Fake

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The first time I watched this video I was skeptical. The video sure is realistic, but I’ve read enough about aeronautics to know that human flight and bird flight are not the same thing.

Ever watch hang gliders taking off? They do it from hill tops, not level ground. The guy in the video lifts off from level ground with little or no wind. Look at the wings and the trees in the background – there is little or no movement.

As planes and gliders move forward (or face the wind) the air passing under the wings provides lift. The faster the velocity of the air relative to the wing, the more lift that is provided. But if the speed is being provided by a man running with the glider, as soon as the lift pulls his feet from the ground there is no more acceleration and drag causes the glider to slow down.

Gizmodo:

Update 2: Some glider pilots are weighing in with their expert opinion, like reader Orian Price:

As a hang glider pilot, I can tell you that this is not real.

Not even close. The roll stability and pitch stability mechanisms are not present to fly.

It takes 10hp for these to have powered flight and with that they can’t climb nearly as fast as that guy.

Another reader, who claims to be a pilot, provides another argument against it:

I’m an Airline pilot with 25 years Airline experience, 7 years Air Force experience, 8 years kiteboarding experience and a background in aeronautical engineering. It’s a fake. Just look at the wings. They’re not showing load at any time. The fabric from the old kiteboarding kite—that’s what the wings are made of—never loads up. If the wings were producing lift, the fabric would be tight, it would look like it was inflated. It never does. There are other signs too, but it doesn’t matter. Since the wings aren’t loaded, they aren’t producing lift. Not even the glide is real. It isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s simple fact. If the wings aren’t producing lift, this has to be a fake. Period. If the wings were producing lift, they would show that they were under load. They never show a load, so they never produce lift.

Update 3: Hang glider G.W. Meadows is also unimpressed with the validity of the video:

I’ve been flying hang gliders for 33 years, a Master Hang Glider Pilot for 23 years, past president of the United States Hang Gliding Association and a Gold Medal winner at the 2000 World Championships. To take the time to try to explain to you why this is so obvious to those of us who fly a nearly identical machine (that just doesn’t flap) that this is a fake would possibly just be too involved. Instead, take a minute and look at a few things that are just obvious to a casual viewer. Why would the people run away from the machine just before he tries to take off? Why is the guy running at the camera blocking the view of the pilot? Note after he gets airborne, his feet are behind him like superman. As a guy whose spent a couple of thousand hours hanging from a hang glider, I can tell you that you have to have a mechanism to hold your feet up like that.

Update 4: An engineer write us about his opinion on Updates 2 and 3, calling it poop:

While I must admit that something doesn’t quote look “right” about that video (mainly that the contraption sure seems to gain altitude mighty quickly after “takeoff” relative to the forward groundspeed speed, but I guess the pilot is very lightweight dude, and maybe there was a good strong headwind) it is also true that the over-confidently-made arguments of the “Airline pilot” & “G.W. Meadows” do not take into account the actual construction of the

This wing is NOT a simple flexible “rogallo” type wing as the Airline pilot & hang glider expert seem to think. In fact it has a semi-rigid main aerofoil section.
The unsupported fabric trailing edge does not appear to be loaded because it is not the main source of lift.

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When birds flap their wings they don’t simply move up and down. If they did every time the wings moved up the bird would move down. When a bird takes off by flapping its wings there are a number of complex moves involved, and the wings don’t just provide lift, they provide thrust too.

Watch the video of the ornithopter below. You don’t see the actual take-off, but watch the cabin move up and down with each flap. The ornithopter flew for about 20 seconds in a straight line, never getting far off the ground. The motive power for the flapping was the pilot’s leg muscles.

Which brings me to my last point – the small electric motors used by Jarno Smeets are simply too small to provide the necessary torque. Not only that but a real bird’s wings make long full strokes. Smeet’s wings barely move.

In the age of Obama you just can’t believe everything you see.

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When did progressives turn ugly?

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Remember the old Hollywood westerns? The ones where the good guys were handsome and wore white hats, and the bad guys were ugly and wore black? Those were the days when truth, justice and the American way all went together. At least we thought they did.

As I got older I began to realize that America wasn’t quite as good and pure as it was pictured in John Wayne movies. But in my heart I still believed in the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and I believed that liberals wore white hats and that Republican headquarters was located in Barad-dûr.

