Category Archives: Crap For Brains

People and especially governments do some incredibly stupid stuff. This is about those stupid actions.

Quote of the day–Gun Guys

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They haul out the tired mantra of “government intrusion on their rights.”

But those are just code words for being selfish and lacking empathy.

Gun Guys
November 8, 2007
Another Child Shot Accidentally as the Gun Lobby Selfishly Refuses to Help Protect Our Kids
[I’ll bet you didn’t know the Bill of Rights was just code words for being selfish and lacking empathy. I didn’t either. Maybe he thinks people with black skin should stay out of white restaurants, whites only swimming pools, and not use drinking fountains intended for whites. Does that mean black skinned people should understand that whites like the Gun Guys shouldn’t be exposed to using the same eating utensils that have been in the mouths of blacks. And swimming in the same water? Isn’t that real lack of empathy for whites? And I’m sure it was being selfish and a lack of empathy for the Aryans when the Allies went to war with Germany just because they were trying to implement a Final Solution for the Jewish Question in Europe.

It seems to me there are a large number of people that seem to believe, at some level, that Governments can’t intrude on rights–that it’s a logical impossibility. They seem to think that governments grant rights and hence if the law changes the right no longer exists. The truth of the matter is, of course, that rights exist irrespective of governments and governments can only infringe, guarantee, and/or protect rights. The Gun Guys mindset is but one example.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Brady Campaign

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With a policy that tightly controls guns or bans them altogether, colleges and schools can ensure that the only people carrying guns are their security guards and the police. This is the way it has likely always been, and schools are safer because of it. For maximum safety and security, this is the way it should always be.

Brady Campaign
No Gun Left Behind
May 2007
[Evidence of these policies at work around the world are here and here. Some of the better known:

Maybe they are using a different definition of the word “ensure” than the one I am familiar with. Otherwise what they say makes no sense to me. But more likely they have mental problems and are unable to answer Just One Question.–Joe]

Like that is going to help

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It’s a pleasant fantasy but the people offering these sort of solutions either don’t understand the problem or don’t want to face reality. From one of our wonderful government laboratories:

Los Alamos Lab developing liquid scanner for airport security

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a new type of scanner that can distinguish liquids blaring out a warning for bad ones, like explosives, while letting through good ones, like water.

…

They will be able to scan bottles as big as a “magnum-sized champaign bottle,” Espy said.

“Apparently the whole duty-free thing is suffering, and people can’t carry their liquor on airplanes anymore,” Espy said. “It’s been disruptive to commerce. So, that’s one of the benefits of this.”

Software upgrades could add new liquids to the device’s detection list if any new threats arise, she said.

“The nice thing about this system is it’s not tuned to any specific threats,” Espy said. “As new materials of concern arise, it can be adapted to detect those.”

Even after the scanner is in place we still won’t be able to take liquor on airplanes–unless they are going to allow ethanol on board. In which case I need to demonstrate how to make an “explosive” out of ethanol. It would be tough to get a true detonation but in the enclosed space of an airplane cabin it just won’t matter whether the speed of propagation is greater than or less than the speed of sound.

And if they stop letting people take liquid hydrocarbons on board I’ll demonstrate the same sort of thing is possible with bread flour, powdered sugar, or coffee creamer. And when they ban those let them build a scanner that is sensitive to powdered human hair.

And those ideas are all taking the direct “brute force” approach. There are lots of other, much more subtle, ways to defeat airport “security”. TSA is backward for A Security Theater. It’s time we considered the alternatives.

A letter From Son

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My son, a freshman in high school, occasionally sends me e-mail from school, but due to a busy study schedule and extremely slow computers (it’s a public school) they are rare.  Today’s letter was notable.  Our complete exchange follows:

In the last period of the day, we had a study hall, and I had no homework. So, I decided to go on the boomershoot website and look at explosives. I also had the ultimak webpage open at the same time. I actually had a teacher come and tell me to find another subject!

To which I replied:

Sorry to hear that (actually, I read it but “sorry to read that” just doesn’t have the same effect) but I’m certainly not surprised. Our popular culture has been effectively trained, like Pavlov’s Dogs, to recoil (like the metaphor?) from anything that shows guns in a favorable light.

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/medicine/pavlov/readmore.html

Racist bigots once behaved in exactly the same way toward blacks or other minorities– back then you might have been looking at Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings while in a study hall in Alabama, and been told to read something else! We don’t hear much from the racist bigots any more, because they tend to keep their mouths shut in polite company. Now we have anti-gun bigots instead, who feel no compunction and mouth off regularly.

On a side note; many have never learned (because this story doesn’t fit the popular, leftist anti-gun action line) that during the civil rights struggle, many black leaders and religious figures joined the NRA and encouraged their black neighbors to arm themselves. As one would expect, violence against blacks tended to fall precipitously in those areas where such advice was taken.

