We Interrupt the Continuous Stormy Daniels Coverage For This Syria Coverage

Just kidding.  CNN wouldn't do that.  If they interrupted their continuous Stormy Daniels story for anything, it's just that it's the latest shiny, whatever that may be.

As I'm sure you've noticed, we seem to be on the verge of doing something in Syria, again.  Trump is tweeting that we're going to launch missiles, Putin is saying his forces will destroy them and then destroy whatever platform launched them.  Meanwhile state television in Russia last night told people to have preps on hand for a few days in case there's a nuclear war, and know where to find the nearest fallout shelter

Which brings us to Russian state TV.  Last night on the nightly news broadcast, the coming conflict with the USA was the big news and officials in Russia repeatedly said “If the United States attacks Syria based on this phony chemical weapons fraud, then Russia will shoot down the incoming US missiles and fire upon the platforms which launched them – including Ships, planes and ground based locations.  This action by Russia would likely cause a war between the US and Russia and . . . . . Russian state TV gave citizens advise on what they should take to Bomb Shelters.

This was complete with a reporter standing in front of a wall of monitors showing a mushroom cloud.

(Full video - in Russian with subtitles)  Is this crazy brinksmanship rhetoric like we get from North Korea all the time?  I don't know.

The guy I trust for insightful thoughts on this sort of topic is LL over at Virtual Mirage.  He addressed the situation and thinks that it smells funny.  In response to a couple of comments, he said:

The LAST gas attack was likely an accidental release from rebel stores after an attack from Syrian Air Forces.

This time, I really don't know.
...
There was NO reason for the Syrians to launch a gas attack. It makes me very skeptical.

I don't honestly know what to make of this.  Is this a real threat of nuclear war (the closest we've come - perhaps - since the Cuban Missile Crisis), or is this some sort of belligerent posturing that Putin and Trump are going through?  In the last Tomahawk attack on an empty air base, we notified the Russians what was coming so they could evacuate their forces.  It's my understanding that was the normal way things worked in the first cold war: back channels talked to back channels so no big, ugly mistakes happened.  Is that happening again?   It apparently didn't happen in early February when Russian mercenaries attacked US forces in Syria, and lost 300 men (Peter had a really good summary here).  

Obviously, I don't have any access to the real intelligence on this, so it's pointless to comment on that.  

I'm old enough to remember duck and cover drills in elementary school, getting under our desks, and "put your hands behind your neck".  All of the talk of a "new cold war" has pretty much rolled off my back as "oh, that again".  I guess we'll find out in the next few days.  

Another View of the Facebook Privacy Problems

In the early days of the 20th century when radio was being established, the inventors and early advocates of radio couldn't understand how to make their invention work.  Who's going to pay for music brought into their house, even if it's a world class orchestra instead of something they could hear locally? Not just that, how could they arrange the payments?  Somehow the idea was born that radio could be "free" to users, except for buying the radio itself, if they could arrange sponsors to pay for the broadcasting.  The sponsors, in turn, got minutes out of every hour to sell their products. 

The result was the birth of interruption-based marketing in radio and that has penetrated to all the successors to radio: TV, and the Internet.  Virtually all of the marketing you're exposed to is interruption-based: commercials on radio, television or in a movie theater; junk mail in your physical mailbox; SPAM in your email inbox; and phone solicitors are all interrupting you to try to sell you something.

Why would anyone think that a computer user, who has just been looking at various websites, or who just found a result with a search engine would want to suddenly sit there for 30 seconds and look at a popup ad?  For that matter, why would anyone think cold calling sales contacts during the people's scant evening free time would be likely to catch someone wanting to drop what they're doing and listen to the call?

Isn't interruption-based marketing fundamentally rude?

The big problem marketers have is that interruption is being limited by technology: ad blockers, script blockers, SPAM filters, video recording to fast forward through commercials, telephone answering machines, and more are making it harder for them to interrupt us.  Good!  I've never bought anything by clicking on an ad, just as I've never bought anything from a door to door solicitor or someone who shows up at my door offering to do some sort of work around my yard.  I don't like being interrupted!

The alternative is called permission-based marketing, and it's just what its name implies.  In principle, it's like the "contact me" forms you may fill out, or the "it's OK to email me" box you have to check off to enter a contest.  Perhaps you're shopping for a car or appliance and you visit several places online.  You click a box giving them permissions and suddenly it's not SPAM anymore.  In the case of Facebook, it's implicit permissions. 

An extension of that is attraction marketing, trying to draw you to their product by offering things of value to you; perhaps gun reviews, tool reviews, or perhaps give away content or other things you find useful.  The idea is to attract you to the product rather than push that product on you.  (The CNC website I find I visit the most is CNCCookbook - the owner of that company is very good at this)

The root cause isn't Facebook, it's interruption-based marketing.  They're trying to refine everything a seller might want to know about you into a package that can be sold to advertisers.  They do that by mining everything you do or say on their site, and apparently wherever their tentacles reach on the 'net.  In any case, it's purpose is to refine and limit the number of companies who interrupt you. 

I'm a free enterprise guy, and I don't begrudge the companies trying to figure out who might want their products or services, but I jealously guard my time and don't want to be interrupted.  In turn, I don't want to interrupt other people.  I can easily put myself into the position of the company.  I only want to be contacted by companies I allow the privilege of contacting me, but how do I know I've allowed everyone who I really might like to hear from.  A company might say, "you allowed those guys to contact you, and our product is better!" 

Don't think I'm defending Facebook: I briefly had an account, but dropped it five years ago because I think they're a despicable company for the way they do things, like tracking people who don't even have an account there and who couldn't have given approval. That's not even considering how they silence conservative voices.  The root cause, though, is interruption-based advertising. That, it seems, is going to be with us for a long time. 

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ASME's Milestones in Mechanical Engineering

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has put out a list of what it regards as nine of the most important milestones in American Manufacturing and Engineering.  Most date from 19th and early 20th centuries.  The list, at Machine Design, is interesting in the number of inventions related to firearms.

The first entry in the list defies that categorization of 19th and 20th centuries, dating to 1794 in the18th.  We're talking, of course, about Springfield Armory.

The National Historic Site

To supply his Continental Army with weapons, George Washington helped form the U.S.’s first national armory in Springfield, Mass. It supplied weapons for every war the U.S. fought when it was operational, which was until 1968. It also ushered in a host of machine tool innovations, including the Blanchard lathe, which could duplicate irregularly shaped parts such as wooden gun stocks. Rather than relying on a workshop full of carvers, it could reproduce a dozen exact copies simultaneously. Interchangeable parts were also partially developed there, as well as a set of precision gauges which contributed to manufacturing standards. One of the most famous of the many weapons designed and built there includes the Garand M-1. More than 5.5 million were built and used during WWII and the Korean conflict. And between 1939 and 1945, the time needed to make one was slashed by 75%

The innovations from the Springfield Armory fed number three on the list, Robbins & Lawrence Machine Shop (1846).  

