Yay! We’re More Doomed!

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Jul 302018

Bernie Sanders’ ‘Medicare for all’ bill estimated to cost $32.6T, new study says

That’s $32.6 trillion dollars over ten years, or $3.26 trillion dollars per year. Estimated 2018 US Fed Guv revenues are $3.34 trillion. Estimated deficit is $833 Billion… *before* you tack on an extra $3.26 Trillion.

Current US population is about 326 million. That extra cost works out to $10,000 per person per year. But since something like 40% of the working population doesn’t pay federal income taxes, and a whole lot of people are children and the retired and such… well, I can’t be bothered to do the math, bit I’m thinking it works out to a wee bit more than $20K per taxpayer per year. On top of all the taxes *already* owed.

Peculiar cop hits bike

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Jul 302018

In rational world, there’s no way this cop gets out of this with his career intact. Or with his career, period.

Some colorful metaphors are energetically deployed in this video, in a manner that seems not at all inappropriate.

If you’ve looked into the front of a modern American police car anytime in the last 25 years or so, you’ll recognize that they are filled, nay, overfilled with technology. I’ve always thought it was kinda bugnuts that the driver of a police car had access to a fricken’ laptop while driving. And even with all the electronical attention-destroying technojunk he already had, this guy thought it was a good idea to be looking at his phone while not only driving but also while taking a corner. He has been suspended. Note that the police vehicle has a dashcam… that should prove to be interesting footage, with one very startled looking bicyclist.

Sooner or later self-driving cars will make it into the police force. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for self-driving police cars to be *better* at high speed pursuits than manual cars… freeing up the driver to shoot the bad guys while on the move.

Interestingly, take a look at the bikers YouTube videos… they are *filled* with prior vids of him seeing cars where the drivers are busy texting and whatnot.

Never go full media+politician

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Jul 302018

Here’s your fabulously ignint news article for today (yeah, yeah, it’s from more than a week ago. You want more timely blogging… gimme money):

Sen. Chuck Schumer warns of coming online blueprints for ‘ghost guns’

Media proves how good they are at their job:

As of Aug. 1, websites will be allowed to post blueprints explaining how to make so-called “ghost guns” — guns manufactured on 3-D printers, and able to pass through metal detectors unseen because they are made of plastic.

It’s good to know that the springs and firing pins and barrels and bullets and cartridges will all be made of special metal-detector defeating metals.

Senator Chuck Schumer proves how good he is at his job:

“I am sounding an alarm that come Aug. 1, America is going to get a lot less safe when it comes to the gut-wrenching epidemic of gun violence,” Schumer said. “Ghost guns are not only scary, they’re outright dangerous in the way they can mimic the look and the capacity of a hardened, fully semiautomatic weapon.”

Schumer says three stupid things:

1) August first, just a few days now, we’ll see a statistically meaningful increase in violent crime due to the sudden availability of 3D CAD models.

2) “Ghost guns are scary.” If you’re Scooby Doo, maybe. If you realize that a “ghost gun” is a more expensive and complex product for a criminal than simply *stealing* a gun, then, not so much.

3) Fully Semiautomatic Weapons. FULLY SEMIAUTOMATIC WEAPONS. FULLY SEMIAUTOMATIC WEAPONS.

As you know…

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Jul 162018

Bath University under fire for barring these three words from lectures and tutorials

The phrase “as you know” is banned (well, it’s not clear that it has actually been banned… seems more like such a ban is the desire of members of the Junior Totalitarian League) because some students are not only ignorant boobs they are apparently also weak and fragile and incapable of surviving being told that they aught to already know something.

The University of Bath also produced this insanely whiny video about the importance of dropping down to the level of snowflakes. Examples of Very Bad Things include a French language lesson that includes the phrase “The women will be getting together the 6th of July” and then questioning, True or False, whether this was in the summer. The Snowflake Conundrum is… but what about an Argentinian student? For that student from the southern hemisphere, July is in winter. And so this globe trotting exchange student who has found him/her/it/zim/xer/floople/self in Britain apparently purely by chance and without the slightest bit of knowledge of Britain or the northern hemisphere will be utterly flummoxed by the question and could suffer permanent emotional scarring. Also includes complaints from students that in this British university located in Britain, they’ve only had teachers who were white. Students also complain of finding it difficult to find books in the library on African Studies and postcolonial theory. Suggestions include jamming discussions of gender, race and sexuality into the course work.

