Seems Like This to Me

Lisa Benson's summary of the Obamacare story.

Like I said a couple of weeks ago (about "repeal and replace"): 

Why should we want to replace it?  Why wouldn't we just want to burn it to the ground and do everything we can to create a free market in medical care?   From what I can see, the problem with healthcare is over regulation and a thoroughly broken market because of it.  This brokenness has been building for over a hundred years.  Naturally, anything that took a hundred years to break is going to be hard to unscrew.

While I know the president is going through his campaign promises and ticking them off his "to do" list, Rand Paul is among the most reasonable voices in this whole mess.  Rand says repeal it now because everyone is in agreement on that part, then work on a possible replacement.   According to The Hill, Paul introduced a repeal bill on Thursday:

By introducing the new bill, Paul hopes to repeal the ACA without immediately rushing to replace it. He argued in a written statement that Republicans are much more united on repeal, saying:

“The Republican Party is unified on Obamacare repeal. We can honor our promise right away by passing the same language we acted on in the last Congress."

Paul continued by pointing out that they could replace it later on, saying, “we can have a separate vote on replacement legislation that will deliver lower costs, better care, and greater access to the American people.”

John Hawkins at Townhall.com has a good summary:

Although Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party are guilty of a multitude of sins against America, the worst one was Obamacare. The bill was never popular. In fact, it was so hated that it catapulted Scott Brown into Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts for a term. The bill was an albatross around the party’s neck and the results were devastating.

During the Obama years, the Democrat Party lost 12 governorships, 900 state legislature seats, 69 House seats and 13 Senate seats.

Why was Obamacare so costly to the Democrats? Because the bill wasn’t bipartisan. Because they sold it with lies. Because it was never popular to begin with. But most of all, they created a system that had a small number of winners and a large number of losers.

So popular, it drove the people in Massachusetts to give a seat that has been under Democratic control since the last ice age to a marginally competent rookie like Scott Brown. It has literally made the Democrats a marginal party.  All they can do is work at screwing up things. 

Look, I'm sure there's a subset of the population for whom Obamacare works.  Someone with an expensive existing condition, or was otherwise so broke and got such good subsidies that they got a winning hand would certainly be happy with it.  As many people have pointed out (including me); getting insurance for a condition you already have isn't the typical risk mitigation role of insurance, it's redistribution of the premiums.  On the other hand, most people were not in that small group and saw their deductibles and premium costs skyrocket.  Retirees are forced to pay for insurance for maternity care they'll never use; non-drinkers are forced to pay for alcoholism treatment insurance, and more.  They completely destroyed what little resemblance health care had to a market-driven system. 

Why should we want a replacement anything at all like Obamacare?  It was designed from the start as socialist income redistribution.  I could do (and have done) days worth of columns on this.  For example, way back in the first year of this blog, 2010, I wrote a piece on Donald Berwick, who had been given a recess appointment to be the Medicare/Medicaid czar in the early days of Obamacare.

Dr. Berwick is now in charge of a program with obligations of 95 trillion dollars (debt clock) - far, far higher than the GDP of every nation in the world.  As far as I can tell, he has zero experience with finances.

Dr. Berwick was not only an unabashed fan of "death panels", but of socialist redistribution of wealth.

"Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional," said Berwick. ...  Is health insurance redistribution?  I voluntarily pay into a system that will pay benefits to any member based on the money it collects from the members of the plan.  I fail to see that being socialist.  So if insurance isn't "just, equitable, civilized, and humane" what exactly is he advocating?  Taxing you to pay for other people.  Government, as Washington said, is force.  Try not paying your taxes, and if you're not a member of the administration (e.g., Timothy Geithner), how much do you want to bet that you eventually don't get a gun pointed at you?  No, this is not humane, it is theft.  

One of the architects of the law was Rahm Emmanuel's brother Ezekiel, who argued we should all die at 75 for a handful of egotistical reasons.  Another was Democratic street thug organizer and scumbag Robert Creamer, who came up with many concepts for Obamacare while in Federal Prison in the mid '00s. 

