Hmmm… – Page 38

Warp factor 7, Mr Data!

Posted on July 19, 2023July 19, 2023 by Mike

Another from PopMech, this one of far more practical use than that last one. Well, at some point further on down the line. Maybe.

By Meddling With Spacetime Dimensions, We Could Finally Reach Warp Speed
New research shows that the “superluminal observer” needs three separate time dimensions for a warp-speed math trick that would please even Galileo.

The secret to faster-than-light physics could be to double down on the number of dimensions, according to new research published last month in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Specifically, the solution may lie in three dimensions of time, with just one representing space. The math is deep and complicated, but the ideas may be within our grasp after all. And there’s one math trick at superspeeds that may just “flip” your lid.

The key idea at play here is that of a “superluminal observer.” “Superluminal” means faster than light, from super– meaning “more” or “most,” and –luminal like, well, Lumière from Beauty and the Beast, and the lumens that power your home movie projector. The superluminal observer is a hypothetical thing that is looking at the universe while traveling faster than light. It’s you in your Star Trek warp-speed shuttle.

Ha! Shows what you know, dipshit. Most shuttles, excepting certain of the Type 7 shuttlecraft, had only impulse engines and were thus incapable of attaining warp velocity/FTL travel, as every Trekkie worthy of the name knows full well. It’s a bit like comparing, say, a deuce-and-a-half with an F16 in terms of power and speed.

The research team—led by theoretical physicist Andrzej Dragan of the University of Warsaw and the National University of Singapore—has theorized that many parts of quantum physics, like indeterminism and superposition, can be explained if you take general relativity and apply its principles to the superluminal observer. In other words, how messy does spacetime get if we take our shuttle up to warp speed? Is everything suddenly in multiple places at once?

Dragan’s new work indicates that it’s at least a possibility. Perhaps more interestingly, the way general relativity becomes quantum phenomena at speeds greater than light doesn’t seem to introduce any causal paradoxes. In earlier work, published in the New Journal of Physics in March 2020, Dragan and his coauthor studied “just” one space dimension and one time dimension, known as 1+1. In the new paper, the researchers upped the ante to include one space dimension and three time dimensions, or 1+3.

Why do we need three time dimensions? To understand, we have to talk about some math.

Annnnd that lets me out. I’ve always been a complete dumbass when it comes to math; being just barely capable of totting up a restaurant tip in my frazzled old noggin, mathematics any more involved or complex than that leaves me stammering and stumbling like Too Old Jaux. The last word here can only be Picard’s.

Who REALLY makes the laws?

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Mike

HINT: It’s not who you might think, nor who the Constitution quite explicitly says it’s supposed to be.

DIY, or don’t

Posted on July 19, 2023July 19, 2023 by Mike

PopMech asks a silly question.

How to Make a Bluetooth Speaker Out of Just About Anything
Why buy a Bluetooth speaker when you can make one that perfectly fits your style?

When it comes to Bluetooth speakers, there are hundreds of options ranging in price from around twelve dollars to more than a thousand. But why buy one when you can build one that not only blends in with your décor but also will impress your friends?

Ummm…counterquestion: why go to all the hassle of building one when you can buy one for twelve bucks that will work just as well?

Understand: as an inveterate tinkerer and customizer, it pains me to utter such blasphemy, it truly does. Throughout my entire life, I’ve always been all about building it myself, tweaking it, making it better or cooler or more functional according to my own personal definition of those words. But at a certain point, the practical considerations come into play. To wit:

The parts for this 50-watt Bluetooth speaker project aren’t expensive and the process isn’t very difficult. If you have basic supplies like speaker wire and solder, it’ll cost just under $100.

Uh huh. Yeah, no.

When I was locked up in hospital durance vile all those months after getting various body parts chopped off, a close friend of mine bought me a little Bluetooth speaker to connect to my phone so’s I could listen to the classical radio station all day without having to keep the phone right by my pillow so that I could hear its tiny, tinny little speakers struggling away with the sweeping, swooping dynamics and frequency ranges of classical music. It even had a fancy psychedelic light show built in, which was customizable in all sorts of different ways at the press of a button. Price: about twenty bucks.

And THAT’S when I stopped reading the article and clicked on through to someplace else.

Thinkers vs Repeaters

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Mike

David Solways ponders Great Schism v2.0.

On Politics, Evil, and Stupidity
In a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson, the controversial but rather impressive Andrew Tate suggested that the standard political distinction between Left and Right, liberal-progressivist and conservative, is not in itself the polarity that explains the culture wars we are undergoing or the social divide that is tearing apart our countries. The distinction, he argues, is between people who think and people who don’t, or as he put it, between “the thinkers and the repeaters.” It’s between those who endeavor to acknowledge reality — for example, that there are two and only two biological sexes or that Socialism, as defined by Thomas DiLorenzo in “The Problem with Socialism,” is “the biggest generator of poverty the world has ever known” — and those who merely repeat the ideological sedatives of the day or the tectonic lies that have become the trademark of the so-called legacy media. Tate should know. He is one of the prime victims of rampant and unscrupulous media disinformation.

But the schism goes even deeper than Tate’s antitheses. Quite bluntly, however problematic or elusive the definition of the concept may be, it has to do with the question of what we call “evil,” which has always resisted a definitive answer. In the moral structure of Judeo-Christian civilization, evil is theologically and philosophically understood as a rupture in the creation of the inhabited universe, the existence of groundless or unprovoked pain and suffering, or the handiwork of the Devil, as the early Christian Gnostics believed. Especially in the human world, evil is construed as the perennial tendency to lie or suppress observable truth, to cause harm for personal advantage, to inflict gratuitous suffering, and to bring misery and destruction upon whole societies in the interests of unworkable theory, unprovable assumptions, vaunting ambition, or what Samuel Taylor Coleridge, psychoanalyzing Shakespeare’s Iago, called “motiveless malignity.”

