Light Ice Cream

I like to be a content provider, but I'm researching an angle on this administration corruption story that's proving tough to get facts on, so tonight I bow to Sean Linnane on NSA Warrantless Surveillance

When they want to implement the coup, first we’ll lose satellites - the Global Positioning Satellite constellation has the capability to be encrypted at the touch of a button. Only the government and military will have commo. Second we will lose electricity. Easy enough to do; the national grid is computer/satellite controlled. The masses will be in the dark literally and figuratively. Riots will ensue and effective resistance to Government control measures will be mitigated. The Powers That Be, all they have to do is sit back and wait, the populace will take itself down; after a period of time the Department of Homeland Security - think TSA, think ATF; think New Orleans after Katrina, think Waco - can walk into areas, restore order, eliminate any rebel opposition and turn the lights back on.

Big is picture right, but of the 2/3 of a million hams in America, I guess fully half of them are prepared for grid down communications, so strike that part about only the .mil has comms.  No way to guess how many of that 300,000 are prepared for long term, real off-grid living, but hams pride themselves on being ready when everything else is down.  It won't be a bloodless coup. 

Ever Known Any One Like This?

It's common modern psychobabble that women like to talk about how they feel about problem while men like to solve problems. 

Mrs. Graybeard (who likes to solve problems, not talk about them) and I ROTFLed at this. (or whatever the past tense of that is...)

Catching Up on The News

The show trial of George Zimmerman for the 2nd degree murder of Trayvon Martin is opening over in Sanford with jury selection nearly complete.  The judge has pretty much said the jury will be sequestered for the month or so of trial. 

Gun Shy Tourist at the "Around O-Town Orlando Area Crime Report and Firearms Blog" has links to good summary articles on the events of that night, and the investigative work done by bloggers and alternative media, because (as we all know) the mainstream media is in the pockets of the race-baiting industry on this one.  Links to American Thinker and The Last Refuge with really in-depth work, especially at the second one.  The Last Refuge article is a very deep investigation into what appears to be Trayvon's drug of choice (more or less in his own words), "lean", written by Dedicated Dad.

According to the autopsy report, Trayvon was 5'11" tall and weighed 158 pounds, the "ideal healthy weight" at that height being 160 pounds.  He was not the skinny little boy with the Skittles that half of America still believes him to be.  He was at least three inches taller than Zimmerman and only about 20 pounds lighter.

In the self-defense training I've taken, I've come to a view that whatever happens in a self-defense incident will be treated almost as if it's a dance in a courtroom.  Each move and counter-move changes the role of the parties and makes one the aggressor or victim.  When I first heard about this incident - I absolutely haven't paid as much attention to it as many have - I thought "bad shoot".  As time has gone by, though, it appears that the first reports were wrong (as they often are) or were lies like NBC's (once is too often).  It appears the night unfolded as Zimmerman reported it.  IANAL, but as I read it, when Zimmerman was following Martin, Zimmerman was the aggressor.  However, it does appear that when the dispatcher said, "we don't need you to be doing that" (following Martin) he went back to his truck, and then when Martin came after him, Martin became the aggressor.   That's why this isn't a stand your ground case.  When someone that's roughly your equal in size and weight, and probably your superior in fitness and strength, is straddling you, smashing your head on the ground and trying to get your gun, it's straightforward self defense. 

Snowden, The NSA, The IRS and Some Thoughts

The NSA stuff that kid Snowden has made public has been covered everywhere - except here.  There's a lot of sparklies going on to distract us from the important stuff.  The entire incident, though, doesn't appear to be a sparklie. This video clip is from 2008, and an FBI advisor to a movie Shia Labeouf was working on pulled out a random phone call he made two years prior. 

I personally can't stand the mindless news media, "Snowden: hero or a criminal?" thread that's going on.  First, it's a false dichotomy: he's a criminal by definition: he broke the laws on handling classified material.  Don't forget our founding fathers were criminals.  They were citizens of England and broke English laws by rebelling against the King.  Like the founding fathers, though, he could also be a hero.  Likewise the alarm over him saying "Lookie, the US has been hacking the Chinese computers just like they've been hacking us!" is almost 100% content free.  Anyone in a position of authority in either government who doesn't expect every government to be trying to break into their system needs to be fired, at minimum.  It's what intelligence services do, and as Borepatch has been saying lately, there may be friendly governments but there are no friendly intelligence services. 

Remember the Soviet space shuttle, Buran, among the last publicity projects of the USSR?  Pretty striking resemblance to our shuttles, no?  Seen the Chinese J-31 stealth fighter?  Pretty striking resemblance to the F-35 Lightning, no?  Gee, I wonder how that could happen...  (Personally, I think inducing them to copy the F-35 is an attempt to bankrupt their defense industry, but that's just me). 

The real question is the story about the wretched PATRIOT act and the NSA's grabbing all the metadata in America to try and find patterns.  In this matter, Snowden is exactly right when he said,

“Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. The storage capability of these systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of magnitude, to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”   

Congratulations:  we have achieved the very definition of a police state.  The founders would have been shooting by now.

I believe an attraction to the Obamanoids is combining the NSA surveillance state with the police state tactics of the IRS (apparently under legal advice of one Carter Hull) - using the IRS as a political baseball bat to intimidate and silence political opponents.  It appears that the IRS targeting of conservative groups actually affected the 2012 election.  This is as bad an example of executive power abuse as I can recall ever seeing.  In the Watergate era, the executive abuse was only against a small number of actual political opponents, not everyday citizens getting together to read history books or pray.  And I keep reading and hearing that although Nixon was accused of using the IRS against opponents, it was never proven he did. 

This is what I think the whole thing is about under the Obamanoids.  They are using the security state to gain intelligence on possible political rivals so they can destroy them.  Remember the case of Jack Ryan, who was running against Obama for Senate from Illinois?  How previously sealed divorce records were suddenly available, causing Ryan to drop out of the race and putting Obama up against a last minute substitution of Alan Keyes?

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of -- again -- the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan's divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on "Star Trek: Voyager."

Getting sealed court records opened is virtually a trademarked move of Axelrod and the Obama camp.  Can you imagine if they have an opponent's entire life history, thanks to pervasive, 100% NSA data collection.  In the last couple of years I've heard several Stupid Party candidates say that their opponents had unexpected dirt on them, such as lists of websites they visited. Tapping that NSA database?  Does this sound like the Chicago way to you? 

The Evil Party has a seriousness about how it plays politics that can't be overstated.  I'm not saying they won't openly cheat, or lie or steal elections.  I'm saying they prefer to look legitimate, like any other Chicago businessman. 

EDIT: 2205  Forgot a title, which is handy to have.

Insider View

You might have heard a lot of squawk about the Air Force telling airmen not to view the things that NSA whistle blower (leaker) Snowden released, because it could land them in jail. 

As someone who has worked in DOD and other classified programs, I realized what they were saying.  Old NFO explains it as well as it can be explained.  As they used to tell us in security briefings, just because something has been leaked and it's well known, doesn't mean it has been declassified.  It would be illegal to look at the leaked data on the computer system they're talking about, because it's still classified and it's illegal to put classified material on that system.  Yeah, insert obligatory talk about stupid rules here, but if you're an airman dealing with that stuff you often have to just say "rules are rules" and do what they say.  Not only is Ft. Leavenworth federal prison not nice this time of year, it's never nice.  

