Armed guards for hoplophobes

 blather, Forward!, news, politics, religion  3 Responses »
Jun 052018
 

Here we go again:

Armed member of ‘Pfleger’s security’ arrested outside his church

“Pfleger” here is “Reverend Michael Pfleger.” A preacher having an armed guard… shrug. Jesus his own self suggested to one of his people that if he didn’t have a sword, to sell his cloak and go buy one, so a preacher having defensive capability isn’t anti-Christian doctrine. Especially when you consider that Pfleger works in Chicago, a town that has been run by anti-gun tyrants for so long that the average person basically hasn’t been able to procure defensive weapons, and thus Chicago has become a place loaded with armed *criminals.* But if you do not recognize Pfleger, he was somewhat notorious a decade or so ago, being a pal with racist Reverence Jeremiah Wright. Since then he has made a name for himself as – wait for it – an anti-gun fanatical demagogue, going so far as to threaten the owner of a gun shop.

And now, wonder of wonders, one of his armed guards has been arrested not only for having an illegal gun, but for not having a FOID (Firearms Owners ID) card. Illinois, unsurprisingly for a state so badly and corruptly run, requires citizens to have a special state-issued card before they are allowed to exercise their basic rights. It’s good and proper for citizens to arm themselves regardless of what power-mad bureaucrats might have to say on the subject… but if you are yourself a power-mad anti-gun nut, maybe you aught to make sure that the guys you hire to stand around you and arm themselves with guns to protect you from the people you want to disarm are at least following the laws. so they don’t get arrested and make a public spectacle of your hypocrisy.

 Posted by at 7:41 pm

Step on it

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., news, science, wisdom, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  14 Responses »
Jun 052018
 

I live a few hundred miles south of the Yellowstone supervolcano. So I have two plans for how to deal with an eruption… plans that are based on the strength of the eruption and the wind patterns at the time:

1) Gather up my valuables and my critters, getting in the car and beating feet towards the west.

2) Sit there and wait to die. Won’t be long.

As you can see, there is a wide range of possible outcomes from an eruption, and my location is such that the details make a big difference in whether the event is escapable or not. It’s always possible that a surprise eruption could occur, say, just after sundown. In this hypothetical, the Big News aspect of it crashes the cell phone network. I’m busy, say, reading or writing, so I don’t see the news on TV or the internet. With no cell phone, no warning calls come in. And a few hours later, not seeing the dark ash cloud against the dark night sky, I go to bed. And I only waked up to the sound of the house collapsing under the weight of the meter or so of ash. This, obviously, is not a survivable scenario.

That said, the Yellowstone supervolcano is not the only volcano in the world. Hawaii and Guatemala have recently demonstrated smaller scale eruptions… incredibly survivable if you just have the wherewithal and wisdom to get the hell out of Dodge. Witness:

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 8:03 am

Let the unwarranted speculating begin

 Hmm..., news, science, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Jun 052018
 

What Has NASA’s Curiosity Found on Mars? We’ll Find Out Thursday

The Mars rover found something sufficiently interesting to hold a press conference this Thursday, but details are embargoed until that time.

NASA will webcast Thursday’s Curiosity Mars rover discussion on its NASA TV channel, as well as Facebook Live, Twitch TV, Ustream, YouTube and Twitter/Periscope. You’ll be able to ask questions of the panel via social media using by tagging your posts with #askNASA.

So, what did it find? It will probably be something along the lines of a scientifically interesting mineral deposit… something indicating the past or recent existence of water, perhaps. Perhaps it stumbled across an actual sign of liquid water bubbling up. Or just maybe, it found something that looks like a fossil… not a fossilized trilobite, but fossilized algal mats or something.

But heck, why not… it found a chunk of processed plastic. It found footprints in the sand. It found Nazi memorabilia. It photographed an alien. It peeked around the curtain at the edge of the set and saw an aged but obviously still alive Stanley Kubrick.

