The Spam I Get

I got this ad from Midway USA today - or so they want you to believe...  Personally, I think this is spam directed at the growing population of Whitetails online and they got my address wrong. 

Happens all the time.  I remember the day I got spam from the same seller offering to increase the sizes of both my p3nis and my brea5t5.

Edit: 1358  To change those two words and put numbers in them.  Let's try to head off the spammers as much as we can, o-tay?

Indiana's Supreme Court Kills the Fourth Amendment

Getting back to normal after the great blogger crash of May 2011.  The crash ate almost all of the comments to my post from Tuesday.  I see the same thing being said at a lot of blogs, so we all understand.

I see from John at Improved Clinch that the Indiana state supreme court has ruled the 4th amendment to the US constitution is no longer in effect. 

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.  

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry.

I knew the 4th amendment was on the ropes, beaten silly by the modern security state: the TSA invasive body searches of people not accused of any crime, including babies, the Homeland Security/Walmart  program to have you watch and report on your neighbors and more.  I just thought it had more life left in it. 

In a statement of stunning ignorance,

"Professor Ivan Bodensteiner, of Valparaiso University School of Law, said the court's decision is consistent with the idea of preventing violence." 

In reality, like gun control laws, this will increase violence against people who obey laws.  Think of it a bonus for any aspiring home invaders.  All they have to do is get something that passes for a police uniform and come to your door.  Do you really know exactly, to the detail of buttons, what your local police uniforms look like?  How about their SWAT teams?  Once inside, being a peaceful, law biding citizen, you'll assume the position, leaving them free to rape, torture, murder, whatever they want to do with minimal risk.  Folks trained in self-defense have long complained that the 3AM door-breaking raids police carry out are impossible to tell from determined home invasions.  You have milliseconds to decide if that person in a black ski mask pushing into your house is a home invader or a policeman at the wrong address.  Criminal gangs have used this attack pattern for years.  The dynamics of identifying them have just gotten worse.

William Grigg of Pro Libertate Blog writes here,

In the interests of brevity, these rulings should be consolidated under the name “Rapist Doctrine,” in recognition of the ... pseudo-scholarly versions of the advice once urged upon women enduring sexual assault: Don’t resist — it will only make things worse.

Watch this one.  Bad law decisions like this can sweep out of one state into the rest of the country.  There seems to be a few gun bloggers in Indiana; you guys need to try to get your legislature to overturn this.

Back on Your Heads

Posts like the last several days worth are so much fun for me that it's easy to not look at the world outside.  Yes, I'm still reading the blogs and following the regular folks I visit (most of the list at right - I have a tendency to not visit every day if the author goes through a period of not posting everyday, and then can get really behind).  It's just more fun to talk about guns, space flight, and caliber discussions, even "hey, how messed up is that market?" than to talk about the approaching endarkenment (as Billy Beck so memorably phrased it). 

There are weird goings on in the market.  Look at the recovery in the dollar (from StockCharts.com):

The dollar is up (against this mixed basket of currencies) around 3.3% since its low.  Why?  I don't know, but it definitely looks out of place, doesn't it?  If you just continued that ramp to the right, the dollar should be in the low 72s or high 71s now.  That's territory it has never been in, so the world may be saying they don't believe the US is ready to collapse just yet.  Or the world could be buying dollars because of the old, "least disgusting girl at the dance" effect.  The EU is in trouble, Greece is talking about pulling out of the EU again, as Brussels is telling them to sell off part of the country to pay back their deficit, and more.  The Chinese economy is suffering from the inflation we're exporting to them, and the Shanghai Exchange is getting ready to do something big (from StockTiming.com). Stock indices can't stay in flag pattern wedges like that past the pointy part. 

Or the dollar could simply be having a dead cat bounce and the planned devaluation will continue soon.

Oil prices going down might not necessarily be a good thing - strange to say.  Part of the drop is the dollar getting stronger (that would take oil from $103 to $100 by that reasoning), part of the drop is that the $4/gal. average (within a few cents) does act to lower demand in the US as it makes life a bit more unpleasant here, and lower demand from the rest of the world can account for all of the drop, which is about 10%.  It's that last one that concerns me - it's saying the whole world is still economically shaky at best.   