Admittedly, it is often hard to distinguish between perduring evil and “repeater” stupidity, between people who act with malice aforethought to deceive or injure others and those who clearly evince a deficiency of intelligence, doing harm unintentionally, going with the turbid flow, and embracing realistically implausible or absurd ideas and practices. Stupid is as stupid does.

“When stupid people are at work,” writes Carlo Cipolla in The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, “the society as a whole is impoverished.” The damage is more than likely to be irreparable. “A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person,” he concludes, though an evil person will give a stupid person a run for his money. We might better say that stupid people are the readily accessible prey of evil people. An infallible sign of a stupid person is the susceptibility to programming and propaganda — what Mike Adams calls an “obedience idiot.”

Or what, in AA parlance, is known as an “enabler.” Be that as it may, the Stupid and the Evil are co-dependents: ie, each relies on the other for affirmation, endorsement, and support both practical and *shudder* moral. They are in effect indivisible, thus leaving any attempt to distinguish between them an exercise in picking the fly shit out of the pepper—a mug’s game, worse than a waste of time.

As a bonus, Solway also throws in Einstein’s cogent observation: There is a major difference between intelligence and stupidity; intelligence has its limits. True, dat. But seeing as how the end result of the collaboration betwixt the Stupid and the Evil is reliably the same—advancement of the Evil agenda—then they should all hang together, in a manner of speaking.

Betcha didn’t know THIS

Posted on July 18, 2023July 18, 2023 by Mike

Borepatch links to one of his golden oldies (from 2011, no less) that’s just chock-full of fascinating stuff.

We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D. We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further – pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!). The reason is that bread is the staff of life – no bread, and people starved.

In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers. Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings. This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the “Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia” theory.

First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years. William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800. When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low – harvests are good. When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.

Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years. You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.

To understand why this is so incredibly bad for the warmist crowd, you need to compare and contrast with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (Carbon Dioxide heating the planet). The theoretical underpinning of AGW predicts a warm zone in the mid-Troposphere (say, 8 miles up or so) in the tropics. Essentially, this is a heat pump that cycles captured heat from the increased Greenhouse effect down to lower atmospheric levels (rather than radiating out to space).

The only problem is that with maybe a million weather balloons looking for the hot spot, nobody’s found it.

BP carries on from there, and it’s…well, like I said, it’s fascinating. Among other notable things, the piece utterly demolishes the persistent shitlib tomfoolery insisting on CO2 as the primary cause of all climatological woes, piece by piece and bit by bit, until not a single molecule of that mythology remains viable. The Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ hoax is explained in plain, non-obfuscatory language which doesn’t require a hard-sciences doctorate to comprehend. As Borepatch so pithily puts it: The whole edifice was constructed from cardboard and tape, and anyone could see that it was wrong.

Elegantly written; brilliantly conceived; meticulously researched; reliant entirely on actual, for-real science instead of the usual shitlib Pseudo variety, with politicking left entirely out of the mix for once and a solid dollop of historical fact thrown in for additional backup—with sincere apologies to the fine folks at Watt’s Up With That, who have been doing yeoman’s work on the subject for many years now, this is without doubt the best, most comprehensive yet concise treatise on the subject I’ve ever seen. BP has an equally-stellar (of an even older vintage, namely 2009) companion piece here.

You mustn’t miss a single word of this one, folks—both the linked posts, really, they’re good, good stuff. Taken altogether, they add up to all the debunking of the AGW hoax you’ll ever need. Bravo, Borepatch, and well done indeed.

Update! Fool that I am, it just hit me like a pie in the face that Watt’s Up is in neither my browser bookmarks nor Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle. Error corrected, with further red-faced apologies to WUWT for the reconkulous oversight.

The biggest question

Posted on July 18, 2023July 18, 2023 by Mike

To ask is to answer.

There is one fundamental question that any candidate vying for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2024 must answer — but that as of yet has gone largely unaddressed, at least publicly, as the field spars over significant but ultimately subordinate issues.

The question is this: How will you win the general election under the present voting system?

A: Unless he’s a Deep State-approved Vichy GOPe collaborator/co-conspirator, he won’t.

As Americans well know, we are lightyears removed from the election days of old — singular days when people voted in person, on paper ballots, after presenting identification. Now, we have mass mail-in elections, conducted over weeks, where those voting in person often do so on electronic machines, and with lax identification standards.

Democrats largely developed and long fought for this system, willing it into existence under the cover of Covid-19. Naturally, they have successfully manipulated and exploited the voting regime they made.

Ballot harvesting is becoming an accepted norm. Candidates not only have to earn votes but figure out how to collect as many votes as they possibly can. Are Republicans overnight going to out-harvest their opponents, or figure out some new means to identify and turn out voters otherwise sitting on the sidelines in sufficient numbers to overcome Democrats’ ballot-harvesting superiority?

The Biden administration is working to leverage federal agencies to mobilize presumed Democrat voters as well — also potentially in conjunction with the same NGOs — under a March 2021 executive order, “Promoting Access to Voting,” that has remained shrouded in mystery as the bureaucracy stonewalls over inquiries about its implementation. Republicans have started to engage in election administration, but largely in the context of monitoring over execution. What is the plan to combat Democrat control over election machinery?

Lawfare is also now an integral part of our election system. Republicans have started to devote significantly greater attention and resources to the litigation game, but to catch up to Democrats will require a long-term, sustained effort, backed with real money. And filing suit over election policies and practices after votes have already been cast of course has proven a losing proposition, as demonstrated by courts’ unwillingness to grapple with fundamental issues around the 2020 election largely on technical grounds.