Many would also be shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to learn that the KKK not only supported gun control (see above paragraph) but their political party of choice was the Democratic Party. No self-respecting KKK thug would ever vote for a Republican.

Give that to your social studies classes, et al, and let them chew on it for a while. They may hate it, but unlike much of what they say, they can look this up and verify it. Then you can explain that you were looking at your father’s web site and the site for an event that you attend annually.

Now, keep up on your homework, be nice, and have fun! That’s an order.

I’ve always had the policy of not “talking down” to my kids.  I use the same language I’d use in a conversation with an English professor.  If they don’t understand something, they’ll either ask me or they’ll look it up.

Quote of the day–Rev. Michael Pfleger

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We are not paying money to gather in a peaceful assembly. If they don’t want us there, they should vote Riverdale gun-free.

Rev. Michael Pfleger
October 27, 2007
With no permit, activists rally at gun shop again
[How ironic. Invoking the First Amendment while trying to destroy the Second Amendment. As a side note–the articles states the criminal trespass charges against Pfleger and Jackson from last June were dropped this month.–Joe]

Silly isn’t the right word

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Uncle is correct in saying “feeling threatened by an empty holster is beyond silly”. Bigoted is the word I would use. The same as if people felt threatened by blacks wanting to use the same drinking fountains. Perhaps even more so.

Quote of the day–The Gun Guys

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A gun range exposes kids to a lot more than just lead dust. It also exposes them to the fascination of shooting guns.

Shooting ranges and rifle clubs have plummeted over the last several decades which used to be a “gateway” for youngsters into target shooting. From there, gun marketers hoped teens would grow into adults and become gun owners and hunters. But now the gun industry and lobby have taken more extreme measures. To rescue its declining gun market the gun lobby is desperately trying to lower the hunting age in several states to lure children into the industry’s “gun and hunting culture”.

The Gun Guys
October 18, 2007
Gun Range in Middle School Should Close Now, Not Wait Until 2010
[It’s interesting he uses the same terminology frequently used to reference recreational drug use. Apparently in his mind firearms and recreational drugs are morally equivalent.–Joe]

The test was too hard

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If some terrorist gets a bomb through security TSA (A Security Theater) is apparently going to tell them try again because they missed it the first time or three. But since it’s coming from that liberal haven (read “logic impaired”) of San Francisco it all sort of makes sense:

USA Today revealed that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) report found screeners at SFO failed to find small bomb parts 20 percent of the time during a recent 12-month test.

SFO spokesperson, Mike McCarron, said the failure rate is unacceptable.

But McCarron said the TSA may have simply made the test too hard.

See also these news items on airport security:

This last item is of particular interest because the TSA is telling everyone, “Hide your stuff here, we won’t look there.”

I’ve been harping on this for a long time and I don’t see any evidence to invalidate my conclusions. It’s time to consider alternatives to TSA because what we have now is just Security Theater.

Whatever

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Apparently having been refuted on the concept that my children grew up in “an awful environment” they have now changed the subject to anonymously attack me on another front (By NephriteAU, 10-10-07).

Whatever.

Virtue of selfishness

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Most anti-gun bigots have a strong tendency toward socialism and the concept of selfishness as a virtue is beyond the mental grasp of socialists. Hence it should not come as a surprise that the “Gun Guys” should think that if you wish to defend yourself that you are being selfish in a negative fashion. What I am surprised at is that he admits it:

Katz’s demands represent the height of selfishness.

Katz is the Oregon teacher with a concealed carry permit that wants to be able to defend herself against her ex-spouse.

Societal engineering

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This started out to be a comment in response to Lyle then it got a little out of scope. The short background story is that Lyle says gun control advocates are vacuous loons and that if we had our act together would have politically crushed them decades ago.

Lyle, It’s a little more complicated than what we would like. Read what Dar Korra’ti has to say to get a feel for just one of the issues involved. Another is, as I like to say, it is irrational to expect people to be rational. For example, people have a very strong tendency to believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts.

Also, many would like to believe that it’s possible to create a perfect world–if only someone was given sufficient power/control/money to do it. They don’t understand that trade-offs are a part of any engineering task whether it is an automobile, a plane, a computer, or a society you are trying to engineer. Most people accept a certain number of automobile, plane, and computer crashes while realizing, at some level, that with the money, time, and other constraints things are working pretty good and certainly they wouldn’t be able to do any better themselves.

But when attempting to engineer a society nearly everyone believes themselves to be an expert and that anything short of perfection is reason to throw some baling wire and duct tape at the perceived deficiency. Then with nothing more than opinion they forge ahead. The rare few that bother to try to put numbers on things and pretend to do an actual engineering analysis almost always only look at one side of the equation. They only look at the potential good that might occur from their changes. They fail to look at the actual and/or potential damage their proposed changes will cause.