We can debate for days whether or not the US economy is actually recovering.  I simply think that if you measure all of the parameters they do in dollars, inflating the number of dollars makes those things look better.  Unemployment (the real number, not the widely reported one) is still close to 20% nationwide, with pockets of worse than that.  Even liberal media (but I repeat myself) are now reporting on real inflation vs. what the Fed.gov reports.  When MSNBC, of all places, puts out a story like this, you know people are sensing the smoke being blown up their butts. 

Meanwhile, the Mississippi flood continues to expand, with the Weather Service (NOAA) predicting a flood level at Natchez about 4 1/2 feet higher than the previous record from 1937!  It's already above that level.

This has the potential to be a real SHTF event with national repercussions.  If those gasoline refineries on the Mississippi get taken out, $5 gas will be a "good old days" memory.   

When I look at these few things, the dominant thought I get is "it just can't last".  We seem to be in the calm before the next storm.

More On That Unanswerable Question

American Mercenary has an interesting piece that relates to Sunday's talk about 9mm vs. 45, Energy, Momentum and Lethality.  He points out the problem with the energy plots like the one I used is that energy uses velocity squared so it gives more favorable results for fast bullets than it does for bigger, slower ones.  Momentum is mass times velocity, so it gives less emphasis on velocity.  Right behind "shot placement, shot placement, shot placement" is penetration, and he argues momentum from big bullets moving slowly has more to do with that:

Ever wonder why the classic Safari cartridges have heavy bullets at or below 2,400 fps?  416 Rigby, which is arguably the "Gold Standard" for a "stopper" has a 400 grain bullet at 2,400 fps, the 375 H&H the "Golden Standard" for medium bores has a 300 grain bullet at 2,400 FPS.  Now there are plenty of newer medium and big bore rounds out there, such as the 375 RUM and 458 Lott that have increased velocity over the old standards, but even the "new" wondermagnums are judged against the old standards.

Of course, the FBI has standards for penetration tests when shot into ballistic gelatin.  There are places to go online to see gel test photos, videos, you name it.  It appears to me that all the major calibers, in modern hollowpoint designs penetrate adequately. Whether they behave adequately in a real self defense situation is the subject of endless discussions based on - thankfully! - few real measurements.

(image from a document I found online a couple of years ago, called, "Beginner's Guide to Carry" from concealedcarryforum.com)

AM concludes with this:

To sum it up, no matter what round you are using, heavier bullets are generally the better bet for lethality on large game.

Like overweight hippies on PCP.  

Were You Planning to Buy Metals on the Dip?

If so, I think you might have missed it. 

You know all commodities got hammered last week, gold, silver and oil all down, and the dollar up.  The minimum appears to have been last week, with silver putting in a 38% retreat before starting back up. 

This chart shows silver vs the long term moving average, raw data on the bottom, normalized around that long average on the top.  The correction was similar in  magnitude to previous corrections, as shown.  On the scale of this chart, it looks even more abrupt than it was.  This chart, of the last few days, shows it a bit better, stripped of the intra-day highs and lows:

The actual low was apparently late on the 5th or on the 5th/6th transition.

The big question is: is it over?  My guess is yes.  The severity of the drop is at least partly due to the change in leverage laws that just went into effect, although Denninger says in that link leverage was all that, but the metals markets are famously manipulated by many different players: central banks, big players (cough - JP Morgan), and so on.   Manipulation or change in laws, it looks to me like silver had gone up too far, too fast, too soon and needed to re-establish support levels.  It has attracted far more speculative froth than gold has lately.  Markets don't go up in straight lines for long. 

In times like this, I ask myself some fundamental questions: has the big picture changed?  Not from what I can see.  If it hasn't, and the big picture is still bullish for metals, what's the small picture?  Last Thursday, Mrs. Graybeard was trying to get me to say, "go back up the truck and buy" on silver.  I wouldn't.  Not because I didn't think it was a buying opportunity, but because every analyst had a different idea on where it was going.  I figured if it's going to $30, why buy at $36?  I don't expect to be able to hit the minimum, but I'll wait until it looks like the drop is slowing, stopping, or even starting back up before I do.  I felt comfortable enough by Saturday.  When I talk about buying silver, I mean physical silver you can hold in your hands, not paper ETFs or any of that.  There's a place for that, too, but physical metal in your possession is king. 

I sure don't believe the TV talking heads saying that the precious metal bull market is over.  I believe fundamentals would have to change radically before the bull market runs out. 