In 2008 I saw for the first time the ugliness of progressives. It started with Hillary and then moved on to Sarah Palin. This post by Bristol Plain contains the latest example:

Responding to the Viral Sensation, Loving my Brother

I’ve been totally blown away by the responses to my post below, which went viral beyond my wildest dreams. Hundreds of thousands of people have read the post, and it’s been shared – at the time I write this — 88,000 times. Thank you for reading, sharing, and commenting. I received over 1,700 comments, and I’d like to take a moment to respond to some of them. The comments basically fell into one of three categories:

Category 1: “I hate you.”

Example: “JLE” at 7:52 am on March 20:

Bristol Palin you have some nerve President Obama does not owe you anything your a nobody, a young loose cow with kid!!!!! You and your mom are true idiots your Alaskan Hillbillies so go back in your igloos stay out of the public eye we are tired of your UGLY FACED YOUR SON TOO& BROTHER TOO!!!!

At first, the Patheos moderators weren’t letting these types of comments through, but we decided to let you have at least a glimpse of the things people say about my family. (We still don’t approve the dozens and dozens of truly obscene rants. This is a family blog after all!) You can see that Bill Maher is not some lone comedian with a unique perspective on us. Rather, he taps into something evil and dark that resides in the hearts of many people who hate our family. Even after so many years, I’m still a little surprised when people make fun of my little brother. They, however, can’t silence me or my mom. In fact, they motivate the to keep speaking. Evil can’t win!

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I don’t know who this “JLE” person is but those words did not come from a good place, they came from an ugly, hate-filled heart.

It would be easy to dismiss a single comment as the droppings of an internet troll, but they are typical of what you can find at far too many progressive blogs these days. Wonkette, Rumproast and Balloon Juice are easily the worst offenders, but scaled down versions of the same kind of hate speech can be found at every pro-Obama blog.

Progressives are supposed to be pro-feminist but I have seen some of the most vile expressions of misogyny at progressive blogs in the past four years. Some of it is truly sickening, and goes far beyond anything I ever heard in a locker room or army barracks.

Nothing good grows from a bad seed.

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Palin Power:

A Front-Row Seat to Palin Power

In addition to regularly contributing to NRO’s excellent Home Front blog, my wife Nancy is the editor of the Patheos Faith and Family portal, a multi-faith website that thoughtfully explores, well, faith and family. Last week she added a young, single-mother blogger to the site, a person who could reach a wide audience and was experiencing life as a mother in the glare of unusually harsh publicity: Bristol Palin.

As an editor, Nancy often lives in the more mundane world of Internet punditry — posting blogs, correcting typos, monitoring traffic, and managing a group of talented and eclectic writers. But some days are less mundane than others.

Over the weekend, Bristol wrote a post that asked a simple question: “Mr. President, When Should I Expect Your Call?”

[...]

Nancy tweeted it to her few hundred followers (she and I have a rather pathetic contest for twitter followers; right now I’m barely in the lead with a whopping 776), and Bristol facebooked it. Within hours, it had been shared 8,000 times. Already it was taking off.

Then Sarah Palin tweeted.

Patheos’s server promptly melted down. One of the most-trafficked religious sites on the web, its server still spontaneously combusted. A small mushroom cloud was spotted over the server farm. Eleven additional servers had to be brought online to handle the traffic flow, and by the end of the day, 8,000 shares had turned into more than 85,000 (update: 100,000), and the story of Bristol’s challenge to the president had been reported not just in the political and mainstream media but also in the Hollywood media as well. Thousands of tweets, and tens of thousands more Facebook shares from Fox to the Huffington Post to the Hollywood Reporter took the post well beyond the familiar and comfortable enclaves of the conservative blogosphere.

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For all the abuse heaped upon her since her mother first became famous, Bristol Palin has only been the target of a small percentage of the slime directed at Sarah. There is a reason for that. Despite what Obamanation says they fear Sarah Palin, and for good reason.

President Obama has a whole section of his staff devoted to politics and propaganda. They carefully plan his every word and move, and with the help of the Journolist media they try to sell the country the belief in his infallible greatness. He commands the bully pulpit.

Working from Alaska with little or no staff and using Twitter and Facebook, Sarah draws headlines and crowds. Obama spent over a billion dollars building and maintaining his image as an inspiring leader. Sarah didn’t spend a dime.  Obama is a poser.  Sarah is the real deal.

It’s no wonder they hate her.

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