The Best Laid Plans

One of those things my Mom always said was, "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry". (which the Quotations Page tells me is from poet Robert Burns). 

With a long weekend coming, I was filling it with all sorts of ideas of what to do.  As it turns out, I had a hard time leaving the office yesterday.  Seems the facilities crew decided that prime quitting time was a good time to wet mop the stairs.  I've known for a while that my New Balance trail shoes aren't very good on wet surfaces, I just had it reinforced.  I fell three steps, landing hard on the sharp edges of two steps on my back.  Temporarily winded, I sat on the floor at the midway point for a minute before getting up, carefully walking the other half way down and driving home.

To make the story short, I suppose this is like anyone slipping on ice up in the frozen north.  A trip to the ER later showed nothing broken.  Use ice packs, muscle relaxants and a prescription NSAID. 

My butt is the size of Volkswagen bug and a cool shade of blue-purple, but what really hurts is where the stair hit between my shoulder blades. 

Yeah, it was just like that.  All weekend plans on hold. 

A Fracking Good Idea

The impact of modern hydraulic fracturing methods - fracking - is enormous.  US imports of energy are down and the amount of natural gas being produced in the US has tripled since 2007.  The supply is so great, it's impacting prices, making gas virtually too cheap to drill for. Should we be able to convince politicians to have the will, the US could be energy independent in the near term - by 2020, or so I've read.

If fracking has a disadvantage, though, it's not the famous problems with burning water, (methane has been found in water for centuries so it's not from the fracking) it's that it uses a lot of water.  It is hydraulic fracturing after all  In case you haven't noticed it, there have been articles appearing for years saying the next big shortage that's going to affect us all is drinkable water. (for example)

In the current copy of trade magazine Machine Design, I noticed an interesting article by writer Elisabeth Eitel which takes on the subject and reveals a very clever idea.

One Canadian company goes even further with a waterless process. GasFrac Energy Services Inc., Calgary, makes equipment that fracks wells with liquid petroleum gas (propane) infused with viscosifying additives. It doesn’t muck up millions of gallons of water. It pulls more fuel out of wells. All the propane is reclaimed.

Water is [a] polar [molecule], so it has a notoriously high surface tension of 72 dyn/cm and tends to get stuck in the capillaries of fracks. In contrast, propane (C3H8) has a surface tension of just 7 dyn/cm, so it easily slips into shale’s nooks and crannies. That helps rig pressure reach deeper into well formations and crack open more recesses. Low surface tension also helps when the process is reversed and pressure is released: Water tends to plug formations, but propane lets more gas flow out for collection. Propane has half the specific gravity of water and small volumes do the job, so tanking sufficient supplies to wells takes fewer trips. After a well tap, propane doesn’t necessitate separate transport back out of the site like water, because it mixes with natural gas and trucks out with the fuel.  [portions in brackets added - link added - SiG]

Frankly, I think this is really ingenious.  The benefits are all enormous there.  No water to recover, or abandon underground; the process extracts more gas with propane than water; plus propane is chemically very similar to the gas being extracted and the gas refinement process undoubtedly can remove it.  That suggests it's reusable.  It simply has everything going for it.  I assume there must be some drawbacks, but I don't see what they might be.

A neat idea that seems like a no-brainer for wide adoption by the gas industry. 

Tales From the Police State

Apparently underage drinking is such a threat that officers need to hop on hood of a car, point guns at college aged girls and break their car windows.  For buying bottled water. 

A group of state Alcoholic Beverage Control agents clad in plainclothes approached her, suspecting the blue carton of LaCroix sparkling water to be a 12-pack of beer. Police say one of the agents jumped on the hood of her car. She says one drew a gun. Unsure of who they were, Daly tried to flee the darkened parking lot.

"They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform," she recalled Thursday in a written account of the April 11 incident.

The state Alcoholic Beverage Control is reviewing the case - anyone want to bet the agents will be chastised for being a bit too "authoritah complex"?   No, I didn't think so. 