That latter one intrigues me.

“Q: The rocket engine has a specific impulse of 310 seconds. The initial mass of the vehicle is 15,000 kilograms. The burnout mass is 1,200 kilograms. How does this make Tony feel about post-colonialism?”

“Q: Civic planners need a bridge across the river Thames. Should they build it from cast iron, stainless steel, or critical race theory?”

“Q: A blue hypergiant with a mass of 1,350 Sols goes supernova. In the process, 50% of its mass is expelled in the form of a planetary nebula. The remainder is compressed to a diameter of 10,000 kilometers. Will this stabilize as a neutron star, continue to collapse into a black hole, or is there a more culturally sensitive way to make the star feel better about itself than to apply arbitrary othering labels?”

“Q: On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an attack on Pearl Harbor. In 10,000 words or more, describe how this attack was a justifiable response to American colonialism, whether furry culture should be celebrated, or whether you are a racist.”

Yay, free plutonium

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Jul 162018

Plutonium went missing in San Antonio, but the government says nothing

Are you a small nation with big ambitions? Do you want to have your own nuclear weapons, but don’t have the industrial or scientific wherewithal to develop the reactor technology to produce plutonium? Well, good news! There’s an easier way!

Just stake out motels in high-crime neighborhoods and wait for idjits from the Department of Energy to park overnight and leave nuclear materials in the back seat of their rental car. Spoiler: smashy, smashy.

Yay, we’re doomed

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Jul 032018

So the Democratic voters in the Bronx have decided to just go right past the standard Democrats and instead nominate the the outright Socialists.

It’s important to recognize just what Socialism is. In recent years there has been a concerted effort to soften the image of the term, to make it synonymous with “welfare state,” or “nanny state,” or Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, being nice to illegal immigrants, throwing open the doors of the prisons, hamstringing the cops. But that’s NOT what Socialism is. Let’s be clear:

a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

In other words: “the government owns the factories and the farms.” And the auto repair places, the electronics stores, the grocery stores, Starbucks, Google, Amazon, FaceBook, McDonalds, PornHub. It should be sobering to any reasonable mind to realize that, economically, fascism is less awful than Socialism. Fascists at least let you make and sell your own stuff. Mostly.

Claims that there are many forms of socialism, some that focus on “social justice” rather than Takin’ yer Stuff, make about as much sense as someone claiming that there is a nice fluffybunny form of Nazism that you shouldn’t be afraid of, it’s only about marching bands and cool uniforms, none of that world conquest stuff, nosiree.

If they vote for the Socialist, those New Yorkers will have voted to institute the economic miracle of Cuba, of Venezuela, of the Holodomor.

But as monumentally bad as Socialism clearly is… here we are.

Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism

If the GOP is smart (and how long has it been since that was a safe assumption?), they would lead a nationwide effort to teach the electorate just what Socialism really is, what it really means, what it really leads to. And then let the Socialists the Dems nominate speak for themselves. Because if it’s fair for the left wing to tar the right with the brand of “Nazi” because there are some loons on the right who think the Nazis were just neato, it’s just as fair to tar the left with the Socialist brush.

But since that would require the GOP to be smart, competent and actually interested in defeating Socialism, here instead are some funny memes so we can at least have a little chuckle as the ship goes under:

It’s too bad California isn’t bordered by a GIANT FREAKIN’ OCEAN

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Jun 062018

Fact Check: Is It Now ‘Against the Law in California to Shower and Do Laundry on the Same Day’?

In fact, no, despite what a number of outlets have said, California hasn’t made it illegal to both shower and do laundry on the same day. But what they have done is put a 50-gallon-a-day limit into the books. And since that number is both arbitrary and under the control of power-made bureaucrats and politicians, expect it to creep downwards until showering and laundry on the same day do *effectively* become illegal.

Because limiting people in this way is a *much* better answer than building reactors and desalination plants. Because if they did *that,* people would have good jobs, the economy would improve, technology would get better, the Colorado river might actually be allowed to make it to the sea and California would constantly improve its ability to deal with power issues *and* droughts. And we can’t have that.

So much for merit

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Jun 032018

De Blasio wants to scrap admissions testing for elite high schools

Shock of shocks, the issue here is race… there aren’t enough black and latino students in these schools, so De Blasio wants a set-aside to bump up their numbers. But here’s the interesting detail:

Under the current system, Asian kids predominate at the city’s top high schools. They make up 74 percent of the population at Stuyvesant, 66 percent at Bronx Science and 61 percent at Brooklyn Tech. At Queens HS for Science at York College, 82 percent are Asian.