Meanwhile, Democrats have engaged in efforts to ruin the lives of Republican election lawyers — in their own words to “make them toxic in their communities and in their firms” — seeking to kneecap their competition before it ever reaches the courtroom.

Are Republican candidates devising comprehensive election lawfare strategies right now to both aggressively target existing election chicanery and stave off that which is to come — with the courage and intellectual heft behind it needed to win in the face of an unrelenting and calculating opposition?

These in-built challenges exist before even discussing election fraud, and the imperative for a Republican candidate to exhaust every available means to prevent it, and in the absolute worst case to detect and mitigate it — this at a time when voting happens at further remove from the election booth than ever before, making finding and proving fraud all the more difficult.

Layer on top of these issues the broader forces any such candidate will be up against, and the prospect of winning becomes even more daunting.

Aw, even with all that, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait til they’ve finally achieved their longstanding dream of eliminating the Electoral College once and for all, that’s when the REAL fun starts.

Dezinformatsia

Posted on July 16, 2023July 16, 2023 by Mike

Don’t believe a word they say. Not EVER, about ANYTHING.

The theme of the bumbling Russians was clearly preconceived and coordinated, and commenced in earnest within the first 24 hours of hostilities. CIA/MI6 fronts like Oryx, Bellingcat, and the war-mongering Kagan family propaganda mill The Institute for the Study of War have pumped out this narrative so relentlessly that it has now been almost universally enshrined as “received wisdom” in the western state-controlled corporate media and among large numbers of clueless, arms industry-compromised former generals – even to the point of entering into the body of assumptions embraced by many “experts” who I expected to be more discerning.

One of the more inexplicable narratives included in this disinformation package has been the allegation that Russian troops are poorly trained conscripts who are thrown into the meat grinder with antique weapons, little ammo, and so little food they are literally starving.

These tall tales are then woven back into the main strand of the narrative: the Russian army is a disorganized mob of demoralized “orcs” whose only real talent is plundering household appliances, raping young women, and randomly gunning down old folks on the streets.

Attached to this constant refrain are repeated comparisons to the allegedly incomparable professionalism, organization, training, and weaponry of US/NATO forces. The implication is that any undersized company of exceptional American soldiers would be more than a match for an entire oversized battalion of incompetent Russians.

I’ve concluded this unrelenting narrative must have as its aim the persuasion of the general public and policy-makers in NATO countries that western militaries are so vastly superior to their Russian counterparts that no one should entertain reservations about making war against them.

Well, I mean, DUH, of course they’re superior! Drag queens; dumpy, out of shape broads utterly incapable of meeting physical-fitness standards, necessitating continual relaxation of said standards for their benefit; “transgenders” only in it for the free dick-chopping; outdated, poorly maintained equipment and/or vehicles; air-“superiority” fighters that can barely even get off the ground occasionally; PC Wokesterism running rampant throughout the higher ranks; militant feminazi officers demoralizing the grunts under their command by making them parade around in spike heels publicly—C’MON MAN! With all that and more besides going for it, why on earth wouldn’t Amerika v2.0’s military be the most fearsomely powerful fighting force in the entire multiverse, striking terror deep into the hearts of all prospective adversaries?

And with that preface, let’s turn to the primary question: could NATO fight and win a war against the Russians on this same battlefield?

My answer is an emphatic NO – for three distinct but equally disqualifying reasons:

There is zero persuasive evidence that NATO soldiers, weaponry, training, logistics, and command are superior to that of the Russians.

Sufficient NATO forces could NEVER be assembled, equipped, and sustained to defeat the Russians in their own backyard.

The very attempt to concentrate sufficient US forces in the region in order to take on the Russians would very likely result in the disintegration of the global American Empire and its massive network of overseas bases – thereby rapidly accelerating the already-in-progress transition to a multipolar world.

As to point #1 above, it bears repeating what I have argued multiple times in recent weeks: this war has seen the Russian military quickly evolve into a battle-hardened and quick-to-adapt fighting force. The US has not faced such a force since World War II.

Many believe the US is a “battle-hardened” force. This is utter nonsense. Of the many thousands of troops currently manning US combat units, only a minute fraction has experienced ANY battle whatsoever, and NONE have experienced high-intensity conflict such as is taking place in Ukraine.

Honestly, I consider point #3 more feature than bug, myself. Regardless of whether Russia is or is not really All That with a Cherry On Top militarily, unless and until

The US has thoroughly unfucked its own military, and
Its populace has outgrown its girlish squeamishness regarding war in general and evinces the will to not only fight, but to win, and
Its moronic political class is entirely forthcoming about US war aims, and what “winning” might and might not consist of

…Amerika v2.0 has no business whatsoever attempting to wage war against anyone at all, let alone any near-peer nation. Period fucking dot, end of fucking story.

Plenty more dispiriting but incontrovertible stuff in the linked article, all of it every bit as condemnatory of the idiotic notion of further escalating Bribem’s Needless and Futile War as I just was.

(Via WRSA)

Update! Scion of a family with a tradition of military service explains why he’s decided he’ll have none of it, yielding several priceless quotes in the process of so doing.

‘Eroded patriotism’: Teen shares why he now won’t follow in father’s footsteps as military recruiting lags
‘Symphony of sewage’ out of White House deters veteran’s son from military service amid recruitment shortfalls

Aden Gilbert grew up watching war movies, fighting enemy combatants in video games and listening to his dad’s Marine Corps stories. He considered following in his father’s footsteps but changed his mind as he saw the country and its leadership heading in a direction antithetical to his values.