The two sides tell completely different stories.  The two girls were stopped by someone showing badges, according to the ABC spokesdroid.  The girls, meanwhile, said, “They were showing unidentifiable badges after they approached us, but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,”.  Fresh from watching a campus program to sensitize them to the dangers of rape,

The woman was on edge after spending the night listening to stories from dozens of sexual assault survivors at an annual "Take Back the Night" vigil on Grounds, said Daly's defense attorney, Francis Lawrence.

Sounds like the "Take Back the Night" vigil did a good job of making the girls think anyone who might talk to them is intending to rape them. 

The whole thing seems to be a horrific misunderstanding.  The agents horribly overreacted - I mean, if two 20 year olds had a case of beer instead of bottled water, so what?  Does it really warrant that sort of reaction?  Talk about a crime by definition rather than something that's truly wrong... The girls, for their part, say they were going to drive to a police station: they wanted the flashing blue lights and the uniforms!  They dialed 911 and stopped when a patrol car showed up.  The whole incident happened because the plain clothes officers freaked out the girls, and when the girls reacted, the officers overreacted.  Culturally, police will never want to allow someone to walk away.  It's surprising things like this don't happen more often.  

No matter what, it still doesn't justify hopping on the car, pulling guns on the girls and trying to break into their SUV.  If they had been running out of a bank, alarms ringing, carrying bags of cash - yeah, sure.  For college age women walking out of a store with something they bought - never.  Never.   

In the eyes of far too many in that uniform, though, there are only two kinds of people in the world: cops and perps.  They're not about to let someone react the way these girls did.  Hopefully, state prosecutors will have some more sense.

More Tales From the Over Regulated State - A Series

In this case, fluffy cotton tails.  For reasons that are logical only to bureaucrats, the USDA has a thing about regulating bunnies.  Not women in skimpy costumes, the small, furry animal kind.

Some of you may remember an incident in May of 2011 where the USDA threatened to fine a Missouri family about $4 million for selling over $500 worth of rabbits.  This week we read magician Marty Hahne, who uses a small bunny in his act, has been ordered by the USDA to provide a written disaster plan for his little prop, er, partner, umm ...pet(?).  Blogger Bob McCarty has the cartoon and story on his blog:

Hahne writes:

My USDA rabbit license requirement has taken another ridiculous twist. I just received an 8 page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. They not only want to know how I will protect my rabbit during a disaster, but also what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly.  I am not kidding–before the end of July I need to have this written rabbit disaster plan in place, or I am breaking the law.

Hahne adds:

1. The new regulation became effective Jan. 30, 2012;
2. The written plan must be completed by July 29, 2013;
3. Hahne and his wife, Brenda, must be trained to implement the plan as written; and
4. The written plan must be available for review by USDA inspectors by Sept. 28, 2013.

The USDA's rabbit fetish may be as intense and stupid as the FDA's raw milk fetish, and that's pretty far gone. 

What's Up With the Precious Metals?

Standard disclaimer first: I'm not a professional at this stuff.  I'm a random internet dood.  Yeah, I usually do what I say.  I've made some good calls and some bad calls.  I put these ideas together by reading lots.

First off, I think we can all agree it's really hard to hit market peaks and bottoms.  I really believe it's more luck than not, even for the best investors.  I saw Jim Rogers saying he had moved to protect his positions in gold and silver last year, getting out of them to some degree, because all assets generally don't move as straight up as they have through the complete bull-market cycle. 

"Most things correct 30 percent every year or two, even in big bull markets – 30 percent corrections are normal and yet gold has only done that once in the past 12 years," Rogers said. "Gold on any kind of historic market basis is overdue for a nice correction."

You gotta like Jim Rogers; not everyone can wear a bow tie like a boss!

I gotta wish I had paid attention to that last winter.  Not sure what I would have done, but gold has been in that correction since the middle of last year, and while a lot of people are predicting a turnaround, they were predicting one a few hundred dollars an ounce higher last month.  (Say the same thing about silver, but drop the word hundred out of that sentence).  The mining stock indices have been hammered, along with the metals, and they don't generally track each other.  It's rather common for HUI or XAU to move counter to the metals; you may have heard the investment advice to invest in both the physical metals and the mining stocks for just this reason. 