Robbins and Lawrence took information developed and maintained at the Springfield Armory, and were the first to master the skills needed to design and make rifles which used interchangeable parts. Parts from any rifle could be used in another rifle of the same model and replacement parts could be made for it. This let the two machinists fulfill a contract for 25,000 U.S. Army rifles (Model 1841). They delivered a similar number of the same rifles to the British. This was made possible by improving and refining standard and special-purpose machine tools, letting them deliver the tolerances needed for repeatability and, therefore, interchangeability. The two also made such good use of milling machines and turret lathes that they are now common in manufacturing.

It's hard to overstate just how important the development of interchangeable, standardized parts is to manufacturing things - as well as later fixing them.  That it began with guns hints at the importance they play in life.  Standardized parts leads to something that the world just couldn't do without. 

U.S. Standard Screw Threads (1864) 

If every screw has to be handmade, that makes them little pieces of jewelry that you dare not misplace or put in the wrong place.  In Alexander Rose's "American Rifle: A Biography" he tells the story of an industrial show in Europe in the latter part of the 1800s, in which an American company brought rifles with interchangeable parts and shocked the European attendees to their core. 

Prior to 1870 or so, there were no standards for screws in the U.S., which made it difficult and expensive to find replacements. Inspired by Joseph Whitworth’s efforts to address the same problem in Britain, Philadelphia’s William Sellers decided to do the same in the U.S. So in 1864, he created a standard for screws and threads adapted for U.S. needs. For example, thread profiles were 60 deg., not 55, which simplified things for machinists and mechanics. He also thoughtfully defined pitch (threads per inch), form, and depth, as well as proportioning hex nuts for bolts from ¼ to 6 inches in diameter. By the 1880s, his standard was widespread in the U.S., letting manufacturers from coast to coast know the same fasteners would be available everywhere—a major step towards interchangeable parts for everything from typewriters to locomotives.

Well, I shouldn't excerpt the entire article, so just the three that mean the most to me.  Threading, in particular, is a fundamental machining operation that is deceptively simple.  For most uses, it is simple: a tap or a die is all you need.  There are families of threads (pdf), classes of threads, and getting the wrong thread someplace can be a major problem. 

To butcher the Isaac Newton quote, "If we have gotten farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".

Plants Know When They're Being Eaten and Fight Back

I started putting this post together last night and it just wouldn't work, but I wanted to try again.
Researchers at the University of Missouri have been conducting experiments that demonstrate plants are aware that they're being eaten and try to poison the attacker.  We're talking about living plants, in this case something called thale cress, popular for experimentation, and not something from a bag of harvested lettuce or salad greens.

To do that, the researchers had to first make a precise audio version of the vibrations that a caterpillar makes as it eats leaves. The theory is that it’s these vibrations that the plant can somehow feel or hear. In addition, the researchers also came up with vibrations to mimic other natural vibrations the plant might experience, like wind noise.

Turns out, the thale cress actually produces some mustard oils and sends them through the leaves to deter predators (the oils are mildly toxic when ingested). And the study showed that when the plants felt or heard the caterpillar-munching vibrations, they sent out extra mustard oils into the leaves. When they felt or heard other vibrations? Nothing. It’s a far more dynamic defense than scientists had realized: the plant is more aware of its surroundings and able to respond than expected.

I simply don't know if there's any experimentation that shows, for example, a head of lettuce you buy at the grocery store responds in the same way.  Could the lettuce harvested in a field somehow be aware that other lettuce heads were being harvested and put more toxins in their leaves?

Many of us poke fun at vegetarians and vegans for their insistence on converting the rest of the world to their views. They seem to feel it's somehow more ethical to not eat anything with a face.  Implicit in this belief is that the plants' have no reactions or "feelings" about being eaten at all.  I expect them to be aware of the 1973 book,“The Secret Life of Plants,” (TSLP) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird (and this is the part that ended up tripping me up last night) .  Those of you who were old enough to be aware of popular books in 1973 (over about 10 or 13) probably remember hearing about TSLP

The science in TSLP has almost entirely been discredited by now, but it made outrageous claims about awareness in plants, including that a polygraph ("lie detector") hooked to the leaves of plant showed reactions to the thoughts of people (and, especially curiously, to the researchers that were around them most), or that they'd show stress if another plant was injured in front of them, or live shrimp were dropped into boiling water.

Despite the negative effects if TSLP, there is higher quality research going on into how plants react to stimulus.

Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coordinate a plant’s behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals. They also noted that neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate have been found in plants, though their role remains unclear.

Here's where I ran aground last night.  The article this quote comes from is long and not an easy read.  I got sidetracked trying to condense its high points into a blog post.  It is a rather interesting read if you have the time, though.

Vegetarians seem to have a poor grasp of a few very fundamental facts of biology.  We're in an extremely unusual time in history due to two enormous factors:  first, the average citizen in the first world doesn't have to hunt for survival, and second, the number of farms providing our food has declined enormously in the last 150 years with more people moving away from farms.  It seems that most have very little idea where their food comes from.   The vast majority of living things in this world don't live peaceful happy lives, and die peacefully in bed surrounded by their loved ones  - like the protestors at that Toronto restaurant, Antler, seemed to think.  The majority of living things are eaten; many are eaten alive and most of the rest are killed and eaten.

Why is killing things that aren't animals better?   When you pick the grains of wheat, grind them down, and make bread, you're using the plant's seeds; seeds that will grow to be new wheat plants.  In more direct words, we're taking the wheat babies, grinding them to dust and then eating the babies. 

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Tiny, Injectable, Floating Robots for Monitoring

A team of researchers has developed a line of tiny monitoring machines that can be used for environmental monitoring, the Internet of Things That Don't Quite Work, or for medical monitoring.

“You can make electronic circuits that are a single atom thick,” [research leader, Dr. Michael] Strano says. “One creative use no one has thought of until now is taking these electronics and grafting them onto a colloidal particle.” Colloidal particles are microscopic solid particles suspended in a fluid. Colloids are small enough to use thermal energy Ve [voltage] and achieve equilibrium with the suspending fluid. They are also large enough that their positions and motions can be measured precisely using optical methods, such as light scattering and laser-scanning confocal fluorescence microscopy. The particle has simple computing functions that can be monitored for data collection and feedback.

