Small Temporary Sanity Outbreak in California

A California federal judge temporarily blocked a California law that would require destruction of  normal capacity magazines, according to the AP.

The judge ruled that the ban approved by the Legislature and voters last year takes away gun owners’ Second Amendment rights and amounts to the government taking people’s private property without compensation.

California law has prohibited buying or selling the magazines since 2000, but until now allowed those who had them to keep them.

“Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of otherwise law-abiding citizens will have an untenable choice: become an outlaw or dispossess one’s self of lawfully acquired property,” San Diego-based U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez wrote.

He issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law from taking effect while he considers the underlying lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association-affiliated California Rifle & Pistol Association.

It was, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, a very small incidence of temporary sanity.  A Sacramento-based judge rejected a similar challenge by several other gun owners’ rights groups.

It seems to me, and I'm not a lawyer, that California has gone over the Rubicon on this one.  It's one thing to ban the sale of these magazines, and that's plenty bad.  It's another to require they be turned over to the state with no compensation whatsoever.  The state isn't saying, "turn in your 30 round AR magazine and we'll give you three 10 rounders"!  They're saying "send them out of state to get them modified to hold no more than 10 rounds, destroy them yourself, or turn them into law enforcement agencies to melt down." That's backed up by the threat that possession can bring $100 fines or up to a year in jail.

Considering how broke the state is, they couldn't possibly buy the magazines from California gun owners, so cry as they might, they're depriving people of use and ownership of legally obtained property, an ex post facto prohibition.  It doesn't matter that this was a resolution passed by California voters.  

Voters agreed in November when they approved Proposition 63, a measure that toughened the penalties by allowing violators to be fined or jailed.

[Judge] Benitez said he was mindful of voters’ approval and government’s legitimate interest in protecting the public but added that the “Constitution is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra disagreed but didn't openly defy Judge Benitez, saying he takes the side of the state.  I strongly suspect he takes the side of the state when he personally agrees with it. 

“I will defend the will of California voters because we cannot continue to lose innocent lives due to gun violence.”

In which AG Becerra scores high on the moron index for thinking passing a law like this can ever have any effect on so-called “gun violence.”

Meanwhile, in the saner portions of the state away from the coasts, county sheriffs seem to have a bit better perspective.

 Law enforcement officers, such as Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, told the Sacramento Bee that he looks negatively at this law and that he doesn’t expect anyone to turn in their magazines, nor will he be sending his deputies out to confiscate them.

“We’re not going to be knocking on anybody’s door looking for them,” Bosenko said. “We’re essentially making law-abiding citizens into criminals with this new law.”

I think this is newsworthy in the “man bites dog”/really unusual event-sense.  Seeing sanity out of the institutions in California, state.gov or fed.gov, is so weird it's like having an actual crew of Klingons land their Bird of Prey in your front yard and ask to join you for tea and chocolate. 

For some reason, AP chose to illustrate their article with an older Ruger 10/22 carbine accompanied by a 25 round magazine and what it calls a 10; I'm using their picture because it looks like my older 10/22 carbine, before I put in a better magazine release.  It's also a useful picture to remind everyone these stupid magazine bans don't just affect EBRs; they affect everything.  I'm not familiar with that 10 round magazine, though.  The stock Ruger 10 round magazines are considerably smaller - just the top, block-shaped portion of these magazines.

Photo of the Day

From Tumblr via Pinterest

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman from the 70s TV show - with a rifle.  I can't tell if that's a Garand or not, but there's not much detail.  Bad angle.  Experts?

A Little Shop Update

I do these posts because I think some of you are interested in home machine shop ideas and what I'm up to in my shop.

The latest thing I've been working on is a little fixture that allows me to automatically find zero for all three axes on a workpiece: X, Y and Z.  The hardware end of this is fairly simple; it looks like this:

In this view, you're looking at the bottom of the tool.  The side facing up in this picture is plastic, held onto the solid aluminum, corner-shaped piece by three countersunk, flat head screws.  Along the far sides of the corner are two more pieces of plastic attached the same way and protruding above the top plastic in this view (which is below that plastic when in use).  

To use this, it's placed on the corner of the rough stock that you want to be (0,0), typically I'd say the lower left hand corner, with the metal side up.  Each of those sides is known width, say 1.000" although that doesn't matter.  The automatic zero routine is software running in Mach3, the machine controller, which moves the table until a metal piece held in the spindle touches X, then pulls it back and checks it again with a slower approach for more accuracy.  Then it moves the table away from the spindle in X and over to a point in Y that should clear the part and repeats the find.  It does the Y axis twice as well.  Finally, it retracts the Z-axis up a distance it expects to be above the part, and slowly touches down onto the top of the part.  Let's say I'm using a 1/4" dowel pin that I know measures 0.2499.  When it touches the edge of the part, the center of the spindle is exactly 1/2 of that, .12495" plus the 1.000" from the tool.  The software sets X and then Y to -1.12495.  Yes, -1.125 is close enough!  Of course, those sides can be any width as long as the software knows how big they are.  Note that the top of the part (Z = 0.0) is offset by both the thickness of the metal and the plastic.  That changes the offset from the thickness of the metal here to the metal plus plastic (1.075" in mine). 

How does it know it has "found" the part?  It measures continuity through the Break Out Board in my controller box.  See that hole on the end of the right side of the tool?  That gets one lead of a continuity checker with a banana plug on it; and the tool or dowel pin or whatever is in the spindle gets the other lead clamped to it with a big gator clip.  That's the purpose of the plastic insulation on the bottom; the insulator keeps it from reading continuity as soon as you put it on the table.  (The plastic side pieces are to grab onto the corner of a piece of stock without using a metal side that will read continuity).  Those thick pieces are just electrical insulation, and can be any convenient size.  I use .075" thick plastic from my mill enclosure.

This diagram is from the instructions on my CNC4PC breakout board, which I implemented just like this except I used pin 15 instead of 13 (pins 10 through 15 are inputs on a standard parallel port).  The pin is configured in Mach3 so that the software knows to look for activity on that line. 

All of this is run from a set of macros in Mach3 which aren't made by them.  They're written by another company called the CNC Woodworker - they're called the 2010 Screen Set.

Does it all work?  Not yet.  I have it together but I'm still working through their instructions.  I had to modify my controller box, taking out the BoB to put the resistor on the bottom of the board and solder the two wires to it.  The line changes state, a test "light" in Mach3 shows its there, and now it's "just" getting everything to play right.   "All ya gotta do...", right?

3D Metal Printing Takes a Page from Carbon Fiber Printing

Over the course of the last month or so, Come and Make It blog has shown some carbon fiber reinforced plastic parts he's been printing with (what I understand to be) a pretty typical desktop-class plastic printer.  The "secret sauce" here is that the plastic has chopped, small pieces of carbon fiber in it.  In a way, it's creating a carbon fiber/plastic composite similar to glass-filled plastics.  Scores of fiberglass boats were made with a mix of chopped fiberglass and plastic resin sprayed onto a mold to create the interior.  The resulting plastic is stronger than plain plastic, but not as strong as laid up cloth.  Laid up cloth can use equal-sized threads in both directions and be equally strong in both directions, or have one direction with heavier threads than the other so that it ends up stronger in the direction the heavier strands run.  The printed, chopped-carbon fiber parts will be weaker than parts made from either type of laid-up cloth, but stronger than plastic.  Continuous carbon fiber printed in plastic is becoming available and will be stronger, yet.

Markforged, a 3D printer company founded by MIT aerospace engineer Greg Mark, has raised the bar on this technology by producing printers that produce chopped carbon fiber-filled plastics(called their Onyx process), printers that produce continuous carbon fiber-filled plastics, and is now going for metal printing with what they describe as their Atomic Diffusion Additive Manufacturing, or ADAM process.  It's a metal powder-filled plastic fiber similar to the chopped carbon fiber approach:

Greg Mark unveiled the company’s Metal X desktop printer , which, once it becomes available in September, will print in a variety of metals including 17-4 stainless steel, 303 stainless steel, 6061 aluminum, 7075 aluminum, A-2 tool steel, D-2 tool steel, IN alloy (Inconel) 625 and titanium Ti-6Al-4V. The printer speeds up production with rapid sintering using a microwave furnace, a process that becomes highly reliable when the printer is following consistent instructions. Designs are printed in metal powder surrounded by plastic, the plastic is dissolved and the metal is sintered, leaving behind a strong metal part.

The link in that description is a short overview; a better overview video is here.

In the first, shorter, video, Greg Mark says, “If you can afford a half million or million dollar metal printer - buy one.  This is for the rest of us”.  Further reading will show you that the Metal-X printer will be just under $100,000.  That doesn't include the cost of the “microwave furnace” to sinter the parts and I have no data on what that will cost, but I'd be confident predicting it's significant.  Definitely not my idea of something for the home market, but something corporations might be interested in.  The hope of metal additive manufacturing (3D printing) is that it will lower the cost of manufacturing, but it's still out of the class of the machining (or subtractive manufacturing) infrastructure that has been the backbone of industry since the industrial revolution.  Let me gloss over the differences and relative strengths vs. weaknesses between additive and subtractive manufacturing to just point at price.  For quite a bit less than $30,000, a company can buy a very capable subtractive manufacturing station (Haas CNC Milling machine).  I've heard numbers suggesting a fully tricked out machining center is in the range of $50,000.  On the other hand, if the work envelope and rest of the work flow supports it, a rather competent Tormach machine can be had for under $10,000.

Design News points out:

Few manufacturers are discussing replacing traditional production methods for parts with AM techniques, as it would simply be too expensive. For plastics 3D printing will probably never beat the speed and volume capacity of injection molding. (However, using AM to create the molds will lead to more rapid product innovation with plastics by eliminating the single biggest bottleneck in the injection molding process.)
....
Earlier this year, CEO Greg Mark told the audience at CES that the future of metal 3D printing is in print farms. The Metal X printer was created as an affordable ($99,500 is the current price tag) standalone shop printer, but the company sees a vision of fleets of these printers operating in tandem.

“Our Metal X printer is the first step in this direction,” (Marketing VP Cynthia) Gumbert told Design News. “It’s not in the same category of the large-format metal printers that form a high-end, expensive niche that only larger manufacturers can afford. Parallelization is the key to scaling volume, rather than a different, faster type of print process. We’ve always been about getting a near-final or finished piece right off the printer that can be sintered with very little post-processing, and ADAM is generating extremely high-quality parts.”

There are thousands of small contract machine shops that will produce a company's designs for them to compete with these printer farms.  I think the only way the printer farm vision gets a foothold is doing the techniques that Additive manufacturing does better than subtractive.  Manufacturing and machining in general just keeps getting better.  The 1/3 to 1/10 reduction in price to go with a more conventional machining center instead of metal AM is a very big disadvantage for the metal printers to overcome.  It might encourage designers to redesign parts to take advantage of the cheaper machining process rather than go to the more expensive metal printers. 

US Army R&D Wants to Radically Improve Machine Gun Barrels

The Firearm Blog, TFB, posted an article last week from an Army ARDEC (Armament Research, Development & Engineering Center) study on using additive manufacturing (3D printing) technologies as a new way to build rifled barrels; more than that, the big goal of the research is to see if the new manufacturing techniques can improve the performance and life of barrels.  The study was called "Optimization of Machine Gun Barrels Using Additive Manufacturing"  (pdf warning).  It's really worth a look if you're at all interested

The project’s goals as stated in the presentation were to eliminate the need for spare barrels to be carried by reducing barrel temperature (especially chamber temperature) and increasing the cook off limit of the barrel (the point at which a barrel gets so hot that rounds will fire from heat alone, without the primer being struck by the firing pin), without a decrease in accuracy or an increase in barrel weight. The team investigated two different 3D printing methods for manufacturing advanced barrel units: [Bold added: SiG]

The study, then, is to determine if additive manufacturing techniques allow them produce structures that are better than conventional barrels; primarily steels.

When heat is dumped into anything, there are only three ways to get rid of it: 

• Conduction is by far the best way to get heat out of a system.  Examples are things that have been bolted to the hot object to carry heat away.  Forced water jacketed cooling is by conduction.  
• Convection is generally a distant second.  Something like a computer CPU that has a heat sink on it, but no fan, is depending on the heat causing air currents across the heat sink to carry the heat away.  The heat sink just increases the amount of surface area that forces the air currents.  Forced air cooling, blowing a fan across that heat sink, is more like conduction cooling. 
• Radiation - radiating the heat away by infrared radiation - is not usually a factor, although it can be when the temperature is very high.  When a barrel (or anything) is glowing red hot it's loosing lots of heat by radiation. 

Given that, it seems that what ARDEC is working toward is barrels that shed their heat so quickly that they don't build up heat enough for rounds to cookoff.  This is a "materials engineering" project; the essence is that the materials in each part of the barrel can be optimized for the required performance.  For example, a barrel might have material chosen for the barrel liner and first few hundredths of an inch away from the bore that wears very well and is very good at conducting heat into the next layer out.  The second layer may have been chosen for its strength but wouldn't stand to long term use if it was exposed to the wear of thousands of rounds going through the barrel.  ARDEC offers this road map:

• Cobalt Superalloy Liner – we know these are good with respect to wear, also play some role in minimizing heat into the barrel
• High Strength Core – minimize the thickness and weight of core
• High Heat Capacity Jacket – maximize volume/mass
–Reduces overall temperature increase per unit of heat into the barrel
• Optimize outer profile of barrel for increased convection

Machine gun crews have been carrying spare barrels since, well, the birth of the machine gun, right? I think it's a good idea for an R&D group to ask something industry asks every day, "we've always done it that way, but is it still the best way?" A lot of advancement in materials science and manufacturing techniques have come since the Maxim gun or JM Browning's first automatic.

Now That Healthcare is "Fixed" (hah!)

As that fiasco plays out this week, the emphasis has turned to "now that we have health care fixed, let's move on to tax reform".  Paul Ryan went so far as to say,

"Transformational tax reform can be done, and we are moving forward,"

Now, personally, I never met a tax cut I didn't like.  The tax system is horribly broken in this country and broad cuts and reductions across the board sound great.   As Ryan also said,

"We are actually unique in the world in the way we discourage capital from coming back to America and how we incentivize off-shoring jobs," ... "This is not the kind of exceptionalism we should aspire to ..." 

There is a genuine problem in America: most people are getting poorer.  Wages have been in stagnation for nearly 50 years while prices have continued to climb.  The statistics the government reports to tell us how wonderful everything is in the country consistently lie about the cost of living.  Their hedonic adjustments tell you that even though the car you want to buy says $33,000 on the sales papers, it really is the same cost as the $19,000 car you bought in 1997.  The new car is technically superior to the 1997 car, so it's really cheaper.  If all you have is the money to pay for the $19,000 car, well then, the government says "sucks to be you".  Not really.  They don't acknowledge your problem at all.

Idiots like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren look at this rampant screwing of the people by the big government and central bankers and think the answer is to make the government bigger and never, ever mention the role of the trillions of dollars of assets the Federal Reserve created.  

The unfortunate reality is that there is no tax reform on the horizon that will make them richer.   Most people aren't poor because the feds take too much of their money; they're poor because the feds have gummed up and distorted the economy so badly.  Hobbled by regulations, fake money from the putrid, execrable central banks, and the crony deals that enrich the few insiders, the Fed.gov can’t deliver the jobs and incomes people need.

Earlier this year, House Stupid Party members said they were going to strive for a tax return you could do in the space of postcard - then they overcomplicated that by keeping popular deductions.  That's not how you do it.

You want "transformational change"?  Throw out every page of the tax code.  Everyone pays a flat percentage.  I don't like throwing around numbers for what it should be because (1) I don't know, and (2) things will change so much, so fast, that any number you start out with will need to be changed.  I've heard 17%.  I've heard 10%.  So let's pretend 15% is the answer.  Maybe three or four questions on a tax return.  

A simple flat tax will never happen.  It would shutter the entire tax preparation industry - there's about a $12 Billion industry there just for the franchises.  No more H&R Block, no more tax lawyers, or accountants.  Everybody pays the same percentage.  The rich will pay the vast lion's share, like they do now, and the poor will pay a pittance, like they do now.   David Stockman, who of course was Reagan's budget chief, said,

The income tax has been slashed so many times since 1981 that it’s no longer a broad based societal tax; it’s a kind of luxury tax on upper income salary earners and the small share of households which garner most of the capital income from dividends, interest payments and capital gains…

Stockman went on to point out that 60% of tax filers accounted for 5% of tax revenue.  In addition, 35% of tax filers – more than 52 million filers at the bottom and middle of the income ladder – didn’t pay a single dime of taxes after deductions, exemptions and credits.

And that kind of reform just ain't gonna happen.  The "Deep State" loves a complex tax code.  The insiders hide little treats for themselves and their friends in it.  They use it to control the "little people".  The stupid politicians who call themselves "voice for the poor" would scream that the rich aren't paying enough.  Perhaps worst of all, there's no public outcry calling for that kind of reform.

If you want to dream of REAL reform, Make the Dollar Great Again.  Or, at least, Make the Dollar Real Again. Tie the dollar to gold again, fire everyone at the Fed and fire all the dictators central economic planners.  Do we legally need to have a Federal Reserve?  Reduce it to one guy running the "gold window" that Nixon closed in 1971: selling gold coins for dollars.  Or maybe that becomes the Treasury office that sells gold coins now.  

All-Electric Small Airplane

From today's emails, I find that a company called Eviation announced an all-electric powered small plane at this year's Paris Air Show.  The company showed a prototype of the aircraft, rated for a 600 mile range.  I don't know if they're doing it here, but pilots ordinarily like to have about 1/4 to 1/3 of their fuel available for contingencies and I assume 600 does not include contingencies. 

Omer Bar-Yohay, CEO of Eviation Aircraft, made the announcement:

“At a time when we are more connected than ever, our mobility options must adapt to reflect this new, efficient future. Whether it is a zero emissions, low-cost trip from Silicon Valley to San Diego, or Seoul to Beijing, our all-electric aircraft represents a chance for people to move with the speed and impact our global economy now demands.”

I have to point out that "zero emissions" only applies only to the exact moment when the airplane is running and completely ignores how it got to that point.  Before I go into that, though, I think it's reasonable to ask, "what's the big deal?" 

I'm not aware of electric planes on the market because I haven't cared to look.  Solar electric airplanes go back decades.  I don't think the technology is exotic or that this is some sort of technological tour de force.  Anybody who has ever seen a Radio Controlled model of a flying Snoopy on his doghouse, or some of other crazy things seen at RC shows will realize that the golden rule of aviation is that anything can fly if the lift to weight ratio is greater than one.  Stick on a big enough engine or make a big enough wing area and you're done.  Making an electric airplane means enough engine or wing to overcome the horrible inefficiency of the propulsion system compared to gasoline.  As I pointed out weeks ago, "While battery makers desperately try to figure out how to reach a specific energy of 450 Wh/kg (Watt-hours per kilogram), gasoline already offers 12,000 Wh/kg."  I don't think it's a stretch to say they'd get at least twice the range if they used Av gas instead of batteries.  Perhaps three or four times the range. 

Earlier this week, several outlets reported a study from the Swedish Environmental Research Insitute that the "carbon footprint" of producing the batteries for an electric car was equivalent to driving for 8 years.  This ignored recharging the batteries for the life of the car, which is obviously coming from an electric power generating plant somewhere, so more than likely generating CO2 itself.  I'm sure you've seen electric cars referred to as coal powered.

The report shows that the battery manufacturing leads to high emissions. For every kilowatt hour of storage capacity in the battery generated emissions of 150 to 200 kilos of carbon dioxide already in the factory. The researchers did not study individual brand batteries, how these were produced, or the electricity mix they use.

The study looked at two models of electric cars, a Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Model S, containing batteries of about 30 kWh and 100 kWh.

Even before buying the car, emissions occurred corresponding to approximately 5.3 tons and 17.5 tons of Carbon Dioxide. The numbers can be difficult to relate to. As a comparison, a trip for one person round trip from Stockholm to New York by air causes the release of more than 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide, according to the UN organization ICAO calculation.

Unless I miss my conversion (or misunderstand their units) the 17.5 tons of CO2 to manufacture the Tesla's batteries is equal to about 26 round trips flights from Stockholm to New York.  The 5.3 tons for the Leaf corresponds to 8 trips.  The electric airplane will not be immune to this sort of reality.

The way I look at it, wanting to buy an electric vehicle (airborne or road) is virtue signalling.  Wanting to sell an electric vehicle is more like the old quote, "there's a another one born every minute."  You want to spend money to feel good?  We'll be more than happy to take your money!

Self-Driving Cars Get Closer to "Mass Production"

In the manufacturing world, a run of 130 of some products is a month's worth, a year's worth, or even all you'll ever build, but for car manufacturing, it's a pretty small number.  Still, the fact that GM produced a lot of 130 Chevy Bolt Electric Vehicles with self-driving technologies added is a milestone for them.

The mass production technique involved the addition of cameras, Lidar and other sensors in an automated assembly plant in Orion Township, MI. It may or may not be a first for an autonomous car, but either way, industry observers expect the batch of Bolts to be followed by many more such efforts, from GM and its competitors. “This is what we’re going to be seeing during the next few years – finished vehicles coming off assembly lines with all the automated driving hardware built in already,” Sam Abuelsamid, research analyst for Navigant Research , told Design News .

The 130 new Bolts more than doubles the 50 self-driving Bolts released last year.  Industry experts also expect GM to produce as many as 1,000 more autonomous Bolts later this year or early next.  Similarly, Waymo, (formerly Google's self-driving car project) announced it will add 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to its fleets.

“We’re going to be seeing the same kinds of numbers – from dozens to hundreds to thousands over the next few years,” Abuelsamid said. 

Despite the doubts many (like blog brother Borepatch and I) have about the technology, the industry seems to be plunging ahead at full speed.  

Most automakers plan to enable their vehicles to reach SAE Level 4 capability in the next five years or so. SAE Level 4 calls for full automation, which means a driver could doze off or even leave the front seat, but only in limited domains. Drivers would have to be able to intervene in certain situations, such heavy snowfall or rain, as specified by the manufacturer.

Last year, Ford Motor Co. stated that it plans to remove the driver controls from some of its cars by 2021. “That means there’s going to be no steering wheel,” former Ford CEO Mark Fields said last August. There’s not going to be a brake pedal and, of course, a driver is not going to be required.”

Abuelsamid predicted this week that other manufacturers may reach the “no controls” point before Ford. “Going forward, as we get to 2019 and 2020, we’re going to see some of the first vehicles built without driver controls,” he told us. Full Level 5 automation – in which the autonomous car can operate in any situation – may not come until 2030, however.

The Design News article concludes with the quoted analyst, Abuelsamid, saying that ultimately the success of the market may depend on people who just don't trust it: both regulators and consumers.  “Studies have shown that there are a lot of people who still don’t trust the technology.” he said. 

Don't trust it?  Yeah.  There's a lot of us who have been over the hype cycle a few times and if we haven't seen it all, we've seen parts of it a lot of times.

Chevy Bolts on GM’s Orion Assembly Plant in Orion Township, Michigan.  GM photo. 

The One Factoid About the Illinois Mess You Can't Miss

By now, I assume everyone has heard that Illinois is on the verge of financial collapse - if not over the edge and already collapsing.  There's just one aspect to the story I'm not seeing widely discussed. 

Courts have mandated payments that consume 100 percent of the state's revenue.

The article linked above, on Fox News Politics, comically says, "even the lottery isn't safe", and is completely missing the point.  Yes, the state lotto requires a payment from the legislature each year and there's no funding past June 30.  Yes that means the state is planning to halt Powerball and Mega Millions sales.  And, yes, that means if given a choice between a smaller, lump sum lottery payment or the "guaranteed" monthly payments, take the lump sum.  But talking about the lottery is burying the lede: Illinois is in a really bad situation even for Illinois.

But the problems are years in the making, caused in large in part by the state’s poorly funded pension system— which led Moody’s Investors Services to downgrade the credit rating to the lowest of any state. The state currently has $130 billion in unfunded pension obligations, and a backlog of unpaid bills worth $13 billion.

The state is at junk bond status.  Re-read that sentence a couple of paragraphs above again.  They need to spend 100% of their revenue just on court mandated payments.  The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in May 2015 that pensions for current government workers can’t be modified.  If 100% of the revenue has to go to the pension funds, that leaves no pay for teachers, no maintenance, no repair of municipal systems, no lights for the state buildings, police or anything else at all.  Every state function has to shut down.

Reports have suggested the state could be the first to attempt to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy -- but under the law, that’s impossible unless Congress gets involved.

“Nobody here in Illinois is considering bankruptcy—first of all, it’s not allowed,” said Steve Brown, press secretary for Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. “Second of all, it would damage the reputation of the state and it’s just not necessary.”

Confidentially, Mr. Brown, don't worry that the rest of the country would think less of you.  Filing for bankruptcy wouldn't make us think any less of your state than we already do.

CBS Moneywatch reports the reason for the problems is Illinois made promises in pension plans but then didn't keep them.

But critics say some of those pensions carried overly optimistic assumptions, especially given periods of market turmoil like the global financial crisis, which ate into investment returns. The state's general assembly wasn't required to fully fund pensions, which meant tax money was spent on other priorities such as schools or infrastructure.

Note that CBS isn't saying the state spent the money to fund the programs through investment vehicles and it just hasn't worked out.  The statement says the state government "wasn't required to fully fund pensions", so they spent it on other things.  I'm not saying it's related to the fact that as soon as I started to type "Illinois politicians pension promises" into my search bar, before I finished the second word it offered to autocomplete with "Illinois politicians in jail".  As the saying goes, I'm not not saying it either. 

If you're a numbers geek, you will probably find the details on the Illinois pension fund problems in this report from Illinois Policy.org illuminating.  I'm not familiar with the organization, but the page seems reasonable in the sense of being numbers oriented and not throwing inflammatory language at anyone.  Their website says,

Illinois Policy is an independent organization generating public policy solutions aimed at promoting personal freedom and prosperity in Illinois.

Illinois has real problems with its pension obligations, and the sad story (as others have reported) is that it's likely to happen in  other states.  There have been calls to split Illinois into more states and assign those pieces to their neighboring states.  I have no idea what that would do to the legal obligations, but how would you feel if pension obligations you had no part in creating from another state were suddenly billed to you?   Is it "fair" or remotely reasonable to have Indianapolis taxpayers be put on the hook for the bad deals of Chicago politicians?  Is it any more fair if the Fed.gov gets involved and pays money it doesn't have either to bail out pension plans? 

It might surprise you that I come down quite a bit harder on the politicians than the employee unions on this.  The unions did what anyone expects them to do: demand and pressure for more and more benefits for members.  The politicians who accepted those contracts and then didn't do their part to make sure they were funded bare the blame.  The unions say "pensions are a promise" and are partly right.  Keeping those pension agreements is more than just a promise; it's a fiduciary responsibility of the government that made them.  And I use government and responsibility in the same sentence without a trace of irony.

(Scott Stantis - Chicago Tribune) Don't worry, economically, you're virtually Puerto Rico now.

Now for Something Completely Different

About a year ago, I told the story of a guitar project I was starting on.  To summarize, a friend had given me an odd "junk guitar" with most of one side cut away.  The story is that the manufacturer, Breedlove, had made it as some sort of demo piece that showed how well they were made by showing what the insides of the guitars were like.    

It has a solid Sitka spruce soundboard (top), which isn't uncommon once you get past the very cheapest guitars; the back, though, is solid rosewood and that's something I expect to find only in fairly high end guitars.  The closest equivalent I know of on the market today seems to be the Fender Paramount PM-3 Deluxe at a K-buck.  The sides are rosewood laminate (plywood), but a guitar's sides are largely structural and don't affect sound very much. So while it has an obvious problem, it's basically a good guitar, not one of those cheap, plywood guitars for beginners.  In other words, while it's a junk guitar because of how it was cut up, it's not a "junk guitar".

Last September, I replaced the missing parts (with the exception of the electronics) to make it playable, and I've been playing it at least once a week as my primary acoustic guitar.  It sounds remarkably good.

All the while I've been trying to come up with a way of restoring it.  The problem is that the shape of that cutaway isn't a piece of an oval, a circle, or anything that looks like a conventional guitar's waist.  I'd have to turn the cutout shape into something I could match exactly to make a solid top with the right shape, and I'd have to rebuild the top and back.  I might have to remove the neck.  I'd need to replace many of the braces inside the box; you can see some of the braces on the back; the braces on the top are a more complex pattern and really a science of their own.  Getting the wood to rebuild the top and back would essentially mean buying the wood to make a whole new guitar, and it would probably take more work than making a new guitar from flat pieces of wood.

What about just putting a piece of wood over the hole?  I started looking into that and found it to be harder than you'd think.  The wood used in guitar making is very thin compared to standard lumber, which has lots of advantages, but means you just don't find it at the Orange or Blue Borgs, you have to buy it from a luthier supply place.  After you find it, the wood's typically sold as a separate top and another species sold as the back and sides.  From time to time, during thickness planing or sanding, a side will get broken and the remaining piece set aside and sold as a practice or "orphan" side.  For a few reasons, I had decided I'd like a light wood, preferably figured maple.  The problem with that is the places who sell these orphan sides tend to say, "no selection"; "you'll get what we have the day we get your request".   One of the major online suppliers told me they'd be happy to sell me two sides at full price, if I'd like, which came across as less helpful than they might have though. 

Somewhere along the line, somebody suggested I replace the side with a piece of clear plastic.  The guitar will always be an oddball, one-of-a-kind instrument, so since it was originally intended as  a showpiece of what it's like inside a Breedlove guitar, this will keep it that way.  I finally went down this road, using some clear plastic left over from building my mill's enclosure.

Since holding the plastic to the guitar has to be designed in, I decided to use pieces of wood called kerfing, for the multiple saw kerfs cut in it.  The first step was to cut this into pieces and glue them to the top and bottom of the body, emulating the way the existing kerfing is positioned.  This picture shows the bottom kerfing already glued in place and the top kerfing being held by rubber band clamps. 

With the kerfing glued in place, the next step was to rough form the plastic.  I made a form by tracing the outline of the body's cut onto some scrap 1x pine, cutting that out with a jigsaw and then smoothing with sandpaper.  After that, I clamped the plastic to the high spot on the form and heated it with a hot air gun.  As the plastic softened, I could push it down onto the form with a long-bladed screwdriver and after a few seconds, it won't spring up anymore.  Much.

Then it was time to go through a cycle of test fit, mark overhang on the plastic, cut it off, and repeat.

As you can see, I put a sound port on the side, like so many high-end custom guitars have these days.

Finally, the real purpose of the kerfing.  In a production guitar, the sides are glued to the flat surfaces on the kerfing.  I thought that for this guitar that it might be best to use wood screws on the sides, because wood glue doesn't work on plastic and epoxy is too permanent.

I suppose it's typical for me to say I'm not sure if it's Done done.  Before I smoothed the plastic to make it match the body's top and back,  I put a new set of strings on it and played for a half hour.  Adding the side didn't mess up the sound, that I can hear.  With the sound port where it is (even though it's not perfectly centered - aarrgh!), it still sounds good from where I'm sitting.  The second thoughts that I have about being done center on how butt ugly it is.  I might do something like stain the light colored wood of the kerfing to make it a bit less glaring, and in-your-face.  I need to learn a bit about options and what I can do to make it look a little nicer, if possible.

On the other hand, it's not like I'm playing in clubs and lots of people will see it.  It'll be under my right arm and held up against me while I'm playing.  Then it will live on a stand until the next time I pick it up.

Oh Noes! It's So Hot Airplanes Can't Fly!

This was the headline about life in Phoenix yesterday and into today.  Well, except for the "Oh Noes!" part.  How hot was it?  118, or 47.8 C.  (Standard joke:  Arizona person, "but it's a dry heat".  Me: "so's a Bessemer furnace")  Seems to me that 118 isn't extremely hot - I'd swear I see temps like that all summer long looking at TV weather maps - and it turns out it seems well off the all-time high in Phoenix of 122. Certainly not a record, there.

So what's going on here?

The only flights that were cancelled were flights of a Bombardier regional jet.  The articles didn't mention the specific model; they just called them a CRJ and there are three models in that series: the CRJ700, 900 and 1000 (pdf warning).  The company I retired from, whom I've always protected from my ramblings by simply referring to them as Major Avionics Corporation, was a top tier supplier to Bombardier and they were, in turn, one of our largest customers.  Just as I can tell you that I did the RF design on a handful of radios on those airplanes, I can tell you that no electronics system we ever sold them was rated to less than 75C, and everything I tested was tested at 85C (167 and 185F, respectively).  118 is pretty meager compared to those.

The answer lies in the airframe and power.  Aircraft are rated for a certain maximum takeoff weight and that must be what the wing area can lift given the speed available out of the engines.  The catch is that physics says lift depends on the density of the air the aircraft is operating in and that's rarely the same as it was designed for.  Pilots refer to density altitude; the equivalent altitude of an airport based on temperature (and humidity) compared to the standard conditions the aircraft was designed for.  At higher temperatures, air has a lower density - it's thinner; fewer molecules are going over the wing.  That lower air density reduces how much lift is generated on the aircraft's wings and it reduces engine efficiency; a double whammy.

On a hot and humid day, the aircraft will accelerate more slowly down the runway, will need to move faster to attain the same lift, and will climb more slowly. The less dense the air, the less lift, the more lackluster the climb, and the longer the distance needed for takeoff and landing.

The CRJ aircraft simply aren't capable of 100% operation in their service area.  They'd need more wing area or more power out of the engines to operate every day.  I understand that aircraft design is full of compromises; heck, all engineering is, and that rating the plane to take off when the density altitude is above the current limit may not have been possible without major changes to something they were primarily designing for (probably cost per seat mile).  It's pretty common in engineering that the last couple of percent of improvement in performance cost more than the first 80 or 90%.  I also note that takeoff air temperature isn't specified in the .pdf brochure I linked to above, so it's possible airlines expect their planes to not be available 100% of the time.

You might wonder if this is really unique, and if not, why it's national news.  I'd say it's not unique and yesterday was certainly not the first time.  Conde Nast Traveler reported on the same situation one year ago today, and that article pointed out it's not that unusual.  It seems really hot days in the third week of June aren't unusual in Phoenix.

This is not the first time airplanes have felt the heat in certain parts of the U.S.—last summer, some planes faced similar challenges, and in past decades, we've seen the same story play out: In June of 1990, temperatures hit 120 degrees, so hot that the asphalt on the tarmac softened, aircraft couldn’t move, and they had to ground flights.

Since it's not unique or the first time, then why is it national news?  Could it be the media is trying to tie hot weather to climate change, and tie that to Trump announcing we're getting out of the Paris climate accords?   That's a guess.  I'll report on stories because I find them interesting.  I don't think the media works that way.
 

Conde Nast Traveler - Getty Images

Searching For Stingrays With Ride-Sharing

That's the provocative idea behind an experiment documented in Wired on June 2nd.  Stingrays, of course, are the boxes law enforcement uses to spoof cellphones into connecting with them (LE) instead of the real, desired tower.  Once connected, the LE agencies can intercept communications, track a suspect's location, and even inject malware onto a target phone.

For two months last year, researchers at the University of Washington paid drivers of an unidentified ridesharing service to keep custom-made sensors in the trunks of their cars, converting those vehicles into mobile cellular data collectors. They used the results to map out practically every cell tower in the cities of Seattle and Milwaukee—along with at least two anomalous transmitters they believe were likely stingrays, located at the Seattle office of the US Customs and Immigration Service, and the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

Beyond identifying those two potential surveillance operations, the researchers say their ridesharing data-collection technique could represent a relatively cheap new way to shed more light on the use of stingrays in urban settings around the world. "We wondered, how can we scale this up to cover an entire city?" says Peter Ney, one of the University of Washington researchers who will present the study at the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium in July. He says they were inspired in part by the notion of "wardriving," the old hacker trick of driving around with a laptop to sniff out insecure Wi-Fi networks. "Actually, cars are a really good mechanism to distribute our sensors around and cast a wide net."

Police at all levels have been very reluctant to provide information on what they're doing with these devices or the devices called "IMSI Catchers", which use cellular phones' International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) as a way to identify a targeted phone.  They've even dropped charges against suspects rather than discuss what they do in open (non-classified) courtrooms.  Nevertheless, most states still don't require a search warrant to approve use of these tricks.

In the absence of publicly available stingray information, the University of Washington researchers tried a new technique to find out more. Starting in March of 2016, they paid $25 a week to 15 rideshare-service drivers to carry a suitcase-sized device they called SeaGlass. That sensor box contained about $500 worth of gear the team had assembled, including a GPS module, a GSM cellular modem, a Raspberry Pi minicomputer to assemble the data about which cell towers the modem connects to, a cellular hotspot to upload the resulting data to the group's server, and an Android phone running an older program called SnoopSnitch, designed by German researchers to serve as another source of cell-tower data collection. The sensor boxes ... were designed to boot up and start collecting data as soon as the car started.

The UW researchers then collected detailed data about every radio transmitter that connected to the SeaGlass modems and Android phones as they moved through the two cities for two months. This allowed them to identify and map out roughly 1,400 cell towers in Seattle, and 700 in Milwaukee. Then they combed that data for anomalies, like cell towers that seemed to change location, appeared and disappeared, sent localized weaker signals, appeared to impersonate other towers nearby, or broadcast on a wider range of radio frequencies than the typical cellular tower.  For instance:

Around the Seattle office of the US Customs and Immigration Service, the researchers pinpointed an apparent cell tower that frequently changed the channel on which it broadcast, cycling through six different kinds of signal. That's far more than any other tower they tested—96 percent of their data showed towers transmitting on just one channel—and represents a telltale sign of a stingray.

Attempting to correlate their findings with police agencies so they could determine just how well their approach worked was just not gonna happen, and to be honest, limits the utility of this study.   

A Port of Seattle police spokesperson said the airport police "don't have one of those," and a Seattle Police Department spokesperson said "it’s not one of ours." The FBI didn't respond to requests for comment, but an ICE spokesperson wrote that ICE agents "use a broad range of lawful investigative techniques in the apprehension of criminal suspects. ...” A DEA spokesperson refused to confirm or deny any specific operations, but noted that stingrays are a "lawful investigative tool that can be utilized in the dismantlement of criminal organizations."

Despite this, for a relatively modest $500 investment in hardware, and about twice that per month, the researchers were able to get a fairly good map of operations in their areas.  That part is probably where savings can be had, by having students or team members drive their own cars themselves. 

The Stingray finder hardware box.  University of Washington photo.  The study paper at UW is rather interesting if you're into that geeky stuff.

Photo of the Day From Last December

I've had this since getting it in some sort of mailing last December, and it just strikes me funny every time I look at it.

Standing inside the machining center is Tatiana Whitlock, professional shooter, trainer and her own brand.  The photo was taken for an announcement she was becoming an "ambassador" for ATEi Guns.  The guy in front of her goes unnamed, and is holding a rapid change tool holder with an end mill that's more reasonably sized than the drill bit Tatiana is holding.  Compare the size of the drill bit in her left hand to the gun in her right. 

The fact that I find it funny probably makes me a target of SJWs for some reason or other.  Meh.  Isn't everybody? 

Monitoring the Country for Dirty Bombs

I recently received an interesting item from Raytheon about a monitoring system they're developing to aid in the search for dirty bombs and radioactive materials that might be in places it shouldn't be.   It's called RAIN for Radiation Awareness and Interdiction Network.

Together, Raytheon and research firm Physical Sciences Inc. have formed one of three industry teams that will demonstrate advanced technologies for a nationwide project called the Radiation Awareness and Interdiction Network, or RAIN. The vision is to develop a network of sensors, communications systems and analytical tools that will work together to detect, identify and attribute vehicle-borne threats before they reach a protected region or site.

It's not like there are no detectors now; the issue is improving them to reduce the number of false hits, while still finding real problem sources of radiation, and doing it faster.

The issue is normally occurring radioactive material, or NORM, a buzzword in detection circles. NORM shipments might be anything from radioactive isotopes in medical materials to a truckload of bananas, which naturally contain the radioactive isotope potassium-40. Or it could be any number of other, innocuous materials.

“One study found a third of nuisance alarms at some border crossings were caused by shipments of kitty litter,” said Dr. Erik Johnson, a Raytheon nuclear engineer and deputy program manager.
...
Fast forward to the present, and the government’s advanced technology demonstration program. In a two-mile strip of roadway at the Virginia Tech Smart Highway Facility, cars and trucks maneuver past checkpoints where researchers measure the performance of different RAIN concepts.

(the Virginia Tech test site - Raytheon photo)

The big advance in dealing with NORM was a software fix to implement a proprietary algorithm called Poisson Clutter Split, or PCS, which processes energy spectra and suppresses clutter — reducing noise levels in the radiation it reads. 

If there's a real breakthrough here, it's the speed with which traffic can be monitored.  Currently, trucks have to be slowly driven though a screening area; with this system, the goal is to monitor cars and trucks going at highway speed.  Raytheon decided to take advantage of existing infrastructure to house the monitors.

Second, the team addressed the economics of implementing the overall system. They installed the PERM radiation detectors as an upgrade to the Raytheon-built, all-electronic tolling systems now in use on roadways from Florida to Israel.

The detectors become part of the elevated, drive-through gantries that have replaced toll booths on major highways around the world. The same vehicle timing and identification data that's used for accurate tolling can help with threat detection, discrimination and vehicle attribution.

It's always easier to mount a new box to existing infrastructure than create new trusses all along the highways.  This turns the toll collection system into a multi-spectrum security scan.   Since the toll systems are already linked to other state infrastructure, typically Highway Patrol and the toll collection networks, the radiation detector signals would probably be able to use the same links - wired or wireless.  The obvious down side, though, is that the way someone with a dirty bomb gets around this is simply to stay off those roads.  First steps, I suppose.

Again, radiation detection is nothing particularly new and has been in place in shipping ports since at least the aftermath of 9/11.  I don't believe I've told this story here on the blog, but a few years ago I went through a period where work sent me to Toronto, Ontario several times to help a vendor and our company resolve some  production logjams.  On one return trip, I had lined up to go through customs for entry to the US. Since I had nothing to do other than look around, I was just standing there, when I suddenly found a security agent alongside me with something in his hand about the size of a small ham radio VHF or UHF transceiver - only it wasn't one.  I didn't get a good look, but it was a dark-colored box with some different colored LEDs on the front of it, and I think it had some sort of antenna-looking device on it.  I heard the agent say, "Over here" in a loud voice to no one in particular, and a group descended on a woman in the next line to my left and a couple of places in front of me.  If you were to look at her, you'd probably say "cancer patient" to yourself.  She produced some sort of letter, apparently explaining why she was radioactive, and after perhaps a minute, the agents went back to where they came from, with cheerful-sounding, "have a nice day" greetings all around. 

That impressed me.  Given the size of the room, they had to have been more than 50 feet from her, yet they quickly isolated her and came to investigate without impacting the rest of us waiting in line. 

A quick search for news of a contract for Raytheon and Physical Sciences for RAIN doesn't return a recognizable hit, so it looks like this is still research for a new system.  Aside from governments, there aren't likely to be customers for this. 

I'm waiting for the knock on the door from Federal Agents who think nobody could possibly have enough kitty litter to set off their detectors.  They haven't seen enough multi-cat households.

Headline of the Day

From PJMedia

Psychic Who Got Hit by Car While Eating Breakfast 'Did Not Foresee That Happening'

Mrs. Graybeard and I used to joke about putting up signs reminding readers there was a psychic fair coming, ending with, "you know where and when". 

Reading between the lines, he seems to be saying, "I'm not that kind of psychic.  I talk with dead people".  Well, alrighty then. 

The Problem With Incitement

I drew a lot of flack from my column on the psychopathic baseball shooter for not addressing incitement.  One commenter in particular kept asking this:

Let's take your claim and apply it to ISIS... Let's say this person watched ISIS propaganda and then followed their suggestions for mass murder. Is the responsibility solely with him? Even if the creators of the propaganda publicly proclaim that it is meant to inspire murder?

As I've said before, the only privilege of owning a blog is that I get to write long, involved answers to this things like this, and this answer turned into a comment too long to post.  So here goes.

First off, let me get this out of the way: Of course it's possible I'm wrong.  It's always possible I'm wrong, even on stuff I spent my life studying.  I never claimed to be the fount of all knowledge in the universe, just to provide you with content that's worth what you pay for it. 

That said, to repeat the commenter here, "if you're going to represent my view point honestly," what I'm saying is that the person ultimately, legally responsible for the shooting is the shooter.  I didn't even address the topic of influence or incitement in the original post because I see it as a morass.  If you want maximum liberty, it's a difficult subject and the exact point where speech becomes incitement is hard to define.  Maybe it's just me.  I do, however, fully acknowledge that incitement is real and unstable persons can be incited more easily than others.  Defining this is where real trouble starts.

My problem is I'm a very practical person and when I see a problem, I want to fix it.  Everything here is based on the question: what do you do to fix the problem?  What do you do with the person or people who incited him?  How do you even find them?  The guy with the gun in his hand is responsible and easy to fix.  You kill him.  Let's say you think it was Kathy Griffin who incited him.  The first question you have to ask is how can you prove, beyond a doubt, it was her and not someone else?  How can you prove it wasn't a belief implanted by a teacher he had forty years ago?  Or by his parents not bringing him up to respect others as real people?  What level of punishment is right for the inciter?  Since incitement makes her part of a capital crime, an attack like this meets the definition of terrorism, do you execute Kathy Griffin?  Imprison her?  What can you do to fix the problem?

Just to be clear, there is a legal incitement test from the Supreme Court, and I don't think anything I've seen out of Griffin or anyone else meets it.  It requires the incitement to "imminent lawlessness", not generally raising the anger level in society.  That test implies something more like urging someone to "go get 'em" in a specific time/place. 

Are you old enough to remember the Son of Sam killer in the '70s?  Do you remember he said he was told to kill by his neighbor's dog?  So who got life in prison, the killer or the dog?  Nobody put the dog down.  The guy, BTW, was declared mentally competent to stand trial even though he said a demon talking through the dog made him kill.  I think that's an indicator of where law places the line for responsibility. 

This is the answer to your question about ISIS.  You say, Let's say this person watched ISIS propaganda and then followed their suggestions for mass murder. Is the responsibility solely with him? Even if the creators of the propaganda publicly proclaim that it is meant to inspire murder?  ISIS is not responsible.  Did they influence him?  It doesn't meet the incitement test, but let's say sure, they influenced him.  So what?  How many thousands of people looked at the ISIS propaganda and didn't get influenced?  Again, what are you going to do about them being responsible?  Go send the military to kill them all off?  Already being done.  Now what? 

Come out and specifically say that you think incitement to violence is protected speech. Or fail to do that or you admit that by your failure to do so, admit that you are wrong, and actually IT IS POSSIBLE in some cases for someone who speaks to also bear responsibility for actions that result.  No, I don't think incitement to violence is protected, I just don't know what it is.  It seems to me that the threshold moves with the person hearing it as well as the situation they hear it in.  The question of what constitutes hate speech and what to do about it is very hard - especially with the forces out there now saying "anything I disagree with is hate speech".  Not just the Antifa a-holes, but the actual Democratic establishment.  In case people forget, in 2014 the Democrat senate voted to "partially" repeal the first amendment.  The move to nullify the Bill of Rights doesn't just apply to the second amendment.

A few minutes after the Republicans voted to "reduce and rename" Obamacare, a dozen Democrats came out saying the Republicans were going to kill people.  Political rhetoric or hate speech designed to incite violence?  What if they intended it to be (A) but it turned out to be (B)?  What do you do about that?  What's the fix?  We're supposed to negotiate outcomes, but how do you negotiate something with a guy like the FN shooter, when top Democrats convinced him you want to kill him when you say Obamacare is terminally AFU?  I personally don't think that gives us the right to go shoot those Democrats.  FN shooter obviously disagreed. 

For your information, I don't live in a "silly libertarian fantasy land".  I'm rather perturbed with the "movement" such as it is and only use the name in the loosest possible way.  Even then quite possibly the wrong way (see the paragraph up top about being wrong). 

If you're going to consider what I said truthfully, you'll see that I never endorsed any prior restraint. I simply advanced the notion that one might actually sometimes bear responsibility for one's actions. For example, perhaps publicly calling for a military coup against the elected president might be something that could possibly merit legal consequences?  I don't see where I said you endorsed prior restraint, but it seems to me that if you start charging people with incitement and imprisoning them that itself will restrain public speech. The act of arresting people for influencing others will be prior restraint.

Again it's all about where you draw the line and what you actually do to fix things.  Let's take the one you mention about calling for a military coup, or like HuffPo yesterday, calling for Trump to be tried for treason and executed.  Are these normal griping or do they need an investigation by Secret Service?  Do you extend that down to Madonna dreaming about blowing up the White House, or that other idiot (Naomi Judd) at the pussy-hat rally?  With the entire left wing media (redundant, I know) doing this crap 24/7, you're going to really overload the investigators. 

Frankly, I don't know where you draw the line.  I do believe the vitriol in all political discourse is way too overheated, but like everything else, it has been on this trajectory for a very long time and the only way it reverses course is for everyone to decide they're going too far and tame their rhetoric and that just ain't gonna happen.  It is literally tearing the country apart. 

Several commentators, Daniel Greenfield (Sultan Knish) and Angelo Codevilla for example, have said that we're in a cold civil war.  I've said the same thing since 2010.  A common interpretation of the "baseball attack" (like here) is that the war has now gone hot.  I think it went hot some time ago, perhaps Berkeley but perhaps earlier with the attempts by the left to start violence at Trump rallies over a year ago.  It's possible it's heating up more, but we'll only know if the tempo of operations goes up. 

I've always criticized lawmakers for never asking, "and then what?" when they propose legislation.  I'm just trying to ask that of myself, as I always do.  


Edit 6/17 1015 EDT:  I accidentally insulted Naomi Watts by using her name in place of Naomi Judd, up above.  Of course, I know neither of them, I just liked Naomi Watts in the only movie I know I saw her in, the 2005 iteration of King Kong.  In the weird world in the intertoobs, there's a greater chance she'll see this than things I'd say to friends.  (Approximately a 1 in 27 trillion chance).

Edit to edit 1200 EDT:  Reader JD(not the one with the picture) points out that the aforementioned moron is actually Ashley Judd, not Naomi.  I'd also like to point out that my previous mention of the odds Naomi Watts would actually see this is an example of the axiom, "47.3% of statistics are made up on the spot". 

Just FN

The shooter who went after the Republican team practicing baseball is just fucking nuts. 

Perhaps the second basic tenet of "small L" libertarianism, right behind that people belong to themselves, is that people are responsible for their own actions.  The FN guy who went to a baseball game practice to kill Republicans is responsible.  Bernie Sanders isn't responsible, although the shooter loved him some Bernie socialist idiocy (that's redundant).  The Democratic establishment isn't responsible.  The disgusting, unfunny, skank "comedienne" with the simulated beheaded Donald Trump mask isn't responsible, nor are the Shakespeare in the Park depiction of assassinating Trump or the "coarsening of the culture" responsible.  The guns are absolutely, unequivocally not responsible.  Only the guy who pulled the trigger is responsible.

However...

We humans are good at stereotyping because it's an effective survival technique.  If one of our tribe is killed by a lion, it's hardwired that we remember that large yellowish-beige cats are dangerous and to be avoided.  Watching things we stereotype can help us see where trouble might be coming from and help us survive.  It doesn't mean that every big yellow-beige cat is going to attack and kill one of us, and paying attention to one while a smaller, spotted cat is stalking us from another direction might be catastrophically bad survival skill.  Likewise, if you got horribly sick and threw up repeatedly after eating something, I bet you're going to be reluctant to have it again, even if you intellectually know it wasn't bad. 

In this case, it pays to be alert to left wing wackos.  If I recall correctly, with the exception of the Palestinian who killed Robert F. Kennedy, every political assassination in the US has been carried out by a leftist.

At the moment, Townhall is reporting that Representative Steve Scalise has had a second surgery and may need a third.  He's in critical condition and in the Intensive Care Unit at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a level one trauma center.  Former staffer turned lobbyist Matt Mika is also in critical condition. 

This incident isn't over for them or their families.  It's only over for the shooter.  

The loyal, loving press, in a capture from Twitter, that I got at WRSA.   The answer, Malcolm, is no.  Never.  Not even a remote chance.  That would never stand in a self-defense case. 

Movie Time

Now that I'm back from vacation, it's time to get back to the difficult work of being retired and having free time.  It requires concentration to goof off at high enough level, so yesterday Mrs. Graybeard and I went to see Wonder Woman in our usual multi-screen theater. 

Any of you who've read this blog long enough to feel like you know me shouldn't be surprised by that.  Almost without exception, whenever we go to see a movie it's either a sci-fi or comic book-based movie.  We've seen everything in the Marvel Universe except for Dead Pool (and that's on the maybe list); we've seen the DC movies in the various re-boots of Batman, Man of Steel, and so on, as well as sci-fi flicks like the Star Wars series, latest Star Trek series, Rogue One, Passengers, Oblivion and Arrival. 

Warner Brothers has apparently decided to bet a lot of money on the DC comics universe, first and foremost on Wonder Woman.  She was introduced in last year's last years' Batman vs. Superman, a movie the two of us were rather unimpressed with, and various released trailers since then show that they've planned at least two Justice League of America movies.  The first, simply called Justice League, comes out this November.  Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, Superman, Batman and more will be in those.  For what it's worth, IMDB says that WW cost $149 million to make and has so far made $213M as of yesterday, 6/12.  Sounds like a sound bet. 

Let's start with the good:  the action scenes are really well done.  The movie is set in the closing days of WWI, when US spy Captain Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) accidentally crashes into the sea just off the island where Diana (Gal Gadot) is watching.  The fight scenes are a good blend of CGI, slow motion stunts and explosions, along with old-fashioned, "puppets and stew meat" effects.  One of the press blurbs on Gal Gadot is that she was in the Israeli Defense Forces and has a level of training and toughness that allows her to do a lot of her own stunts.  I sure can't tell that, but she was pretty convincing in the fights.  She can act well enough to carry the part. 

The bad?  It was a bit slow paced for the start of the movie.  I didn't sit looking at my watch, but my guess would be the entire first half of the movie.  As Mrs. Graybeard told me, at some time she had started thinking "let's get on with the Wonder Womaning".  This was what movie weenies call "character development"; they felt they needed to tell Wonder Woman's backstory; how did she and the other Amazons get where the movie begins?  How did they remain isolated from the rest of the world?  How did Diana get trained to be a great warrior?  In my mind, they could have edited that part a bit more ruthlessly. 

There wasn't any ugly to mention.  They could have made this annoyingly feminist, but didn't go there.  Thank you, whoever made the call.  There were some scenes where they touched on her adaptation to this strange new world she jumps into, but those are either mildly comical or else over with pretty quickly.  They could have made those more annoying.  They largely let the obvious attraction between Capt. Trevor and Diana just stay near the surface. 

My rating would be a 4 out of 5.  The setup part of the movie drags a bit too much, but the rest is good.  Chances are, though, that if you're into comic book movies, you already want to see this.

(IMDB photo)  Chris Pine, Gal Gadot and the "mercenaries" they find to bring WW to the front lines.