on floats, but after that I moved up to a Lake LA-4-200 amphibian.  When landing on water, the retractable gear stays safely tucked away.  But when landing at Boeing Field in Seattle, the gear dropped down and the plane landed on very short, but solid “legs.”

The only oddity of the Lake was that it featured a pusher prop mounted on a pylon over the cabin and above the wing.  Which required a bit of getting used to:  Normally when you’re on final approach for landing, if you pull the power back a bit, the nose will come down and often very little adjustment to trim is needed.

On the Lake, though, when you pull power, the nose comes UP…and depending on how big the power change is, that can be (how to we say this?)  an exciting experience. 

Getting back to our story: so there I was replaying seaplane adventures in my head and looking through the ads in the magazine and I noticed the word RISE has been adopted by the folks down in Kerrville, TX who make the finest/fastest gas prop-driven airplane in production at the moment, Mooney, and their latest does a screaming 242 knots.  Roughly 278 miles an hour.

My, how cool!  Mooney is on track and meeting the needs and of the aviation market, along with great American companies like Cessna, Beech, Piper, Carbon Crafters…you know the list.

Then disaster struck on page 31.

The ad said Rise, also, but as I looked down the ad (with an airplane on the left side, and a large group of what looked like outdoorsmen sitting around a campfire), my eye was drawn to the company name that produces the plane:  Mahindra Aerospace Group.

Mahindra? The folks that make the tractors (dark fire engine red) that are taking over large segments of the agricultural farm equipment market?  Yep, same folks.

And with reason, I might add:  Back in 2004 when I was making a decision on which tractor to buy, a four-wheel drive 25-30 HP class diesel was then pretty well down to a Mahindra (new to the market then) and a Kubota (the bright orange brand).

In the end, I opted for the Kubota because one of our Peoplenomics subscribers at the time worked for Kubota in Georgia, where the US tractors are made.  (Used to be all out of Japan.)

The Mahindra was a solid tractor, though:  Very dependable and though perhaps not as “refined” as the Kubota, within the first 200-hours (at my East Texas Tractor Abuse Festival) the Kubota was in for $1,200 worth of repairs to the clutch/ transmission, which should never have failed as it did.

To this day, I’ve been telling myself maybe I got a lemon, but it’s held up fairly well since.  Still…this Mahindra outfit tractors have earned (the hard way) a very good reputation hereabouts.

And this gets me to the point of this morning’s story if you work up in the square states and work for the airplane makers:  Read up on GippsAero in Wikipedia:

Gippsland Aeronautics was founded by Peter Furlong and George Morgan. The company started operations at the Latrobe Regional Airport in Morwell in the 1970s as an aircraft maintenance and modification business working for large organisations such as the National Safety Council of Australia and Esso Australia, as well as local commercial operators.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Peter Furlong and John Brown were pilots, builders, fabricators and maintenance personnel for, amongst others, the Latrobe Valley Aircraft Club and the Ultra Light Club of Australia. The company builds single-engined utility aircraft. These include the multi-role GA8 Airvan and the agricultural GA200 Fatman. The company is owned by Indian conglomerate Mahindra Group. In December,2009 Mahindra Aerospace Pvt. Ltd. (MAPL), belonging to Mahindra Group of India acquired a 75.1% majority stake and the company was renamed GippsAero.

And now…this month… the AirVan 8 is showing in America’s leading pilot/flying magazine.  We could argue that, since I’m also an Experimental Aircraft Association member and chapter VP, but my point is keep an eye on Mahindra.

The AirVan 8 is not particularly fast (just 8 MPH faster than our old Beechcraft wide open when the AirVan is in cruise).

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Back in about March, I “spun off” my work on the www.nationaldreamcenter.com site to a fine fellow (Chris McCleary) who (packing a couple of Master’s degrees) picked up the project and has moved it ahead and into exciting new territory – all in efforts to give us humans a bit more visibility on “the future” so we can be better prepared for it when it arrives.

I’m pleased to report this morning that Chris McCleary’s Project August is now out with a profile of what the coming month of August may look like.

Project August Report #5 is here. 

It’s long – at least one cup worth, and possibly two if you take it step-at-a-time and work out your own interpretations of what’s being said in the dreams themselves.  Those can be found in the site’s DreamBase over here…. a link to the 20 most recent dreams people contributing to the project have posted.

