I’m sure there’s a *lot* of cherry picking here, but there also seems to be a fair amount of truth:
Mar 112018
Mar 102018
Did anyone else watch “Waco” on the Paramount Network? I recorded the series but have only now started watching it. I’m into the third episode and the ATF has launched their initial assault… and *MAN* the ATF does NOT come off well. The Branch Davidians? Yeppers, crackpot cultists. But the ATF is being depicted basically as a pack of blood-thirsty gloryhounds.
The series starts off with the disastrous and equally stupid raid on Randy Weavers home in Ruby Ridge. That event, coming during the GHW Bush administration and basically approved of and made worse by the Clinton administration, is I think one of the foundational events that led to the current political climate. The Weavers and the Davidians were whackos to be sure… but they were in any rational measure essentially harmless. But the FBI and ATF went after them with a level of force that was wholly unwarranted. Those events led to the the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1990’s militia movement and pretty much the complete collapse in faith in the US government by a great many people who otherwise thought of themselves as patriots. Prior to these events, militia types were a *very* fringe element; after these events they went kinda mainstream. Would we have President Trump today if Randy Weaver had been simply arrested away from his house? If David Koresh had been picked up when he went into town to get some groceries? Would we have the 3-Percenters and Oath Keepers and the like if the government hadn’t actually acted like an organization that people might actually need top worry about? Similarly, I wonder where we’d be today with “ghost guns” and 3D printed firearms, as well as school shootings carried out by lil’ whackjobs obsessed with guns, if the government hadn’t banned modern sporting rifles and standard capacity magazines back in the 90’s, and hadn’t kept threatening to ban them again.
It doesn’t help that prior to the 1980’s or so, a “cop” would look like this:
And seemingly around about the late 80’s, early 90’s, far too often police started looking like this;
And this:
When SWAT teams were first formed in the late 1960’/early 1970’s, their purpose was pretty specific: combating terrorists and heavily armed bank robbers and the like. At the time that was an important function; urban crime and terrorism were on the rise in the 60’s and 70’s. But then SWAT was turned loose on The War On Some Drugs. And then after the crime peak of the 1990’s, SWAT didn’t go away: SWAT teams were used on lesser and lesser criminals, sometimes storming homes on the rumor that someone in there might have a few ounces of weed, for Grud’s sake.
So you’ve got an increasingly militarized police force – ATF, FBI, even the local PD – that has been caught on camera using military tools, weapons and force on American citizens… and we’re supposed to be surprised that some people have concluded that it might be a good idea to gun-up against the day the government turns full-blown fascist?
When i see stuff like this, I have two basic responses:
1: You ask “what does a civilian need with an AR-15,” and I’ll just point to armor-plated cops with automatic weapons. If *they* aren’t safe on the streets without such weapons, why should I feel safe without my own personal General Electric minigun?
2: That’s not a hair question.
Mar 092018
Advanced “space guns,” typically lasers, railguns, coilguns, neutral particle beams and the like, have a problem: power. Nuclear reactors and solar panels can provide power for years at a time, but generally their steady-state power output is only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous power needed when the gun goes off. So to run a weapon that needs many gigawatts for a fraction of a second with a powerplant that produces kilowatts, you need an energy storage system that can convert that energy into power on a moments notice. Things like batteries are great in principle, but their weight is vast and their ability to release power at the high levels needed is generally poor.
Often this has resulted in space weapons that use chemical reactions to provide the power needed. This has meant that the total number of shots that can be fired is strictly limited.
In the 1980’s during the SDI heyday, Westinghouse looked at an alternate approach: rotating hoops. Giant wheels made of advanced composite materials would be spun up over time by a low-power system such as a nuclear reactor, and when needed these flywheels would be electromagnetically braked to generate vast amounts of power as the wheels ground to a halt. The system could be “reloaded” by slowly spinning the wheels up again… assuming the system hadn’t torn itself part.
The weapon shown below is probably largely notional, no masses or dimensions were given. But based on a smaller terrestrial unit (with ten hoops, each 14.5 meters diameter, massing 140,000 kg each, spinning at 1800 RPM to deliver a total of 1 gigawatt for 10 minutes to power anti-missile lasers and such), this can be assumed to be a fairly *vast* construction, far heavier than anything mankind has so far launched into orbit. Obviously such a thing would be impossible to launch as a unit; it would be assembled in space using spools of fibers wound in place. Presumably the weapon itself would be at least somewhat aimable independent of the flywheels… slewing *them* about to aim at a moving target would seem to be an exercise in futility.