Last week, the stock and metals markets went into a snit when the Bernank simply mentioned that the gravy train can't go on forever.  The DJIA has been on a QE-funded roll for months now, creating the illusion of a market and economy in recovery.  The big board average only dropped about 5 percent, though, and then promptly gained back about half of it.  Look at the chart: we're only back where we were at the start of May.

Don't forget that the major brokerages use gold and silver the same way millions of small investors do, too: as a hedge and store of value. Part of the reason for the big drop in the price of the metals two weeks ago was that investors were getting caught short and needed to raise funds.  They went to sell their (paper) gold and ran into a situation with far more sellers than buyers - a situation that is not at all uncommon.  This drove the price down.  I grabbed some silver at what were bargain basement lows, prices it hasn't been in years, only to see it drop another dollar an ounce this past week - which it recovered on Friday. 

In times like this, I always ask myself if the fundamentals of the US and world economy have gotten better, or if it's just oddities of trading.  The answer is the fundamentals haven't improved that I can see.  I'll nod to Jim Rogers again when he said, "Please get worried" about the US economy in 2013 and 2014.

“Be very worried about 2013 and be very worried about 2014, because that’s when the next slowdown comes,” Rogers stated.  “In 2002 we had a recession and in 2008, it was worse because the debt was so much higher.”

He added, “The next time is going to be even worse because the debt is so staggeringly high now. So if you are not worried about 2013, please — get worried.”

Like most of you, I view having some tangible assets on hand, whether it's silver or those wonderful brass/lead/copper assemblies, as essential to the future.  That means a continuous, dollar cost-averaged purchase plan is going to buy cheap some days and expensive some other days.  I can't tell you when it's going to start back up, but I believe as surely as I believe I'm sitting here that it will head up.  There are technical indicators that we could be at the bottom floor of a market that's ready to go on a strong up move. 

Gold (GLD) is undergoing a significant correction after making a huge run from the 2008 low below $800 to $1900 in August of 2011.  Gold is significantly below its 3 year trailing average at $1550 and its 5 year trailing average at $1327.  The last time this occurred was in the late 90’s.  Investors who acquired gold back then saw incredible 660% gains while the equity markets did nothing over the next 15 years.

Cartoon of the Day So Far

The incomparable Michael Ramirez.

Link of the Day

I was starting down this road, but Kevin started before me, and Kevin always wins.  Go read "Faith In Government" at The Smallest Minority. 

I read within the last couple of days that as much as a quarter of the country trusts the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.  Seems to me that would cover writing big, new laws.  

(Holbert at Townhall.com)  He says it like it's a bad thing that congress isn't "moving" on passing new laws.  With a volume of laws and regulations that is enormous and growing, how much could one more law or regulation improve things.  (I note our "friends" at Regulation.gov have put 6591 new regulations in place in the last 90 days).   If congress is moving, it's more likely to just be another federal law you break every day without even realizing it. 

False Flag Operation - Amnesty Style

While driving home yesterday, I was listening to a couple of reasonably conservative representatives taking apart the senate amnesty bill.  The commercial that followed, though, was a poetic homage to the bill, paid for by some "conservatives for something or other" group.  Hard to believe, I thought, considering even Rubio is saying he's getting phone and email bombed saying nobody trusts them.  Must be a false flag operation.

A little searching revealed Breitbart showed it really is a false flag operation - by liberal Mark Zuckerberg.  Yeah, the Facebook dude. And a bunch of stupid RINOs.

As I've said many times, I hate day to day politics.  I believe the bill passed because the ruling class doesn't care even the slightest bit what the voters think. 

On Quantum Computing

A followup to the story on quantum computing; a private email from a commenter included a link to an interview with Dr. Eric Ladizinsky, Chief Scientist at D-Wave, the company working on the quantum computer contract I talked about Monday (and who seem to have an interesting video library I think I need to poke through) 



There's a tremendous amount of interesting detail thrown around in that interview, and it really stuck its hooks deep into my brain.