“If we’re prioritizing being woke, and we can’t actually protect the majority of American people . . . what’s the point of having a military?” Gilbert asked Fox News. “Is it really worth joining and putting our life on the line for ideologies that we don’t agree with and that we don’t want to necessarily protect?”

Military children have historically been more likely to serve their country than their peers. Ten years ago, more than a quarter of new recruits had a parent who had served, and around 80% reported having at least one family member who had done so, according to a Pentagon survey.

“It was something that a man of honor would do, to serve and protect his country and serve and protect those values that existed back then,” Gilbert, 18, said. “But I think things are a little bit different now.”

Indeed they are, son. Astute of you to notice.

The military is struggling to fill its ranks as young people like Gilbert forgo service. The Marine Corps and Space Force are the only branches that anticipate meeting their enlistment goals this year. The Army, Navy and Air Force expect to fall a combined 26,000 enlistees short in fiscal year 2023. The Army also fell short in 2022 by about 15,000 soldiers (25% of its goal).

Military officials have pinned much of the blame for lackluster recruitment numbers on a competitive job market and a dwindling pool of qualified applicants. Only 9% of young Americans are interested in serving their country, according to the Department of Defense.

“I would rather tiptoe around literal landmines than have to tiptoe around people’s pronouns,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert has always considered himself a patriot, but said the left has “successfully eroded patriotism” by pushing restrictive laws, “woke” ideology and “celebrating satanic themes in music and Hollywood.”

“It just angers me seeing our president as the conductor of that symphony of sewage,” he added.

You’re by no means alone in that sentiment, me boy. Not by a long yard, you ain’t.

The problem with cities

Posted on July 16, 2023July 16, 2023 by Mike

Is that eventually, one way or another, their problems become our problems.

Imploding Cities Will Drag All of Us Down — Even if You Don’t Live Anywhere Near One
There is so much wrong with America’s cities, it’s hard to see why any contributing member of society would live and/or work in one of them. Some of the issues arise from far-Left local governance while others are generated by more widespread Leftist policy. These are coupled with an organic workforce evolution, as the United States transitions from an industry-based to an information-based economy. The result is urban areas caught in a downward spiral — and, as with any sinking vessel, threatening to suck everyone nearby down with them.

First, a quick refresher on the compounding problems of urban areas. Chief among them is that big cities are dark blue, and thus they’ve become crucibles of Left-wing policy failure. Uncontrolled crime, roving drug and mental-illness zombies, and swarms of sanctuary-recipient asylum scammers are crowding out reasonable people and businesses. The normals who remain to take advantage of access to cultural events (such as they are) and restaurant variety are also subject to totalitarian social controls and two-tiered justice systems that punish them when they fight back against criminals. But no matter how desperate the situation becomes, city councils can be counted on to double down on woke policies, then double down again.

Businesses are fleeing. In the ones that remain, shopping for basic goods has become a frustrating exercise in waiting for an associate to unlock the case so you can grab a razor and some toothpaste. Add in today’s high interest rates, which make owning and running a business prohibitively expensive, and the writing is on the wall. PJ Media colleague Rick Moran reported last month that large San Francisco commercial businesses, like hotels and malls, are simply walking away from their obligations, handing the keys to the banks with which their real estate is financed. Concurrently, major retailers are declining to renew leases and are simply closing their doors, unable to break even in an atmosphere where retail theft is encouraged. This process is occurring to some degree in major cities across the country.

While we conservatives point and laugh at the plight of woke cities from the comfort and safety of our suburban and rural homes, we may want to take a moment to consider a sobering issue. The effects of the imminent collapse of the commercial urban real estate market will ripple out across the financial sector and affect just about everyone in one way or another.

Remember the mortgage-backed securities crisis in 2008? And how, even if you didn’t default on your mortgage or didn’t even own a house, the entire economy tipped into what the hyperbolic media tagged “The Great Recession” and we all suffered? So, this would be kind of like that, except the problem will start with a commercial real estate collapse.

Which collapse is happening even as we speak (so to, umm, speak). Real Americans who aren’t shitty-city dwellers have no place they can reasonably expect to find succor, either:

Don’t start daydreaming that we’ll have a Republican president by then who will refuse to bail out imploding cities, either. When you realize that everyone’s pensions are involved, you understand that not bailing out these banks and cities was never going to be an option. They have us over a barrel. So we can expect a cool trillion or two to flow from Big G’s coffers. This, while we are still reeling from the inflation and high interest rates from the last crisis, the Great COVID Overreaction Rescue Plan.

There is much to recommend city life: museums, entertainment, fine dining, varied shopping and cultural experiences, travel hubs, and excellent medical care are all steps away. A large segment of the population prefers such a stimulating and convenient lifestyle, and they would happily live in cities regardless of whether they worked at home. Enterprising landlords could convert less-used office space to living space and continue to run a profitable business. But so long as Soros DAs, activists, and city councilors keep making urban life unlivable, America’s cities will continue to circle the drain. And we’re all going to get sucked down with them.

Too bad, that, and no, it ain’t really fair. It’d be all too easy to assume that, what with the industry and manufacturing that for many years was centered in our large cities now gone the way of the dodo, the cities’ influence over and ability to affect the outlying areas might have diminished a great deal, but it just isn’t the case. As ever-larger numbers of those in a position to do so flee the urban shithole-zones, the rest of us Flyover-Country types will almost certainly be feeling the pain too—and the lamentable tendency of those big-city refugees to vote for the exact same things that ruined their own befouled nests* is only the beginning of it.