Meanwhile, there's absolutely nothing to change the advice we've all talked about for months now:  beans, bullets, band-aids and bullion all will get you through bad times better than none.  And I specifically include copper, brass and lead in my investment portfolio.  .22LR is the small change of the new millenium!

Oh - and usual disclaimers:  I'm an engineer, not an investment advisor.  These opinions are worth exactly what you paid for them.  Anyone who would take the advice of a random dude on the Internet deserves what they get.  Your mileage may vary.  Do not remove this tag under penalty of law. 

There Are Some Questions That Just Don't Have Answers

For example, 9mm vs 45.  Unless you're really new with guns, you know that question goes back as long as both calibers have been around, and especially since the widespread adoption of 9mm as the standard sidearm by essentially every military in the world.  Small fast bullets vs. big slow bullets.  War against the Moros in the Philippines.  You've seen it all before.  It's almost a Coke/Pepsi thing, except caliber loyalty, not brand.

Fake motivational posters abound: 9mm – for those who squat to pee... Why .45?  Because they don't make a .46... (although they do make a 50) … 45 – because shooting twice is silly...9mm may expand but 45 never gets any smaller... and more.  It was only a few days after the shooting of congresswoman Giffords that I saw someone post that if the psycho had been shooting 45 instead of 9mm, she wouldn't have survived. On the other hand, I've seen ER doctors say "no physician ever saw a gun shot wound victim being wheeled in and said, 'don't worry, it's just 9mm'".  And the famous FBI "Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness Survey" study (on Scribd, but other places, too) said there's no such thing as "knock down factor" in handguns, and the three most important considerations are shot placement, shot placement and shot placement. 

I recently came across a deal on used Taurus Millenium PT145PRO, my first .45.  My only experience with the caliber is that I shot one in my concealed carry class a couple of years ago.  So now I have 9mm, 40S&W and .45ACP available to choose from.  I posted about a year ago on changing EDC from my Taurus Slim 9mm to the XD Subcompact in 9, noting they were virtually the same size overall, but the XD carried almost twice the number of rounds.  It turns out the PT145PRO is virtually the same size as the XD; a tiny bit thicker, and a little longer in the grip.  Does it matter?  I haven't tried to dress around it.  The PT145 is a 10 round magazine (10+1), so less ammo than the XDsc, but more than the Slim.     

The Taurus and Springfield XD Subcompact together.  Clamped together, side to side, they look like this:

The .45 is on the left.  You can see it's about a quarter inch longer in the grip, but very similar in thickness.  

So far, I've run 200 rounds through the new PT145PRO, to ensure smooth functioning.  No problems except for a couple of FTEs in the last 50 rounds.  New gun break-in?  Dirt from  a few hundred rounds?  Don't know, but everyone who handles a semi-auto has to know how to clear a malfunction and a couple every few hundred rounds are not an extreme concern.  This was ball ammo; I'll have to try some good hollowpoints to make sure they function before I'd commit to that.  Two long-time friends have essentially the same gun.  One is trouble free, the other had to send it back to Taurus to make it trouble free.  Taurus has a lifetime warranty and will not only fix the defective gun, they'll upgrade parts to the latest version (or so I've heard).  Will I carry it?  Not through the summer.   

There is an interesting alternative – that I don't own.  Taurus has announced a successor to the PT709 Slim, the PT740 Slim in 40S&W – the same caliber as my Xdm.  It turns out the ballistics tables show the 40S&W (once derided as “40 small and weak”) as superior to both the 9 and 45 ACP.  Look at the advantage in impact energy of the 40S&W JHPs (155 grain) vs. the 124 grain 9mm and 230 grain .45ACP.  This screen capture is from the Federal ballistics program you can download here.

The red plot is the 40, green is 45 and blue 9mm.  All are representative weight bullets - I chose them because I own SD rounds for the 9 and 40 in those sizes.  I don't own any 45 yet, so I used the most common weight.  The impact energy you care about for self-defense ammo is typically along the left side - out to 5 or 10 yards.  The 40 S&W holds an advantage for longer distances than I'd care to explain having to shoot. 

The new PT740 just won the NRA's handgun of the year award, (to roars of derision from Glock Talk fanbois) and the PT709 is credited in some circles as starting the now very hot trend of single stack, slim 9mm pistols for concealed carry, although they certainly were on the market before it.  I'm not sure the Kel Tec PF9 was the first, but it was among the first.    