Instead of this being tyrannical, as Old NFO says,

"they are doing their folks a favor by preventing them from committing, however unwittingly, a security violation they would “legally” have to be prosecuted for."

Runnin' On Empty, So Tech!

Running low on go tonight, so a little tech news.  This is a development that is probably going to be a Big Thing, if the cost/benefit curve works.  It will bring microprocessors and controllers into places they haven't been, yet. 

American Semiconductor announced the first physically flexible microcontroller recently.  In the description it sounds like a typical low end processor:  "The FleX-MCU is an 8-bit RISC microcontroller with 8KB embedded RAM operating at up to 20MHz with a 1.2V core and 2.5V I/O. It includes multiple serial interface peripherals, including UART, I2C, and SPI." (for the techies that understand what that means).  The difference is the final form is flexible. 

In the background is conventional silicon wafer; although at 6 or 8" diameter it's small by today's standards.  Today's top of the line microprocessors come off wafers the diameter of large dinner plate.  Wafers have the look and feel of a gray mirror, with extremely fine, small squares on one surface.  In the gloved fingers in the foreground is the proprietary FleX system they've developed.  This is a polymer with  microcontroller chips built on it.  There are silicon layers and metal layers, all so thin the resulting processors can be wrapped around a standard number 2 pencil. 

Imagine a book reader that instead of being a rigid tablet, could be rolled up into something easier to put in a pocket.  Perhaps tablets that can be folded like a wallet.  Processors will end up in flexible things like clothing, perhaps for health monitoring, starting with military uniforms and working down the cost/benefit curve through hospitals to individuals.  And I'm sure tons of things I can't even envision.  Ubiquitous computing is ubiquitous.

The Truth Behind Overpopulation

Chances are that all your life you've heard about how overcrowded the earth is.  It's a basic tenet of militant environmentalists, who always seem to talk about saving life on Earth by destroying humans - as if we're not a native animal on the planet.  It's basic to Agenda 21, the massive UN program.   From the story in that link I posted two years ago:

Central to the plan is the idea of being carbon neutral.  That's right, "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever they call it this week, is the basis for mass murder on a scale that Mao, Pol Pot, or Hitler could never aspire to.  You see, to quote from this piece at End of The American Dream, the population must be reduced:

• CNN Founder Ted Turner: "A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."

• Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: "My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world."

• Maurice Strong: "Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?"

Gee, the moderate guy only wants to kill off more than 95% of the human race.  See the current world population is around 7 billion people.  For Dave Foreman, 100 million out of 7 billion is 100 out of 7000 or 1.4 %.  At 300 million, Ted Turner would generously let 4.3% live.

So how bad is the overpopulation that we need to kill off billions of people?  John Robb at Resilient Communities runs this graphic of how large an area the population of the world would consume if we housed them in the style of six different cities.

This shows, for example, if we housed every single person on earth with the population density of Paris, they would fit into the area of three states: Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.  If we used the population density of New York City, the entire population of Earth could fit into the area of Texas.  Likewise if we used more generous the suburban spread of Houston, the whole population of the planet would fit in the middle states of America.  I concluded the talk of genocide with this speculation:

Around 20 years ago, I heard that the entire population of the world would fit in Jacksonville, Florida, without resorting to vertical high rise buildings.  It would be austere, but they would fit.  ...  Even today, you still could fit every man woman and child in the world in the area of Jacksonville, but each person would only get 3.5 square feet, so it would pretty much be shoulder to shoulder.  According to the Wiki, the area of the state of Florida is 65,755 square miles.  Given the 7 billion people in the world, if you spread them evenly across the state, every person in the world would get 261.9 square feet.  Not a big room (unless you're in NYC), and small by US standards, but generous compared to much of the world.  Of course, the infrastructure would take room, so you'd probably need to spread them out, but I suspect everyone in the world would fit comfortably in the southeastern US.  And we need to kill off 95% of them because they're taking up too many resources? 

Sure, there's more to providing for a population than putting them in these areas, which is Robb's whole point.  His whole blog is focused on developing communities that provide their own food, water and energy and therefore need minimum help from today's global web of imports.  But any of these colored areas is a tiny fraction of the land on the planet.  It's true that there are many areas on the planet unfit for farming or cultivating - or that we wouldn't want to.  The next time that some greenie starts rambling about needing to have fewer children to save the planet, patiently explain the entire population of the world could fit in Texas and live comfortably.  See if their head explodes.

Do Stupid Things, Pay Stupid Prices

As I've mentioned before, Mrs. Graybeard and I have a small boat, the kind of small boat found in the yards and carports of much of America.  An aluminum V-hull boat, 16' long.  Seats about three with full fishing gear. 

I'm not gonna lie: the last time we had a boat was around 1990, and while we've had this one out maybe 10 or 12 times, I'm still not really sharp at that whole launching and retrieving up the ramp sequence.  So today, while returning to dock, I got into one of those "America's stupidest home video" moments - feet on the deck while stretching out to reach for a piling - and fell out of the boat into the saltwater lagoon.

There's only one positive thing I can say: I didn't get hurt. 

On the other hand, in my left front pocket was my iPhone 4s.  In another pocket was a magazine filled with .380 JHPs (the gun was safely in a bucket in the boat).  In other pockets were my wallet and car keys, with remote control door lock fob. 

It took us less than a half hour to get home to where I could immerse the phone in water and isopropyl alcohol.  By that time, the phone's light had come on and it was hot to touch.  The battery drained down and it has been dead ever since. 

Realizing it was time to pay the "stupid tax", I tried to call my local AT&T store and after minutes in voice mail purgatory, ended up talking with a guy somewhere who told me my two year contract would be available to renew on July 23.  Don't want to go without the NSA monitoring me for 6 weeks, but when I told him I needed my phone and contact list, he told me they could get me an iPhone 5 if I renewed my contract and he could get me a chance to do that now instead of waiting if I "act now".  I wasn't ready to tell him to sign me up for a two year contract, though.  Backed out of that and off we trundled to the local AT&T store. 

My AT&T store left me feeling conflicted.  I've never felt quite so... serviced.  Not as in "what great customer service!"; more like "the farmer had his female hogs serviced".  They actually got me running in the sense that they gave me a SIM card to revive my 4 year old 3GS, I'm trying to restore my calendar now, so I suppose it wasn't that bad.  I can make phone calls and get my basic functionality back.  What got me is the only option to replace my phone they gave me was to sign up for their TV/ISP package, Uverse.  Ever heard of it?  I get offers in the mail all the time.  By snail mail, once a week for sure, by email, every couple of days.  So on the one hand, if I even try this Uverse stuff, I can renew my contract and get back to where I was before hitting the water.  On the other hand, why can't I just buy a replacement phone? 

So here I am with a broken phone and they won't sell me a replacement without getting me to sign up for their cable TV, which I don't particularly want.  I'm sure it's fine, but I regularly ask myself exactly why I haven't pulled the cable out.  I sit down to watch about an hour of cable a week, maybe two, if good gun or fishing shows are running.     