The research team predicts that these micro-machines will be used to monitor large areas for bacteria or spores, or even smoke, dust, and toxic fumes. By introducing the concept of an aerosolizable electronic device, one can achieve a significant cost savings compared to other satellite or drone search alternatives. [Note: anything in square brackets has been added by me - SiG]

This illustration depicts a micrometer-sized polymer particle coated with a nano-electronic circuit. (Credit: Michael Strano)

This diagram shows something that goes beyond "microscopic" to "molecular-sized".  Those free-floating yellow/blue things on the right are molecules, as are the most of the features.  The tiny size has the problem that not much computing power can be put in that size; it detects what it's looking for and changes the state of something that can be detected.  Computers aren't going to be getting much smaller than they are now anytime soon, due to hitting quantum limits, and nobody really knowing if quantum computation can actually work. 

The researchers, led by Volodymyr Koman, Ph.D., a research fellow in Strano’s group, simulated objects this size floating in a natural gas pipeline (certainly anything this size can be suspended in a moving gas indefinitely).  They were able to detect the presence of carbon particulates or volatile organic compounds in the chamber, and successfully store that data within its memory.  This is only representing 1 bit of memory.  Found it Yes or found it No. 

The data is stored on retroreflectors placed on the particles. Through them, the researchers are able to download the information for further analysis. The particles have a designated metallic connection, like a socket, for readouts. One can read the information via the two probes on the particle. The memory can be wiped for reuse once the data has been downloaded.

But gas pipelines aren't the same as injecting into people, and that area is still speculation.  The team  developed a biocompatible set of electronic components for the particle’s coating to form an electronic circuit consisting of a power source, a detector, and a memory device.  They then aerosolized them and propelled them toward a target in an effort to see how far they could be sent. They found the particles were able to fly a couple of feet.

The next step is to develop particles for specific applications. This includes monitoring applications in the human digestive system. “This is the right idea and the right time,” says Strano. “Think of these as proto-robots.”

This idea has been floating out in the "idea universe" for a while now, and I see I've done a few pieces on it (such as this).  Lots of teams are working on it, but this MIT team doesn't appear to be leading or doing things that nobody has done.  Injectable robots are coming, but not this year. 

We're In The Age of Mass Manipulation

That's not news.  After all, it was over 55 years ago that Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, "The medium is the message" (good story there about the misprint on the book's cover that reinforced its message).

This week we've seen another shining example of a coordinated attempt to shape public opinion and policy, the so-called "caravan" of some large number of "immigrants" coming north through Mexico planning to storm our border.  Coming through Mexico?  Isn't it common knowledge that Mexico is famously strict on its immigration laws, such that invaders from Guatemala or points south should be stopped before they get into the middle of Mexico? 

It's every bit as "grass roots" AstroTurf as the March for Our Lives, and some of the same international socialists are behind it as well. 

The organization taking the lead is “Pueblo Sin Fronteras”.  The name translates as "people without borders".  Far from a spontaneous thing, formed by people suddenly realizing, "it's so bad here I have to try to get into the US!", this is an annual occurrence.  Pueblo Sin Fronteras has been running these operations for 15 years.  There are stories that before that, they ran them under a different name.  After all, if this was a spontaneous uprising, how would they get a BuzzFeed reporter embedded in the march?  

If it was spontaneous, would they be flooding through the Chiapas, Mexico, southern border crossing with not one Mexican officer stopping them?  That green building visible in the distance is the immigration checkpoint. (BuzzFeed photo)

One of the principal Americans behind the caravan is Alex Mensing, whose LinkedIn profile says he specializes in "Immigration Justice".  As always, whenever an adjective is used in front of the word justice, like "social justice", it's not about actual justice.  It's about special treatment.   The profile says he's involved in the "CARA Pro Bono Family Detention Project".  Pro bono, of course, means "for free", but chances are someone is paying some expenses associated with all the logistics of moving this many people.  The saying that, "armies march on their stomachs" is true for any group, not just the military.  This sort of thing can't be done without a lot of logistics. 

CARA is part of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (headquartered in Maryland) and the American Immigration Council.  Both groups are big recipients of cash from George Soros.  "People without borders" can be a little more poetically translated as Open Society, the name of one of Soros' pet organizations.  "A World Without Borders".  Yeah... no.  No thanks. (Hat tip to Glenn Beck)

We're being played. This is a replay of techniques used in March for Our Lives.  Careful control of images, so that you see pictures featured of young women with children, not of the late teens through 30-year old men visible if you dig for other pictures.  We keep getting played over and over again, by the same organizations; the same people.  It's one reason trust in the media is at an all-time low. 

For a long time, it has been a pretty good idea to look at any story in the media and ask "why are they telling me this?"  Is it local news that's supposed to break your heart or make you watch that news show over their competitor?  "If it bleeds, it leads"?  In the case of something like the anti-gun March, it was obvious that we were being fed a story.  They showed lots of kids, but kids were 10% of the demonstrators and the biggest demographic was older women: the average protestor was a 48 year old woman.  The problem is we don't know that when they're showing it, because they don't attempt to find out the truth and put that in their broadcast.

I think it's a safe bet to always look at any hot news story, or big event like these, asking the questions, "what are they trying to sell me, and who's behind it?" 

This Changes Everything for Me

Back in February, I talked about some of my attempts to get started reloading for 6.5 Creedmoor.  I was really down to one, big, nasty problem: Hodgdon’s H4350 propellant.

I can verify that I've been looking for H4350 on every "Powder Sale" to cross my email since July and have yet to see it in stock anywhere.  To date, I've had my best results with 140 gn Hornady ELD-M rounds, and I think it was one that talked about reloading with H4350 (I swear I recall seeing that on one of the first boxes I bought).

Ten days ago, I got an email from Natchez Shooter's Supply telling me it was in stock.   I don't even recall when I signed up for notification when it was in stock, but I grabbed three pounds of it.   

Words I have never seen on any web site, circled in red.  Note the 8 pound jugs were not in stock.  I just checked right now and it still shows as being in stock.  The long shortage is finally being overcome.

About the time the powder was delivered, the April sales flyer from Midway USA came.  What to my wondering eyes should appear, but the very bullets used in the ammo I've had the best results with.  Hornaday 140 grn ELD-Match bullets were on sale this month.  300 of those are on the way and should be here Saturday.

So in the space of two weeks, I will have gone from not being able to reload the 6.5 Creedmoor to having everything, and even two different types of match grade bullets: these and the Berger Hybrid Bullets I got a couple of months ago.

I still have things to learn and lots to do, but it's good to be getting to this point.  The only drawback is that our shooting season is winding down.  The weather should be good until May and might even last through May.  Not that I don't go in the summer; I just make a point to be ready to shoot when it opens and be aware of the sun.  We usually just shoot from 8 until 11/11:30.  While today, it might not have made it to 80 degrees until noon, by late July that will be close to the overnight low.

Now That That's Done For Now

Another me me me me post.  