Are they “vacuous loons”? Well, yes. But I’m of the opinion that is the present state of the average person and there isn’t much we can do about that. And that a form of society/government in which the loons are unable to participate is likely to have serious deficiencies of its own.

Someone thinks they are a mind reader

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Someone apparently believes they can read my mind from reading part of my blog. And she thinks I have problems:

By Sheryl, 10-07-07
I checked that guys site out, very disturbing. I found the home life thread especially very disturbing. Any grown man that likes to brag about intimate relations with his wife on a public blog has some real personal problems. Using sexual terms to generate more search engine hits in conjunction with posts about his children saddens me. What an awful environment they must have grown up in. It frankly disturbs me even more that such a person has access to assault weapons and explosives.

Such a dark world we live in.

I left the following comment but was told “Akismet thinks your comment is spam, so it will be moderated first.”

Sheryl, I regret to inform you that you are unable to read my mind or my motives. The only thing truthful about your comment is that which you shared about yourself–you are disturbed.

Update: Interesting… someone else’s comment, again very negative, showed up but my comment and that of Miss C don’t. Does the moderator have an agenda?

You better get used to it

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Uncle says see-through frogs are creepy. I say you better get used to it. People are now creating completely new species. Future Shock is here and now.

I read Future Shock in about ’75 and my opinion hasn’t changed with 30+ years of evidence–Toffler just likes to blather about things no one can or has any need to measure.

Do you think we can gain any traction with the environmentalists who whine about the loss of species if we started creating new species faster than we made old ones extinct? No? I didn’t think so either. There’s just no making some people happy.

They just don’t get it

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I suppose its to be expected. You can’t get more government contracts if you were to tell them the problem cannot be solved as long as they are headed in that direction. But what you can do is sell them millions and millions of dollars of technology that can be defeated with a few dollars worth of mu-metal and/or a Faraday Shield. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s just government money. They have to spend it on something anyway, right?

Here are the details:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a comforting prospect for the million or so daily passengers on U.S. airlines. Los Alamos National Laboratory is working on an alternative to the “sandwich bag” solution for carry-on liquids.

Passengers’ ability to carry liquids with them during boarding has improved since the original total ban installed after a plot involving liquid explosives on transatlantic flights was busted in London in August 2006.

A total ban has given way to a partial ban because current X-ray machines can detect liquids, but they don’t know the difference between Gatorade and a liquid explosive.

But the so-called “3-1-1” plan for placing smaller-than-3-ounce liquid containers into one separately scanned, quart-size plastic bag per passenger remains an annoyance for many airport travelers, a fact that has not been lost on the department.

Within a month after the London scheme was foiled, said Michelle Espy, LANL’s co-principal investigator on the project, the laboratory had sketched out a “proof of concept” for a liquid-sensing instrument that has come to be called SENSIT.

In May this year, Brian Tait, a program manager in the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency made a presentation on LANL’s demonstration for using magnetic resonance technology to perform non-invasive “liquid and solid explosive detection at ultra-low field without radiation.”

Espy said the technology is a variation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a very low-field approach that the lab has been using for studying the brain in a technique known as magneto-encephalography, which is a way of reading signals emanating from the brain.

The sensor or magnetometer used in both the brain study and the bottle analyzer is known as a SQUID, an acronym that stands for Superconducting Quantum Interfering Device.

Comforting? I suppose you could say that. It will give some people a false sense of comfort. But then that’s what TSA is all about anyway. A Security Theater that makes some people feel good.

In Boston, of course

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Of course it was in Boston where the cops all went bonkers because someone was carrying around some wires and LEDs (via Bruce):

Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device today at Logan International Airport for wearing a sweatshirt that had a circuit board affixed to the front with green LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery.

This is not a bomb:

And furthermore, being the nit-picky engineer that I am, it’s a breadboard, not a circuit board.

If someone wanted to carry a bomb around at the airport they would almost for certain put it in a suitcase instead of wearing it in the open on their sweatshirt. And since it was in the open you can easily see there is no detonator and no explosives attached. But this is Boston. And so:

Outside the terminal, Simpson was surrounded by police holding machine guns.

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands, and not make any movement so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” Pare said at a press conference at Logan. “There was obviously a concern that had she not followed the protocol … we may have used deadly force.”

Simpson was arrested…

Bruce says Refuse to be Terrorized. I say Boston was just exercising their authority as a police state. And the police probably hadn’t gotten to play with the sub-guns in weeks. They had to justify having their toys by actually pointing them as someone occasionally.

I do agree with Bruce that the true terrorists are probably laughing at us.

Another example of TSA’s uselessness

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Box Cutter Sails Through Airport Security

At least TSA put on a little bit of a show for their Security Theater. They make him pour out his coffee.