Yesterday was spent working on the boat.  Today was spent trying to recover from falling out of the boat.  Wouldn't have even been in the boat except to check out yesterday's work.  There's a lesson in there somewhere...

The Coming Revolution in Small Scale Production

As a part of reading up for the other night's post on 3D printing vs. milling machines, there was a link to this book, Fab, by MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld.  Dr. Gershenfeld. runs the "Center for Bits and Atoms" at MIT, which describes itself as, "... an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the boundary between computer science and physical science. CBA studies how to turn data into things, and things into data." I'm not sure when I've come across a more interesting guy.

He does a pretty good talk on TED, but while that talk struck me as a bit disconnected and rambling, this talk at The Edge seems better to both Mrs. Graybeard and I.  Dr. Gershenfeld's summary is this:

We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally outside the box, as we bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world. With the benefit of hindsight, there's a tremendous historical parallel between the transition from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools to personal fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including sensing, logic, actuation, and displays.

Personal fabrication has the potential to completely turn everything we think in the order of producing and consuming upside down.  Dr. Gershenfeld goes on:

We're approaching being able to make one machine that can make any machine. I have a student working on this project who can graduate when his thesis walks out of the printer, meaning that he can output the document along with the functionality for it to get up and walk away.

In support of this basic research we started teaching a class, modestly called "How To Make (almost) Anything," where we show students how to use the millions of dollars of machines available at MIT for making things. This was meant to be a class for technical students to master the tools, but I was wholly unprepared for the reaction. On the first day a hundred or so students showed up begging to get into a class with room for ten people, saying "Please, all my life I've been waiting for this. I'll do anything to get in." Some would then furtively ask "are you allowed to teach something so useful at MIT?" There was a desperate demand by non technical students to take this class, who then used all of these capabilities in ways that I would never think of. One student, a sculptor with no engineering background, made a portable personal space for screaming that saves up your screams and plays them back later. Another made a Web browser that lets parrots navigate the Net.

I strongly recommend you watch the video on that Edge.com page.  There is powerful stuff going on.  We've all heard talk of the "Digital Divide" between rich and poor; he says he has seen computers sitting in villages because there's nothing useful to do with them. 

The World Bank is trying to close the digital divide by bringing IT to the masses. ... Rather than the digital divide, the real story is that there's a fabrication and an instrumentation divide. Computing for the rest of the world only secondarily means browsing the Web; it demands rich means of input and output to interface computing to their worlds.

3D Printing and CNC machines are part of filling this fabrication and instrumentation divide.  Add in a personal injection molding machine on Kickstarter, (more info here) and you start to see the megatrend developing.  Small lot production folks are in a bind.  It can cost a lot to make a mold for injection molding (which allows you to mass produce cheap parts), but the surface quality you get from the mold is miles ahead of what you get on low end 3D printer. 

 If you want to make small, commercial-quality plastic parts or prototypes, it can cost $5,000 to $10,000 or more to make a steel mold. Then you send the mold to China, where a manufacturer will use large hydraulic molders to make 10,000 parts at 1 cent each. But if I only need 10 parts a week and want to make them quickly, on demand, there's no practical way to do that.

By the way, if you have a CNC mill, you can make your molds (yes, it's a specialty you'll have to learn).  A small production company can start with a 3D printer and small injection molding machine.  The difficulties of producing good, clean, injection molded parts go up quite a bit as the items get bigger, but this would fill many applications for typical small parts.

In the end, personal fabrication isn't about making personal versions of what Walmart sells for yourself.  It's about making something that nobody sells, or something that not enough people know about or care about.  It's about things with too little demand for the big companies to turn on the production machines.  Or it's about making the right thing you need just when you need it, when you're in "rural India or the far north of Norway", as Dr. Gershenfeld demonstrated.  Just as broadcasting with three networks has turned into narrowcasting with cable systems that carry hundreds of specialized channels, manufacturing is going to turn to more personalized products, too. 

The Unpleasant Case of Sarah Murnaghan

Sarah Murnaghan is the 10 year old girl who needs a lung.  She has been quite in the news this week, as Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius refused to intervene into an existing process intended to determine the optimum distribution of an exceptionally scarce resource: donated lungs. 

Through a roundabout path, I ended up at an insightful article by Ace of Spades on Bretibart.com that encapsulates what bothered me about this whole incident.  You should read the whole thing.  (Thanks to Robb, I bounced through Popehat who does an excellent imitation of the Screwtape Letters, "Screwtape Embraces the Internet").

A federal judge has ruled that little Sarah can be put on a different waiting list; rather than waiting for a pediatric lung, Sarah can be put on the list waiting for an adult lung.  Adult lungs are about 50 times more available than pediatric lungs because, thank God, children rarely die of traumatic brain injury leaving behind most organs.

The problem is what this whole episode says of the coming of Obamacare and life in general.

Oh I don't mean to say I don't feel sympathy for this little girl.

But I mean this:  Her family will succeed in politicking on her behalf.  With ObamaCare coming, and bureaucrats patrolling for whether it's cost-justified to save your life or give you that new hip, our health care will increasingly consist of politicking -- going to our government to plead for special favor, enlisting the media and, for the well-heeled, even PR companies.

Our nation is no longer one of rights or ownership.  It is now one in which we merely plead to the courtiers of government for favors, or to keep something we have in our possession.

Sarah got her special place on the list because of a judge.  More to the point, Sarah  got onto this list by popularity contest.  Her parents worked the media and the public as deftly as any PR expert ever could.  Like the author of that piece, I don't mean to say I don't feel sympathy for Sarah or her parents.  I can hardly imagine the depths of their desperation at losing their daughter.  The public lobbying campaign they waged was a natural reaction. But what they really did was move to save their daughter's life at the expense of the life of another adult who needs that lung. With scarce resources, like lungs to transplant, it's inevitable that saving one kills another. 

What's coming is a time when exactly who gets a transplant is whomever polls better on Twitter, or who gets more Reddit Updings.  In an era when all resources are scarce (all single-payer health services are like this) the right diseases will get treated; the unfavored diseases, not so much.  If you have one of those rare diseases that only a handful of people get, especially if it has an expensive drug or surgical treatment, so sorry, you need to plan for your funeral.  Congress had a lobby full of women in pink T-shirts and ribbons when the budget was being set, so the money for your disease went to breast cancer.  (Or an lobby full of women lobbying for autism research - whatevs). 

This is what I can't stand about big government and big government health care systems.  To get what you should be able buy, you need to grovel and beg to the government.  You need to put on PR campaigns, and you probably need to be photogenic. I'm sure it would probably help to spread some donations around.  It aggrandizes them and diminishes us all.

As an engineer, I say the answer to the transplant problem is tissue engineering, and the solution to 10 year old girls needing lungs is genetically engineering a cure for cystic fibrosis.  Unfortunately, you can expect less medical research due to the Obamacare taxes.

On 3D Printing And Making Guns

A little diversion on the subject of making guns and stuff. 