The emphasis for the last couple of days was the spring planting, but not veggies (except for one more tomato plant); it was our decorative bed in front of the house.  The old hibiscus bushes I mentioned in my last post were likely 37 years old and hardly alive.  We cut them down and pulled them out, after a trip to the Lowe's for some replacements.  I don't have any before pictures but they were scrawny sticks with a handful of leaves on them.  We got three replacements and a couple of others.

It was a lot of work, but we planted the first two last night after dinner to take advantage of the evening cool down, then were back out this morning at sunrise to do the rest.  We were done by 10 AM.

There are still two that are about the same age in a different flower bed, but they look better.  We'll give them a bit more water and food, and see how they do this summer. 

---

As I've been trying to troubleshoot my dead oscilloscope, I've gone back to a forum I'd never heard of over and over,  EEVBlog.   Those of you with similar interests might find it a worthwhile stop, too, or already have.  I decided to look around a bit and see if it would be worth my while to join the forum, and stumbled across a thread on leaking alkaline batteries, which we've talked about here before and got a lot of interest. 

The conclusion of the commenters is that both Duracells and Energizers leak far more than they used to, but after that it's speculation on reasons and different views on alternatives.  One of the comments that bears what research I can do (perhaps by buying some) is that the big two are competing on image and perhaps some specsmanship about capacity, while cheap batteries aren't trying to win on capacity but rather on cost.  In the fight for being able to claim better capacity, they may squeeze the room in battery too much and leave out critical elements, such as not leaving enough space for the compounds that remove excess hydrogen that the battery produces during discharge.  It leads to the conclusion that the cheaper batteries may be better. 

Consensus is that lower tier brands like Kodak, Sunbeam, Fuji, Panasonic and Sony make good alkalines that don't leak as often, and that Panasonic's Eneloop NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) rechargeable batteries are a good substitute.  I have eight  Eneloop batteries for a couple of radios I use regularly and they do seem to be better than the non-branded NiMH batteries I've used. 

I'm not in a position to start replacing all the alkalines in the house with Eneloops, I don't even know how many there would be to replace, but I think I've bought my last Duracells.

It's Back to Spring Planting

Yesterday's pulled pork right out of 14 hours in the smoker.  It's like an Easter ham except for being a pork shoulder and not a thigh.

February was pretty warm around here, I ran the air conditioner almost every day, even the separate A/C in the shop while I was out there.  March started out quite a bit cooler, and the air wouldn't cycle on at all, until about the calendar start of spring.  When it's cooler outside, that makes it easy to put off doing the spring planting.  I mentioned doing some back in February, and that new hibiscus is doing fine, but some of the older bushes need to be replaced.  These are hibiscus bushes that are as old as the house and they just seem to be dying of old age.  Everything else is growing except these two old bushes.

We had the first tomatoes out of the garden this weekend - and these from a plant that we put in last spring, made it through the winter, even lost some leaves during the only frost we had.  Time to add some more tomato plants, dig out those old hibiscus bushes, and replace them with something new.  Before it gets into being May.

Happy Easter!

I thought it was time to re-dress my annual Easter post and drop some of the links that are five years old.  Part of that is hard to drop, because it's part of my personal conversion story, but parts of that will still be here.  Even though I read Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ and I thought it was well researched and well written, it was released three years after I went forward.

Coming from my background, it was a large change.  I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college through my third year before some life detours, eventually getting my degree and starting to ply my trade as an engineer.  I had been an amateur astronomer, so between them I was deeply marinated in the standard model of Cosmology as well as conventional biological evolutionary theory.  Frankly, I wasn't giving it much thought any longer, but my wife had re-affirmed her faith (she had first accepted Christ as child) and I was having all of my mental models disrupted.  She had started a subscription to Bibical Archaeology Review and the constant refrain from archaeologists, not religiously motivated, along the lines of "we thought this was old Jewish folklore, but here it is" got me thinking "if that's true, maybe there's more that's true."  Strobel's book, played a role in filling in the gaps in my historical knowledge. 

Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection.  Everyone has a birthday, but only one man in history has been resurrected.  So since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples. Strobel says:

Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them.

Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!

In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.

For a great examination of this, see the 2016 post "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" at Sense of Events. Donald Sensing put together an excellent piece; simply put, it's preposterous to reconcile the events of that time without saying Jesus rose from the dead that Sunday.

The other religions of the world are about ritual and ultimately about self, about proving yourself worthy; Christianity is about grace.  You're not worthy on your best day; you're saved by Grace.  No other religion teaches Grace.  Islam teaches that Allah is unknowable.  Christianity teaches that not only is God knowable, he wants us to know him.  Islam doesn't teach salvation, it teaches servitude to a fickle, arbitrary, distant Allah.  Christianity teaches forgiveness by Grace; that you're given a gift you don't deserve by a God who wants a close personal relationship with us.  I like the way the Message translation talks about being saved by Grace (Ephesians 2: 8)

It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. 

Evolution vs. creation? I believe people pay way too much attention to this.  There's no mention of evolution in the bible, but there's no mention of the laws of thermodynamics, Avogadro's number, or relativity.  The bible isn't a science book.  Look at it this way: the creation story, how we got here, takes up a page.  The next thousand pages (or more, depending on font size, paper size, and so on) are concerned with how we treat each other while we're here; how we create and maintain a civil society.  Creation is clearly not the emphasis of the book, the other 99.999% is. 

Saying a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum exploded creating everything sounds remarkably like "Let there be light", especially if someone were trying to explain the standard model of cosmology to people who were mathematically at the level of today's preschoolers.  You got a better way to explain modern physics to kindergartners? 

Enjoy your day.  Enjoy your families. As always, I'm up early with a pork butt in the smoker.  Pulled pork tonight.

Keep An Eye on the Sky

The Chinese Tiangong-1 ("Heavenly Palace") Space Station is going to reenter the atmosphere sometime between tomorrow night and Monday morning (here on the east coast).  The best current predictions from Aerospace Corporation are saying

Tiangong-1 is currently predicted to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere around April 1st, 2018 15:15 UTC ± 14 hours.

For references, minus 14 hours is 0115 UTC, or Saturday night at 9:15PM EDT, midpoint is 5:15 PM EDT Sunday and the plus 14 hours time is Monday morning at 7:15 EDT.  And, no, stating the time to the minute when the uncertainty is 14 hours doesn't make sense to me.  With 28 hours of uncertainty, it should be plain to everyone that the buzz earlier in the month about the debris landing in Michigan was impossibly precise, and apparently just an attempt to gather some headlines.  It won't be possible to predict where the debris lands until it's known when the orbit breaks down.  I'll guess they won't know where the debris will be come down until about 30 minutes before impact.