Quantum physics describes conditions that seem alien to us because they deal with a world we can't see everyday.  Photons, "particles" of light, can act like waves or particles depending on how we treat them.  In perhaps the most famous example, "Schroedinger's cat", Dr. Schroedinger speculated about a cat in a box with a radioactive emitter, constructing the thought experiment to explain how the cat was both fully alive and fully dead at the the same time. Part of the puzzle is we don't understand why we don't see these behaviors all around us.  After all, quantum behaviors are very visible in the ultra-microscopic world of subatomic particles and atoms, but we're made of atoms, just as is everything else we see.  Dr. Ladizinsky talks about the fact that in his quantum computer, a loop of super cold niobium wire has all of its electrons going in one direction and at the exact same time the same piece of wire has all of its electrons going in the opposite direction.  Their niobium wire is exhibiting quantum behavior in a macroscopic object.

I've heard quantum mechanics poetically described as, "the dreams that stuff is made of", and I've heard it said, "if you're not shocked by what it says, you haven't understood it".  It was the perfect example of a theoretical pursuit that had no practical use for so long that it's interesting to see it turning into (potentially) multibillion dollar industry.

An Unexpected Voice Blasts the Central Banks

H/T to Bayou Renaissance Man for this article which reports (via Reuters) that the Bank for International Settlements, the BIS, has blasted the governments of the developed world and their central banks for not trying to get their economic houses in order and fix things before they break for good.

The Basel-based BIS lambasted firms and households as well as the public sector for not making good use of the time bought by ultra-loose monetary policy, which it said had ended up creating new financial strains and delaying rather than encouraging necessary economic adjustments. [emphasis added]

The BIS is sort of an uber-central bank; like the mother ship of central banks.  For them to say this is roughly translated as, "You idiots!!! We've been trying to give you time to get your sorry asses in shape so that the whole freaking world doesn't collapse, and what do you do?  You blow it on hookers and coke!!! "  Well, alright, maybe that's what I would have told them, but I think that's what they were thinking. It's arguable, of course, that there's a global plan among the elites to destroy the world's economy - so that they end up on top, but they're already on top, so this way, they'll be on topper..er.   

The problem is that they can't jump start the economy by leaving the current absurdly loose fiscal policy in place (the latest Federal Reserve "bond purchases" are creating over a trillion dollars a year from nothing).  As Denninger says,

I have said since 2007 that the path of "bailout and lowering rates" in all of its forms could not possibly work.  It cannot work because a person who has too much debt cannot make themselves financially healthy by borrowing more money any more than you can drink yourself sober.

Nor are the effects a mere palliative or even purely psychological -- they have real impacts on real people in that currency dilution through credit issuance destroys purchasing power.  Giving people more and more handouts as the private sector is destroyed and its ability to produce squandered is not sustainable -- period.

Monetary inflation, what he means by "destroys purchasing power",  is the stated goal of the central bankers; it destroys individuals but helps central banks and nations.  (And Janet Yellen, the rumored replacement for the Bernank, is also a fan of inflation, too, arguing for inflation when Greenspan wanted to drive inflation to zero. )

We are now collectively in worse shape than we were in 2008 because we have issued trillions of additional credit into the system for which there is no matching production.

I've used a quote from Dr. Alan Bartlett before "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Back to KD:

Exponents are a bitch.  The longer you wait to deal with any problem that has a compound factor (that is, "X% per year") the worse it gets and the damage increase is not linear it becomes exponentially worse over time.  A 10% fiscal deficit that is "counteracted" with something like QE (which is what we've run, more or less, since 2007) doubles in 7 years -- not 10 -- and then it doubles again in another 7.  In 21 years it is not three times the original problem's size it's eight times larger!

We've already doubled down -- and doubled -- the pain we needed to take in 2007.  It will be four times as bad, and we will not survive it as a nation or society, if we let this go on for another seven years.

Sometimes it's a bitch to be able to do the math.  To see what's coming and not be able to convince anyone with any power that we have to change course or epically bad times are coming.  But this ain't the Frobenius method, this is arithmetic.  Even an honest lawyer should be able to see this.  (Hmmm - you know the old saying, the corrupt lawyers give the other .01% a bad name?).  