* Which tendency may or may not be apocryphal, interestingly enough, according to what you’re reading and who wrote it

News you can REALLY use

Posted on July 13, 2023July 13, 2023 by Mike

From Sido, on a topic he knows a thing or two (a-HENH!) about.

Everyone knows that Americans can’t manufacture anything anymore, we just aren’t competitive on labor costs. In order to have the stuff we want, we have to send those manufacturing jobs overseas. Sure it destroys the working class but those people can learn to code or better yet get low paying service jobs at dollar stores selling stuff workers in China made. Progress! The free market at work!

It is pretty hard to get anything made in America, from electronics to clothing to just about everything else, all of it is made in China or some third world shithole full of child labor sweatshops. As a nation we are pretty much resigned to grumbling about everything being made in China while still buying stuff made in China.

Not to mention that China is a controlled economy with a billion people making low wages and living in cramped conditions most Americans would find intolerable.

But is that paradigm true? Can Americans really not compete with China and other Asian countries when it comes to manufacturing? I don’t think it really is, not on everything, and the big reason is that there is one thing that Americans make that is affordable and high quality:

Guns.

America makes guns. Lots and lots and LOTS of guns. From “low end” stuff to super high end firearms costing multiple thousands of dollars, like Staccato 2011s that run from a couple grand to over three thousand for competition guns. There are guns for every price point and every budget.

This video helps demonstrate that as The Honest Outlaw tests a Bear Creek Arsenal AR-15 and finds it to be actually pretty decent.

Let me say clearly that BCA is not my first or fifth or tenth choice for a primary or back-up rifle. Thanks to my dealer discounts I am in a position to get higher end ARs and BCA does have something of a reputation for the occasional quality issue. Still, for the vast majority of AR owners it is probably more than adequate. Bear Creek makes their firearms in North Carolina and has something like 220 configurations and calibers in their line-up (see here).

On the other end of the spectrum you have outfits like Sons of Liberty Gunworks and Daniel Defense who make very expensive rifles for people who like to mock “Jus’ as Gud” poors. Between the two extremes are an enormous array of manufacturers from Palmetto State and Anderson to the big names like Ruger and Smith & Wesson and the smaller mid-tier places like Stag and Rock River. Of course you can also mix and match as the parts needed to make an AR are also widely available and made in the US from barrels to detent springs.

Pistols are the same, although I would caution that there are brands you should never, ever buy, most specifically Hi-Point and SCCY, both making absolute garbage. I refuse to carry either brand as an FFL. Right now you can buy all sorts of handguns for under $500 that are well made, reliable and accurate for the majority of shooters from places like Ruger, S&W and many others. The most popular handguns for a long time running are made by Glock in Austria but the rest of the industry has caught up to and I think surpassed Glock, and of course most serious shooters who own Glocks replace most of the Glock parts with after-market parts made in America.

Well, if the politicians and their Corporate Americans sponsors/partners/co-conspirators/whatevers have decided the US is to be left with a viable manafacturing base in only one or two fields, I’ll take guns as one of those and be glad to get it. Read all of it, you’ll enjoy it. Meanwhile, in the comments, Moe Gibbs offers a few penetrating insights.

I am one of those who “learned to code” ages ago, earning a handful of STEM degrees in undergrad and grad right out of high school. Contrary to what Brandon and others think, not just anyone can “learn to code” and I sincerely doubt that Brandon himself has anywhere near the intellectual horsepower to wrangle an old-fashioned STEM degree. I’ve spent my entire career working in defense electronics, which, like arms manufacture, did not lose its all-America focus until fairly recently. My employer, a Big Three in defense, is now admitting non-citizen H1-Bs into the workforce, citing a paucity of native-born American applicants. But just ten years ago we had exactly zero, none, nil.

When I started in my field during the Reagan defense boom, every single assembly, pc board and wire harness was made from scratch, in house, to very exacting military standards from America-sourced raw materials using American-made tools by native-born, English-speaking American citizens. Today, we buy replaceable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) computer-on-a board assemblies from all over the world, which are essentially ticking timebombs, unrepairable when they break, often incompatible between manufacturing sources. They are obsoleted so quickly and often that the only viable approach is to buy as many of the things as we will ever possibly need at the start of a program, including a ponderous number of ‘spares’, which results in no cost savings to the customer (U.S. taxpayer) at all.

To bring manufacturing back to these shores, Americans would have to accept a very sharp reduction in compensation, and, hence, a serious crimp in their luxurious lifestyles. With burger-flippers commanding $15 an hour, skilled wiremen and component assemblers would naturally demand $40 an hour or better. And no way is any commercial venture going to turn a profit if the guys and gals who assemble hand mixers and home security systems and flat-screen TVs pull down such wages here while chinese slave laborers are paid a fraction as much.

Just like another moon mission, we could bring manufacturing back home, but only if we had literally no other choice. Who is going to be first to give up their $68,000 Beamer to commute in an old beater to work on the assembly line at a repatriated GE manufacturing plant? What “successful” childless working couple is going to downsize from their 3800 square foot McMansion to live in a modest tract home and raise a brood of White children with stay-at-home mom on a single blue collar income? The genie of entitlement and affluence is well and truly out of the bottle, and wrestling that bitch back inside would take some truly monumental effort.

As it happens, I grew up exactly like the example I boldfaced, the primary departure from Arthur’s outline being that my dad couldn’t fairly be considered blue collar (he was a Blue Cross/Blue Shield salesman and, later, a benefits administrator before finally starting his own independent insurance-sales biz), and it was nothing less than idyllic. So much so that for years, it’s been my oft-stated contention that my parents’ generation was the last one to get child-raising in the traditional, all-American fashion right. The loss of that tradition—abandonment thereof, more like—has been a costly, damaging mistake for the entire country.