This came from the paper “Rotating Hoop, Pulsed-Energy Converter” contained in “Transactions of the Fifth Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems.” A PDF of that can be downloaded if you go HERE and click the “PDF” button.
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Mar 032018
After the school massacre in Parkland last month, the Civilian Enfeeblement Movementarians started yammering on about how this was proof that we need to ban standard capacity magazines. Uh… huh. Yeah, about that…
It seems the shooting stopped when his gun jammed, a feature of crappy ammo and poor maintenance. Not because he ran out of ammo, or had a sudden change of heart, or someone else stopped him. he was able to do what he did with low-capacity magazines.
Mar 012018
Pentagon confirms that Russia is testing a cruise missile powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor
Uh-oh.
Russia’s new cruise missile has crashed in testing: US
Putin is claiming that the Russians have a nuclear powered cruise missile capable of defeating all current missile defense systems. Something like Pluto would very likely be able to do that… if it works. Mach three at a thousand feet altitude would be incredibly hard to shoot down, and would make a hell of a mess over the entire flight path; shock waves from the passing craft would cause structural damage and injuries, radioactive particles spat out by the reactor would leave a trail of waste behind.
It’s a little difficult to imagine what advantage such a system would *really* provide. Missiles like this would cost a lot more than simpler ICBMs, and it’s not like the US has an effective defense system against a massed ICBM attack. A nuclear-powered cruise missile is the sort of thing that the Russians can’t use *a* *little* *bit* against the United States; any use of such a weapon would result in a full-blown nuclear response, so it would only be useful in the context of a full-up war.
All that said: the news should be interesting over the next few weeks. It’s entirely possible that Putin is full of crap and they don’t have a Pluto; or there was a translation foulup somewhere, and the Russians never meant to imply they have a Pluto. But what if they *are* claiming to have a Pluto? Go ahead and imagine the unholy sh!tstorm that would result if the US announced that it had a new cruise missile with a nuclear reactor as a power source, a missile that would leave a 10,000 mile path of radioactive waste behind it. The press would go *insane.* It would be the biggest news of the day, and would lead to outrage and protests and all kinds of trouble. What will a Russian Pluto lead to? We shall see, I suppose.
Feb 282018
The public opinion certainly seems to be that school shootings have become more prevalent in recent years, that schools are more dangerous places. Studies, however, indicate something quite a bit different. The major change, I think, isn’t that school shootings have become more common; rather, its that the media cover them more and social media allows them to be more “immediate.” A study by Northeastern University puts some numbers onto the subject:
Schools are safer than they were in the 90s, and school shootings are not more common than they used to be, researchers say
Things were *not* better during the years when the Clinton “Assault Weapons Ban” was in effect. Columbine, the sort of Ur-School-Shooting, was right smack in the middle of the AWB.
A related story from Northeastern U:
How did the media get the number of school shootings so wrong?
After the Parkland school shooting, the claim hit the press that already in 2018 there had been 18 school shootings in the US. But by any rational definition of “school shooting, there had been no such number. One was a kid who committed suicide in the bathroom. Another was an adult who shot himself in the parking lot of a school that had been shut down for seven months. At least two were shootings in the parking lot hours *after* school. Only eight of the eighteen “school shootings” actually involved injuries.
The author suggests that the cause underlying this sort of bad reporting is a desire to be First with the news coupled with laziness. This is undoubtedly true… but do not discount the importance of simply not giving a damn about the facts when it comes time to promote a political narrative.
Feb 262018
House Democrats introduce bill prohibiting sale of semi-automatic weapons
The Assault Weapons Ban of 2018 will prohibit the sale, transfer, production, and importation of:
· Semi-automatic rifles and pistols with a military-style feature that can accept a detachable magazine;
· Semi-automatic rifles with a fixed magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds;
· Semi-automatic shotguns with a military-style feature;
· Any ammunition feeding device that can hold more than 10 rounds;
· And 205 specifically-named and listed firearms.
This would basically make everything more modern than a revolver eventually illegal, since “transfers” would be illegal. Which means you could not leave your pistol or hunting rifle to someone in your will.
This is the dream of the civilian enfeeblement movement: the eventual removal of the means of defense from all of the little people. Keep this in mind the next time someone lies to you and says “nobody wants to take your guns:” this bill may not make confiscation plain, but it makes it plain that theydon’t want to let people keep them.
Feb 232018
Two stories from worlds apart that illustrate the same basic flaws in the human operating system:
Muslims burn piles of Pampers nappies and call for a ban because cartoon cat’s whiskers printed on them ‘look like the Arabic spelling of Mohammed’
Apparently this:
Looks like this:
And thus idiots in India are protesting, burning stuff in the streets, demanding not only boycotts but also arrests.