Setec Astronomy

A movie I really enjoyed in the 90s was Sneakers, kind of a sleeper film starring Dan Akroyd and Robert Redford.  Ignoring their obvious liberal slant, the concept behind the film was rather ingenious.  A mathematician had developed a way of factoring enormous numbers quickly with a custom piece of hardware.  The Big Deal is that all modern cryptography relies on polynomial factoring, and what protects your data is the low probability that a computer could guess your public key so that it can factor your encrypted data.  Whenever you hear something like "it would take the fastest computers longer than the age of the universe to decrypt your messages", that depends on a whole cascade of assumptions, not the least of which is that computers never change in a materially important way. 

The title of this post, by the way, is an homage to that movie.  The term "SECTEC ASTRONOMY" haunts the group for a while until, while playing anagrams with Scrabble tiles, one of them rearranges the letters to spell "TOO MANY SECRETS". 

Don't look yet, but everything may be about to be turned upside down.  Thanks to a link from the Vulgar Curmdugeon, to MIT Technology Review's "Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab"  Quantum computing has been talked about as the next important milestone in computing and has been worked on for about 20 years, as I recall. 

While regular computers symbolize data in bits, 1s and 0s expressed by flicking tiny switch-like transistors on or off, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, that can essentially be both on and off, enabling them to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. In principle, quantum computers could prove extraordinarily much faster than normal computers for certain problems because they can run through every possible combination at once. In fact, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe.

All of this is highly experimental; the company making the computer D-Wave has had detractors saying its approach is flawed, it won't work, and all the usual things said about new inventions since long before the Wright brothers.  Mind you, I'm not saying this approach will, but the quantum computation problem will be solved and quantum computers will be available to do something, I'm sure. 

The tie to the movie is that last sentence, about running more calculations in one instant than the number of atoms in the universe.  That means this machine could break every code we know of that relies on factoring large numbers.  It's the Sneakers machine.  And while you may not be able to buy one, a partnership of Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) and the CIA has put up $30 million to fund research, and that's to get the first machine going.  It's likely to cost quite a bit.  Which is still chump change to Fed.gov, the CIA, the NSA and all those agencies that would love to peer into every secret transaction in the world.  Not to mention the mafia, who, like in the movie, would love to break into every bank in the world. 

(The D-Wave computer)

You'd Better Like Your Water Supply

According to a fascinating piece of audio recorded in Tennessee and posted at Sense of Events, if you complain about your water quality and the water department thinks it's fine, you could be charged with terrorism. From the Tennesseean:

“We take water quality very seriously. Very, very seriously,” said Sherwin Smith, deputy director of TDEC’s Division of Water Resources, according to audio recorded by attendees. “But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.”

Just. Wow.  So, if the water is good according to their tests, which you're apparently not allowed to question, and you think there's something wrong with the water and tell someone, that's terrorism? 

It's to ensure you have the proper Oliver Twist regard for your government.  "Please, sir, I want some more."  You'll take what we give you and you'd better be grateful for it. 

Picture of the Day

This showed up in the traffic today:

Nomination for a Lesser Known Grammy

Gun Shy Tourist links to this, which I nominate for "Best Use of Tannerite In A Music Video - 2013":


Sure, I find the trigger discipline uncomfortable but you just see so darned much of that sloppiness that seeing it in a video just isn't that upsetting.  What stood out to me was seeing the guitar explode (2:48).  I'm hoping it was one of those $20 eBay specials and not a real guitar.

Cartoon of the Day So Far

Chip Bok - Bokbluster.com

Silver at under $20, like it was on Thursday, because the stockbrokers are in a snit about their crack supply being cut back?  "Back up the truck, sweetie, I need to fire up the forklift."

Syria - Obama Continues US-Destructive Foreign Policy

We've done it again.  The administration has determined that the US is going to support the enemies of Syrian strongman Assad.  The rebels are going to be supplied with small arms, - and arms are reaching them already - the very arms that administration's propaganda corps has been telling us are useless against an army, are going to be used for exactly that.  Syrian jihadist fighters, unlike you, will not be subject to a background check or big tax and long waiting period to get fully automatic weapons.