MOAR NUKES, PLEASE!

Posted on July 11, 2023July 12, 2023 by Mike

Stat.

During the recent power outages and denial of interweb service, I took up reading a book I picked up a while back on a subject I have always had questions: The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future by Robert Zubrin (Polaris Books 2023). It’s a very thoughtful argument that debunks the toxic falsehoods that have been spread to dissuade us from using it by the ignorant, the fearful, and the fanatical from returning to the use of Nuclear power as a remedy to our festering Twenty First Century problems. Here’s a quick synopsis of what I culled from his book.

In a very literal sense, energy technologies have molded humanity. The invention of cooking with fire by those small brained Homo Habilis dudes cut the metabolic energy needed to digest meat, making it safer to consume and allowing the primates to eat more small animals or their enemies. Evolution directed some of these surplus calories to their brains, enabling the hungry organ to grow in size and ability, leading to the industrious little guys, Homo Erectus, the forerunner (to) us, the Bozo Sapien.

Over the millennia, humans learned to harness fire to smoke meats, craft pottery, bend metal, and more, forming much of the material basis of the pre-fossil fuel world. Wood power (or what is now called “biomass”) was such a good deal that parts of Europe started running out of forests in the 1700s. Britain was the first nation to innovate itself out of this dilemma, which they did by burning coal.

Mastering coal and other fossil fuels prevented energy scarcity, but also led to an unforeseen revolution in human life. Synthetic fertilizer, electricity, cars, plastics, smart phones, x-rays, ChatGPT—nearly all elements of modern life—exist because of fossil fuels. Today billions of people enjoy a prosperity that would be unimaginable to their ancestors.

This history of energy begins The Case for Nukes. Robert Zubrin, an American aerospace engineer of three decades tells the history of energy to set the stage for one of his core arguments, that humanity should use more energy. Over 700 million people languish in extreme poverty today and billions have not reached a standard of living equivalent to that of a developed country.

In contrast, radical environmentalists urge people to use less energy, which they believe is necessary to avert climate and ecological apocalypse. Zubrin contends that slashing energy use would be so harmful as to be borderline genocidal, but he does recognizes that the environmental harms of fossil fuels are unsustainable. Thus he endorses nuclear energy, asserting that only atomic energy can lift all people out of poverty while conserving the environment.

The fabulously talented and visually stunning Diogenes Sarcastica™ closes her post by gleefully declaring, “I say let’s start smashing some fucking atoms and keep the lights on,” a proposal with which I must enthusiastically agree; by gum, those fucking atoms have it coming. Before that beautiful, beautiful dream can hope to become a reality, though, it will be necessary to dispense with a great many Luddite shitlibs, which requirement I consider to be more plus than minus—a side benefit, shall we say, making the whole thing a win-win for everyone that matters.

Poesy

Posted on July 10, 2023July 10, 2023 by Mike

In comments to the Horatius/Trump post SteveF mentions a certain pome with which I was heretofore unfamiliar. So I looked it up and MY, but it’s a dandy, albeit long as an afternoon suffering all the tortures of the dentist’s art. A bit more of it, then.

XXVI
But the Consul’s brow was sad,
And the Consul’s speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall,
And darkly at the foe.
‘Their van will be upon us
Before the bridge goes down;
And if they once may win the bridge,
What hope to save the town?’

XXVII
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,

XXVIII
‘And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?

XXIX
‘Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?’

XXX
Then out spake Spurius Lartius;
A Ramnian proud was he:
‘Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,
And keep the bridge with thee.’
And out spake strong Herminius;
Of Titian blood was he:
‘I will abide on thy left side,
And keep the bridge with thee.’

XXXI
‘Horatius,’ quoth the Consul,
‘As thou sayest, so let it be.’
And straight against that great array
Forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome’s quarrel
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old.

XXXII
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.

XXXIII
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high,
And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.

Rings all too familiar in the modern ear, no? Especially those last two stanzas, which encapsulate the current situation in Amerika v2.0 pretty thoroughly. Proving once again that, in art as in life itself, some things really never DO change, and that the same can truly be said of eternally-immutable human nature—the shitlib conceit of malleable, perfectible Progressivist Man notwithstanding.

Much, much more rich, buttery epic-poetic goodness at the link, incredibly enough, which you should read if you’re inclined in that direction, finally clocking out at an eye-bulging Stanza LXX. Pity the poor shoolkids who had to memorize the entire pome way back in the Aulden Thymes, if Pournelle’s claim is to be believed.

Inside baseball side note: Man. A. LIVE, but what a right royal pain in the ass formatting that was! Thanks to the abject failure of the MarsEdit find-and-replace function to do its ONE FUCKING JOB, replacing all the paragraph HTML tags with line-breaks throughout the above excerpt of the pome by hand was a most arduous task indeed. Necessary though, to keep things all clean, tidy, and looking as they should around here. I swear, the things I do for you people…

Ahem. And now, to get cracking on tomorrow’s Substackery.

Got our number

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Mike

Don’t look now—OVER THERE, A SQUIRREL!—but the Rooskies just confirmed that they take the old Biblical admonishment to “know thine enemy” very seriously indeed.

Needless to say, It’s not a ‘smiley face’ sort of situation.

His final words?

“So far, the finally degenerate Western political class is trying to raise the stakes in bloody clown horror. In a state of persistent dementia pushes our little world to the third world. The stoned Kiev regime is inciting the war to the last Ukrainian.”