That Aerospace Corporation webpage includes a video explaining the re-entry and breakup process of the 34 x 11' space station, commonly said to be the size of a "school bus" (as if they're all a standard size everywhere in the world).  As atmospheric drag picks up, I'd expect the solar panels to rip off first, which they depict.  After that, it's anybody's guess how much burns up and how much makes it to the surface, but some will.   It should go without saying that with a total of 374 square feet of profile, some small amount of that which will make it through the atmosphere and that could hit anywhere on the 197 million square miles of the earth, including the ocean, anyone's chances of getting hit are infinitesimally small.  The odds make hitting the Powerball look like a sure thing.

So I Had A Little Run-in With eBay...

It was a while ago, but I think I'll tell the story now because it goes with the current pogrom going on with YouTube and the other so-called progressive tech sites.

It starts out with my DPMS LR-308B, an AR-10 clone/knockoff, which I've had since early 2010.  I know I've posted about some of my experiences on occasion over the years.  I was never really happy with the ergonomics of the rifle; it came with a standard A2-style fixed stock and it was never quite right.  Here's the DPMS website's photo.

Before I ran across the sale on The Precious, I was considering taking the LR-308 out as my long-range, precision rifle, so I spent some more time with it about a year ago.  The ergonomics of the stock became apparent and I decided to do something about that.  Then my focus shifted to the Ruger and fixing this issue went to the back of my mind.

Last November, with good sales on AR parts (and complete rifles) going on at a blistering pace, I found a sale on a Magpul MOE adjustable stock and with some help from them, figured out all the parts I needed to get to swap out stocks.  A video from DPMS helped.

My cluttered workbench with the new stock in place.

After a few weeks of occasionally thinking, "what do I do with this old stock?", I decided to check eBay.  There were a bunch of A2 stocks on there, as there are tonight, so I assumed it was OK to put it up there for auction; I put up the listing on January 21st.  The next morning, I had an email from eBay with the ominous wording:

Your eBay listing has been removed: Assault Weapons Parts and Accessories

The email went on:

Some of your listings haven’t followed our Assault Weapons Parts and Accessories policy. In this email, we're including some policy information to help you with your future listings. We also had to take the following actions:
- Listings that didn't follow eBay guidelines have been removed. A list of removed item(s) is available further down in this email.
- We have credited all associated fees except for the final value fee for your listing(s).

Due to numerous laws and regulations regarding the sale of assault weapons (including parts and accessories for assault weapons), these items aren't allowed on eBay.

You may list accessories that would fit a variety of different weapons, such as scopes and sites. However, if you sell these items, you can't mention assault weapons in your listing. 

There was a convoluted process for appeal, and I tried, but those people are put there to keep you from getting what you want.  When I complained that there were several of those stocks on their site right at that minute, the 'droid gave me an ominous, "we'll get them, too".  I let it drop. 

Although I'm not sure and the text of the listing is long since deleted, I think my faux pas was to say I took it off my LR-308, and the last paragraph specifically says "you can't mention assault weapons in your listing."  I took a look at one such listing for an A2 stock tonight, and that page says:

Fits a wide variety of non assault makes & models.  When in doubt please use "ask a question" button to find out if this will fit your gun.

If I had been a bit more of a weasel, I bet they wouldn't have kicked the listing off the site.  I've been telling myself that I should open a gun broker account, though.  This is a bit of an incentive.

The lesson here for surviving YouTube in the future might be to never honestly say what the videos are about in the title and maybe not even the description.  Maybe refer to an AR-15 as an Armalite-inspired small diameter and an AR-10 as a large diameter?  That hurts the ability to search for them, so maybe not.   

News Story of the Day

My favorite news story appears in a few places today, about the restaurant in Toronto that was being protested by militant animal rights activists.  The restaurant is called Antler, and advertises as "local seasonal and wild foods such as bison, boar, rabbit, duck and deer."

Although they don't serve game animals that they've hunted themselves, the practice is illegal according to the Toronto-centric blog, they make an effort to provide food with all the buzz words that are going around these days: locally sourced, free-range, ethically farmed and foraged*.  When the protesting began, co-owner Michael Hunter was nice to them, even changing one featured menu item from a goose dish to a vegetarian dish.

As you might expect, a concession didn't appease the protesters, it made them feel as if they won a battle against the restaurant, so they arranged to come back.  When the protesters returned for the fourth time with signs bearing messages like "animals are not ours to use,"  "killing and eating animals is horrifying" and "MURDER," Hunter decided to conduct a little protest of his own.

About an hour into their demonstration, protesters say that the restaurant's co-owner and chef, Michael Hunter, "brought out an entire animal leg and started cutting it up right in the window on a table reserved for diners."

Event organizer Marni Jill Ugar wrote later that night on Facebook that she felt Hunter had been "taunting" the group by cutting up a deer leg right in front of them.

"Once the deer was cooked Michael Hunter, owner of Antler, sat back down at the window to eat the dead deer," she wrote.  [Facebook warning: SiG]

"Look in the window. Look at Michael Hunter. That deer was treated like a joke. That deer was an innocent animal who did not want to die."

During the time when Hunter was cutting up the venison leg in the window, Toronto police showed up, although no source says why.  The police and Hunter are seen talking in the window, and then walking away with each other, all apparently smiling and getting along well. We don't know what they talked about or why they left the window area, but one the protesters was quoted as saying, "I'm not sure if the police were telling the owner to stop for trying to anger the protesters, or for ethical or health & safety violations,"  It's also possible the preparation was done and it was time for him to go to the cooking area. 

Asked for comment, Hunter told BlogTO by email that "our identity as a restaurant is well known throughout the city as is our ethical farming and foraging initiatives." He added: "While we would much rather not be the focus of these protests, we are not at all surprised. We simply want to carry on running a restaurant and have a peaceful environment where our guests can enjoy their food."

Antler doesn't seem to be hurt by the attention.

In fact, one commenter on the protesters' Facebook page wrote: "Antler is now the hottest restaurant in Toronto thanks to you guys. Congrats." Most -- if not all --of the other commenters on the animal rights activists' forum expressed similar sentiments.

Headline photo from BlogTO, showing the Toronto police officer and Michael Hunter while he was preparing the leg for cooking. 

*Author's note:  I don't know what they mean by "foraged" food; like the food critic article talks about a dish with "foraged ingredients".  Does that mean they found them in the dumpster? 

NFL's New England Patriots - One of the Unnamed Behind "March For Our Lives"

A lot of people have been finding and exposing those that are behind the Parkland students and the supposedly-grass roots protests this past weekend.  Sultan Knish, Daniel Greenfield, probably has the largest column on it.  Naturally, I've been watching as well.

The NSSF's Ammoland Shooting Sports News joined the fray with an article yesterday.  They point to this NBC Sports story revealing that Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, donated use of the team's private airplane to give the kids rides to the protests.  In explanation, they say that Kraft responded to a personal phone call from Gabby Giffords.