Let's be absolutely clear: we have no business in Syria.  There are no good guys to side with.  The government troops have gone beyond "ethnic cleansing" to just "population cleansing" - killing anyone of any age or sex who they think might be against them.  Children are forced into fighting.  The rebels are essentially Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood  jihadists; these are the guys shown in a well-circulated video cutting out and eating the heart of a government soldier the rebel had just killed.  The government soldiers aren't much better, if any better at all.  Buck Sexton, National Security reporter for the Blaze says, “The level of violence and viciousness and evil that is going on in [the Syrian] conflict is well beyond what I think most people understand,” he continued.  “The viciousness is impossible to overstate.”   There's a 10 minute video at that Blaze link, but it's radio audio, an interview with Sexton from the region.  Listen to it.

There are no good guys.  It's not a war of democratic rebels against a tyrannical government, it's a war to see which evil tyrants get to rule.

Donald Sensing over at Sense of Events wrote it about on Wednesday in "No Justification for Syria Intervention", and goes over both political and Just War Theory approaches to see if he can find justification.  No.

In Syria, however, even if the Obama administration was inclined toward Realpolitik it would find there is no upside for American power interests in intervention. Simply put, the outcome of the  civil war there is wholly immaterial to the national-security interests of the United States. The fight is not a fight between repressed Jeffersonian democrats and their cruel oppressors. It is a fight between what we may understand as a Stalinist regime in power and a fascist movement that wants to replace it.
.....
In fact, the list of places in the world where the US would be morally justified in mounting military action to defend the innocent is very long. But it would be impossible for us to do so. And that requires exercising another principle of war, distinction or discrimination. If not everyone, then who and why? If there is an especially compelling reason we should intervene in Syria and not Lower Zambezi, then let advocates make it. But they do not even attempt.

There is neither a strong moral nor national security case to be made for US intervention. Intervention fails both just war theory and Realpolitik.

But the problems are bigger.  Assad's Syrian government is backed by Iran, their puppet Hesbollah, and Russia.  This isn't the cold war anymore; we don't need to oppose whomever Russia supports.  And it has gotten pretty weird out when Vladimir Putin makes more sense about our choices than anyone in DC. 

"You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support?," Putin told a news conference.  [Note: Intestines?  It was his heart, Vlad.  Still, you're 95% right. - SiG]

The Mideast is on the verge of collapse, and it threatens to pull the whole world down around it.  

Syria and Egypt are dying. They were dying before the Syrian civil war broke out and before the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Cairo. Syria has an insoluble civil war and Egypt has an insoluble crisis because they are dying. They are dying because they chose not to do what China did: move the better part of a billion people from rural backwardness to a modern urban economy within a generation. Mexico would have died as well, without the option to send its rural poor - fully one-fifth of its population - to the United States.

The best case here appears to be that two sides declare a draw and go back to living in absolute squalor - since they've destroyed the country.  Possibly, the Syrian rebels could win and it ends up a Muslim Brotherhood state, like Eqypt; starving, squalid, horrible conditions, sliding down into complete collapse.  Possibly an Al Qaeda state.  The other cases go considerably worse, from a wider Mideast war, through involvements that spread to include Turkey, more of Europe, or potentially even World War III.  

(Free Syrian Army machinist works a mortar shell on a large lathe)

For the last five years, the US has made bad call after bad call in foreign policy.  This is just another.  We are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood to the highest levels of government, to our detriment.  We have no business in Syria. 

As someone said, "it's not that the War on Terror is over: it's that we switched sides"

To My Fellow Florida Gunnies

This is about HB-1355.  If you don't know what that is, read the next paragraph and the link. 

I've sent some money to pretty much every pro-gun group at one time, from the NRA to the 2AF.  For the last month, I've gotten an urgent letter from NAGR every couple of days saying "you've got to call Scott right now and tell him not to sign HB-1355!!!1!!!".   Yesterday I got that email and an email from the NRA saying, "you've got to call Scott right now and tell him he has to sign it!!!!!"  Now, I knew Marion Hammer and the NRA were instrumental in writing the bill, but I didn't know what's actually in it.  Jon Gutmacher put up a post on the bill this morning.  If you're on the fence, go read it. 

For those who don't remember the name, chances are you've seen his book, Florida Firearms Law, Use and Ownership, which is universally recommended in concealed carry classes. 