In broad terms, there are two ways of making things: additive and subtractive.  Most of us have made things out of wood, even if it's just from a mandatory wood shop class we took in school.  Woodworking is a great example of a subtractive process.  You start out with boards, cut away portions to cut elements to size, maybe cut away portions to make strong joints, or thin the the stock down to size with a plane.  Of course, it started out as a tree, so a lot was cut away or thrown away to get the lumber you started with.  Sculpting, as most of it seems to be done, is another subtractive process.  As one sculptor said, start with a block of marble and cut away everything that doesn't look like (his finished piece). 

In contrast, there are additive processes, where you put down only what you need.  A rough example would be slip casting ceramics, where you pour a water-clay mixture into a mold, and form a layer of the ceramic on the inside of the mold.  You eventually remove the mold and are left with a thin layer of clay that is then glazed (or not) and fired.  Likewise, in lost wax casting, widely used in the jewelry industry, a wax mold is embedded into a ceramic that dries and sets up hard, then fired to produce a copy of the wax mold inside the ceramic, and molten gold (or silver, palladium, platinum...) is poured into the mold, putting down just the amount needed.   

Clearly, 3D printing is an additive process; the subtractive process is usually just called machining. 

Quite some time ago, I did a piece on The Futility of Gun Control, in which I linked to a piece by Popehat called "The Third Wave, CNC, Stereolithography, and the end of gun control".  In that piece, he talks about 3D printers and CNC machine tools and was really right on target.  As someone with the kind of low-end, home CNC machines he talks about, I really think the emphasis on 3D printing lately, and especially the bedwetting over 3D printing a gun, is a bit excessive. 

For $1300, your local Staples will get you into a Cube 3D printer.  I'm not even sure if that really gets you started, and I'm less sure you could build anything other than a single shot gun that might be as dangerous to you as someone you need to shoot.  For about two bills more than that price, you can home build a basic CNC Router.  Gizmodo just ran a piece on a Shopbot at $5000, with a work area of about 24 x 18 x 2".  Clearly intended for thin stock, like making signs or cutting things out of plywood, this is almost 4x the price of the 3D printer, and while it can make serious stuff, I don't believe you could finish an 80% lower on it.  Check out the video on this page of a couple that makes a cool triple bunk bed for their obviously delighted daughters.  They milled what looks like plywood or MDF and assembled it themselves. 

Note that the cool machine they show in most of the pictures in that article isn't this little $5000 machine, it's Shopbot's $40,000 five axis machine.  Personally, if I was going to drop $5000 on a ready made machine, I'd get one of these from Little Machine Shop:

This is a Sieg (Chinese) CNC machine with a work envelope that's 10.2" × 4.3" × 7.1"; smaller in XY than the desktop Shopbot (it's not designed for quarter sheets of plywood), but tall enough to cut that fire control pocket.  It will cut aluminum, steel, stainless, titanium, brass, and other really useful materials along with wood, plastic and wax (useful for models).   Its list price is $500 less than that Shopbot, but it weighs 275 pounds so it will cost a bit to ship it and get into place in your garage.  By the way, this is considered a mini-mill.  It's not a big machine by anybody's standards.

We can get into the particulars of machines another time.  The 3D printer, as I see it, has only one thing going for it: it doesn't require much from the user to create a piece that has been designed and is known to work.  The same thing can't be said for the CNC milling machine, which needs some knowledge of machine shop practice from user.  You need to know, for example, the way you clamp your work down can change its dimensions enough to matter.  The 3D printer, to the best of my knowledge, isn't terribly dangerous.  It can burn you if the plastic is hot, but a well designed machine is probably not going to let a user stick their fingers into places where they can get hurt.  A mill, on the other hand, is capable of cutting steel, so your finger isn't going to offer much resistance!  On the other hand, if you know it can take your hand off, you tend to keep that in mind, and there's no reason any adult who can cook on a hot stove, or shoot safely, can't use machine tools safely.

Finally, I have to say that no matter what you get, it's just the start.  For the CNC machines you'll need design software and very likely software to turn part shapes into the instructions for the machine.  For the printers, you'll need 3D modeling software, too.   Some of them seem to be shipping proprietary software with their printers. 

1982

31 years ago today - this evening, actually - Mrs. Graybeard and I were married. 

Like most folks, we've gone through some trials, but not too many.  More times than I deserve, very dark clouds turned out to have thick silver linings.  There were times when I thought we wouldn't get to see even 20 years, no matter how much we both would have wanted, but we did.

Remember: the only time you can say "it's all downhill from here" is when you're over the hill.

Building Electronics

If you're of a certain mindset and a certain age, the name Heathkit is going to get a reaction from you.  You're probably getting all warm and runny inside just thinking about it.

For the rest of you, the Heath Company, apparently still existing in some form, was founded in Chicago in 1926 selling kit airplanes.  Later, (as I've heard the story) when they got hold of some electronic parts that were WWII surplus, they started the electronic kit business that made them legendary, and moved to upstate Michigan.  Most of the people that are all warm about them are thinking "Benton Harbor, Michigan" right about now.  

What made Heathkit great was their manuals.  They realized that they needed to be as explicit as possible and they needed to guarantee your success, or folks simply wouldn't buy the kits.  They needed to make them as foolproof as possible, and their manuals remain a monument to the draftsman's art today.  Here's an example, a view of a page in one manual:

Their designs and products were solid, rarely stellar (all IMO, of course); what sold them was two things.  First, in the days of this sort of assembly, doing the hand work yourself could save you a substantial part of the cost of the electronics; perhaps 30 to 50%.  Second, there is an undeniable moment of magic when you turn on something you built yourself, possibly hundreds of parts and hours upon hours of work, and it works.  As the electronics industry moved from hand-wired, hand-soldered things like this (I actually owned one of these HD-11s!) over to printed circuits (AKA printed wiring boards), the portion of price that was labor went down, reducing the incentive to build the kit. 

That said, they produced some products that are still revered in ham radio circles, and some unique items like color TVs with test equipment built in to align the fussy sets yourself.

Over the last couple of years, there have been rumors they're starting up again, and rumors they're not.  They appear to be there again at the expected URL.    And if you're tragically geeky and want to do a very in-depth survey that takes about half an hour, don't tell anyone I told you it's here. 

BTW, the first "major" Heathkit I built was this one, when I was 13. 

Same Chart, Different Conclusion

Mike "Mish" Shedlock over at Mish's Global Trend Analysis posts this chart in "Lowest Core PCE in History; "Flation" Perspective"

As you can see by the title, PCE is the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index. You can also see my main gripe with it: it excludes food and energy spending.  Just like most of the governmental data. 

Mish looks at the last year of lowering PCE, calls it "disinflation", and concludes:

...the hyperinflationists missed the boat by a mile. 

If there's anything ominous here, it's that personal consumption has been in pretty steady decline since mid-2011.  That's despite the Fed monetizing just over a trillion dollars per year in QE3 and the previous money creation moves.  They've inflated the price of stocks and bonds, but haven't brought about recovery.  Basically, as so many of us have said so many times, the Fed is running out of ammo.  When you create a few trillion dollars out of thin air, the next hundred billion has less effect (see marginal utility function - Econ 101).

