Election day

Weird, weird election cycle. The stories are worthy of a Matthew Bracken or Dan Brown novel. I’ve got pages of links about voting “irregularities,” and a lot of them include electronic voting machines changing the presidential vote on a “straight R party ticket” to Clinton. None of them involve an irregularity going the other way. Not one. Hmmm.

Lots of shenanigans. Honest voting is only possible if both major parties actually want it enough to do what is necessary for it. Neither side apparently does, though for different reasons. Policy preferences make no difference if there are not honest elections to hold the elected accountable. A nation with no border and no common culture or ideas will never have honest elections, because at least one side will always try to take power by corrupting the election process at some point when power is within the margin of fraud. Here’s a few links to peruse (not all of them, just the fraction I decided to grab from time to time): Continue reading

When do the F/X start?

How should a person feel on the day he wakes up in a Dan Brown novel? Especially to realize he is not the hero, but rather just one of the many expendable pieces of background collateral damage to make the finale more exciting? And you don’t know if he’s planning on writing a sequel or not? Or even what page of the story you are on?
Continue reading

Action, reaction; the left never learns

Seattle passed a “gun tax” they claimed would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, dollars to be spent on gun violence research. Being idiots they are, the did not expect that anyone would react to changing incentives. Of course any significant percentage tax-rate increase on something that costs several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars is a considerable sum. So people changed buying habits and bought from outside the city limits. So the ordinary sales-taxes collected plummeted because of falling sales. The city is refusing to say how much has been raised, or lost, as a result of the decision.

So is it that they cannot learn, are they are blinded by ideology, are they clinically insane, or what? I know some of them appear to be intellegent and function in daily work life OK, soooo? Why/how is it that something so obvious is done again and again? This sort of thing gets predicted over and over, but it’s like watching Charlie Brown going after Lucy’s football.

Ballistic fart

For something more gun-related and lighter, I present the “ballistic fart.”

High speed footage of a 44 mag bullet striking ballistic gelatin. Has a good explanation, too.

bulletfart

You need to click on the GIF to animate it.

In the pot, or from the pot

Human psychology is an odd thing. A person can justify and rationalize all sorts of evil for all sorts of reasons. Collective action allows people to absolve themselves of guilt by saying “well, everyone was doing it!” (think social drinking, or conspiring to cheat on a test), or “I was ordered to do it” (think crew-served weapons like machine guns or cannons in war-time). Napleon used a lot of cannon batteries because he knew that people would not want to “let their buddies down”, and that being part of a team effort allowed each man to tell himself “I didn’t kill all those men, I just loaded powder charges,” (or carried cannon balls, or pulled a lanyard, or managed the limber, or whatever). Continue reading

Well… Isn’t that interesting.

More than a handful of people that read this blog are programmers. Anyone know the best way to get this into the hands of people that can actually do something about it?

Considering Washington State is an entirely vote-by-mail bubble-form and counted by machine state, the possibility of rigging by this method is more than a little plausible.

For what it’s worth, I found it from a Drudge link to Infowars, so it’s not like nobody else will hear about it, but…..

Banana Republic, anyone?

Update: Looks like YouTube’s view-count is getting messed with, just like the vote-count 🙁
After more than two hours with a DrudgeReport link, it’s only at 909 views, and 276 likes. Not bloody likely.

A question of tactics

In any battle, you must have weapons and tactics that work against the enemy of the moment. If you use Marquis of Queensbury rules, and he brings three buddies with barbwire-wrapped baseball bats, you will lose. I.e., you don’t take a gun to a law-suit, and you don’t face a mob alone. The English longbow was effective against the mounted French knight because they were fighting by similar rules, against similarly-minded men, on a fair battleground. The longbow did not have any effect against Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the Church door (a mixed metaphor, I realize; just go with it). No matter how distasteful it may be, you must choose the weapons that can hit your opponent’s “center of gravity,” where they have power. Continue reading

Meme trolling

2016 may be the year parody became impossible.

Draft your daughter

Because “equality.” Or something.

It takes trolling to a whole new level. Most bizarre election ever. The “humor” category tag is invoked, but it’s dark, very dark, humor. It’s like a Mobius strip written in LISP, a recursive self-referential redaction of a caricature of reality.

Pushed out the Overton Window

The Overton Window is the range of “acceptable thought” in ordinary public life. One of the goals of the left is to simply push any ideas they don’t like outside the Overton Window. They do this by Bowderizing books, by harassment, name-calling, shaming, and double standards. But most importantly by using language; by declaring some words or phrases  “beyond the pale,” and as such, anyone who says, uses, or believes them is likewise beyond the pale, is a common tactic. (ever wonder where “Pale” was, so you’d know where to avoid? (first meaning)).

To the left, words, and feelings of the moment, are far more important than actual actions, logic, or consequences. they are in a surreal place where your perceptions define reality. They really think that it does depend on what the meaning of “is,” is. And they feel it’s totally OK to redefine it on the fly, and differently for different people. So, to leftist followers, simply an assertion that someone is racists / sexist / whateverist is grounds for shunning and more.