Funny

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Old “fake but accurate” Dan Rather is suing CBS:

The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times, alleges that CBS violated Rather’s contract by giving him insufficient airtime on 60 Minutes after he was ousted from the anchor seat at the CBS Evening News in March of 2005. It also claims that the company commissioned a biased investigation into the Texas National Guard controversy, resulting in a flawed report that “seriously damaged his reputation.”

[…]

The suit says the public apology Rather offered to viewers and to Bush on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 was written by a CBS corporate publicist, and that he delivered it “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

It’s amazing isn’t it? It was conclusively proven the memo he reported on was a fake but no apology was warranted. Had he been getting away with that sort of crap for so long that he thought it was acceptable? If so then how much damage did he do before he finally got caught? His betrayal of the public trust should have required of him something much more substantial than a public apology. It should have been an exceedingly stiff fine and perhaps some jail time.

Quote of the day–Ronald Reagan

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The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

Ronald Reagan
[The difference I saw between working on government contracts as a “Senior Research Scientist II” at PNNL (I was once told I would be considered a “god” if I had a PhD) and working at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer was like teaching high school Freshman versus earning my MSEE. But you don’t need to be an engineer to see the truth of Reagan’s statement. Just look an some of our government agencies, like the TSA. This is just part of the reason why government should be limited; they are too stupid to spend our money wisely.–Joe]

Unobscuring Kip Hawley

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TSA head Kip Hawley (http://www.kiphawleyisanidiot.com/) attempts to explain the reason for the three ounce limit on liquids and why the rule is reasonable. He is deliberately obscure in places:

“This is something we thought a lot about. There’s a whole classified section to the answer, but in the unclassified part we are limited to discussing, with 3-1-1, the major focus was first, to stop assembled bombs,” he said.

“The nature of liquid explosives is that they are very volatile, unlike military-grade explosives that react predictably. With homemade explosives, while the benefit is that they are made of easy-to-get ingredients, the downside is that you get widely different results for the same quote-unquote recipe.

“If you’re going to use these explosives in the aviation context, you have to be very precise in the mixing because, as we found in the testing, minor variations in formula have a very dramatic effect on whether or not the explosives are successful.

“So 3-1-1- eliminates the ability to assemble the ingredients in a laboratory, using expert people to provide a finished bomb for somebody to use on a suicide mission on an airplane,” he said.

On a plane, mixing up a bomb in a suitable container “isn’t like mixing a beverage,” he said, adding: “This stuff is very volatile; it is very obvious; you can smell it a long way away. It’s very corrosive.”

The volatile stuff he’s talking about would be the acetone used to make acetone peroxide. And yes acetone is very smelly. I have never made acetone peroxide and have no plans to. It’s called “Mother of Satan” for a reason.

The “very corrosive” stuff would be nitric and sulfuric acids used to make nitroglycerin; probably the most well known of all liquid explosives.

Yup. Mixing up either of those explosives without being noticed would be difficult on a plane. The acetone in particular is very noticeable. Finger polish remover is frequently acetone. So if someone starts working on removing their fingernail polish don’t be surprised if you see the flight crew getting a little excited about finding the source of the smell.

The problem with the whole explosives testing thing is that there are lots of things made out of stuff they don’t, and essentially can’t, test for that make the whole exercise just A Security Theater. That money would be far better spent on finding the bad guys before they ever got to the airport. But don’t expect Hawley to tell you that. It’s not his job to tell you his job is a sham. His job is to make you feel safer. Do you feel safe yet?

Quote of the day–Ginny Burdick

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It’s just ludicrous to allow guns in schools under any circumstances. There are regular common-sense gun owners who overwhelmingly want the local school board to at least be able to make their own decision on this at the local level. Most of the parents I talked to had no idea, and they were horrified when they found out it was possible to bring a gun to school. . . . Johnny’s parents don’t want his first-grade teachers packing heat.

Ginny Burdick
Oregon State Senator
D-Portland
September 11, 2007
Teacher demands to carry gun in school
[Oh really? ANY circumstances? How about when some nut case or (redundancy alert) religious fanatic is shooting up the school? Should the cops leave their guns at the station when they come out to put a stop to it? If no, then why shouldn’t the teachers put a stop to it even sooner? And how about this teacher who has a nut case ex-husband? If she is a teacher then she doesn’t deserve to be able to defend herself? And it’s particularly noteworthy that she appeals to “common-sense”–because there is no factual data to support her conclusions. If she lived in the deep south 40 years ago she would be appealing to the “common-sense” laws prohibiting blacks to use the same water fountain with whites. It’s typical that she claims she is an advocate for “gun safety legislation”. I’ll bet she has never taught or even attended a gun safety class yet wants to legislate on the issue. In conclusion, not everyone is a bigot or has mental problems like Ms. Burdick. Some people want teachers to be able to protect themselves and their students. That is the real “common-sense” which should be adhered to.–Joe]