It is such a fetid cesspool of legislation it should be torn up from the ground up.  There's no reason to want anything like it at all.

Florida's RINO Infestation

My out-of-state friends have probably not heard that a great package of gun bills is apparently being scuttled in the Florida Senate, again - just like last year, by an influential Republican, again - just like last year, a Republican who made public commitments to being a supporter of the 2nd amendment, again - just like last year.

The RINO this year is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Anitere Flores of Miami.  Miguel at Gun Free Zone has been doing the yeoman's work of reporting on this with important pieces starting yesterday, March 9th, when the story broke.  Miquel's first report summarizes as follows:

Flores, a key vote on the Judiciary Committee, vowed she wouldn’t support Steube’s 10 other bills, which means they would have virtually no chance of making it onto the Senate floor. 

Flores is one of five Republicans and four Democrats on the committee, so if she votes against bills and all Democrats vote in lockstep, Steube’s gun bills would be sent to their graves early.

Senator Greg Steube, who is referred to here, is a genuine advocate for Florida's law-abiding gun owners, and had originally (January) proposed a single large bill that embodied campus carry, open carry, carry in the "non-sterile" parts of airports (such as where the Ft. Lauderdale airport attack took place), courthouse accommodations, and more.  He broke it into 10 smaller bills after concerns that one portion might block all the others.

Marion Hammer, the NRA-ILA representative in Tallahassee and former NRA President responded to questions this way:

"I cannot tell you why Sen. Flores suddenly turned on law-abiding gun owners because I do not know.  (Until yesterday she had a 100% rating with NRA and USF)

I cannot tell you if Sen. Flores was acting on her own behalf or on behalf of the Senate President or Senate Leadership because I do not know.

I cannot tell you whether or not she has the power to kill all pro-gun bills and not allow the Senate to vote on them because I do not know.  But -- as the old saying goes -- "it ain't over 'till it's over,"  and this is only Day 2 of the 2017 Legislative session.

And finally, am I giving up for this session? ABSOLUTELY NOT.  I represent law-abiding gun owners statewide and they depend on me to fight for them and I will."

Like Miguel and others, I've sent the Senate President my own comments, which start like this:

It's being widely reported that Ms. Flores effectively turned her back on her supporters and said she wouldn’t support any of Senator Steube’s 10 gun proposals.  Whether this is simply being a turncoat or if it's the result of bribery or other corruption, readers can't say but it's a betrayal of her supporters and all of Florida's law-abiding gun owners.  In spite of her anti-gun vote promise, in recently (post-Pulse club shooting) writing pro-2nd amendment letters to Marion Hammer, Ms. Flores clearly and plainly said she was on the side of legal gun owners.  In reversing direction she has betrayed not just all of her supporters, but has cast a pall over every Republican elected official in the state.

Anitere Flores, right, with Michelle Gajda, head of the Florida chapter of Michael Bloomberg's (the most dependable asshole in American politics (tm)) "Moms Demand Action".

Miguel proposes a simple approach: reset every senator's NRA grade to zero.   We no longer grade on PR statements or returned questionnaires: we grade on results.  Pass laws restoring our rights, you get good grades.  Block them, you get left at zero.  Unfortunately, I don't think that's right either.  To Michelle Gajda and her fellow travelers, a zero from the NRA is a good grade and I don't want to give her a good grade.  Likewise, Senator Steube really is a better advocate and friend than Flores, so if we go by the idea that nobody gets above zero if the laws aren't passed, he ends up rated the same as she does.  She's the roadblock and needs to be seen as the roadblock.  I don't think there is a fix for someone flipping like this, until the primaries, by which time we're fighting a rear-guard action to try and get rid of them to keep them from doing more damage.  Again - just like last year. 

Did Mad Dog Nominate A Muslim Brotherhood Supporter?

I ran across word on PJ Media that Secretary of Defense Mattis has recommended the appointment of Anne Patterson to be the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.  The author of that piece, Raymond Ibrahim, went so far as to call her a Muslim Brotherhood Stooge.  Is she really a Brotherhood stooge, or is she just a career State Department wonk who was in Egypt at that time?