Stupid, you say? Too dumb to happen here? But wait! There’s more!
Student Faces Expulsion for Joking that Square Root Symbol Looks Like Gun
Apparently people thought this:
Looked like this:
Because, well, sure. And of course, the cops were called and searched a students home. And it gets better:
KATC reported, “Any student accused of talking about guns or school shootings will be investigated by three entities: the school board, the sheriff’s department, and the district attorney’s office.”
The student who made the joke is banned from campus and will enter a hearing to determine if he will be expelled from the entire school system.
TALKING ABOUT GUNS CAN GET YOU EXPELLED.
And yet somehow, the Left’s army of child soldiers can protest and howl and disrupt school all they like and not face expulsion… even though their whole schtick is based on the fear of guns being hammered into them by the media and peer pressure.
Feb 202018
The Daily Caller points out something obvious:
According To The FBI, Knives Kill Far More People Than Rifles In America – It’s Not Even Close
As could be expected, after the Parkland school shooting the Civilian Enfeeblement Movement has been freshly reinvigorated. Kids are being used to emotionally agitate for the latest round of gun control, showing once again why we don’t allow children to vote. Conveniently left out of the anti-firearm debate that’s been stoked by the left and their allies, the school-shooting psychos, is this little detail:
According to the FBI, 1,604 people were killed by “knives and cutting instruments” and 374 were killed by “rifles” in 2016.
The psycho-political theater here is obvious, and comes in two parts:
- Not everyone has a semi-automatic rifle but nearly everyone has a knife, even if it’s only a steak knife. Those behind the Civilian Enfeeblement Movement would thus have a much harder time banning knives than rifles so they start with the easier one, even though if their true purpose was to get rid of dangerous weapons For The Children they’d go after knives first.
- Knives kill one at a time, generally. But dozens killed in one go makes for a bigger, splashier headline, just as one hundred people killed in one hundred separate car crashes is less newsworthy than one hundred people killed in one plane crash.
So rather than go after the more dangerous weapons, the Civilian Enfeeblers go after the “scarier” ones. And of course, they ignore the elephant in the room… the giant, stanky, psychotic and enraged elephant: deinstitutionalization. Starting in the 1950’s and accelerating due to JFK’s influence (apparently due to guilt over his sister being lobotomized because his father was a horrible monster who bred a whole dynasty of horrible monsters), the loony bins of the United States were emptied out. A lot of this was due to the rise of drugs that did fantastic things for people with Entertaining Brains, and while that’s good when everything works right and the drugs are taken appropriately, drugs aren’t always taken appropriately. And by getting rid of the nuthouses, society has made it difficult to lock up the truly wacko except in prisons. And that requires that the crazy actually break things and hurt people before they are locked away, and by locking them into prisons they not only receive minimal proper mental health treatment, they are locked into a criminality training ground.
The Parkland shooter was apparently seen as a clear and present danger by a *lot* of people. In earlier decades he would have been institutionalized in some way; and locked in an insane asylum he would not have had access to firearms. A modern nut house would of course be a far better one than one in the 1950’s, with better practices and pharmaceuticals. He might have been “fixed” so that he could be returned to society as useful and minimally dangerous citizen, but since it is now seen as “wrong” to lock up people who manifestly nuts, he will spend the rest of his life at taxpayer expense in the prison system. A lot of kids died for that, and the rest of us may well lose some of our rights. One might wonder if that is at least part of the reason why there’s not so much interest in re-institutionalization… keep a sufficient number of dangerous whackjobs roaming at will in society and you keep people afraid and willing to surrender their rights to a more over-reaching government.
There is a rational solution: end the ridiculous War On Some Drugs and use the money wasted on that to build modern psychiatric institutions… and lock up people who are clearly nuts.
Note: I fully expect that some people might read this and be more incensed by my use of terms like “loony bins” than the fact that hundreds of thousands of clearly dangerous mentally unstable people are left to roam at will. This is indeed one of the great problems in modern society: the prioritization of politically correct speech and making sure the easily offended aren’t offended over actually fixing the damn problems.
Feb 052018
Pretty sure I’ve posted these, or something like these, before. But in light of the Boring Company’s “flamethrower,” here’s a flamethrower that anyone can actually buy, and that will project *real* fire a good long ways. The “Dragons Breath” shotgun rounds, which fire pellets of burning zirconium or magnesium, are not particularly wise for home defense.
And then this so very, very 80s: