More Tales From the Over-Regulated State

Tennessee has passed a law that anyone who posts a picture online that causes "emotional distress" to anyone, anywhere at anytime, is subject to fines and or imprisonment. 

The specific law outlaws posting a photo online that causes "emotional distress" to someone and has no "legitimate purpose." While the law does state that there needs to be "malicious intent," it also includes a massive loophole, in that it says that you can still be liable if the person "reasonably should know" that the actions would "frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress."

Seems unconstitutional on its face, but that doesn't seem to mean much anymore.  Just more ways to bend you to their insane wills. 

Read the whole thing.  It's short.

Say, isn't Oleg in Tennessee? 

"The Universal Currency is Energy"

Someone (I think it was R.A. Heinlein) once said that energy is the universal currency.  All transactions between people reduce to transactions about energy.  Think about it: what's the most fundamental of your needs?  Food and shelter.  What is food other than energy to run you?  How do you build your home?  Don't you need energy to make your home livable; to separate the inside from the outside?  If you buy anything, you're trading some of your concentrated energy for someone else's.

For as much of my life as I can remember, people have been preaching that we are running out of oil and we needed alternatives.  I first remember seeing the term "peak oil" invoked in the second 1970s gas crisis, when OPEC was deliberately raising the price of their product to gouge us.  When we started making motions to develop our own resources - rather than just talking about it - the price of oil came down.  A lesson for today?  It seems every 10 or 15 years or so, someone else announces we're at peak oil and the world will soon be ending. 

Environmentalists and other idiots are always screaming how we need green energy or renewable energy; both terms are code.  What they mean is they want to return the world to some idealized pre-industrial state that never existed.  They want fewer people, and some have fantasized about killing up to 98% of humanity.  It's not just about magical unicorn farts to power everything. 

Enter Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute with a great review article "Four Dirty Secrets About Clean Energy".  This is a well thought out piece, and worth the time to read.

1. Dirty Secret #1: If “clean energy” were actually cheaper than fossil fuels, it wouldn’t need a policy.
2. Dirty Secret #2: Clean energy advocates want to force us to use solar, wind, and biofuels, even though there is no evidence these can power modern civilization.
3. Dirty Secret #3: There are promising carbon-free energy sources--hydroelectric and nuclear--but “clean energy” policies oppose them as not “green” enough.
4. Dirty Secret #4: The environmentalists behind clean energy policy are anti-energy.

Talking about the desire to see humans wiped off the planet may seem like I'm going too far, but it's real.  In 2007, when senator Obama famously said "under my cap and trade plan, energy prices would necessarily skyrocket", he didn't say that it would necessarily kill people on the lower rungs of our society --- but it's hard for me to believe he doesn't know that, if he's as smart as his peg boys say.  Earlier in the week, WSRA linked to Francis Poretto's piece Causes of Death.  If you haven't read that, please do. 

I Hate It When You Lie Like That

The Bernank says that the economy will resume growing once again as we recover from disruptions from the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster.  The bad numbers last month are only due to short term "head winds" or a "bump in the road".

The problem is, that when you account for their printing press, the economy isn't growing.  When you look at the source for that pathetic "54,000 jobs created" we saw reported, it's from using the Bureau of Labor Statistics birth/death model - it's not measured or reported jobs. 

Business Insider put up the numbers to analyze the GDP growth situation last Friday.

The Federal government borrowed and spent $5.1 trillion over the past four years to generate a cumulative $700 billion increase in the nation's GDP. That means we've borrowed and spent $7.28 for every $1 of nominal "growth" in GDP. (emphasis in original)

That's bad enough as it is.  Would you promise to pay $7.28 to get $1?  Maybe if you desperately needed to get you car out of the shop or some emergency like that, and the only guy who would lend it to you was "Friendly Guido", the local loan shark, but you sure couldn't make a steady living out of it.  As I frequently say: "don't worry: it's not that bad.  It's worse".

In constant dollars, GDP is flat: we got no growth at all for our $5.1 trillion: zip, zero, nada. In constant dollars, the GDP in 2011 might return to the 2007 level, if the economy continues "growing" at the same pace reached in the first three months of 2011. If not, then the GDP will actually be lower than pre-recession levels.

The Fed has pumped amazing amounts of money into the system.  After all, they need to create that money if they're going to keep up with the incredibly prodigious deficit spending of the Obama administration, considering China is essentially getting out of US Treasuries. 

As I've said a couple of times already, I believe QE3 is going to happen.  It is simply the only thing they know how to do.  The dip in the broad stock market indexes could be caused by the people who want QE3 putting pressure on the banksters.  And it may be the old adage "sell in May and go away".  A look at this 6-month chart shows clearly that the S&P 500 has been essentially flat since mid February. 

I Sincerely Hope You're Storing Food

Amid all the stories about the wicked problem with produce contaminated by E. coli in Europe, it's not being emphasized that massive amounts of food are being destroyed.  In Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic and the UK.  I don't know how this food will be made up, or what the percentage of damage is, but it has to press food prices up. 

Here in the US, Corn planting is late in the upper Midwest, which is still sopping wet from the winter and (alleged) spring.  The situation appears to be the same in the Northeast, where it seemed to be  a record winter for snowfall.  Much of this corn is grown for animal feed; not having the feed is going to increase demand on corn from somewhere else, but it's looking like there's no such place as "else". 

Texas is still almost completely in drought conditions, which will put pressure on cattle ranchers.  In Arkansas, the situation is schizophrenic.  "Tyson Privett, an extension agent in northeast Mississippi County, summed up the two extremes: On one side of the county's levee system, corn and other crops are starting to shrivel up. On the other side, hundreds of acres of farmland are still flooded."  Let's not even get started on the lower Mississippi area, where floods have not receded enough, and a lot of that land is not going to be usable for years. 

I know I've beaten on this drum before, but better to have and not need than need and not have.  Food prices are going to continue to go up.  And coffee really is like guns: two supplies is one and one is none. 

Unintended Consequences

No, not the book.

A while back, I recommended you watch the National Inflation Association's video, The College Conspiracy, viewable on their page, or on YouTube.  If you haven't spent the hour watching it; perhaps you don't have kids of that age, or you think you know the story anyway, I still recommend watching it.  There's an important idea in there that is a partial explanation for the mess we find ourselves in as a nation.  This thought has been tugging at the back of my head since I watched that in mid-May.

There's a scene in there starting at the 45:24 minute mark, where a young guy named Ethan Jacobs talks about his experiences with going to law school.  This is in the midst of a long section on the fraud perpetrated by law schools (as an example, they tell students that "80% of our students get a job after graduation" but include jobs as night clerks in Walmart, or working as the law school janitor).  He starts out by saying in his opening weeks of law school he found that while he thought the purpose of the law was to help create freedom, liberty and justice, he found the law was a there to create jobs for lawyers.  The devastating effects of all this law and regulation, created simply as make-work for lawyers by lawyers, are destroying our country.

Billy Shakespeare famously said (King Henry VI - Part 2, Act IV, Scene II) "The first thing we do: let's kill all the lawyers".   He meant that the lawyers were the protectors of the people - protecting them from the tyrants.  Historically, it always seems to work out that those who set themselves up that way become the tyrants themselves.  Daniel Webster said,

In every generation, there are those who want to rule well--but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters--but they mean to be masters.

There are worse ideas than Billy's. 

This Week's Worry: Do Cellphones Cause Cancer?

The news this week was all a-twitter about the World Health Organization declaring the electromagnetic fields from a cell phone as “potential” cancer agent, classifying it with diesel fumes, dry cleaning fluid, talcum powder and automobile exhaust.  Like all radios, cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, totally unlike atomic sources.  It is simply radio, at a frequency (coincidentally enough) fairly close to where microwave ovens operate.  If cellphones are dangerous, all radios are. 

Fair enough: is radio dangerous?  Certainly some of it is.  We all know for sure that if we put Mr. Hamster in the Microwave oven, Bad Things happen.  But is that transmitter down the road safe?  How do we know?

Let me start by pointing out my biases.  I am an electrical engineer who specializes in doing radio frequency design.  I'm also a radio amateur - ham radio operator.  The two of those combine to mean I work with and am physically immersed in radio fields most of the time.  I consider myself a fairly careful guy and if I thought it was dangerous or would cause a long term problem like cancer I'd get out of it and do something else.  Years ago, though, I worked with a guy who would walk far out of his way to avoid a piece of test equipment I was using, so that he could go outside to smoke.  I guarantee you that the nanowatts of energy he might get from that equipment was much, much less hazardous than what he was getting from his cigarettes! 

Electromagnetic radiation exists in a spectrum whose frequency extends from below audio frequencies (less than a cycle per second) through radio, through light, x-rays, gamma rays and beyond.  All common broadcast radio, cable TV, satellite TV, data, Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, 4G and other services, use radio waves.  It has been pointed out that we live in a constant electromagnetic “smog” of all those EM sources (and more).

(xkcd)

I find that many people don't understand the difference between the two major types of radiation; ionizing and non-ionizing.  Ionizing radiation is energetic enough to, as the name says, knock electrons off an atom and form an ion.  There is a relationship between energy and wavelength (the DeBroglie wavelength), and all ionizing radiation is extremely short in wavelength; far ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays and beyond.  For example, the wavelength of an x-ray is centered around 1 nanometer (billionth of a meter) and gamma rays are centered around 10 picometers (trillionths of a meter) while cellphone radiation is centered around 20 centimeters; 200 million times longer wave (lower in energy) than the less energetic X-rays.  X-rays and gamma rays are genuinely dangerous, so the idea isn't that electromagnetic energy isn't dangerous; the idea is that the longer the wavelength, the less energetic the EM wave.

The only absolutely proven effects of radio frequency or power line emissions (besides electric shock from contact) are heat related and the National Cancer Institute is in agreement on that.  The most common heat effect is cataracts: if your head gets irradiated by a strong enough radio field, the circulation in your corneas is so limited (diffusion, really) that your corneas can cook and turn opaque.  If you were exposed to a radio field on the order of that in a microwave oven, you would cook as easily as any other hunk of meat.  When you reduce the power in the field, though, there are no demonstrated, medically proven effects from radio fields besides the thermal effects.  Studies show up from time to time that offer glimpses of other effects, even though there is no known mechanism that could explain them.  Follow-up studies usually don’t show these effects, leading to the tentative conclusion that the effect was some sort of statistical noise or really correlated with something else.  These studies bother some people, but they don’t bother me.  Why?  Simply if you have many people looking for an effect and it behaves like this, either there is no link, it's a very weak link, or the link is really to something else that isn't present in every study. 

For example, over 20 years ago, I read of a study that black and white televisions correlated with leukemia.  Black and white television, not color?  Even 20 years ago, the only people who used black and white TVs were pretty low income.  Poverty, it turns out, is associated with all sorts of negative health impacts.  It's easier to come up with an explanation of how poverty could lead to leukemia than how black and white TV sets could.  You will see the same argument about proximity to power lines causing leukemia or other problems; could it be the property values under the power lines are low, and mainly lower income people live there?  Again, it's easier to see how poverty could cause health problems than it is to see how 60 Hz fields could cause them. 

You regularly read about people who claim to be sensitive to EM fields in general, and who claim health effects of all kinds.  The thing is, as I mentioned above, everyone in modern society is immersed in a soup of radio signals from AM broadcast up through microwaves; they're in the near field of the AC power line, exposed to TV transmitters, radars… and don’t forget that the sun bombards us with radio signals, too.  The strengths are widely variable, but everyone in the western world is within one wavelength of an AC power line (which is five million meters – 3100 miles - for the US 60 Hz lines). 

There’s a saying in toxicology that the dose makes the poison.  The same concept applies here: while in the case of sticking your head in a running microwave oven, harm is guaranteed; in low doses, I see no evidence of harm from radio fields (and radio fields are used as physical therapy - diathermy, or as local heaters for prostate cancer).  In the case of a nearby transmitter, the dose is moderated by distance and the power from a radio field drops off very rapidly with distance, because it radiates in all directions.  Think of a candle flame, radiating light in all directions and lighting the inside of a sphere centered on it.  If you double the distance to the candle, the light spreads out over four times the area, so the light is ¼ the intensity.  This is called an inverse square law, and power drops off very quickly.  If you’re far enough away from the antenna that it looks like a point, the field drops off like this.  If the antenna looks like a line, say the power line from a few hundred yards, the field drops off proportion to distance, not distance squared. 

(picture credit) 
Let’s consider an example of an FM transmitter, one of the big ones, 50 kW.  Now 50 kW is a lot of power, but due to the inverse square law, you have to be very close to the antenna to be hurt by it.  Imagine standing at the base of the tower and imagine it can radiate you well there (it can’t – it’s aimed toward the horizon).  Just 200 feet away, that power has dropped from 50 thousand watts to less than 1 W (760 milliwatts).  Is that dangerous?  The standards organization that made the standards for radio exposure (based on heating) says 200 microwatts per square centimeter at this frequency should be the limit.  The area of a sphere that big in diameter is 502.7 thousand square feet or 467 million square centimeters.  Divide 760 milliwatts over 467 million square centimeters, and you get 1.6 billionth of a watt per square centimeter.  The safety limit is over 125,000 times bigger than that.  Sounds pretty safe!

The inverse square relationship means that if you cut the distance to the antenna in half, the power goes up by a factor of four.  What if you were 100 feet away from the transmitter?  Instead of being 125,000 times weaker than the limit, the field would be 31,000 times weaker.  50 feet away?  7800 times weaker than the limit.  You almost have to be holding the antenna to be in trouble (almost…). 

The story is a bit more complicated than that.  The amount of power you can handle depends on how much you absorb, which depends on the size of the wavelength compared to your body size (structures about ¼ wavelength in size absorb quite efficiently; much smaller or much bigger are less efficient).  There are two reasons I chose an FM transmitter for this thought experiment.  First, an average-sized person is about a quarter wave tall when they’re standing up.  Sit down to change your size in wavelengths and you’ll absorb less power.  The second reason I chose FM is that it’s the lowest power limit the FCC requires.  By the time you get to the frequency of cellular phones, allowed levels are a few times higher. 

More complications: as frequency goes up, radio doesn't penetrate any conductor well, an effect known as the skin effect; in a wire, the energy travels in a skin with the thickness dependent on the frequency of the radio.  Tubes are as effective as wire at carrying radio.  The effects also depend on how much cooling the body part being irradiated gets.  You don't think of your body as a liquid-cooled fuel cell engine but you are; blood circulation acts to remove local heating.  A hand gets a lot of circulation, and the body’s trunk gets even more. Actually, getting efficient power transfer of radio signals is far from trivial to do, and being exposed to a field is really very different than being affected by it.  

You can do the sort of path loss and power calculations I just did to determine the amount of power at any distance from TV stations, AM radio stations, cell phone towers and so on, and you’ll find they’re not going to cause anyone to get more than the allowed radiation – usually by a factor of thousands.  No surprise - they were designed to meet the laws that limit exposure! 

So what about your phone?  What about the video of the iPhone power detector in the girl’s hand?  The effect she's demonstrating is that as she absorbs signal by wrapping her hand tightly around the antenna (which is why the reception gets bad), she keeps signal from reaching the base station, and the base commands her radio to increase power.  This is what the system is supposed to do. 


The maximum power out of a handset is less than 2 watts.  The exact amount of power you will be exposed to and how much will be absorbed from a phone held to your ear is a computational nightmare, and I'm convinced that computational difficulty is one reason why the “science isn't settled”.  If they could point to  consistent, repeatable calculations and measurements that show the power transferred to your ear and brain was less than the recommended limits, the hype may have died down by now.   Remember, you can't be exposed to all of the power radiating out of the phone; if you absorbed even most of it, not enough would reach the other end and the call would drop. 

When you see people say “does your ear fell warmer after you use your phone?”, consider that the phone gets warmer because the power amplifier isn't 100% efficient; it's more like 20% or less.  That means to get 1 watt out, you put at least 5 watts into the final amplifier and that other 4 watts warms the phone, along with anything in contact with it. 

During normal operation, the output power of the phone will vary depending on how good the signal path is from your location.  In an elevator or other metallic box, the phone will more likely be at full power.  In a place with better radio path characteristics, the power will be lower. The accepted value for how much power you'll be exposed to is around 1 mW/sq. cm., which is approximately the limit.  When I first started in radio design, the limit was 10 mW/sq. cm.; there were no massive studies they undertook to lower the limit, it was done to make US limits more like other country's limits.   

With cell phones as widespread as they are, if there were any sort of clear link between their use and cancer, it would have been determined by now.  Instead, what you get is the “we need more research” chorus.  The simple fact is that the only known effect caused by radio fields is heating.  Any researcher who wants to say otherwise needs to show possible mechanisms for the injury.  I believe this should have been put to bed years ago.  I don't believe there any health risk from radio other than the thermal effects.  You don't stick your head in the microwave, you don't stand in front of a search radar and you don't go grabbing antennas on operating transmitters putting out over 10 watts or so.  Other than that, don't worry.  

The most dangerous thing about a cellphone is talking on it while driving.  I say that as someone who was run down while riding their bike by a small pickup truck driven by someone distracted by their phone.

Tales From the Over-Regulated State

The Over-Regulated State doesn't sound quite as dramatic as Police State, but what are those police going to enforce except regulations?  One of Ayn Rand's more memorable quotes is:

"There's no way to rule innocent men.  The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

There's a joke picture going around; perhaps you've seen this referred to a "The Compleat Guide to Women, Volume 1" (for example, here)

 

When I saw it, I thought "Code of Federal Regulations, Volume 1 of 9247, Abridged Edition"  

From the TechDirt pages, it seems the Fed.gov hydra wants to make it illegal to embed videos.   Naturally, if they're going to say such a thing they have to define the terms, so our Glorious Betters have decided:

If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link... you could be facing five years in jail.

Now, as for why it's a 5 year term if 10 people watch but not punishable if 8 people watch it, you'll have to ask our insect overlords.  Since having 20 people watch it is not materially worse than 10, that means 10 is some sort of magic number.   But just think of all the criminals they can create this way.  It's fantastic!

Does your head hurt?

How about Net Neutrality?  I've blogged on this a bunch of times (just enter the term in the search bar and you can read them in reverse chronological order), especially the incestuous relationship between FCC Chairman Julius "Seizure" Genachowski, and Robert McChesney of the openly Marxist "Free Press".  The two go way back.  I've said a bunch of times (in more words) that McChesney and "Free Press" would write the laws and the FCC will copy them onto their letterhead.

Who would have guessed? 

(Judicial Watch President Tom) Fitton added that "the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency that follows the law. The American people should be deeply troubled by the fact that the Obama administration, on issue after issue, seems to be run by shadowy leftist organizations."

Word.

Long Term Thoughts and Short Term Actions

I don't read Claire Wolfe as much as she deserves to be read.  I stumbled across a bookmark to her today and found an interesting piece, "What Do You Think You'd Do In a Hyperinflation?"  Her setup is:

"I’m not talking about some post-apocalyptic George Romero scenario where starving urbanites are crawling through your windows in search of your stash of freeze-dried potato dices and fruit galaxy. I’m talking about getting along — as people did in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and most other places when their currency went to toilet paper on them."

In both places, people fell back on other currencies and barter or an existing black market.  In Zimbabwe in particular, they fell back on US dollars.  In Weimar Republic, they used a variety of other exchange media as well as the dollar, but Germany wasn't the only place going through bad inflation at the time.  Austria is often overlooked, but was not much better.   The main difference between what we're facing and those places is that we won't have a stable reserve currency to fall back on.  That should make it worse here than it was there. 

It's almost 100% certain there won't be a Euro to fall back on - Greece is teetering closer to collapse and the survival of the entire EU shouldn't be taken for granted.  If the EU goes, there's really nothing else behind the Euro.  There's a link in that Business Insider story to an article in the UK Telegraph which lays out a good step-by-step look at what's likely to happen when (not if) Greece defaults. 


Think of this as the long term.  Perhaps. It may all go down later this summer or early next fall.  There's certainly a case to be made that some forces are trying to collapse the Western world - the EU then the US in rapid succession. 

Although, as I've said before, I believe all of the necessary conditions are in place for the collapse of the dollar.  Political things happen strangely slowly to my mind, but I work in a world where we worry about stray picoseconds of delay.  The slow pace of things gives us more time to prepare for a world of barter, and paying for lunch with a single 1964 quarter.  In the short term, shop sales on everything.  I won't recommend going into debt, but inflationary times are kind to debt, denominated in dollars.  If you get "cost of living" increases that inflate your pay, that old debt gets smaller. 


So what do we do to prepare?  Clive Maund, a commentator on markets who seems to do well, shows the technical plots that give support for the general press lately that the economy is going down again.  One of my interests is silver, so let me present his plot here:

Note that his prediction is for a rebound into the mid-$40 range through this month, but then to seriously correct down to the $30 level by August.  Given the "fall of a cliff" shape of the last correction, his slopes seem gentle. Regardless, it looks like we're in a bit of a buying opportunity now - with a chance for better buys in a month.  If you're on a regular buying program, just keep doing what you're doing. 

I agree with Maund's assessment that the big traders on Wall Street could be driving the big indexes (DJIA, S&P 500) to demand the next round of Quantitative Easing - QE3 - or whatever they're calling it this time.  For them, the Fed is giving them virtually free money to crank stocks up with.  "Money for Nothing" - Dire Straits had it wrong.  Don't be a rock musician.  Work for the Goldman Sachs. 

Weiner Hacked

Has anyone seen Lorena Bobbitt ? 



That is all.

Strange and Bizarre Stories From the Police State

"Offered for your consideration" is a handful of stories that are completely unrelated, at first blush. 

First: why is there a secret morgue near Joplin, MO?  Police railroaded a CNN crew away from the place in this video:



Everyone knows there were tornadoes in Joplin and everyone knows there were many victims.  Anyone who thinks about it, and puts in the context of other stories we've heard, knows that there's probably some amount of collecting body parts and trying to match them into sets of remains that can be given an identity.  I'm sure some of the bodies are in a condition that family members wouldn't want pictures of.  But I don't think people want to watch that; I think most people are just curious about the magnitude of the tragedy.  I can understand you don't want cameras in there in respect to the survivors, but to essentially make the entire thing secret?  Why not just have a spokesman outside or in a nearby place to talk with the news media?  This is the sort of total blackout secrecy tactics the CIA and NRO use: just make everything secret.
  

The next story is about the terrible crime of pruning your trees on your own commercial property: 

The church was fined $100 per branch cut for excessive pruning, bringing the violation to $4,000.

$100 per branch?  The "City of Trees" (Charlotte, NC, by the way) will get rid of the fine if they destroy the trees and replace them.  No, really. 

The fine will be dropped if the church replaces each of the improperly pruned trees, said Tom Johnson, senior urban forester for city of Charlotte Land Development Division.

I'm speechless.  So if you let the trees grow back the pruned branches, (which is why you prune a tree, after all) that's a $4000 fine, but if you kill the tree and buy a replacement, that's better?  Did a nursery write this law? 

As Borepatch says, North Carolina used to be a nice place, now it's doing its best to become the Massachusetts of Dixie.

Finally, the story about the Department of Fatherland Security's "Future Crime"-like FAST system is getting wider circulation and made "The Blaze" today.  This is the system that they plan to use at bowl games and other big sporting events that they think are terrorist targets.  Or places to round up Threepers, Bitter Clingers and other anti-regime groups. 

The system strikes me as a lie detector (polygraph) in different clothes.  The way they say it works is to examine your physiological responses and compare it to expected values, which is exactly what a polygraph does.  In other words, like all polygraphs, it works by intimidating you into thinking it works.   

It always struck me as funny that on one hand, the government gave polygraph tests to all sorts of employees, while on the other hand, the three letter agencies were teaching classes in how not to get caught by a polygraph.  "Lie detector" tests are inadmissible in courts because the technology has basically been discredited (summary here - but just Google or Bing "beat polygraph") for more. 

And what do all of these stories have in common?  The Government knows better than you, is there to protect you from yourself, and will send police to enforce that. 

A Day of Remembrance

There has been a lot of talk lately, including here, about the police state we are becoming, or that we are.  Can we agree to put this aside today and pay respect to those who gave their all?  This feeling isn't universal; I even saw a reference - somewhere - that those veterans who gave the ultimate sacrifice didn't do that for us, they did it for the government.  They did what they were told.  And that observation was delivered in a way to diminish that sacrifice.

That war is "the extension of politics by other means" is credited to Clausewitz in  the 1800s.  It doesn't take a genius to see the author is right in assertion but terribly wrong overall.  

Yeah, I'm torn up by the murder of Jose Guereno, too.  And, as we've all pointed out, signs of the coming police state are everywhere.  But it's a simple act to pause, pay respect, remember the men of Omaha Beach, Chosin, and Operation Redwing.  That these men were conductors of US foreign policy does nothing to diminish their honor.  They gave their all for the men there with them.  But they gave more.  They gave us the chance to represent them. 

TSA To Oversee High School Prom??

I was just visiting the TSA careers web page, and I didn't see a single item that said you would provide security at high school proms - or, to put a more accurate description on it - not a single thing that said you would pat down high school girls at their prom.  That seems to be the job this month, though.  This is confusing, but apparently Candice Herrera and her sister went to the Capital High School prom and were treated roughly by the security officer at that prom

Candice Herrera said, "She grabbed my breast and grabbed the inner part of my bra and shook it and then picked up the front of my dress to like mid thigh." Herrera said. "She was patting down my bare legs which kind of didn't make sense."

So to ensure rough treatment of high school girls doesn't happen, the Santa Fe school board has hired the TSA to pat down the girls.  

On Friday, the court ordered Santa Fe Public Schools and the security company ASI to provide at least one TSA certified person at the Santa Fe High School prom and the Capital High School graduation.

Oh - the highly professional TSA is being brought in to provide a higher level of ... professionalism?  What could possibly go wrong?  Every single word there is a separate link, and I don't even scratch the surface. 

I Come To You With A Heavy Heart

I believe the recent abandonment of the fourth amendment is causing a cascade failure of the Bill of Rights.  Maybe that's not precisely right, maybe it has nothing to do with the recent court rulings because the BOR has been falling for quite a while now.  But there's a growing feeling it has started. 

John Venlet at Improved Clinch joins several who believe the next civil war has started, and it has come - not surprisingly - on jack boots.

The war of the United States government against the people is an ongoing and expanding action, the current preferred term being a kinetic military action, and this war is being waged on multiple fronts, with casualties on all fronts, though the highest body counts are currently on the domestic, or home front.

As Alan at Snarky Bytes said last week, you know we have problems when the police work under looser rules of engagement than our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  John continues:

Individual Americans are mostly silent in response to the war(s) being waged on them by the government, one could say complicitly silent, even as the war(s) death toll rises.  Why is this?  If Islamic terrorists were killing Americans in their homes, a hue and cry would resound throughout the land, marches would be held, politicians would righteously harrumph, and mainstream media sources would pour rivers of indignant words.  These things are not happening in America in response to the war of the United States government against the people because it is the police who are killing the people under the banner of law and order.  It is because America is become a police state. (emphasis added)

Professionalism fills American Mercenary as he goes through a couple of examples of how one can use open source intelligence to understand their Area of Operation.  Check out the Targeting Packet and the important field of Human Network Analysis. 

There are many open sources of information available today.  Many counties, including the Pima County, have the tax collector's records online.  It's a simple matter to look these up.   

One of John's comments links to this wonderful quote by Jeff Cooper:

“Not long ago it was easy to tell who the bad guys were. They carried Kalashnikovs. Now it is much more complicated, but one thing is sure - any man who covers his face and packs a gun is a legitimate target for any decent citizen.” - Jeff Cooper, June 1993

That cat's lucky they have such good trigger control, I tell you what! At least the cat didn't get shot at 71 times. 

How to Oppose the BATFE Long Gun Sales Proposal

No Lawyers - Only Guns and Money has put up a web page that will allow you to send a form letter to oppose the BATFE requirement that any sale of more than 2 rifles of "22 caliber or larger which use an external magazine" within 5 business days be subject to additional restrictions. 

While I think that a personally written letter has more impact, to quote the saying about automatic fire weapons, "quantity has a quality all of its own". 

My original post on this was missing the important detail of how to comment, so there it is.  Even better, it's an easy to fill out online form, so go do it, and get the word out to all your 2A friends and acquaintances.  Let's letter bomb these mofos. 

It's A Good Thing These People Weren't in Massachusetts

An hour or so south of the castle is sleepy St. Lucie county, where a unique story is reported.  If Massachusetts almost put TJIC away for a bad joke, these folks would be in solitary confinement. 

Officials are investigating a weekend incident during which a man indicated his wife fired an AR-15 rifle at a target inside a master bedroom closet, missing the target and blasting holes in a washing machine.

Now, I gotta tell you something.  I've got an AR or three, and I find the 35 or 40 minute drive to the rifle range somewhat annoying.  I really wish there was something closer, or Florida was like it was when I was 14, and I could just wander around past the end of the road with my rifle and plink at cans.  But I have never, ever thought of putting a target in my closet and shooting it with my AR.

A deputy learned they'd been in the bedroom shooting the target in the closet.

See, up till now, I never thought I would see the words "in the bedroom shooting the target in the closet" in a single sentence.  

"They had done this on multiple occasions," a report states, noting both had been drinking.

And they had been drinking while shooting targets in the closet.  Who would ever guess that alcohol could be involved?

But notice the article concludes this way:

Investigators spoke to a prosecutor and determined no charges would be filed at the time.

Well, to be fair, the LEOs confiscated the dude's three guns "for safe keeping", but I think I would expect that in pretty much every situation where a gun is discharged in a house.  Not saying it's right, but I think if this couple were in The Peoples Republic of Massachusetts or Callie-Fornia, they'd be hanging from a dungeon wall by shackles.

A Dual 1 W Laser? Set Two People on Fire at Once??

Seems like only yesterday, but actually a year ago, I posted about a one watt laser from Wicked Lasers.  It featured warnings it could burn through your skin, set you on fire or blind you instantly. Naturally, everybody wants one.

They're at it again.  This time, the "Sith" (what else?) laser that couples two of those same "Arctic" model 1W lasers into a "Darth Maul" style dual. 

A friend of a friend just ordered one of the Arctic models.  Hopefully, I'll get a look at one without burning off parts of either of our bodies. 

A Rabbit Foot Note

It appears the USDA is caving on the fines.

According to Bob McCarty on BigGovernment.com,

"I base that conclusion on the following e-mail I received late Tuesday afternoon from USDA/APHIS Spokesperson Dave Sacks:

We are working out an alternative to the $90K fine and plan to reach out to Mr. Dollarhite over the next week to discuss. We are hopeful he’ll be amenable to discussing it with us and let us visit his facility as we work the issue out."

Perhaps it was the personal touch of some elected officials (McCarty names a few).  Perhaps it was the planned Anti-tyranny protest this afternoon.  Perhaps it was phone calls or emails from all of the blogs that picked up this story.  Perhaps it was an interesting letter from lawyer Richard L. Anderson of West Branson, who wrote:

 "My client rejects that proposal. I note that a descriptive pamphlet ... that IES “now conducts more than 6,000 cases and collects approximately $ 2 million in civil penalties annually.” That averages a penalty of $ 333.33 per case, and yet you contend it would be appropriate my client tender a penalty of $90,643.00.

Near the end of the letter, he added the following:

I cannot imagine that the actions of Mr. Dollarhite would merit a fine or penalty that would be 272 times larger than what the “average” fine ($ 333) collected by the USDA, IES, APHIS would be, under the circumstances of this case, and would certainly hope that a reasonable hearing examiner would agree."

Good!  It ain't over until it's over, but the Fed.gov extortionists are backing off for now.

We use the name Leviathan for a reason: it's a giant.  More like a Hydra - you cut one head off and another can still kill you.   You have heard of the year long sting operation against an Amish farmer who was selling raw milk - to people who were going out of their way to find it, and paying high prices for it, right? 