Further, Delta Air Lines donated three around trip charter flights to the protest, although we don't know if Gabby Giffords called Delta's CEO.  John Richardson at No Lawyers - Only Guns and Money blogged about this Saturday as well.

Sultan Knish adds an important bit of context:

The March for Our Lives permit application was filed by Deena Katz, a co-executive director of the Women's March Los Angeles Foundation. This wasn’t just a little bit of professional activist assistance.

The application lists Katz as the “Person in Charge of Event”.

Katz apparently incorporated March for Our Lives as a 501(c)(4) organization instead of the more common 501(c)(3).  Why?  Secrecy.  Donations to c4 groups aren't tax-deductible, but in exchange the organization doesn't have to identify the donors. That makes c4 organizations a great dark money conduit.

There's a tangled web of dark money flowing here among these students useful idiots and a ton of backers.   Glenn Beck had his crew research as much as they could find in a few days, much more than a part time "citizen journalist" like me could find, and they found several ties to (three guesses...) George Soros.  It's an interesting 5 minute video.  (If you're not familiar with Beck, he regularly refers to Soros as "Spooky Dude", dating back to when Beck first got threatened by Soros' staff when he was on Fox)

On today’s show, Glenn chalked up a list of at least ten far-left donors known to be behind the March for Our Lives movement, including:

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz
• Mark Kelly & the Gifford Foundation
• Michael Bloomberg & Everytown for Gun Safety
• MoveOn.org
• Planned Parenthood
• George Soros & Open Society Institute, the Tides Foundation, Women’s March, Louis Farrakhan
• Friends Committee of National Legislation
• American Federation of Teachers
• Jeri Rhodes & Greenpeace

“Their list of donors reads like a who’s who of radical leftist organizations,” said Glenn. He later added, “The last thing that they want is for names like ‘Soros’ or ‘Farrakhan’ … to show up on their tax sheet. But we’ll never know the full extent because big progressive donors don’t want you to know who’s really in charge here.”

If you listen closely, you'll find Glenn found a different name than Sultan Knish found for filing the paperwork on the march.  Instead of Deena Katz, Beck's team found it to be Jeri Rhodes, former Greenpeace CFO.  Chalk it up to the difficulties of doing this detective work when all these organizations in the background are trying to stay hidden.  

So why the secrecy?  Especially why if everything is so "grass roots"; it's all just honest, hardworking but traumatized teens looking for reform?   As if anyone capable of a moment of thought would believe that crap.  I think Sultan Knish has a good summary.

None of this has much to do with Parkland. The mass shooting by a mentally ill man who should have been committed and arrested long before he carried out his massacre was a political opportunity.

Now that opportunity is being exploited to the hilt by a professional class of political activists.

Gun control activists wring their hands over the NRA. They claim that a special interest lobby is illegitimately thwarting the “will of the people”. Yet it’s the anti-gun groups that are invariably false fronts. It’s very clear who runs the NRA. But the latest fake anti-NRA group is a nebulous shadow. Out front are the high school students and out back are the professional activists.

And who is really behind the whole thing? Hollywood celebs, Bloomberg, a network of organizations?

We know who supports the NRA. You can see NRA stickers on car windows even in the bluest cities in the country. But who really supports the anti-gun political network? You’ll need to spend hours sorting through paperwork, following the trail, comparing addresses and researching names, to even get a hint.

That’s what an illegitimate lobby thwarting the will of the people really looks like.

Instead of March for Our Lives, maybe it’s time to March for the Truth?

(From 90 Miles from Tyranny)

There's a deep reality here that I've said once or twice but hate saying.  The pro-freedom side needs a billionaire, and we need one for at least two reasons. 

First, here we see Michael Bloomberg (worth $50 Billion) and George Soros (worth $8 B - both per the Forbes list) throwing around millions like it's spare pennies found in their sofa.  While I think the role of money in elections is overstated, there's no denying that billions of dollars can give the appearance of a lot of grass roots.  I recall Harry Reid being so upset about the billionaire Koch brothers' candidate donations that he dedicated time to attack them from the senate floor 134 times, but I find no evidence of anything like Soros' Tides Foundation, Open Societies or any of his other monetary shell games, and I can find no evidence of anything like Bloomberg's Everytown or the Demanding Mommies. 

Second, and this just piles onto the previous advantage, the anti-freedom side has an inherent advantage in organization.  The anti-freedom side wants central control in everything and that means an almost military organization/hierarchy.  The reason they sprang into motion so fast after Parkland was that they were ready to spring.  They've been hiring community organizers, planning and putting every piece in place to act since Sandy Hook.  I don't know who and I don't know where, but the reaction was just too fast to have happened on the fly.  A decentralized bunch of gun rights advocates that are suspicious of central control going up against the organized anti-gun side is starting from way behind.  

If it seems we're being outflanked on every side, it's because they hired troops to look for ways around us, putting pressure everywhere.  While we thought we had an upper hand because of the swelling gun sales year after year, they were working to squash any advantage we had. 

New Database for Gel Terminal Ballistics Tests

The folks at AmmoToGo sent me some links to a pretty massive database of gel test results that they posted on March 14th.  For what are arguably four of the most popular carry calibers (if not the four most popular): 9mm, .380, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP, they list five shot average results of every brand of self-defense loads they tested.  It can be sorted by name, recovered diameter, penetration depth, or muzzle velocity.  For instance, here's the top few entries (out of 32) for 9mm self-defense ammo.

This is the default sorting, which you can get back by clicking the top of the "AMMO" column.  You can see the first offering, Magtech First Defense, 124gr bonded JHP, clearly didn't expand.  The 5 shot average diameter is 0.35, which is almost textbook 9mm (.356"), and the average depth into gel was 31.5"!  Clearly over-penetrating - unless maybe if you're being attacked by Sumo wrestlers.  By contrast, the next listing,  Black Hills 115gr +P expanded to 0.69" and penetrated a much more reasonable 13.76".

The test results are on these four web pages, which also feature the ability to look up each round and buy some:

• 9mm 32 entries
• .380  15 entries
• .40S&W  22 entries
• .45 ACP  21 entries

I imagine this took a pretty large amount of work - you can add that up to 90 entries with at least 5 rounds of each, so a lot of shooting, setup, tear down, data reduction and I'm sure there's stuff I'm not even thinking about.  That's got to be expensive for a small business.  The details on the test setups are not on the results page, so it took a bit of digging to find this:

We fired each round included in our testing from a distance of ten feet, following the FBI standard, measuring from the muzzle to the front of the block.
...
For our condensed version of the FBI test we opted to simulate shooting through typical heavy cold weather clothing as our intermediate barrier. We placed the barrier in front of the gel, which consisted of one layer of Denim (14.4 ounces/yard), one layer of Polartec 200 fleece, one layer of cotton dress shirt (3.5 ounces/yard) and one layer of cotton T-shirt material (5.25 ounces/yard).