A degenerate Western political class, foisting “bloody clown horror” on the rest of the world? A state of persistent dementia? Yep, I’d say this guy (Dmitry Medvedev, that would be, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council) knows us extremely well; better than we know ourselves, from the looks of it. Meanwhile, back in “Keeeev” (just around the bend from “Pock-e-stahn,” in the preferred argot of obnoxiously smug former presidents, Western Enemedia “news” anchors, and other pretentious “citizen of the world” twits across the multiverse)…

Does that sound like a country that’s on ‘the back foot’ or ‘losing’? Not to me…Have the Russians had setbacks? Sure… part and parcel of war. HOWEVER The fucking moronic Krainians? They’re running out of people. The latest vidyas I’ve seen, from the Krainians themselves? The fucking ages of the ‘cruits and boots they got?

Jesus.

I’m younger than the majority of these guys.

I’m pretty sure if Grandpa is on the front line, yer in “Germany circa 1945” territory. I mean for real. 65 year old guys, in uniform, looking miserable? They should be at home but apparently Krainfeld is bound and determined to kill off every single male Krainian between the ages of 16 to 65.

Not that fucking faggot and his Kocaine Klown Krew are actually on the front lines…nope…he’s faaaar too much of a rock star. In fact I’m pretty sure he’s actually holed up where the green screens keep him looking like he’s still in the Kraine, as I have my doubts…hjuyhjfucking if anything, I highly encourage someone in the Kraine, or Putin himself, to put both the Kraine and us (the rest of the world population) first and put Krainfeld out of OUR collective misery.

I.E. drop a Kaliber on his fucking ass.

Fuck him.

Sideways

Preferably where even dental records wouldn’t help with ID.

Jes’ Sayin;’

We could use a little dose of that particular prescription right here at home, I’m thinking. Maybe Putin might be, umm, persuadable on my nuke-DC proposal.

Trump as Horatius

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Mike

Now here’s a YUUUGELY flattering comparison I’ll bet you never thought of before.

Donald Trump – Our Horatius at the Bridge?
After reading the account of Horatius again, I wonder if some of the electorate view Donald Trump as our Horatius. Bear with me; I’ll explain all that.

Horatius’ fame resulted from his action described in Macaulay’s poem and by Plutarch; he planted himself at a bridge and, with only two comrades, faced down an invading army until the bridge could be removed and the gate closed. He did so without question, an act of courage, patriotism, and duty so profound that it has survived through the ages.

Even so, a lot of people jumped on board the Trump train right at the outset, and lots of those folks are still riding that train today. Is it because they see Donald Trump as the latter-day Horatius?

It may very well be. There are several parallels.

Horatius took a stand, with only two faithful followers, against an invading army. Donald Trump’s campaign now portrays him as the only man who could take on the army of the Deep State, and that he is taking a stand to do so.

Horatius was unafraid, taking his stand out of a sense of duty to Rome. Trump’s message was that the Deep State scares him not a whit, that he is losing wealth by running for President, but that he does it out of a sense of duty to America.

Horatius took his stand with two others, also loyal soldiers of Rome, who shared his commitment. Trump sells himself similarly, that he is a “team builder” who would put together a crew to put our national affairs in order.

There are, of course, some key differences.

Naturally there would be, not all of which redound to Trump’s discredit. In the final analysis, we’re left with this.

There are probably a lot more holes in the comparison than I’m mentioning here. An actual scholar of ancient Rome would probably pick the idea apart. But I do think that this is a big part of Trump’s appeal. It’s a potent symbol: The strong, stoic man, standing at the head of a small band of heroes, with weapons drawn, saying, “No more. It ends now. This far and no farther. Now we will drive you back.”

Mind you, I’m not saying Donald Trump is that man. He may prove to be, but it remains to be seen. But I think, consciously or unconsciously, that this is the image he is trying to portray, and it may well work for him if he can resolve some of his other issues. And it may be a cautionary note that Horatius’ brave stand being what it was, Rome still fell to the Etruscans.

Here’s another important cautionary note. About five hundred years after Horatius, another Roman leader emerged, and this one saw the end of the Republic. That’s a parallel that voters should be watchful for. Caesar was a populist, legally elected Dictator first for ten years, then for life, largely on a slate of jobs and benefits for the common people of Rome. But in the end, his actions led to the fall of the Republic and the rise of the totalitarian Empire.

It’s tempting to say it can’t happen here. But a lot of Romans about 49 BC probably thought the same.

It may be tempting to say that, but that’s probably due more to its being comforting than it is to any factual accuracy. Because, as history has demonstrated for us over and over again, it can happen anywhere—and it WILL.

Fiddling with numbers

Posted on July 8, 2023July 8, 2023 by Mike

Yahoo News tries it and, thanks to Divemedic, comes a cropper.

In this editorial piece disguised as news and statistics, Yahoo tells us that there are only about only 16.7% of Americans actually own firearms.

the top twenty percent of all gun owners actually owned 55% of the guns. In terms of absolute figures, ten million people owned 105 million guns – for an average of ten guns per person, and the remaining 87 million guns were owned by 34 million people – for an average of 2.6 guns per person. The population of the U.S. was 263 million in 1994 – indicating that only 16.7% of Americans had actually owned a weapon.

So their claim is that 44 million people own all of the guns. That is complete and total bullshit, and I can prove it. Let’s use concealed weapons permits as an estimate of the number of gun owners. Florida alone has approximately 2.6 million active concealed weapons permits. With 12% of all Florida residents having a concealed weapons permit, this would mean that three in four gun owners have a CWP. That would be a very high percentage, indeed.

How many people in Florida have weapons but no CWP? That is impossible to know, but what we do know is that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement conducts 1.5 million instant background checks for firearm purchases per year. The anti-gunners are claiming that all of these firearms are being sold to the same people over and over.