Anyway, we now see this is full force in the all out media-assault against Trump. They are scared, and see this election as do-or-die. Continue reading

Carbon, warming, C4 vs C3 photosynthesis, and an interesting detective story

I came across an interesting story. A different perspective that brings together the mystery of the mega-fauna die-out in the last ice age, science-geek level photosynthesis details, global warming / climate change, crop science, and more. It was written sort of like a mystery story, but I think it merits consideration and more research.

The title of it is The Solution to Ice Age extinctions. The title is a joke, or at least a play on words and meaning, at a couple of level.

Ultra-short version: there is more than one type of photosynthesis, they operate at different efficiencies at different CO2 concentrations, different types of plants utilize different methods of photosynthesis, and different animals eat different types of plants. Nothing earth-shattering from each of these items individually. Very interesting when considered together, because organisms respond to changes in the environment.

Word of the day

Veritaphobia: fear of the truth

Veritaphobe: one with veritaphobia.

Example usage: People who think we can balance the budget and pay off the national debt without raising taxes or cutting spending are veritaphobes, just like those who think banning guns will solve all our crime problems.

InfoGalactic

Infogalactic is a new web knowledge-base, sort of. It’s a Big Fork of Wikipedia. Start with their open information, clean up the back end supporting database mechanisms, add a better editor system, add a better “different view for different folks” mechanism (that and more laid out in the Road Map page), change the presentation to fact-level, context-level, and opinion-level view, etc, and turn in into a much better, more reliable knowledge source. You could, for example, be the sole editor of your bio page, so you don’t get edit-wars by your political supporters and opponents: check out how often Hillary and Trump’s pages have been altered (8 times so far today, 11 times yesterday, etc)!

Check it out, use it report errors, become non-SJW-converged Galaxian, see what you think.

Predictions… about the future…

A thought occurred to me. They do, sometimes. Occasionally they are even interesting.

You may have heard we have a national election coming up. The pundits and pollsters are saying it’s too close to call, or that it’s Hilliary’s to lose. But one thing we know is that there are some states where elections are typically close enough that before the votes are cast it could swing either way with new news. Hence they are called “swing states”. Current polling (as of the time of this posting, anyway) says that there are 188 (solid/likely/leans) Electoral College votes for for Clinton, 185 EC votes in the “too close to call” column, and 165 (solid/likely/leans) EC votes for Trump. In the “leans Clinton” column are Illinois and Oregon, and in the tossup are FL, OH, IA, GA, PA. Continue reading

A glitch in The Narrative

Some of you may have heard about the Somali immigrant of undetermined ancestry, religion, or motivation slashed nine people with a knife while asking them if they were Muslim at a Minnesota shopping mall over the weekend. Most news stories say the self-proclaimed “soldier of the Islamic State” was stopped by an “off duty police officer.”

Turns out the hero of the day was also a USPSA member, 3-gun competitor, and NRA-certified shooting instructor who happens to be the “President and Owner of Tactical Advantage and has also been operating Tactical Advantage Firearms Training, Inc., since 2003.”

Yeah. Bad day for that particular knife-dude to go to the mall, and only bring a blade to a gunfight.

Thank you, Jason Falconer. May you live a long and happy life.

U.S. Code Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 101, Section 2071

Huh. Look at that. U.S. Code Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 101, Section 2071:

(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.”

Well, what do you know…. It doesn’t say “upon conviction….”. Hillary is DQ from being Prez. That might be an interesting point to bring up in the debates, or perhaps a campaign ad or two…. Might be fun to watch the Dems tap dance around it.

(H/T to Capitol Gazette via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical)

On a related election note, the German anti-immigrant party the AfD went from 0% (zero percent) to 21% of the vote, second only behind the SPD and ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel CDU party in her home region of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Times they are a-changin’…

Oops

There are so many details in the gun and ammo industry it might be easy to overlook some little decision and the side effects of it. Some mistakes are minor. Some are a little larger.

The ATF accidentally banned ammunition manufacturing.

Well, not exactly, but sort of. The changed the regs and reclassified nitrocellulose as a high explosive. You know, nitrocellulose. The stuff that is used to manufacture virtually ALL smokeless powder? All the facilities that made or handled powder would have to be totally redesigned, and frequently relocated, and shut down in the meantime. Yeah, just a minor change. So, the ATF, having been informed of the effect of this minor update, issued a “it’s still on the books, but never mind for the moment” notice.

Joe, I know you say you’ve had nothing but positive interactions with the ATF field agents and personnel, but you must live in a odd location in the time-space continuum.

Yeah…. Top. Men.

Metadata is harmless…

… or so the government sometimes says.

OTOH, when you have Big Data, with enough MetaData, it turns into Creepy Data.

No, a shrink having her patients friending each other *based on FaceBlock’s reccomendation* isn’t creepy at all. It’s all totally harmless, and could never be misused, right? (and people wonder why I don’t do Book of Faces)

I wonder if they could sue FB for violating HIPAA?

Survey says….

Monday morning I called a surveying company, and they happened to have an opening Tuesday. I drove down to meet them and talk about what was there.

Short version: The internet lies, and I was a bit further off than she, but it’s 95% fixed now. Continue reading