The thread that explains Trump voters

 Hmm..., politics, wisdom  No Responses »
Jul 172021
 

I know I’m late to this one, but who cares?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 3:08 pm

A court gets it right

 awesomeness, news, politics, weapons, wisdom  No Responses »
Jul 132021
 

Two-thirds of the court, anyway:

Handgun sale ban to under 21-year-olds is unconstitutional, appeals court says

If you are 18, the United States Federal Freakin’ Government can come along and draft your ass and put a gun in your hands and drop you behind enemy lines… but there are those in the government who think that a 20-year-old should not be allowed to have a pistol of their own.

A 19-year-old, to these people, is not responsible enough to own a small firearm… but, sure, put a 16-year-old behind a two-ton chunk of metal capable of a hundred miles an hour.

If an 18-year-old is not old enough to handle their full Constitutional rights… why are they allowed to vote?

Anyway… the 4th US Circuit Court Of Appeals ruled two to one that the Constitution applies to 18-year-olds. Of the three judges, one was appointed by Trump, one by Dubya, and one by Obama. Guess which one thinks that the Constitution is just a set of vague guidelines, not rules restraining government power?

 Posted by at 6:50 pm

Biden makes the case for the private ownership of air superiority fighters and nuclear weapons

 awesomeness, blather, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, weapons, wisdom  No Responses »
Jun 242021
 

Hmmm…

Biden touts new crime prevention strategy focused on gun control

“Those who say the blood of Patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government,” Biden said. “If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

Considering that the whole point of the Second Amendment is to make sure the people can take on a tyrannical government, Biden just admitted that the National Firearms Act is unconstitutional. I *really* hope that this gets before the USSC.

I’d love to see “the Biden Act” get passed that wipes away all the nonsensical gun control laws and restores the Constitutional rights of the citizenry. The downside of that would be that the ammo shortage we’ve got now would be *nothing* compared to what it will be when people can go to WalMart and get themselves a full auto MP5, go to the gun range and blow through a few hundred rounds in under a minute. All thanks to one demented old kiddysniffer accidentally speaking some truth…

Huge Spike In Americans Buying F-15s After Biden Suggests You’ll Need Them To Overthrow Government

The nation scrambled to buy F-15s and nuclear weapons after President Biden said in a speech Wednesday that you’ll never beat a government unless you have the fighter jets and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

All over the nation, American citizens were seen parking their brand-new F-15s in their driveways and garages. Some wealthier Americans purchased the F-22, while less fortunate citizens were forced to buy the F-35 joint fighter. But no matter what craft they chose, American citizens said they were just glad to finally be protected against a tyrannical government.

Image below not related. Or…. is it?

 Posted by at 4:52 am

A thought about misgendering

 blather, Crazy, Hmm..., humor, politics, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 122021
 

Apparently, if some shrieking weirdo appears to be a male and you refer to them as such and they think of themselves as female – or something else entirely – you have just “misgendered” them, and that’s terrible and bad and wrong. Not because what you’ve said is objectively factually inaccurate, but because they simply don’t *like* to be called male.

Fine, whatever.

In recent years, an effort has been pretty successful to start referring to people who identify as what their bodies are as “cisgendered,” “cis-male,” “cis-female.” This terminology was not  chosen by your average “cisgendered” person, but has been dropped on us without our consent. So… referring to a “cisgendered” person as such seems to me to be a form of “misgendering.” Such misgendering should, it seems to me, be countered with something like “I’m not ‘cisgender,’ I’m ‘normal’.” You can then launch into a five-minute rant about how the other person is ignorant and in need of education and how it’s not your responsibility to provide, free of charge, the emotional labor required to train them up in the recognition of such things.

Discus.

For reference:

 Posted by at 11:27 am

Notable!

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, weapons, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 012021
 

Trying to rob a dude while he has a gasoline spray-gun IN HIS HAND might not be the best idea, as these Chilean criminals discovered:

And then there’s this attempt to take down an armored cash-transport in South Africa. I know, I know, who would have ever believed that there’d be violent crime in South Africa. Mind blown.

This is a story screaming out for a followup.