This chart says spending on other things is down.  I think the explanation is pretty simple.  Food and energy are inflating in price.  If incomes aren't keeping up with the inflation in those prices, a higher percentage of income has to be spent on food and energy than the other things in the PCE.  If anything, this shows just how misleading it is for the government to exclude food and energy costs from their measures of inflation. 

It doesn't mean the hyperinflationists are wrong.  Again, hyperinflation isn't "inflation on steroids", it's economic collapse caused by lack of faith in the currency.  Sellers demand more and more payment until a runaway failure happens.  And besides, this economic mess isn't over.  The real S hasn't even started Hitting The Fan yet.  Wait till the Yen collapses.  Or the Euro.  Or wait 'til anyone borrowing money in the form of government bonds insists on inflation compensation.  The price of the 10 year bond has been going up for a few weeks lately - and there's a clear uptrend since mid '12.  If this keeps going, interest rates are going to have to go up.  The US can't survive interest rates at what they really should be. 

The College Bubble

Divemedic over at Confessions of a Street Phamacist has a good article on the college bubble we're going through, Higher Cost, Lower Value.  Not just the cost bubble, although that's necessarily a big part of it, but the need for college in general.  It's a topic I've written on before, too.  He has some good examples:

In 1880, it cost: $400 per year to attend Vassar. This included tuition, room, board, heat, light, and laundry service. Adjusted for inflation, $400 in 1883 equals $9,635 in 2013.
$300 per year to attend Georgetown. This included room, board, and tuition. Adjusted for inflation, $300 in 1883 equals $7,126 in 2013. Georgetown law charged $150 for the entire law school tuition, and $100 for the entire series of medical school lectures.

Since 1980, inflation has caused everything to more than double in price. What cost $1 in 1980 now costs $2.15. However, every dollar in college tuition in 1980 is now $5.98. That's right, college tuition is rising at a rate that is 5 times higher than inflation.

This inflation in college prices is a terrible burden to today's students, and yet it's brought on almost entirely by the academic sector in collusion with the federal government.  Student loans, now the dominion of fed.gov alone, are available in essentially unlimited amounts.  There are only so many chairs in the colleges around the country, so the combination of demand for those chairs and fed.money assures any price will be met. 

Another place where government (at all levels) pumps the education bubble is by insisting on certain qualifications to be "allowed" to work in an area.  Divemedic writes:

In the 1980s, it was possible to be a Physician Assistant with only an Associate's degree. Now it requires a Masters. The school itself is still two years, but it now requires a Bachelor's degree for entry. What the degree is in does not matter.  Nurse Practitioner was a master's program, now it is becoming a PhD program.  Registered Nurse is fast requiring a profession requiring a BSN. [Emphasis added: SiG]

It doesn't matter what your degree is in, as long as you have one??  Only someone with an advanced degree could come up with something that crazy.  If you don't need to know something from your undergrad degree to understand the material, it's nothing but a "weed out" requirement, to limit the number of applicants.  The only thing it could possibly demonstrate is that you can take on four years of steady work.  Four years in the military would prove much more grit and determination.  It just means the admissions office doesn't have to think about whether a student can really make it, if the student can't color in one bubble:  Bachelor's Degree: Yes () No ().  If there are no scientific principles called on that one needs from undergraduate work, the undergrad degree shouldn't be required.   This sort of "requirements inflation" leads to needing a bachelor's degree to do manicures or a state license to braid hair.  This sort of rule does nothing to protect consumers; it just protects practitioners in the field.

In an article I did in April of '11, (second part of the one linked above) I wrote:

There are many jobs that simply can't be taught without the student doing the task.  There may be no better example for "you can't learn it by reading a book" than shooting.  You can read all you want, but sooner or later you need to master your physical gun handling.  As another example, I've ground a few telescope mirrors.  Like shooting, you can read all about concepts, but nothing other than actually doing it will teach you how to do it; it's a task overwhelmingly controlled by the feel, the sound, and the behavior of the glass in your hands.  Things like this were taught by apprenticeship before the gentrification occurred that says we need everyone to attend college.  I have tremendous respect and admiration for opticians, machinists and other workers who can exceed the accuracy of their tools and produce works of mechanical art.  On the opposite end, surgeons go through an internship and residency where they learn the hands-on work of surgery.  This is nothing if not an apprenticeship, for people who already have eight to 10 years of college.

One of the reasons we press for college is how badly the public school system sucks.  Divemedic points out, "Abraham Lincoln took the Bar exam, and never even completed the third grade.", while Ann Coulter has pointed out that Frederick Douglass, a freed slave who taught himself to read, left behind a body of work with a vocabulary that modern law school students can't understand.  When faced with blank stares from high school graduates, and long searches to find one who can read a ruler and understand simple paragraphs, companies start asking for more education.  Instead, they should be demanding public schools either get better or shut down.  And, yes, it is that bad; I've had to hire hourly workers for manufacturing companies - I've seen adults who can't read a ruler myself, 30 years ago.

Divemedic has a graph of college tuition vs. inflation.  How about this Cato institute graph of SAT and other test scores vs. spending and staffing in public schools?  This shows no matter how much we spend on public education, achievement remains the same. 

For all of recorded history, until the last hundred years or so, education was done at home or with a local person with the right temperament for the task.  Schoolmarm used to be a respected title, not an insult.  Today, there are those trying to restrain or eliminate home schooling because home schooled students routinely outperform their public-schooled cohorts.  A German family who came to the US so they could home school their children has been a target for deportation by the administration saying they have no fundamental right to school their own children.  Excuse me?  A citizen has no right to not use the public schools? 

As the cost of college goes up, students really need to ask themselves if they're acquiring real, marketable skills or if they're just going to 13th to 16th grade of public school.  The "requirements inflation", demanding higher degrees for the same job, is a tougher nut to crack;  you'd be hard-pressed to find a school, organization or politician with the guts to say anything against that.  Majoring in Poetry is nice, and society might need a couple, but do you really want to go into debt $35,000?  (70% point of the population, according to Fidelity)  I heard a young woman in a radio interview saying, "somebody has to teach poetry, it might as well be me"; if that's your attitude, be prepared to eat a lot of beans and Ramen noodles for the next 20 years.  If my son were a high school senior today, instead of 30-something, I'm not sure I'd recommend college.  If you don't know what you want to do and what sorts of jobs you could work in that you could live with, maybe a couple of years trying a few things, or enlisting in the service would be a better choice.  In other words, don't go just to go. 

Are We In the Age of Robots?

Author Bill Laumeister of Maxim Integrated (Maxim ICs) writes a thought provoking column in Electronic Design online.  He starts with an unusual analogy and goes from there:

Two thousand years ago, Roman citizens would count their slaves to determine how many tasks could be accomplished. Early in the twentieth century, people counted their electric motors to answer the same question. Today we count microprocessors.

He goes on to consider the microprocessor as a robot; “a mechanical or virtual artificial agent.”.  Like most of you, I grew up on Isaac Asimov's robot stories, "I Robot", and more.  I think of robots as having a body that moves around, or, at least a machine with major portions capable of movement.  My CNC mill is more like a robot, my desktop PC less like one, although both contain microprocessors.