A Small, Furry Story From the Police State

I shouldn't joke about this.  Facing a $4 Million dollar fine for selling a few (dozen) bunnies is not funny and could completely ruin this family.  It's not funny.  It's just that it's at least a little better than executing them on the spot, as the police state did with Jose Guerena in Arizona the other day or Erik Scott in the Las Vegas Costco last summer, or (you can insert a list here).

The story is from Bob McCarty on BigGovernment.Com (link just above).  It begins:

...John Dollarhite and his wife Judy of tiny Nixa, Mo., have been told by the USDA that, by Monday, they must pay a fine exceeding $90,000. If they don’t pay that fine, they could face additional fines of almost $4 million. Why? Because they sold more than $500 worth of bunnies — $4,600 worth to be exact — in a single calendar year.

At this point, my chin hits the floor.   Selling $4600 in bunnies warrants a $90,000 fine?  And enough penalties to raise that to $4,000,000 - almost $1000 fine per bunny?

  

The story continues:

By the year’s end, the Dollarhites had moved approximately 440 rabbits and grossed about $4,600 for a profit of approximately $200 — enough, John said, to provide the family “pocket money” to do things such as eat out at Red Lobster once in a while. That was better than the loss they experienced in 2008.

Let me get this straight: they sell 440 rabbits for $200 profit, or under 50 cents each, and somehow that warrants $1000 each in fines?  It's worth reading the whole thing.  Just another example of the worst of what this country has become.  As one commenter put it:

And this is how they do it. By going after the little guy because it's easier to go after a law abiding citizen than to go after a big factory farm with lots of money and lawyers at their disposal.

Another commenter posts the laws, passed in 1989, that stipulates selling over $500 worth of rabbits is a federal offense.   The insanity that is the police state.  

"This Is Freakin' Awesome!!!"

QoTD yesterday, from my number one shooting buddy, Mrs. Graybeard, on shooting her M1 Garand for the first time. 

Just getting a feel for them, loading the en-bloc clip, loading the clip into the rifle, working it for the first time, shooting it for the first time.  Getting a feel for how the sights work at 25 yards.  The whole experience. 

This is her first 8 round clip.  When you discount that one through the Caldwell logo (pushed a little more by the .30-06 then expected), all of them within 3" and progessing toward the center. 

And my first two clips.  Trying to see where the post lines up on the target, and refining POA. 

I'll call it benchrest shooting because of the front support we have for the gun.  No use of a sling, standing sitting or prone.  Sitting on something chair-like.  But not those fancy benchrests that immobilize the gun  The gun is capable of moving, so it's more like leaning the barrel on a tree branch.  One of these - doesn't clamp on, just a better thing to lean on than your arm. 

Thoughts I Didn't Get To This Week

I talked about Obama's stupid policy towards Israel the other day.  I see it as the US abandoning Israel.  Caroline Glick sees it as Obama's Abandonment of America and raises some interesting points.  Here's one we absolutely agree on:

AS FOR ISRAEL, in a way, Obama did Israel a favor by giving this speech. By abandoning even a semblance of friendliness, he has told us that we have nothing whatsoever to gain by trying to make him like us.

It's a final cutoff, telling Israel to go pound sand.

Something to bear in mind is that if this is truly God at work, it doesn't matter what we do - if the US is for or against Israel.  It's His call.  It may be that Israel needs to be sifted (Luke 22:31).  It may be that the US needs to be sifted.  The Bible is nothing if not a collection of stories of the Jews (as models of all of us) falling away, and having to be punished, then put back on the right track.

In the wake of the death of the 4th amendment (Indiana and then the Supremes themselves) something has been bothering me, and my wife put it into perspective.  There is now no way to pass the Jews in the Attic Test. 

I haven't commented on the murder of Jose Guerena, but Sheriff Douchebag, um, Dipshit,... um Dupnik in Arizona has really raised a lot of hackles.  I'd bet there's at least ten thousand people in this country who would take him out, given half a chance.   Yes, this is the same Sheriff Dipshit who blamed the shooting of Congress Critter Giffords on the "vitriolic rhetoric" of the right.  I'm sure his crack swat team shooting an innocent Marine veteran 70-frickin' times is someone elses' fault, too.  Gonna blame this one on Rush, too, Dipshit?  I'm with RTC on this one.

This case is bullcrap from top to bottom.  Kill a guy who never took his gun off safety with 71 shots, then deliberately keep the paramedics from treating him until he dies because everyone know "dead men tell no tales"?  And then try to frame him?  Screw impeachment or recall.  This sheriff needs to be in jail.  This is the worst of what America is turning into.