The data set is hours of entertainment for the "numerically inclined" and you can bet any amount you'd care to bet that people will bitch about it because it didn't test their favorite ammo, or their favorite gun, or something.  It may have me picking out a new carry round for my Sig P238, though.  The Speer Gold Dots I've been carrying apparently didn't expand in their test.  Some more research is in order. 

Day 2 Was A Bust

I'm not sure what was up with the show, but we never saw or heard the B-17 today, or the B-25 that was supposed to show up (Panchito).  The T-birds were the only thing we saw and no shot that I took today is better than others I've taken before, so they're all going in the bit bucket.  Here's the best of the "almost" shots - this is the bottom edge of the sensor in the camera.  The rest of the frame was blue sky:

"Missed it by that much". 

Since it was somewhat of a waste today, here's a little shop humor:

I think every mechanic, everybody who has worked on stuff understands this fundamentally. 

I have a couple of good leads on hosting companies to look into.  There's a couple of names that keep showing up in the top few in the ratings I see online.  I'll go look into that some more.

Air Show Weekend!

The annual air show is in town this weekend, so I'm spending some time out in the yard watching for whatever flies my way. 

The big feature is the Thunderbirds, but there are some other things worth watching.  Early this afternoon, I heard a bit of a rumble outside and said "that's not a regular prop driven plane".  I hopped outside, looked up over the house and grabbed this snap in the two or three seconds I had. 

That's the B-17 named Memphis Belle, from the movie by that name.  I've never seen one in real life. 

The other headlined airplane that was going to be here was to be a today-only flyby of a B2 Spirit bomber.  Unfortunately, here's where my location about 3 miles north of the runway was an issue.  The bomber did a low flyby heading east over the strip, continued out east (probably offshore) then turned around and flew west over the strip again.  It never really presented anything remotely "photogenic" to me. 

Only one or two passable shots of the T-birds. 

I'll probably try again tomorrow because challenge.  There's a few P-51s flying, Memphis Belle again and the 45 minutes or so of the T-birds. 

For the photographers, my lens is a 300mm Sigma budget zoom, and I generally leave it focused at infinity on aperture priority autoexposure in my Canon T6i DSLR.  With the APS-C sensor, that's equivalent to a 480mm lens on a "full frame" 35mm sensor.  I use IS800 allowing me to shoot at roughly f11 and 1/2000 second.   Of course that varies a bit, but I try to push for depth of focus and fast shutter speeds. 

Trying To Figure Out The Post-Google/YouTube World

I spent a bit of time today trying to figure out what the post Google/YouTube world is going to look like for me.  It's not really clear, yet, but here are some ramblings.

YouTube:  I have one real gun video up there,  cutting the fire control pocket on my 80% AR.  The name of the file isn't likely to attract attention, but the description specifically says that's what it is: "A short segment of milling the fire control pocket on an AR-15 lower receiver. The mill is a CNC Sherline/A2Z CNC mill under control of Mach3."  I suspect that they're going to delete it. 

This isn't about "monetization" that drove guys like Hickok45 over to Full30.  Taken at the literal word of what they're saying, any or all of the firearm companies will be gone on April 1st, or soon thereafter.  I subscribe to Springfield Armory, Sig Sauer, and Savage;  the "black letter" text of YouTube's policy says those company sites will be gone.  My AR-15 video has 9567 views in seven years, so it's not exactly viral (but it's not exactly exciting, either).  I think it's safe to say nobody involved, from me to YouTube to anyone in the universe, made a fraction of a penny off that video. 

What bothers me the most about YouTube is that they're going to stop being a source of information on how to take down new guns, reloading, or anything related to the vast majority of things to learn about guns.  It's not just that they're removing all references to hobbies or interests they disapprove of, it's that they're definitely "othering" us.

What YouTube is doing is nothing new for YouTube or media in general.  No Lawyers - Only Guns and Money links to a good column by Jim Scoutten on The Shooting Wire with some good perspectives on this.  Take my video with a dinky 9500 views.  He points out some stats on the very high quality "Night of the SAINT" video series Springfield Armory produced for the product release of their SAINT AR-15.

One major firearms company commissioned a reality series of episodes, with a group of selected women competing in physical and firearms challenges.  It was nicely, and expensively, produced and might well have made a successful TV show.

But in one full year of promotion of the series through Internet advertising placement, the viewership of the seven episodes has averaged a hair over 6,900 interested watchers.  Not 69,000 that might be the household reach of an outdoor category television show in a single airing, and definitely not Internet viral, matching the millions of views of the latest cat video on YouTube.

What happened?  The unseen “algorithms” apparently detected “Guns" and suppressed viewership.

His most relevant point might be this:

The major broadcast and cable channels have prohibited any form of firearm advertising for years.  25 years ago we struggled with ESPN in the first year of our gun show series when Colt was a sponsor, but couldn’t advertise their guns.  Since then we’ve moved three times to new networks as each was taken over by anti-gun New York City-based owners. We’re pleased to make our television home now on the pro-second amendment Outdoor Channel.

So do I take down my 25 videos and tell YouTube to take a hike?  That will break every embedded link I have here.  Then where do I put those videos?  Only one fits on a gun video site; the other 24 are machine tool related.  I have no particular reason to take down those 24 videos except that I dislike YouTube as a company for how they're punishing us for the actions of a psycho.  Who's the number two video site: Vimeo?  Which then flows to the bigger point: where do I go for videos on things like fixing a printer, or replacing a window.  YouTube has done both of those for me over the years. Vimeo appears more interested in art than that. 

What about Blogger?  I just had my 8th anniversary, so there's a lot to move.  I need to look into finding a hosting service.  I don't care about a lot of features that a business might want to have because I'm not a business.  I need a blog with an email address and a place to host a couple of gigs of old postings.  

Without Blogger and YouTube, I'll have virtually zero interaction with Google. 

The rest of the companies to avoid or encourage is still too unsettled for me to know if it's all done.  Dick's is out, but I haven't been there since the last time they got stupid about ARs; I don't have a Citi card; I think Visa was good, Bank of America was stupid; don't rent a car from the major chains, but I have trouble keeping them straight.  It's getting hard to figure out which businesses are opposed to freedom and which ones are OK. 

Wakanda Place Is This?

Mrs. Graybeard and I decided to go catch Black Panther and it looks like it's probably the last week it will be at the theater we typically go to.  We walked into the theater almost at the starting time and there were two other people in there, out of at least 200 seats.  There was another couple that came in after us, and I think the six of us were the total audience.