 Posted by at 10:29 pm

Getting around gun laws with the 1776 Boomstick

 art, awesomeness, dumbassery, humor, I'm from the government, news, politics, weapons, wisdom  No Responses »
Apr 242021
 

It is legal for you to build your own firearm from scratch (assuming you live in a civilized region that recognizes your basic human rights). Where things get tricky is if you try to *sell* your home-made firearm. If you don’t have proper Federal licensing… you can get in a *lot* of trouble.

But there seems to be a loophole: government “buy back” events. They will buy any piece of junk gun for a relative pittance, no questions asked. They will then (probably) check the firearm to see if it was used in a crime, and if not, they will then (probably) destroy that firearm, no matter how rare, valuable or historically significant it is (unless, gasp, someone in the chain recognizes its value and absconds with it).

“Buy backs” are of course dubious for any of a number of reasons. The guns they get are typically either junk that couldn’t function to be used in a  crime, or grand-dad’s old war relic that hasn’t seen the light of day in years and isn’t likely to be used in a crime either. And of course there’s the existential issue with buy-backs: how do you buy back something you didn’t own in the first place?

Here’s the fun part: you can make a functional crappy zip gun or slam-fire shotgun for a few bucks in scrap and labor. And these buy-back morons will buy them for substantially more than they cost you to make. And it’s all legal, apparently. Gentlemen, behold – the 1776 Boomstick, the profit-making venture of the future:

Florida Man Sells Homemade ‘1776 Boom Sticks’ At Gun Buyback, City Runs Out Of Cash In 30 Minutes

The gentleman selling the “Boom Stick 1776” shotguns told me he called the City rep before the event, and asked if they would purchase a single-shot shotgun – because the flier said they were buying semi-automatic firearms. Allegedly, he was told they would pay $125 for single-shot shotguns. So he attended the event.

At the checkpoint, he did have to demonstrate that they were functional (they were), and he was sent to the payment line, guns in hand.

Maybe ten bucks worth of junk, twenty bucks worth of labor, for $375 in sales. SPECTACULAR.

Would it be illegal or unethical to petition your local city or county to hold a buyback, while you have prepared a stock of slamfire shotguns for the specific purpose of selling at ten times their cost? I dunno, maybe… but it would be *appropriate,* and got-dam hilarious if you pulled it off.

 

Side note: take a look on that cops face. It is the weary look of a man who knows that he’s getting played, and knows that there’s nothing he can do about it, and who knows that there are *far* better things for him to be doing with his time.

 Posted by at 7:52 pm

“Nazi Sun Gun”

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, history, Hmm..., Meh., projects, science, science fiction, spacecraft, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 142021
 

A YouTuber who has, ahem, come to my attention before has produced a video on the concept of the “Nazi Sun Gun.” In a nutshell, it’s the idea that the Nazis had plans to orbit a gigantic mirror in space; the mirror would focus sunlight to a point on the Earth and burn cities to ash. As a yarn it’s entertaining enough; as history it’s a bit dubious; as physics it’s laughable magical thinking up there with car engines that burn water.

There are two major problems with the “Sun Gun” story:

1: It is very poorly documented. There were a few news and magazine articles on the topic immediately after the war; both the New York Times and Life covered it. But none of these stories provide any documentary evidence for the claims. It *appears* that someone who didn’t know any better stumbled across Herman Oberth’s ideas for an orbiting mirror from the early 1920’s. And while his ideas were reasonable enough given the time, his ideas were to provide some illumination at night, not make cities burst into flames. In all probability, some reporter, or perhaps a military officer looking for some press, heard something they didn’t quite understand and, using the journalistic integrity that CNN has demonstrated so well, blew it far out of proportion for the 1940’s equivalent of internet clout.

2: The physics does not work *AT* *ALL.*

The difference between providing useful levels of illumination and light so intense that wood catches fire is many, many orders of magnitude. For example: on Pluto, the sunlight is about 1/1500 less intense than it is on Earth… and that’s still more than adequate to read by. The full moon, which is strong enough to do useful things in, is only 1/400,000 as intense as full sunlight. In contrast, starting a fire with light requires light *far* more intense than plain everyday daylight. Whether using a parabolic mirror or a glass lens, you have to focus a lot of sunlight into a small area to get fires going… and typically you have to hold it for a while to do that.