There are a couple of points that I would make on interpretation of my own (not official, by any means) but certainly something to think about.

Chris does a fine job of running down the “Otherlies” and there’s also a section about “Sly Flashes” which is taken as possibly indicating something like EMP taking place.

When I read that, something else went off in my head:  Is is possible (as last summer sky watching season comes along) that people on the ground may be able to see “sky flashes” of the Earthlings (our) space-defense system repelling (otherlies)?

And that gets me back to the problem common between investing and  future-forecasting:  The future continues to be a kind of (to borrow from Michael Crichton’s concept laid out in the novel Timeline) bubble-up event of dueling future-potentials which at the last minute coalesce into one alternative, or the other.

The future is ugly, that way:  Dreams tend to get it spectacularly right on occasion and when they do (as they have several times for me personally) they  are not to be ignored. An example of this was my “Serious, Personal, WoWW “ in March of this year.

The problem with really nailing the future is difficult because so many people who claim to work in the field get very proprietary about it.  What’s obvious is that “the future” belongs to all humans.

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What would qualify for the term “brain quake?”  That’s a term that could describe what could happen if science (quite by accident) tripped over a discovery that could justify a whole new brand of Life.   Up until now, we’ve been a world full of “converters.”  Not very efficient ones at that; we eat food, convert it to the proteins and sugars we need and blithely assume that’s how all Life works.

Except, it ain’t.

A huge discovery this week has started a real brain quake.  And, as I’ll explain, this one could ripple beyond anyone’s imagination.

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As we have been reporting for months, the EU has its eyes on subjugating Russia and forming a super union which (as one EU official put it) would stretch from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

At the time, I told you this was dangerous talk and that the Russian people still had borders and no intentions of joining the EU particularly in the wake of the German siege in World War II.

But now fast forward to today’s tragedy over Ukraine where a(north) Malaysian airline has been involved in disaster – thing time a purported missile shootdown that claimed all 295 souls aboard the jet.

But here’s the rub:  The rebel forces in Eastern Ukraine/disputed territories, don’t have that kind of hardware.

And what’s more, Russia Today/RT reports that “President Putin’s plane might have been the target for Ukrainian missile – sources…”

If you’re a non-partisan analyst, with an eye to detail and a keen sense of inquiry, the Russian denial of Kiev’s move on Black Sea ports would be reason enough to attempt to kill Putin, but then toss on the flames of that fire, no more “freebies” on natural gas.

Now toss in Russia’s backing for a reopening of a Cold War era spy facility (regardless of how insignificant compared to the American mass recording/Studio Provo operations).

Then for a capper, toss in Putin’s efforts to end US Dollar hegemony via the BRICs summit and you have all the makings for an….er….accident.

It reads like a poor novel of political intrigue played out by fools.  Unable to aim, alright, and now it’s not an unreasonable stretch to call it a “Message in a missile.”

We shouldn’t have to wait more than a month, or two, for Putin to retaliate with a “message back” if indeed it was a missing message, so to speak.

Still, it may be an “accident” (or it may be sold after the fact as such.  It wouldn’t be the first time that Ukraine has knocked down an airliner, if it plays out that way.  Check the Wikipedia entry for Sibera Airliones Flight 1812:

Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 crashed over the Black Sea on 4 October 2001, en route from Tel Aviv, Israel to Novosibirsk, Russia. The plane, a Soviet-made Tupolev Tu-154, carried an estimated 66 passengers and 12 crew members. Most of the passengers were Israelis visiting relatives in Russia.

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….what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you always got.” 

The sage advice from an old friend applies (many times over) in politics.  While a Gallup poll out this morning shows that immigration has eclipsed the economy in most people’s minds, the results of recent elections continue to sting:

Overwhelmingly, the same idiots who got us into this mess have been winning their primaries…so the public expects those “who broke it” to now “fix it.”

If that isn’t the clearest example of national stupidity ever, I’ll eat my hat.  (I had a special chocolate one made, so it won’t be too bad if it comes down to it…)

It also begins to show the Northeast Liberals for what they really are, too:  Do as we say, not as we….

Maryland governor says don’t dump illegals here.

So too, Connecticut wants no part of housing illegal kids en masse.

What?  Two standards?  One for the border states and one for the land of liberals?