Could it be the answer to the perennial question of “9mm or .45?” is “Neither: .40 S&W”??

Bringing the Smart

We had a bit of a debate here the other day about the mission to kill Bin Boy.  I think that anyone who cares about government being too big ought to think about this.  I personally accept that mission for a handful of reasons that I won't go into here. 

Victor Davis Hanson brings the smart to the issue with a very good article, Rules for Killing Rogues, addressing some of the issues that should give us pause.

(Khalid Sheik) Mohammed, a confessed killer, was one of just three detainees waterboarded. In contrast, we have executed from the air well over 1,500 suspected terrorists by Predators. President Obama has ordered four times as many drone attacks in the last two years as former president Bush did in eight.

Why is it acceptable to be judge, jury and executioner of someone whom you can only tentatively identify from a drone, but not acceptable to waterboard a confessed killer?  Why is it that it's acceptable to many on the left to vaporize someone with a bomb, but criminally wrong to send a sniper after them?  We, or someone, just sent bombs into the suspected home of Libya's Qaddafi, killing many, but not him.  Why is that acceptable, but a direct assassination isn't?  Is it that deep down, the left feels comfortable with war when death appears random, and not precision?  

For those who don't recall, Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed, among other things, he personally "decapitated with my blessed right hand" American reporter Daniel Pearl.  In the 9/11 Commission Report, you get more insight into KSM (poodle-back man), planner of both the 9/11 attacks and an abandoned plot called operation bojinka, which would have blown up 11 jumbo jets in the air over the Pacific and assassinated the Pope.  The guy is not only a psychopathic murderer, he's a psychopathic murder convinced of his own genius, and superiority to, well, everyone.  (If you haven't read the 9/11 report, you should.  While sometimes reading like a bus schedule, the majority of the report is very readable.  It isn't the ultimate word on the subject, but it's a high quality summary).


Go read.

OK, This Is Seriously Cool

A fully automatic 12 ga. made of Want.

I think Eric Holder just wet himself.

(Probably ought to give a language warning for a few f-bombs.)

Dmitri is a Professional Russian who likes to demonstrate various weapons on You Tube. 

"Professional Russian"?  They pay for that?  A commenter on the BigGeekDaddy website says this is actually an American gun and backs it up.

Edit 2056 right after posting.  The embedded video didn't work, so I switched to a URL link to YouTube. 

50 Years Ago Today

Alan Shepherd convinced them to "light the candle" and rode his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule atop an IRBM into a suborbital flight.  The American space age had begun.  Good summary at the appropriately-named "Mercury News".

I was a snot-nosed kid (really - I had allergies) around the limits of civilization in Southwest Miami - places that are now densely populated.  Schools weren't air conditioned.  TVs were rare, and the whole school, it seems, went to the couple of rooms that had a black and white TV.  (It must have been the heroic 6th graders who had them, certainly not us lowly first graders!)  I still remember the noisy black and white images from that day, and the air of excitement that filled the country.

On July 21, Gus Grissom would ride another suborbital Mercury-Redstone flight, famously losing his spacecraft, the Liberty Bell 7, before John Glenn would become the first American to orbit the earth, riding the more powerful Atlas ICBM booster into orbit.  But the most historically important moment happened mere weeks after Alan Shepherd's flight, May 25, 1961.  John F. Kennedy announced

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

I suppose you had to be there.  I was captivated and became a space geek kid. 

As big a fan as I was - and am - of space exploration, NASA's finest days were over by about 1980.  Today, it's an arthritic bureaucracy better at preserving itself than exploring.  I don't know for sure that the future is with Spacex and not one of their competitors, but this week they took the unusual step of posting their actual costs to develop their rockets and the actual costs of their flights.  This is unheard of in that business. 

The Falcon 9 launch vehicle was developed from a blank sheet to first launch in four and half years for just over $300 million. The Falcon 9 is an EELV class vehicle that generates roughly one million pounds of thrust (four times the maximum thrust of a Boeing 747) and carries more payload to orbit than a Delta IV Medium.

 

Let's get the arthritic dinosaur out of the way and let innovation flourish.  

The Mighty Mississip

In 1814 we took a little trip
along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans

Thanks to a link from Kevin at the Smallest Minority for tipping me off to the building problem with the Mississippi.  It seems we're building to the biggest flood stage since 1927, almost a century. 

Did you catch the stuff about the levees being blown to save the town of Cairo, Illinois?  That's just the start. 

But the real threat posed by this historic, gathering flood may well lie several hundred miles to the south, where the Mississippi crosses the Louisiana border. There, as the Corps well knows but dare not discuss, this historic flood threatens to overwhelm one of the frailest defenses industrial humanity has offered to preserve its profits from the immutable processes of nature. This flood has the potential to be a mortal blow to the economy of the United States, and outside the Corp of Engineers virtually no one knows why.

From a second source:

The river is forecast to crest at 53.5 feet on May 18 at Vicksburg, Miss., a key gauge. That is the highest river stage recorded at Vicksburg since the catastrophic flooding of 1927 when the river reached 56.6 feet and would have kept on rising if levees hadn't given way, causing massive flooding and killing hundreds. After that calamity, the nation undertook an aggressive $13 billion plan to build levees and floodways that would avert such a scale of flooding again.

Unfortunately,  those folks at Bird's Point were sold out by a law in 1928. 

Yet it has always been the plan of the Corps, which bears responsibility for “managing” and “taming” the mightiest American river, to use Bird’s Point as a floodway in an emergency. The plan is sanctioned by the 1928 Flood Control Act.

So while I feel bad for those folks, I believe this would have shown up in the survey or deed search that has to be done before a mortgage is granted.  It's like building on the beach around here.  You might not get wiped out by a hurricane this year, or next year, or for as long as you want to live there.  But sooner or later it will happen.  Just a matter of time.

The little known Old River Control Structures (bottom center), a frail line of defense between the raging Mississippi River (top) and a total dislocation of the US economy, by way of the Atchafalaya River (bottom).

Where Do You Draw the Line?

An anonymous commenter to yesterday's post made me try to put this into words.  About my references to the gay Al Qaeda...



from

Ding Dong the Douchebag's Dead ...

I was in bed when the news broke last night, so I heard it when I first woke up at 6 this morning, to the clock radio's alarm.  So long ago that it's a dim memory, I assumed that if they got Bin Boy, that's how I'd find out.  First thing in the morning, in the fog of waking up.  I get a lot of important news that way. 

Unless someone has broken their secrecy agreements, we probably don't know the truth about what went down, and besides: first news reports are always wrong (although I like this one).  Did they fly helicopters disguised to look like the Pakistani choppers?  Did they spoof transponder codes or other responses so that Islamabad ATC thought they were Pakistani?  Did the US pilots answer calls in the native language?  Did some key insiders in their government know?  The team was apparently on the ground for 40 minutes, enough time for them to scramble a helicopter to check out what was going on.  We have pretty good reason to believe that much of their intelligence services, the ISI, is on Bin Boy's side, so that they would have warned him that an operation was on the way, and by the time our guys got there, he would have been somewhere on K2.  

Sounds like it went as well as a complex operation can go.  No one was injured.  Captured lots of evidence.  And whoever it was who did the double tap followed training perfectly (anyone worth shooting is worth shooting twice).  Everyone is reporting it was the SEALS; Seal Team Six, which officially doesn't exist any more.  My bet is it was a combo of SEALS and Delta, probably with some CIA guys - the "All Pro" team of special ops.  Whoever it was, I really only have one thing to say:  Thank you.  Well, a few things:  Thank you.  God bless you.  Well done.   

It's probably inappropriate to say, but since this is relatively anonymous: I used to be a seal.  I have only one picture from my training days, which I release with some trepidation.

 

Wait - you thought I meant I was a Navy SEAL?  Ha hahahahahahahahaha.

Another View

A few days ago, I did a piece on why I think that QE3 is inevitable.  As an aside and not the point of this piece, there was a really bad error in that one.  I said;

"How long do you think we can sell $45 billion in bonds per day (the projected deficit for 2011 divided by 365 days)?"

There's decimal point missing: it's $4.5 billion per day.

Jeff Clark, who's a "real" stock market analyst and writer (as opposed to me) begs to differ.  He thinks Zimbabwe Ben is going to let the market suffer for a while.  His writing is nice and snarky, too.  Beating old Ben like a rented mule.

Poor Ben. Here's a man who believes his policies prevented a global depression. He saved the banking industry, kept the U.S. economy afloat, prevented unemployment from reaching record levels, and saved the earth from Martian invaders.

 

But he gets no credit for any of it.

 

Instead, he's lambasted in front of Congress, ridiculed in the newspapers, humiliated online, and de-friended from just about everybody's Facebook page. The man gets no respect.

 

My guess is he's anxious to give people a taste of what things would be like if his QE programs weren't around... at least for a little while.

 

No one appreciates the drug dealer until the agonizing moans of the withdrawing heroin addicts drown out the sound of the TV set. "Do whatever it takes to quiet them down!" people shout. "Just get things back to the way they used to be."

(See Junior Deputy Accountant for the actual Stop Bernanke bumper sticker. )

Is Clark right?   I still see red ink everywhere, and I still think that they'll do QE3 because they think it's the least awful alternative.  Ben may want to make us suffer for not worshipping him, but he'd end up hurting his banker buddies, and that probably won't happen.

They are, by definition, going to destroy the savings of any of us who have saved for retirement, "a rainy day", vacations, new homes, cars, or anything else we wanted to save for.  They are, by definition, going to make a mockery of anyone who bought US treasuries (bonds).  Remember when China told us they were concerned we wouldn't honor our debt commitments to them?  China was right.  But, you know, if you're going to make an omelet.... 

Saturday Funnies

Both by Chuck Asay, Townhall. 

The Corruption is Stunning - Part II

This time, add in-your-face arrogance.  The BATF, embroiled in the Gunwalker (aka Fast and Furious) scandal, is trying to push through silly restrictions on the purchase of long guns.

Under the proposed rule, gun dealers would have to report sales of two or more rifles to an individual at one time or during a period of five business days if the rifles are semi-automatic, with a caliber greater than .22 and detachable magazines...  (emphasis added - GB)

This proposal was out for comment in December, and I wrote them asking what "caliber greater than .22" meant.  Do they mean .22 long rifle or .22 short?  Is a .22 magnum larger than a .22?  Is .22 Hornet larger?  .22 WRF?  What about .22-250, .22 Swift, .22 Cheetah, .22 BR Remington, .22 PPC...?  I see a big future for .204 Ruger if this idiocy is passed.  It's smaller than .22 any way you measure it, but can go around 3500 fps.  Business opportunity: .204 Ruger uppers for your AR lower.

This idea that Mexican drug gangs come into the US, spend hundreds of dollars for a semi-automatic AK-47 in American gun stores, when they can get fully automatic versions in Guatemala for $25, is insane.  Cables released by Wikileaks verify that the majority of the arms the cartels use come from Central America, not the US.

Yet one of the cables maintains that 90 percent of the heavy armament Mexican security forces seize from cartel gunmen comes from Central America.

Heck they probably get guns given to them by corrupt Mexican Army members, or steal the AKs from the Guatemalans.  Which makes more sense?  Come across the border into the US, and bring back a few expensive semi-automatics, or buy a cargo container and pick it up at the port?  I know that rifles do go across the border from the US - they're all being shipped by the BATF!  Whistleblowers say thousands of guns were involved in Gunwalker, making the US Government the largest known runner of guns into Mexico.

According to Mike at Sipsey Street:

It was first published in December and had a 60-day comment period that garnered almost 13,000 responses. About 30 percent opposed the reporting requirement and 70 percent favored it, ATF said.

Looks like a concerted effort by the antis - Codrea says it was Mayor Bloomberg; also looks it's time to comment to BATFE again.  Care to join me?

Excuse me, ma'am, but where did you get that AK?

Hmm.  Maybe I should try to lobby them for my version of common sense gun laws.

How To Avoid A Dark Age

Got this link from Alan over at SnarkyBytes (who needs no introduction from me...)

Best 15 minutes I've spent in a while.  Enjoy.

The Markets React to Ben Bernanke's Talk

Gold up about $25 from a low today of $1502/oz to $1528

(read the green trace, )
Silver up $3.50, from $44.86 to $48.36

 (green trace again)
 And the dollar index hit a 2.5 year low. 

(Kitco News) - Comex gold and silver futures prices rallied sharply and moved to daily highs in afternoon trading, in the wake of a bullishly construed statement from the Federal Reserve. June gold hit a new all-time record high of $1,524.20 an ounce. The U.S. dollar index weakened and fell to its daily low, hitting a fresh 2.5-year low, in the wake of the FOMC meeting statement, which contained no major surprises but did hint that U.S. interest rates would remain low for some time to come. That was bullish for metals due to the inflationary implications and because it was also bearish for the U.S. dollar.

I find this particularly funny because I saw Elfin Timmy Geithner on TV first thing this morning, saying the US is firmly committed to a strong dollar.  I almost dropped my breakfast: 

“Our policy has been and will always be, as long as at least I’m in this job, that a strong dollar is in our interest as a country,’’ Geithner said in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “We will never embrace a strategy of trying to weaken our currency to try to gain economic advantage.’’

Seems the investors of the world don't believe him.  You can see why Pimco is shorting US bonds and China has been dumping US dollars since at least last October, when they became net sellers of US debt.  

As Karl Denninger says, “The market is bigger than any one man or any one nation and it does not suffer arrogance lightly. Virtually everyone who has tried to tangle with it has wound up with their head between their legs after not only their head was chopped off but both arms as well.” In this case, the market has concluded that the Fed is going to keep deflating the dollar, keep monetizing our own debt, and the US will keep declining until the collapse.


(note: in the half hour I've been composing this, silver has gone up from $48.36 to 48.57; since the world markets reopened, not even two hours ago, up 80 cents per ounce)

Fun Rumor Out of the LHC

Turning our backs on the economic collapse, I note some interesting rumors flying around the Large Hadron Collider over at CERN.  There's some evidence that they have indeed spotted the Higgs Boson, one of the reasons for constructing the LHC.

A look down the axis of the Atlas detector in the Large Hadron Collider.  Note the people: one standing facing camera on the large white block in the middle, and another working on the left (the yellow safety helmet stands out).

In English?  Over in Switzerland, near Geneva, the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) has constructed the largest scientific instrument ever made, the Large Hadron Collider.  It is a particle accelerator and colliderl that is, it's a large machine for colliding hadrons, not a machine for colliding large hadrons.  The claim to fame of this instrument is that it is designed to generate higher collision energies than have ever been observed.  It does this by generating particles and anti-particles, accelerating them around an enormous (17 mile circumference) loop until they accelerate to nearly light speed, and then smacks them into each other in that detector (or another one like it).

The purpose of this is to understand what matter is made of, and test theories in physics.  Also, another purpose is  to look at the machine, it's parts, and the printouts of results and say, "cool...".  The idea is that when you smash the particles into each other, they break apart into the things they're made out of, much like if you smashed two watches into each other at nearly the speed of light, you'd get a shower of gears, springs and dust.  The size and energy levels in the LHC led to a lot of pre-construction speculation that it was going to somehow destroy the earth, perhaps by forming a black hole or strangelet or by bringing beings from another dimension, or something like that.  Since we haven't seen Elvis, and the planet hasn't been sucked into a black hole (unless I slept through that) I assume those were just crackpot ideas. 

The Higgs Boson features in almost every major theory of physics, but has never been observed.  The particle is named for Peter Higgs, the theoretician who figured out it must exist.  A famous physicist, Sheldon Glashow, I think, said something to the effect of "A Higgs boson is like a toilet; every house has one, but they're not objects of great beauty, and the owners don't talk about them much".  Which leads to here.

And I think an excursion that leads from the most avant garde physics of our time, to the largest particle accelerator ever built, to the Higgs Boson and finally to an over-priced toilet is probably enough for one night.

Edit: 2139  photo problems

Yo, Mr. Prez! I Can Tell You Who's Responsible for Gas Prices Going Up!

Hey!  Mr. Obama!  Hey A.G. Holder!  You don't need to appoint a fancy commission.  I can tell you who's responsible.

Look in that mirror there: that's who's responsible.  You are! (Who's the cute little despot?!  You are!!!)

Every single action you've taken since you took office has helped raise oil prices.  You shouldn't be surprised; back in 2008 (when you were running) you said "under my plan, energy prices would necessarily skyrocket".  You said, "building a coal-fired plant won't be illegal, we'll just make it so hard on them no one would want to open one".  Anyone who listens to you knows you want to destroy the American standard of living, making energy costs impossible for working Americans.  Only your rich cronies like Jeffy Immelt and Georgie Soros will be able to afford to live.

• You canceled oil drilling permits on lower 48, offshore oil fields.

• You've restricted the ability to drill onshore or in shallow water, forcing oil companies into deep water. 

• You've tied up Gulf of Mexico drilling permits since the BP disaster, but allow Petrobras and other foreign entities to do it. 