Asimov said, “I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”² We agree. If we removed microprocessors from our homes, our standard of living would plummet.

Absolutely agree with both of them.  Processors are becoming one of the  most common features of our world.  Laumeister writes:

But back to Moore’s Law, which has been modified slightly over the years, but the concept is solid. Today we say that transistor density on ICs doubles about every two years. This is akin to compounded interest in banking and has held true for the last 48 amazing years. To illustrate, in 1971, Intel’s 4004 processor had 2300 transistors. In 1978, the 8068 had 29,000 transistors. In 1989, the Intel 486 had 1.2 million transistors. In 1999, the Intel Pentium III processor had 9.5 million devices. Then 2010 found Intel processors with 774 million transistors and 2013 dawned with 2.27 billion transistors. (chart)

As exceptional as the density increase is, the rest of Moore’s prediction has also come true. The price of microprocessors has declined, so they have proliferated everywhere. You can now buy little processors for less than $1 each. In high volumes, they only cost pennies.

(backgrounder on Moore's law here in pdf.  As an aside, with 2.27 billion transistors in a new processor of which many thousands will be made - and that's this year alone - I believe that mankind has made more transistors than anything else our species has ever made, even screws and nails).

Using the approach in his first paragraph, he goes about counting motors (158), electrically operated machines (87),  and finally microprocessors in his house (278).  I suppose it comes down to your definitions, but his assertion is that programmable processors that do things for us are robots.  He's the first writer I've read to assert this, and it doesn't sit well with me.  A Neato XV vacuum cleaner is a robot.  A processor controlled porch light, while handy, isn't. 

Unlike the Roomba, which takes a random path around the room to vacuum, the Neato maps the room with its little laser sensor, then uses the same sort of overlapping rectangles method that people use. 

Everybody seems to agree that robots in my sense will be becoming more of a part of our lives.  Anthropomorphic or humanoid robots are likely to remain an area of research interest because researchers seem convinced it's the Next Big Thing.  Robots that are essentially physically compatible with humans, hands of similar size and geometry, able to fit through the same doors and into the same transports, will fit more easily into our environment.  Getting one to wash the dishes or pick up odds and ends will need less adaptations to work in our environment.  Long time readers might possibly remember my post about humanoid robots two years ago, and the emphasis of researcher Heather Knight to make robots able to live better in human society.   There's a fine line between making robots that move with us, and fit in with us in our homes, but that don't creep us out.  To be honest, some of the robots I see do creep me out a bit. 

We have definitely entered the age of robotics, they're just not home robots walking around helping us.  The fastest growing portion of the robot industry is the service robot sector.  I believe robotic "waiters" like these from China will be coming here.

Although maybe they won't look quite as Lego-like.

Mid-Week Techy Overload

Back to work today after a 5 day weekend, and overloaded with some neat techy stuff to let everyone know about.

Back in 2010, I ran a post on a 1W Laser That Sets People on Fire.  It was a very popular post for a long time.  Today, I get news of one with 3 times that amount of power made from the laser diode in a Digital Light Projector (for you true geeks, that's a 5 dB increase).  This is the technology behind DLP movie theaters. 
They call it a lightsaber on Gizmodo, but of course it really isn't.  The beam goes on forever like any other light; it doesn't suddenly stop 3' from the emitter, and you can't hit another beam with it to duel in a shower of sparks.  But at 3W, it does cut a lot of stuff open and start a lot of fires.  (and will blind you in an ohnosecond)...

Next, it's virtually a tag line I use that I like to make stuff of all kinds, from electronic projects to woodworking to metalworking and even some software.  There's a relatively new word for people like me: Makers, and a Maker Faire movement around the country.  EDN writes on the Bay Area Maker Faire held last weekend (5/18&19).   If you've never seen pictures from one, get on over there.  Everything from personal drones, to a car covered in plastic lobsters and fish that sing (the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir - I'm not making this up) to robots and this walking pod-thingy which would fit right in at Burning Man (a story in itself). 

Speaking of making things, if you could use a way to make plastic parts that aren't too big or too critical - we're talking maybe some gears or parts to repair your ice maker, not an AR lower - you might want to look into a 3D printer kit.  This one appears to be decent low end printer with some support, at about $800 (650 Euros).  Other groups make them.  I expect that relatively soon, we'll find that service bureaus will open similar to the paper print shops we have today.  We'll send our files to the shop and pick up the plastic parts later.  

Can't Talk. Busy

So one of my all time favorite pictures:

By the great Terry Border.

Memorial Day 2013

On this memorial day, I've seen a familiar haunting image from 2005.  Donald Sensing links to it as, "a single image continues to haunt".  And it does.  But this one still haunts me in deep ways.

In case it doesn't seem familiar:  

In a final act of loyalty, Hawkeye, the dog of slain Navy SEAL U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Jon T. Tumilson walked up to his fallen master’s casket during the funeral in Rockford, Iowa, and then laid mournfully down beside the body for the rest of the proceedings

Hawkeye refused to abandon his "master".   Petty Officer Tumilson was one of the 30 I wrote about a few weeks ago.  One of the group that members of our administration are being accused of setting up or being complicit in the killings of.

Hawkeye refused to abandon his friend.  Unlike the employees of the state department who abandoned four of their coworkers to die in Benghazi.   

If only our administration had the loyalty and pure, raw character of a dog.

To all who served, thank you.  To those who served and didn't come back, words will never suffice.

EDIT 1855EDT: The typo monster stole a word.  I swear, right after I hit "publish" it vanished!

Being Proven Right By Unfolding Events

If you're a regular here, you know I take it on the chin when I make a prediction and clearly get it wrong.  I want to take a minute and claim that I think I got one right a while back, and the current IRS scandal is my evidence.

Over on the bottom of the right column, in my list of my most read posts in the history of this blog, I have the story of the raid on the Gibson factory in August of 2011.  The story seemed big because the raid was based on the Lacy Act, a hundred year old act that had recently been given new dentures.  The article opened with this simple question:

"Where were you when owning wood became a felony?"

and centered on the fact that the way the Lacey Act is worded, virtually anything in your possession made out of wood would probably violate the letter of the law.  We're all felons, at the mercy of whatever JBT decides to arrest us.  Here's a snippet, but to get the full feel of it, read the whole thing:

Henceforth, all wood is to be a federally regulated, suspect substance. Either raw wood, lumber, or anything made of wood, from tables and chairs, to flooring, siding, particle board, to handles on knives, baskets, chopsticks, or even toothpicks has to have a label naming the genus and species of the tree that it came from and the country of origin. Incorrect labeling becomes a federal felony, and the law does not just apply to wood newly entering the country, but any wood that is in interstate commerce within the country. Here are some excerpts from a summary:

What made Gibson so bad was that the raid was predicated on the idea that Gibson bought Indian wood that they believe complied with every law on the books, but the Feds raided Gibson based on the Feds' interpretation of Indian law - not even their interpretation of our law. 