I just don’t see it. It is far more likely that, when called by some random “survey taker” that the person answering the phone either says, “Guns? We don’t have any guns here,” when asked, or they simply refuse to take the survey. I just don’t think that surveys are a reliable means of “research” on any topic like firearms. I might as well take a survey of high school boys, asking them about their number of sexual partners. I’m equally as likely to get an accurate count in either case.

Yep. Then again, though, it’s not as if the Enemedia “people” are really trying for accuracy here, either. The point, the REAL point that we’re all not supposed to know about or notice, is to propagandize; to demoralize Our Side and enhearten their own; and to mislead and obfuscate generally. That, after all, is what propaganda is for, its raison d’être. There IS a factual bottom line here, which DM helpfully spells out for us.

If even one percent of the gun owning public decides to respond in kind to being called an enemy of the people, there will be somewhere around 1.8 million people who are armed, pissed off, and know how to shoot. Many of them spend their weekends hitting small targets at thousands of yards, because they think it’s fun. They will not be lined up in neat ranks out in a field somewhere, just waiting for you to nuke or drone strike them.

The US police cannot even begin to control the gang problem in our inner cities, and the membership of those gangs is only around 800,000 or so and the gang members aren’t actively hunting cops, no matter what the cops try to claim. This is a fight that cannot be won, but they don’t care because liberals are not the ones who will be getting killed. Or so they think. That is dangerous thinking indeed. The people of each side who are the least stable will be the ones who decide when the violence begins and how far it goes.

Pretty much, yep, and t’was ever thus. This all reminds me of a couple of things right off the bat: Number one, the wise old Heinlein quote from SGT Zim in Starship Troopers (Chapter 5) that posits “There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.” Number two: “Can you count, suckahs? The future is OURS, if YOU can count!”

I can dig it, Cyrus.

The perfect “pResident” at the perfect time

Posted on July 7, 2023July 7, 2023 by Mike

Okay, maybe not “perfect,” precisely. Fitting, appropriate, or consonant, more like. Justified, say.

Consider for a moment, and be grateful for, how perfect “Joe Biden” is as president of this foundering republic. He and his family project the rectified essence of every depravity now driving the life of our nation to some murky bottom, where it may be forced to assess its sorry state, repent, and perhaps recover (or just give up and die). There he stands, without ambiguity or conscience: “Joe Biden,” the personification of a failed state.

As a criminal enterprise, for instance, the Biden family influence-peddling operation among foreign powers reflects exactly the racketeering character of corporate America today — which is to say, making money dishonestly, and often for doing nothing.

The Biden business model also applies nicely to medicine and higher education, two endeavors saturated in prestige and pomp, like the doings in the White House, but which, similarly to that hotbed of policy and action, in the case of medicine, produces shocking amounts of unnecessary death (est. 251,000 a year from iatrogenic treatment errors), and in the case of higher ed, the production of specious and harmful Big Ideas — while both endeavors expand like turbo-tumors within the dying body of an expiring manufacturing economy.

As in the Biden model, dishonesty is now the keystone in both “Meds” and “Eds.” Our public health officialdom hasn’t stopped lying about the Covid-19 episode since it began, and in every aspect from the origin of the disease (if that’s even what it was), to the deaths statistically attributed to it, to everything about the “vaccines” cooked up to stop it. In turn, those officials coerced America’s doctors into withholding the best treatments (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) while applying deadly protocols (remdesivir plus intubation) guaranteed to kill hospital patients — which the government then rewarded with gargantuan bonus payments.

Higher ed has now turned its energies from learning to political activism, meaning the performance of morality preening stunts for acquiring status under the pretense of addressing social problems that boil down to bad behavioral choices and mental illness. Higher ed is now in the business of generating more of both those things in the form of manufactured racial antagonism and sexual torment (in partnership with the medical establishment). All fields of study in college are now racialized and genderized, and all at the expense of organized knowledge, which gets burdened with fatuous theory and spurious crypto-religious missions. The price of admission to this carnival of fakery multiplies at a faster rate than the generalized annual dollar inflation, abetted by federal loan guarantees that “Joe Biden,” in his munificence, seeks to abridge with a jubilee for student debt.

Of course, it’s the fantastic psychodrama within the Biden family that presents the most arresting model for America. “Joe Biden” tells us over and over that he loves his son, who he calls “the smartest man I know.” A father’s love is a wonderful thing, for sure. And yet, is there anything that Hunter Biden has not done to destroy “the Big Guy,” short of, say, driving a number nine knitting needle ear-to-ear through the old man’s skull?

OH NOES, we must all hope and pray that such a thing will never, ever happen. Why, that would be just awful. PLEASE DON’T DO IT, HUNTER! Well, unless an opportunity presents, and you just feel like it that day.

Putting the shoe on the other foot, though: is there anything Pedo Jaux has not done to destroy Hunter? Using his son as a bagman, then glomming a worse than usurious share of those ill-gotten gains for himself; blandly placing him in dangerous situations shaking down ruthless men; idolizing and lionizing his dead brother whilst essentially ignoring him; shaming his entire dysfunctional “family” with all his grifting, his groping, his serial sexual deviancy—time after time, Hunter has been urged into criminal behavior, without even the courtesy of a reach-around for shouldering all that risk.

So if this greatly-put-upon Prodigal did wake up one late afternoon with a sudden irresistible urge to spike the Big Guy’s brain via his crusty earhole, who could really blame him for acting on it?

Meh, then again, it might just be a case of the bad apple not falling far from the poisoned tree. Myself, if the whole damned Organized Crime familia dropped dead five minutes from now, I wouldn’t be shedding any tears over it.

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