• You've had your EPA shut down an arctic ocean drilling program causing billions of dollars in losses to Shell Oil.

• You've contributed to instability in a major oil production area by encouraging uprisings in Egypt and all over the middle east, not to mention by bombing in Libya.

How does any one of these help keep gas prices low?  Every single one has been chosen to make energy more expensive.  It's almost like you want energy prices to go up and have been working really hard to make them go up. 

And then, to ice the cake, you've gone on a spending spree like no spree in the history of the world, and you're paying for it by devaluing the dollar down to the value of Charmin.  You've had the Federal Reserve create more money than ever existed in the world to buy up our debt.  More dollars chasing a fixed amount of oil has to make oil go up in price - think of oil as a commodity standard, like gold or silver.  They know you're making up more funny money, so they raise the price of oil in dollars to get more of them and offset your deliberate devaluation of the dollar.   I know Economics 101 is advanced for you guys, but you ought to read it.  Not the Cliff Notes book, the real thing.  It explains a lot!  You know, that Marx dude was a moron.  And your buddy Bill Ayers - whew! what a moron.  Hate to break it to you, but I'm just sayin'....

When you create an increase in the number of dollars like that, do you honestly think it has no effect on commodity prices? 

See, Mr President, if you knew a little about Economics 101, you wouldn't say stupid things like, "if the raw materials a business needs go up in price, they make more profit".  That means their costs went up and they may not even be able to offset those costs!  I hear you saying, "Gosh, Mr. Economics Dude: are you saying if what the oil companies pay per barrel went up, they don't make more profit??" and I say, "Way to go, little Skipper, you're getting it!"

(from Denninger)
You really ought to learn a little business math, too.  Did you know you can do percents directly on most calculators?!  That way, when someone tells you that Big Oil company made a big profit, you could figure what percent of revenue that profit is.  Then you can see that if Exxon made a big profit, on a percentage basis, it's much less than your buddies at Google or GE or Apple.  And maybe, just maybe, you can see that if you raise taxes on businesses, their customers pay the tax, not the corporation itself...

But maybe I'm asking for too much all at once.  Tell you what, Skipper: just study that Economics 101 and forget the business math 101 for now. 

An Easter Story

(Source here)
Last Saturday, author Lee Strobel wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal called "How Easter Killed My Faith in Atheism".  It's short, only about "a page", so it's worth your while to RTWT - if you're the kind of person with any questions about faith, or can't understand "how can an intelligent person believe in God?", a common idea.  Ever noticed how when the average comedian does a parody of a dumb person, it's always someone with a southern accent?  If they're going to make fun of Christians, it's always a dumb southerner who pronounces "Jesus" with three or more syllables?  I'll leave the topic of perceived intelligence of southerners vs. northerners for another day (well... except for this).

In a way, his story starts the same way mine does:

It was the worst news I could get as an atheist: my agnostic wife had decided to become a Christian. Two words shot through my mind. The first was an expletive; the second was “divorce.”

This was me in the mid 1980s.  In Lee's case he goes on to say,

I thought she was going to turn into a self-righteous holy roller. But over the following months, I was intrigued by the positive changes in her character and values. Finally, I decided to take my journalism and legal training (I was legal editor of the Chicago Tribune) and systematically investigate whether there was any credibility to Christianity.

My wife didn't show any of those "positive changes in her character and values" - she really didn't need any - (no disrespect to Mrs. Strobel intended).  And although I didn't have "journalism and legal training", I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college through my third year before eventually getting my degree and starting to ply my trade as an engineer.  Strobel's own book, "The Case for Christ"* 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.

The other religions of the world are about ritual and ultimately about self, about proving yourself worthy; Christianity is about grace.  You're not good enough on your best day; you are 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 by a God who wants a close personal relationship with us.  I like the way the Message translation does this verse (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.  Creation is clearly not the emphasis of the book, it just starts out that way.  And saying nothingness or a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum exploded into light ("Let there be light") sounds like as good a picture of the standard model of cosmology for non-physicists as I can think of.

Enjoy your day.  Enjoy your families.  I have a pork shoulder and three-quarters of a chicken in the smoker as I type.  Enjoy things while we can. 

* - it's probably time for my frequent disclaimer that links to books on Amazon are so you can see the book I'm talking about; I don't make any money off anything you see on this web page.  It's entirely self-funded; as long as lots of folks keep flying commercial air travel, I'll have a job as long as I want.