A couple of days after that posting, August 28, 2011, to be precise, I wrote a piece that pointed out

One of Gibson’s leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Company. The C.E.O., Chris Martin IV, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the DNC over the past couple of election cycles. According to C.F. Martin’s catalog, several of their guitars contain “East Indian Rosewood.” In case you were wondering, that is the exact same wood in at least ten of Gibson’s guitars.

Gibson's CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, is a Republican who donated to several Republican candidates and gets raided.  His competitor who contributes to Democrats (and contributes more, by the way) uses the same products and doesn't get raided.  At the time, I pointed out several things that "stink like yesterday's diapers" to use a line from Roger Rabbit.

Gibson is the only guitar company targeted by the Obama DOJ under the Lacey Act -- Tennessee is a right-to-work state.

Fender, Taylor, Rickenbacker, Danelectro, Carvin, MusicMan, and ESP are in California; Spector is in New York; Martin is in Pennsylvania; Guild, Ovation, and Hamer are in Connecticut; Alvarez is in Missouri; B.C. Rich is in Kentucky; Heritage is in Michigan; Washburn is in Illinois. --  All are forced-union states. [emphasis for Martin added]

Does the similarity of Obama's National Labor Relations Board slapping down Boeing for opening a non-union shop in Right-to-Work South Carolina seem like too far to reach for an analogy?

 Eric Holder's Department of Justice has proven itself to be a political organization, that is stunningly corrupt, and not only not interested in enforcing laws, but willing to kill anyone anywhere to achieve their political goals (Gunwalker anyone?  Dealing with drug cartels to allow them to move cocaine into the US?).  The entire administration plays politics as bloodsport.  After all, resident Obama told a group of Latino voters, to "punish our enemies", and told followers in '08 "if they bring a knife, we bring a gun".

Does it seem even remotely out of character that they might try to destroy Gibson for being a non-union shop, or for not contributing enough money to democrats?  I don't think so either. 

 

(This is not my Gibson (Epiphone) Les Paul, but a catalog picture that looks strikingly similar to mine.  My contribution to Gibson's defense fund).

I may be reaching, but I think the emerging story of the use of the IRS as a political bludgeon is strong evidence that this whole affair unfolded as I'm describing here.  "Someone" in the administration/DOJ noted that a profitable company wasn't paying enough tribute into their corrupt little empire, or working with enough union goons, and got the raids on Gibson trumped up.  Can I prove that?  No.  I don't know if there are any "real journalists" who will run down a story like this; I don't even know if Gibson thinks it's worth spending money on it.

Mr. Language Person Visits

Mr. Language Person was an occasionally-used persona of humor writer Dave Barry, and I used to enjoy the Q&A format answers like this:

Q. I have trouble remembering the difference between the words ''whose'' and ''who's.'' Should I put this in the form of a question?

A. In grammatical terminology, ''who's'' is an interlocutory contraption that is used to form the culinary indicative tense.

EXAMPLE: ``You will never guess who's brassiere they found in the gumbo.''

''Whose'' is the past paramilitary form of ''whomsoever'' and is properly used in veterinary interrogations.

EXAMPLE: ``Whose gwine spay all them weasels?''

Well, I can't compete with that, but I can link to a neat article on Mental Floss - 38 Wonderful Foreign Words We Could Use in English.  Like:

1. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

Enjoy both of them.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

(source)

The "I" Word

I'm going to venture into a topic I've never gone into in depth, immigration.  I'm rather sick of being accused of being a hater and racist simply because I oppose open amnesty and open borders, but I really don't care anymore.  I know where my heart and motivations lie.

What got me thinking about this is the ongoing clash of civilizations in Europe.  We see the mass immigration from mostly Muslim countries in Africa, the Mideast and Asia flooding Europe as we see mass migration from Latin America in the US.  Europe is on fire, with the riots and burnings in Sweden going into their sixth day - and when the news reports it's because of "youths", you have to work to determine they're primarily Muslim youth.  The only new aspect of the riots in Sweden is that they're in Sweden - rioting and burning cars is almost an annual summer sport in France.  An increasing number of European nations now have "No Go Zones" where local Muslim populations scare the police out and the governments have given up control by default.  Most European "soft socialist" states have an underbelly of Muslim youths that haven't - and won't - assimilate into their new cultures.  Cap that with incidents like the murder of an off-duty British soldier by Islamic extremists this week and you can see an ascendant Islam taking over the European continent if the Europeans don't wake up in time.

Let me detour to say that if this short overview is offending you because you view Islam as a "Religion of Peace", or you think Islam and Christianity are comparable, or you think I'm racist for saying this, you are simply ignorant.  Don't be upset, ignorance is curable, it's stupidity that's not curable.  Go spend a day or two reading the history at Gates of Vienna.  Read about Geert Wilders and what he's gone through.  Read about the murder of Theo Van Gogh.  I could go on all day.
 
I believe it was in 2003 - maybe somewhat earlier - that a friend pointed me to Pat Buchanan's book "The Death of the West", and I see it has been revised as of 2010.  It's quite an eye-opening read.  If "Demographics Are Destiny", western civilization is in for a really rough century.  At least since the second World War, the West has been living a pattern of declining birth rates and expanding social structures.  The pattern has been that as child mortality dropped, and birth control became widely adopted, women worked more outside the home, bringing more prosperity, which led to families getting smaller because there wasn't as much need to have large families to ensure some children survived.  It has been said prosperity is the best birth control.  As families got smaller and became more mobile, elderly grandparents were less able to depend on family to help them; that was accompanied by an expanding state social structure.  As Western families get smaller and birth rates drop below replacement rates, tax revenues go down (all other things being equal) making the expanding states impossible to maintain just when they're most needed.  To solve that paradox, Western societies have almost all imported immigrants.  It has not necessarily turned out to be a smart strategy.

I refuse to spend much time on emotional arguments, like how hateful it is to deport children of illegal aliens who were dragged here and grew up in the US.  We're talking a couple of percent (at most!) of the immigrant problems.  I'd gladly say let them all stay if we fix the parts that are downright broken.

We need to close our borders.  Look at a map or a globe: what defines a nation?  It has borders that separate it from other nations, borders that define where different laws and cultures are in place.  Those borders need to be managed and controlled, just like every other nation on the face of the earth manages its borders.  Compare US immigration policy and enforcement to Mexico's or any other place.  We are orders of magnitude more welcoming of immigrants of all types.  And please don't give me this "but we're a nation of immigrants" line.  All nations are nations of immigrants and all have been made up by the movement of peoples between nations.  Who isn't a nation of immigrants?  Myanmar?   And besides; immigrants that came over a hundred years ago - like my grandparents on both sides - are demonstrably different than today's immigrants.  The immigrants from Ellis Island a hundred years ago didn't have a government handout system to fall back on.  They either made it based on their own hard work or they didn't survive here and went home.

We need to know who is coming in and control that.  This all I really want.  We should know if an immigrant really is a farm worker, and not a Hamas operative.  