While the movie was enjoyable, it was probably the least enjoyable of the Marvel movies I've seen.  I really liked a few of the actors/characters: the guy who plays Black Panther/King T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and the girl who plays his kid sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), but the story bothered me on a few levels.  First and foremost, it was too predictable.  Ordinarily these movies are fairly predictable; after all, they're comic books.  The good guys win.  The bad guys have to be exceptionally evil.  But this one was too predictable.  I think there was only one scene in the movie that was even moderately surprising and the Marvel guys usually do better.  There were few genuinely funny quips in the dialog, maybe two, and that's another thing Marvel tends to be very good at.

At it's core, (I don't think this is a spoiler), the back story is that a solid vibranium meteor hits east central Africa.  Vibranium is the fictional "strongest metal in the universe" that is in the entire Marvel Avengers story arc - Captain America's shield is made of it.  The metal becomes discovered by a group of tribes there, and they become the most technologically advanced civilization on Earth - Wakanda.  They become isolationist and hide themselves from the outside world by pretending to be a backwards, third world country, but behind perfect cloaking technology it's a place with high speed monorails, towering buildings, and miraculous technologies - juxtaposed with an attempt to look authentically African.  So you see characters in aircraft that look something like a cross between stealth fighters and UFOs approaching dense forest and then plunging into it, suddenly revealing this "city of the future" (as Disney would have called it).  More extreme than that, they have a hollowed out mountain extending some enormous distance underground, with all sorts of hovering VSTOL aircraft, including some that resemble grasshoppers, flying around in it.

I'll freely admit to being too much of an analytical guy, but I couldn't help thinking, "Where do they process the vibranium?  How do they melt it?  How do they work it into sheets and all these other forms?  Where are the factories?  Don't they need steel, aluminum and other resources from the outside?  I mean, they can't make everything out of vibranium; it would be stupidly wasteful to use the "world's strongest metal" where a buck's worth of aluminum would work.  How many people does it take to have this kind of industry? Where do they get the labor?" and more thoughts like that.  They don't show much of the city, but what they do show has the look of "bustling open marketplace" like you'd see in the stereotype Mideast film, and that seems out of place in this high-tech city.  Nothing that looks like the industry it would take to make a city like that.

You might conclude that I'm not fun to be around in movies or things; and I won't dispute that. I find it easier to "suspend disbelief" in other movies than this, and haven't had too much of these thoughts in Star Wars, or Star Trek, or the other comic book movies.  Maybe because Star Wars is a totally new universe, not just something going on here on Earth that nobody knows about.  I couldn't not think of "how could Wakanda not be detected?"

Take the latest reincarnation of Star Wars from a few years ago, "The Force Awakens".  I see the kid, Rey, making a living in a society full of droids by scavenging old wrecked star ships.  On the face of it that doesn't make sense: don't we think of robots as doing the low end, manual labor tasks?  That means it's a universe where human time and labor was worth less than a robot's time and labor, because if those shipwrecks were considered a resource, robots would be climbing on them to salvage the stuff that Rey was getting paid for.  Bu here on Earth, Wakanda is a self-isolated country hiding the fact that they're sitting on the most valuable strategic metal in the world (in so many words).  Where do they get clothes?  What about trade for toilet paper, food and all the things needed to keep an advanced civilization alive? 

Well, that's a bit of a rant.  By far the best movie I've seen in the last year was Thor: Ragnarok, and this falls quite a bit short of that.  Great special effects, cool action, and good acting, just weak writing and a premise that I had a hard time with "voluntary suspension of disbelief".  A 3 on my 1-5 scale.

Black Panther/King T'Challa and his sister Shuri.

Killing Goats and Fighting Fishermen In the Galapagos Islands

It all started innocently enough.  In 1959, fishermen released three goats on the island of Pinta, one of the isolated, rocky islands in the Galapagos Archipelago about 800 miles off the coast of Ecuador.  The idea would be to hunt the goats if need be, presumably as a backup if they couldn't catch fish - no one would confuse goat for fish.  The goats did what goats do, so that by the 1970s those three goats had turned into 40,000 and the island's vegetation was being destroyed.

The story is from Modern Farmer, not one of my regular reads, so hat tip to the Ammo.com newsletter.

Goats have a well-known reputation for their voracious appetite, so much that they're bought for clearing brush and destroying invasive weeds.  That's OK if it's managed, but a herd of goats in a delicate place like the Galapagos turns into more change than ecologists can bear (really, preservationists, not ecologists, but that's another rant for another day).

By 1997, the Galapagos goat population had reached six figures. To fight back, an NGO called the Galapagos Conservancy convinced the Ecuadoran government to wage an extermination campaign against the goats.  A massive, multi-agency project called Project Isabela was launched.  Platoons of goat-hunters scoured three islands, on foot and in helicopters. The method of killing? A clean shot to the head or the heart. 

“It can be hard to see so many goats lying dead out there,” says Dr. Linda Cayot, science advisor for the Galapagos Conservancy. “But those goats were destroying the habitat of the tortoises. In my heart and mind are the tortoises.”

“...so many goats lying dead out there”?  Yes.  The groups involved decided that the goats were the embodiment of all the nutrients the ecosystem produced.  If the goats were harvested and the meat shipped back to the mainland, those nutrients would be taken away from the Galapagos.  They decided the only right thing to do was to "recycle" those nutrients by leaving the goat carcasses to rot away.  (They say a handful of goats were consumed by the eradication team, but not many).

Since the whole problem started with three goats, there was only one possible outcome.  Only one way to be sure.  The eradication had to be total; every single goat had to be killed.

For Project Isabela to be a success, it required total eradication. “It took the same effort to get rid of the last 5 percent as it did for the first 95 percent,” says Cayot. To get rid of the stragglers, the team employed something called a “Judas goat.”

Judas goats were sterilized and injected with hormones to make them permanently in estrus (heat). These unwitting traitors were then set free around the islands, irresistible bait for the fugitives. By 2006, Project Isabela had eliminated all goats from the target areas.

There are still small problems here and there.  Some of the few locals like to hunt the goats and want some around.   More oddly the goats have become a political football.  When local fishermen are displeased with government fishing regulation, scientists say they retaliate by releasing new goats on the islands. “It’s reintroduction as a malicious act; a way to spite the park service.” 

The conservationists are aware they might have a PR problem with their fans and monetary donors.  Goats are cute and furry and every honest preservationist will tell you it's easier to fund raise for cute, fuzzy little animals than ugly ones.  Ever seen a "Save the Blobfish" fundraiser?  If their average supporter knew they were funding a goat genocide, well that might not go over well.  Last words to Dr. Karl Campbell, the field manager who ran Project Isabela’s operations.

“We don’t want to put a cute face to an invasive species.We focus on the outcomes, letting people see how good the islands look once the goats are gone.”

Galapagos goats being goats.  Photograph by Josh Donlan