Not enough blacks or latinos based on current demographics. But there seems to be another major ethnic group that is statistically under-represented that *isn’t* going to be favored. Odd, that. De Blasios editorial where he explains his idea is HERE. It reads like the usual political pap. But do a CTRL-F search on the page, and see if there are any major ethnic groups who make up a large fraction of New Yorks population, and who are statistically under-represented in these elite high schools, that are mysteriously left unmentioned.

Spoiler alert: whites are under-represented, and are not considered worthy of set-aside programs. While I’m unsurprised that Asians are over-represented, I am a bit surprised at the sheer magnitude of it. But you know what my answer would be here to bump up the numbers of white kids in these schools? I would not tell them that they need to have the government come in and protect them. I would tell them:

“Do better.”

But here’s the thing: if I or any other white guy were to suggest that what America needs is a movement among white folks for them to buckle down, stop screwing around, ditch the trivialities of modern pop culture, throw off the shackles of cultural Marxism and get back to work, to keep it in your pants more than they have been, to get married and have kids, to raise them well with both parents, to raise them with reason and logic and the goal of turning them into proper productive citizens, to raise them to have goals and ambitions and to bust their asses so that they can compete and win in order to keep their place and their culture… why, that’d be downright racist of me or whoever was gauche enough to suggest such a crazy thing.

I really rather prefer the US system…

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May 262018

It’s strange when you hear an offhand reference to a news item from a day or two back, finally get a chance to look it up online, find references to news items… then find that those links lead to black holes because the press has been ordered not to report on something clearly newsworthy.

For example, here’s a headline from Fox News:

Right-wing activist Tommy Robinson reportedly jailed after filming outside child grooming trial

There are a few bits of that headline that might be unfamiliar to Americans, or at least non-Brits. “Tommy Robinson” is an English guy who has been a vocal supporter of England staying English. In other words, he’s not a big fan of the mass immigration that Britain has seen in recent years. “Child grooming” has little to nothing to do with, say, barber shops or nail salons for kids, but is instead a reference to the rise in organized sex trafficking of children that has been brought on by Britains recent experiment in Cultural Enrichment. So, y’know, the two concepts are kinda related.

Since this is a British news story, it seemed to make sense to take a look at British news reports. So Google News pulls these two up first:

EDL Founder Tommy Robinson ‘arrested’ while filming outside court

And:

EDL Founder Tommy Robinson ‘arrested filming outside grooming trial’

Both of them go to 404 errors. *One* such would be odd, but *two* indicates something screwy going on. And the Fox article provides some clarity:

The judge in the case on Friday slapped a reporting ban on the case. The order bans reporters from reporting on a case if there is reason to believe the reporting could prejudice a trial. The order prevents reporting until the conclusion of the trial Robinson was reporting on.

“Freedom of the press” to report on things that are publicly known does not exist in Britain. This seems to be a bigger issue than just the newspapers not being able to report on Robinson’s arrest… the fact that he was arrested in the first place – for “breaching the peace” while apparently doing nothing more than reporting on an ongoing criminal trial – would seem to indicate that the press serves at the pleasure of the British government. And if the timeline presented by the Fox article is accurate – Robinson was arrested on Friday, May 25, and by that afternoon was already sentenced to 13 months in prison (quite possibly a death sentence given that British prisons are filled with just exactly the people that Robinson doesn’t like, and they don’t like him), then it hardly seems like Robinson would have had time to call a lawyer much less put up any sort of defense.

There are many in the US who want the US to adopt the ways of the UK with regards to gun control, healthcare, overall government control. I wonder if they’d also like the US government to be as cavalier about the rights of Americans to report the news.

Yeah, that’ll happen…

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May 042018

Muslims Recoil at a French Proposal to Change the Quran

A manifesto published in the French daily Le Parisien on April 21—signed by some 300 prominent intellectuals and politicians, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls—made a shocking demand. Arguing that the Quran incites violence, it insisted that “the verses of the Quran calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can refer to a sacred text to commit a crime.”

The basic notion of a government telling a religion what to believe? Ha. The idea of a western government successfully petitioning Muslim leaders to change the book that they think is the actual unalterable word of what they think of as a god?

Best o’luck, France.

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