Who says we can't be selective about immigrants we allow into our country?  Why shouldn't we choose immigrants to make our country better?  What moron came up with the idea that we allow everyone in that walks across the border?  Most countries in the world will make sure that at least you're not bringing in communicable diseases, but we apparently don't even do that, and get outbreaks of tuberculosis (and other diseases) in our country.  Sounds like a smart idea to me.  Who's more valuable to our country: a construction worker from Guatemala or a Ph.D. Engineer from Spain?  They're both Hispanic so don't start on that; don't you think the Ph.D. might contribute more to GDP?  A lettuce picker from Tijuana or an M.D. from Germany?  Look, I know we're neighbors with Mexico and Canada, while Europe is much farther away.  Maybe we should have a closer arrangement with them; fine, as long as we know who's coming in.  But the high ratio of Latin American immigrants to Europeans isn't because they're not interested in coming, it's because the 1965 Immigration Law made it harder for Europeans to come here.  I say we should use immigration to make our country a better place - give preference to professionals and high achievers from any place on earth, not to low achievers just because they're our neighbors.  If the intent of allowing the people into our country is to improve the demographics and increasing tax revenues to support the aging population, you want the higher achievers.  If you don't care about improving the country but want a voting demographic that will deplete the country faster, and loyally vote for whomever gives them handouts, you want the low achievers.  I think that shows how the system is running. 

But the biggest reason I'm opposed to the status quo is that it's immoral to treat immigrants the way we do.  We make people from Asia or Europe go through years of process and hassle to get here legally, while ignoring the millions who just walk into the States and into virtual slavery.  Illegal immigration is the 21st century version of slavery.  By denying them legal status and legal entry into the country while encouraging them to come with tons of incentives, we're perpetuating a system of abuse of the workers that come here.  Corporations seem to be more than happy to pay them less than legal citizens, and we creating an underclass that can be taken advantage of.  The majority are under-educated compared to Americans, so they have 50% higher rates of poverty.  They represent the vast majority (over 70%) of the increase in the uninsured.  They use welfare programs at almost twice the rate of born citizens (173%).  (Source, Census data excerpted here)  The biggest problem with the immigration system we have now is that it's morally bankrupt and wrong.  We're creating a slave class in the name of keeping our lettuce cheaper.  It's not worth it. 

Mr. Airplane, Meet Mr. Thunderhead

Every pilot knows that there are times in the flight when control of the airplane does not reside solely in the cockpit.  Most will admit that a big thunderstorm is not something to fly through.  Thunderstorms can have terrible downdrafts, wind shear, turbulence and hail.  It doesn't matter if you're flying a small home built or a commercial jet liner; if you don't have your wits about you, and a bit of luck, you could have far more excitement than you'd like.

This is an Airbus (mumble mumble) after going through a bit of a hail storm en route to (mumble mumble).  I'm told by my source that this was in early 2012. 

In addition to the obvious windshield damage, note the nose over the weather radar is crushed in.  I don't know if the radar continued to work.  The windshield doesn't look very good from the inside, either, but these pilots are all instrument-rated and the planes have every system there is; they don't really need to see the runway. 

“There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime.”
 – Sign over Squadron Ops desk at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ, 1970.

Why The Next 3D Printed Gun Should Be .45ACP

Earlier today, Borepatch linked to a story on Forbes about further experimentation done with a 3d printed gun, plastic barrel and all. 

One evening late last week, a Wisconsin engineer who calls himself “Joe” test-fired a new version of that handgun printed on a $1,725 Lulzbot A0-101 consumer-grade 3D printer, far cheaper than the one used by Defense Distributed. Joe, who asked that I not reveal his full name, loaded the weapon with .380 caliber rounds and fired it nine times, using a string to pull its trigger for safety.

When I first heard about the idea of printing a gun, I thought the barrel would be the hard part.  Plastics just wouldn't hold the pressure, or so I thought.  But a few weeks ago, it popped into my head that anyone knows that to make a vessel hold higher pressures, you just increase the wall thickness.  The gun might not end up looking like other guns, but it would indeed be functional.  Here's the barrel they used.  Doesn't look like your typical pistol barrel, but it worked.  This is after 8 shots.  They pulled it after that number, out of caution.  (Forbes)

 

There are limits, of course.  To make a scuba tank that would hold 70 cubic feet of air at 2000 PSI, I don't think you'd want a plastic tank the size of a small room.  Sorry - don't remember how to do the calculations off the top of my head.  (Bad blogger!  Lazy blogger!!  Why, I ought to rub your nose in your Marks Handbook!!). (Whaddaya mean schizo?  Who's schizo?  Us??)  I'm sure a real M.E. would know.

When I saw that Cody Wilson ran his first tests of the Liberator with .380, I was impressed.  I thought for sure he'd run .22LR.  But I never bothered to do what I did I today, look up chamber pressures for various common cartridges. It turns out the SAAMI chamber pressure for .22LR is 24,000 PSI, but .380 is 21,500 PSI.

And the SAAMI pressure for .45ACP is 21,000, even lower than the .380 they've already demonstrated. 

Screen capture of the "Lulz Liberator" that fired nine successive shots. 

The original FP-45 Liberator of WWII fame was .45 ACP.  Smooth bore, so it was inaccurate.  This one has a rifled barrel (you can print rifling in place!), so it has the potential to be more accurate - though bigger because of being plastic rather than sheet metal.  So what are you guys waiting for? 

Video of the Week So Far

Go over to Sense of Events and watch the RC helicopter video. 

And then consider it as a homemade drone...

that's how I reacted...

QoTD

From Gunslinger's Journal, a quote from a comment on American Thinker

There was a time when the IRS acted against Al Capone. Now, under Obama, the IRS acts like Al Capone.

There was a time when the DOJ fought crime syndicates. Now, under Obama, the DOJ is a crime syndicate.

There was a time when the FBI investigated crime syndicates. Now, under Obama, the FBI investigates for a crime syndicate.

There was a time when the ATF stopped Gun Running Gangs. Now, under Obama, the ATF is a Gun Running Gang.

There was a time when the TSA protected women's privacy at airports. Now, under Obama, the TSA inspects women's privates at airports.

There was a time when the DOD left no man behind. Now, under Obama, every man has to watch his behind (double meaning intended).

There was a time when people in India dreamed of coming to America to get Health Care. Soon now, under Obama, people in America will dream of going to India to get Health Care.

  

State of Shock

The damages from yesterday's Moore, Oklahoma tornado are just mind blowing. The Blaze has a collection of 83, but I'm sure there must be others out there, too.  Several sources are carrying the story that the tornado dumped more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Several meteorologists contacted by The Associated Press used real time measurements, some made by Schumacher, to calculate the energy released during the storm's 40-minute life span. Their estimates ranged from 8 times to more than 600 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, with more experts at the high end.

(A child is pulled from the rubble of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., and passed along to rescuers Monday, May 20, 2013.  Sue Ogrocki/AP)

Every place I'm hearing is reporting that the churches are the first ones in with trucks full of pretty much everything.  Glenn Beck's charity, Mercury One, which his businesses pay all expenses for, is there as well.  The folks there have lost everything and will need help for a while.  Ask yourself what you'd need if suddenly your house was scattered over a square mile, and your clothes, food, and all your most precious possessions were all gone. 

Give if you can to whomever you feel comfortable with.