What he said sure sounds reasonable to me and has gotten me off the fence on this. It's limited.  It has ways for those denied rights to get them back.  It restricts the state more than the people.  I think it's worth supporting. 

About That NSA Data Center in Utah

Yeah, we've all read about that.  The Blaze did a special one hour show featuring it.  It's everywhere:

So how much data can the site store?  Five zettabytes.  How much data is that?  That link uses the analogy that it's 312 billion iPhones.  But iPhones come in a few sizes.  Nice analogy, but I like crisper numbers.

A zetta- anything is 10^21 of them - it's an SI Prefix.  It's always impressive to write those out, so 5x10^21 is 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, which is even less helpful.  At 50 GB in a Blu-ray Disc (BD), which is 9 hours of HD video, 5 zettabytes is 100 billion BDs.  Wait... 900 billion hours of  HD video?  That's over 102 million years of 24/7/365 video they can store.  Srsly, NSA, you think you have enough?  How many copies of Grumpy Cat and pr0n do you want?  (Prediction: soon after the data center is online, we nuke Nigeria after discovering 80% of traffic analysis leads to a banker who wants to share some unclaimed money with us).

Wonder how big it has to be?  Since a terabyte is 10^12 bytes, and enough 1 terabyte drives are out there that everyone has seen one, it might help to think that a billion terabyte drives is one zettabyte.  Poking around Amazon, I see a mid-range 1.0 Terabyte drive for $70.  You'd need five billion of those to equal the storage in Utah.  It measures 4.8 x 3.2 x 0.6 inches, or 9.216 cubic inches.  Five billion of those is 46.08 billion cubic inches.  According to the handy online conversion calculator,  that's 26.67 million cubic feet, or 988,000 cubic yards.  Even if you just stacked 1 Terabyte drives 6 feet high, like standard equipment racks, making a layer 6 feet deep, 26.67 million cubic feet would  cover 4,445,000 square feet.  Which sounds big, but it's not extremely big for commercial building standards: a square only 2108 feet on a side.  Of course, when you're dealing with that much electronics, you'll need to run power to them, data buses, cooling, support computers, lots of spares and lots of infrastructure.   A lot of room.  Easily twice that 2108'.  Maybe three buildings a half mile long on each side.  Or one building that's three stories tall.

A good set of pictures is here at Business Insider.  Before I get any responses about being a shill for the NSA, to best of my knowledge, I've never worked on anything that ended up there, nor have I ever worked for the NSA.  Except for being a taxpayer.  In that sense I've worked for the NSA; all of us stupid taxpayers have. 

Came Up Dry

For the last couple of evenings, I've been trying to run down information on the higher-up at the IRS who was the instigator of the special probes of liberty-oriented groups, Carter Hull.  Pretty much everybody online that I could find used the same basic quote I'll use here (this one from Newsboy)

“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” said Elizabeth Hofacre, an employee of the Cincinnati IRS office, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.

Hofacre’s office, which oversaw tax-exempt applications, reportedly requested help from the agency’s Exempt Organizations Technical unit in Washington, D.C. in 2010 to deal with an influx of new applications from Tea Party groups.

IRS attorney Hull sent Hofacre additional information request letters [pdf] that he’d already sent to two tea party groups and instructed her to use them as a “foundation to prepare and review” cases and prepare her own letters to new applicants.

Hull has apparently pulled his Facebook page and retired.  Obviously not a "spring chicken": he even looks older than me.  Very convenient disappearance, if I do say so. 

I was able to find essentially nothing about him - and the stinkin' NSA didn't even offer me some help, like cached copies of his Facebook page.  I heard Jay Sekulow of the ACLJ on the radio saying that Hull was a well known for being opposed to free speech, often testifying there's no right to it.  So I was searching for every combination of those terms I could find (including on the ACLJ site) and could find nothing.  

Having gone over that pdf linked above, it's his name on it, and he does appear to be the HMF behind the orders to the field offices.  With him out of the way, it's hard to know if it stopped with him, or if someone higher up had him write the briefs (my guess).  Institutionally, it's disgusting that nobody in the IRS stopped to say "they're asking me to do something wrong" and stood up against it.  Institutionally, they're still "The Untouchables" in their minds.  

Light Ice Cream

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

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

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