OK, so why is this a problem for a space mirror? Because the sun isn’t a point source of light. It is a distinct circular area, about one half of a degree in apparent diameter. This means a parabolic mirror or a lens can *not* focus the light to a point, but to a circle. This limits how intense the spot can be. To first approximation, the best you can do, given really, really good workmanship, reflectivity and aiming accuracy, is to make your mirror look as bright (from the viewpoint of the target) as the sun. If you do it right, and your mirror is as big in the sky as the sun, your target will receive the equivalent of full daylight. So if you aim this fantastic mirror at a city that’s currently in night-time – and it would be difficult to do so with a daylit city – you will provide the city with the equivalent of normal daylight. Blue sky, chirping birds, all that. But that is far, FAR from causing fires.

And even that would require a truly VAST mirror. If your mirror is orbiting at 200 miles, about ISS altitude, it would have to be 1.75 miles across to look as big as the sun. And think of the geometry: you’re trying to reflect sunlight down onto a city. But if you’re only 200 miles up, that means most of the time when you’d be in position to fry a city, there’d be a *planet* in the way. Your mirror would be in darkness. So, move it out to 5,000 miles, as the “Sun Gun” articles suggested the Nazis were planning. In order to be as big in the sky as the Sun now, since you are 25 times further away your mirror would need to be 43.75 miles in diameter. We’re getting on to about the size of the Death Star… and all you can do is turn night into a pleasant, brief day for some city or other. If you want to start fires, you need to be *hundreds* of times more powerful… which means you need to have tens the diameter. A 400+ mile diameter mirror is something that is beyond stupid.

This is not physics only discovered post-war; this has been known for centuries, ever since children discovered the psychopathic delights of frying ants with magnifying glasses. Imagine being that ant and looking up to see a magnifying glass being moved into position in order to burn you. In the moments before your compound eyes fail and your brain melts… just how much of the sky does that magnifying glass take up? A very large percentage of it. An orbiting mirror meant to burn cities would have to be equivalently huge.

This is not mysterious; this is basic. So whenever I see a discussion of the “Sun Gun” with no mention that the idea is simply unworkable fantasy that defies logic and optics, I get a little miffed.

 Posted by at 6:00 pm

The Sound of Freedom

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., science, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 122021
 

The Chrysler Turbine Car sounds a little different from your average automobile, due to having a turboshaft engine.

Jay Leno owns one and did a piece on it about a decade ago. He makes a good and rather depressing point: in 1964 when Chrysler made over a hundred of these, much of the rest of the world barely had internal combustion engined automobiles, while Americans were tooling around in jet cars. The US was “The Jetsons,” while much of the rest of the world was “The Flintstones.” And while it not a bad thing that in the nearly sixty years since the rest of the world has advanced, what *is* bad is that the United States has, in many ways, gone *backwards.* Americans should today be getting around not just in jet cars, but jet cars getting 50 miles per gallon on the highway… and probably 30 miles per gallon *in* *the* *air* as they drive or fly to the spaceport to cat the 12:15 to Space Station V.  Instead, we got The Great Society, Facebook and Twitter.

 Posted by at 1:25 pm

I have a new favorite preacher

 art, awesomeness, Forward!, I'm from the government, news, politics, wisdom, youtube  No Responses »
Apr 052021
 

OK, granted, I didn’t really have a favorite preacher *before,* but this guy…

He demonstrates the proper method of dealing with officious bullies and government Karens: raise your voice, be more belligerent than they are, intimidate *them* but without becoming actually threatening or physical. Don’t give an inch. Don’t give them the opportunity to speak. Shout them down. Now people need to start doing this whenever the likes of AOC or Beto O’Rourke open their yaps. Since he’s in Canada, I guess he won’t be screaming much at Biden.

I suspect he and I would have theological differences. But I gotta respect his ability to drive away government officials who want to interfere with his right to practice his religion, pandemic or no. If the Worst People In America get their way and ban standard capacity magazines and incredibly common firearms, I have hopes that when government stooges and toadies go knocking on doors to intimidate citizens into enfeebling themselves, this is the response they’ll get.

 Posted by at 3:10 pm
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