 

 

 Posted by at 7:25 am

Cake decision

 news, politics, religion  10 Responses »
Jun 042018
 

Supreme Court rules for Colorado baker in same-sex wedding cake case

The baker had declined to make a cake with an over message on it that the baker had a religious problem with. Rather than simply going to another baker, the plaintiffs instead took this all the way to the Supreme Court, in order to set a precedent that business owners do not have the right to decline to produce products that they personally disagree with. Sadly, while the baker won this case in the end, the ruling was so narrow as to not set any sort of precedent whatsoever. The Supreme Court’s conclusion wasn’t that an artist or artisan can decline to produce something that offends them, it was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had gone overboard in its antipathy towards religious beliefs in *their* ruling that cake bakers do not have First Amendment protections.

This whole thing could have been avoided via one or both of two means:

1) When the couple found that the bakers didn’t want to bake them a cake with a specific message on it, they could have easily gone to another baker who would have gladly taken their business

2) The baker could have operated under this simple business ethic: “Mask your contempt and take their money.” Smile – or don’t – do the job, cash the check, move on with life. Simple. If ya really gotta, write a Bible verse or something between the layers of the cake. If ya *really* gotta, while taking the order, express your objections while writing down the order; if they persist, once you deliver the cake, smile evilly and drop hints that you added “a little something extra” to the cake, that extra being the text between the layers. Under no circumstances add anything evil to the cake… but don’t tell them just what it was you did add. This sort of thing can apply to any sort of religiously or politically offensive cake-message that a baker is being pressured to make. Nazis want a cake for Hitlers birthday? Great. Enjoy the added flavor of the Star of David frosting in the middle. Democratic party having a party? Yum, there’s a chocolate AR-15 drawn within. And so on.

 Posted by at 11:22 am

Nickel-63 Nuclear Batteries

 Hmm..., news, science  1 Response »
Jun 032018
 

Prototype nuclear battery packs 10 times more power

Short form: beta decay of nickel-63 has been utilized in prototype nuclear batteries that produce about 10 times the total energy (not power) as a conventional battery… about 3,300 milliwatt-hours (11,880 Joules) of energy per gram. A battery like this would produce a trickle of energy for a century or more and could be useful for things like pacemakers and spacecraft sensors. Not terribly useful for things like cars… the actual power extractable from the battery might not be that great, and it would not be rechargeable (after a number of decades,when it starts to run down due to the halflife consuming a meaningful fraction of the material, it would have to be torn apart and recycled like radioactive electronics).

11,880 Joules in a single gram is pretty good. But over a century you could only extract about half that energy (the halflife of nickel-63 is 101 years, going to stable copper-63), and 11,880 J/2 over 100 years averages a whopping 1.883E-6 watts per gram. One hundred kilos of the stuff would give you 0.2 watts. So… yay, I guess?

 

 Posted by at 9:38 pm

So much for merit

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., I'm from the government, Meh., news, politics, science, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  2 Responses »
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.

 Posted by at 7:56 pm

Justifiable homicide?

 AARRRGH, cats, critters, Hmm..., news, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
Jun 032018
 

Dallas woman says she killed husband for beating their pet cat, cops say

Even if you you don’t like cats, even if you dislike cats, ya gotta recognize that someone who would beat a cat is someone who would easily graduate to whompin’ on humans for the same ill founded reasons. Is it legal to kill someone beating a cat? Almost certainly not. Is it *right* to kill someone beating a cat? Hmm…

 Posted by at 7:23 pm

I suppose this explains the trolls, somehow

 Crazy, dumbassery, Meh., ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Jun 032018
 

Over the years there have been a few trolls pop up in the comments section, schmucks irritating enough to get themselves blacklisted. The strange thing is that by far the majority have been Australians, based on their IP addresses. Now, it could be that it’s really just one troll hopping from IP address to IP address, but the *style* has varied enough that there seemed to be at least three or four different individuals using Oz addresses.

Why this blog should draw the attention of Aussie trolls in particular, I have no idea. If the trolls were hailing from commie lands like Cuba or China or Berkeley, that I guess would make a measure or sense. But there is perhaps a new datapoint to throw into the debate:

Australia Doesn’t Exist And People Who Live There Are Actors Paid By NASA – Flat Earthers Claim

At this point… sure, why the hell not. There’s a wage gap, white privilege is real, the Holocaust was a hoax, supply side economics doesn’t work, prohibition keeps people from getting trashed, gun control is a great idea and Australia is nothing but a troll farm conspiracy.

 Posted by at 2:18 pm
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