I know my N.E. liberal friends will be calling any minute – it will go to voicemail today.  But the point is that tearing down America’s border (let’s call it what it is….) is treasonous.  Both money-corrupted parties are elbow-deep in the scam including George Bush who pushed for Amnesty, something the right doesn’t like to bring us.  It’s a business model to have a “zone” and not border. 

Anyone who’s in favor of that is a scammer, in my book.  Border or merger with Mexico…there’s no “soft in-between.”  I’m prepared to leave Texas if the border continues to fall.  I’m willing to vote with my wallet.

And if American’s aren’t bright enough to figure that out, then we would like to thank Common Core and its precedents that eroded once solid values-and-skills-based curriculum and stuffed the minds of America’s young with situational excusifications, all backed up by case law made up from the bench liberalista-stuffed Courts and promoted by the political correctness corps.

So enjoy your police state, your surveillance, and what the ACLU calls the Constitution-Free Zone –  and remembers those fine words of Pogo:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I wish I could say “George is losing it.”  But no, you are:  The country.  You know, those things on maps indicated by borders?

Gaza Reloaded

So in the rest of what passes for news, we see how there’s what passes for a cease-fire in Gaza.  But based on historical data, the smartest bet in the house this morning is that this will just time time for resupply and reloading until the death festival comes back for an encore.

Hmmmm….another one of those hard questions to answer:  Where is that line between optimist and idiot, again?

Selling Terrorism

Say, this is choice:  The CBS affil in NYC headlines “Police: Al Qaeda magazine suggesting attack on US Open.”

I know, how is it with anti-terrorism budgets what they are, that AQ can publish a magazine that the NY PD  gets?

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As we were sitting here, splitting a bag of O’berto Teriyaki Beef Jerky for breakfast, Zeus the Cat was remarking on how what has saved America’s bacon in the past has been our sense of inventiveness.

“Ure kind of a sourpuss and too cynical, most times,” he told me.  “You didn’t mention the article on HackaDay about the Midwest Maker Faire up in Kansas City.  If you want to see where the future is going, and be able to invest in “the right stuff” you need to get out to precisely this kind of event.  More jerky?”

I didn’t find too many right off the bat, but a list of some of the major international technology fairs over here looked interesting, particularly the Smart Materials and Surfaces conference in Thailand.

“Wrong search terms, Fatso.  Try “inventor conventions” to improve your search results.”

And insulting cat who hogs the beef jerky….what could be worse?  I mean other than him being right all the time…

“Say, the Cat, there’s only one good one left on this list (close enough we could make it) – and it’s up in Chicago in November.”

“Try this one.”

“I don’t see anything good there….”

“I’d be a lot more up to speed if you’d give me back the big-screen you took away claiming I was watching kitty porn on it…”

“It wasn’t just the kitty porn, if the 976 numbers and not sharing your catnip,” I reminded him.

“Trivialities, biped.  You and I have both missed Everyday Edisons and a whole lot more.”

Hmmm…

Truth of the matter is that the Cat may be onto something.  Inventing is one of the coolest pursuits out there…and just having my name on three or four patents is a high-mark in life.

I didn’t pursue the conversation.  Original thinking is our stock-in-trade around here.  Besides, I already have an IP attorney, and I don’t want Zeus the Cat’s animal rights attorney crossing him.

But I thought I’d mention it: Who will be the next Ron Popeil  (perhaps the second best American inventor/marketer after Edison) and where do I buy shares in it?   Ever read the list of his (or should we count them as Ronco) products?

• Chop-O-Matic: a hand food processor. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to show you the greatest kitchen appliance ever made … All your onions chopped to perfection without shedding a single tear.”
• Dial-O-Matic: successor to the Veg-O-Matic (and very similar to a mandolin slicer). “Slice a tomato so thin it only has one side.” “When chopping onions with this machine, the only tears you will shed will be tears of joy.”
• Popeil Pocket Fisherman: a small fishing pole. “The biggest fishing invention since the hook … and still only $19.95!” (According to the program Biography, the original product was the invention of Popeil’s father and only marketed by Ronco, but as of 2006, Popeil had introduced a redesigned version of the product.)^[6]
• Mr. Microphone: a short-range hand-held radio transmitter that would broadcast over an FM radio. The nearby radio(s) would therefore amplify the sound coming from the Mr. Microphone.

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