Becoming Undersecretary of Defense for policy would make Patterson the third highest official in the Pentagon, and the only one of the top three (the other being Deputy Secretary Robert Work, an Obama appointee holding over until he's replaced) to not be a retired career officer.  Politico describes the problem this way:

As ambassador to Egypt between 2011 and 2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist government. She came under fire for cultivating too close a relationship with the regime and for discouraging protests against it -- and White House officials are voicing concerns about those decisions now. 

The emphasis of the Politico piece is that Mattis keeps nominating people whom he knows and has some regard for, and the Trump administration keeps refusing them.  Middle East Briefing seems to back that up, at least partly, simply reporting that Mattis and Patterson worked together when he was still a general.

General Mattis’ choice of Patterson for the top policy post at the Pentagon is the result of their close working relationship when Patterson was serving as Ambassador to Pakistan from 2007-2010, and later during her posting in Cairo. General John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who headed the U.S. Southern Command before taking the Trump cabinet post, and is a close collaborator of Defense Secretary Mattis, also knew of Patterson’s earlier career as Ambassador to El Salvador (1997-2000) and Colombia (2000-2003). She served, briefly, in Colombia during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe, who took a hard-line stance against the FARC (Armed Forces for the Liberation of Colombia). As head of Southcom, General Kelly had been a strong promoter of aggressive action against the Colombian drug cartels, including the leftist FARC.

The PJ Media piece is more negative about Patterson.

Back during the months leading to the June 30, 2013 revolution, Patterson -- the “Brotherhood’s Stooge” as she was called by all, from news analysts to the Egyptian street -- was arguably one of the most hated individuals by the millions of Egyptians who took to the streets against Morsi and the Brotherhood. Not only did her face regularly appear next to Obama’s in placards; it sometimes appeared alone, indicating just how closely she was seen as supporting the Brotherhood.

Ibrahim includes several photographs of protests in Egypt directly attacking Patterson.  For example:

There are more of these, as well as quotes from Egyptian sources who seem to be uniformly against Patterson.  There are allegations that she's Muslim Brotherhood agent, and more.  Is it just because she was the visible face of a very unpopular Obama policy? 

As I mentioned, Politico seems to emphasize the conflict between Trump and Mattis, saying that several of his appointments for assistants have been refused. 

The skirmish surrounding Patterson’s nomination is the latest in a series of personnel battles that have played out between Mattis and the White House, with each side rejecting the names offered up by the other while the Pentagon remains empty. The White House has yet to nominate a single undersecretary or deputy secretary to the Defense Department, while Work, Mattis’s deputy, is an Obama administration holdover who only agreed to stay on until the secretary taps a deputy of his own.

...
But it is Mattis who’s dug in most stubbornly, insisting on staffing his own department. “Mattis is a guy who cares very much about personnel,” said a Mattis friend. “He doesn’t want people off the tracks that he has laid down and that he’s running his train on.”

Which indicates that he feels he can trust and work with Anne Patterson.  The above quote from Middle East Briefing implies that General John Kelly of Homeland Security also likes and trusts Patterson.  Middle East Briefing continues:

The harshest criticisms of Patterson center on her close relationship with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and their former President, Mohammed Morsi, when she was Ambassador in Cairo from 2011-2013.

...
Patterson arrived as Ambassador to Egypt four months after the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, and she immediately established strong ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, while also keeping lines of communication open to the ruling armed forces. She became the emblem of the Obama Administration’s policy of courting the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” force within “political Islam,” which had been enshrined in President Obama’s Presidential Study Directive-11 (PSD-11) of August 2010, and the later Presidential Decision Directive-13 (PDD-13) of February 2011, which set forth a policy of opening to Muslim Brotherhood organizations in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria. In the spring of 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced a public opening to the Muslim Brotherhood, and she later approved a visit to Washington by a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood leaders from all over the Middle East and North Africa.

It's being reported that Trump and the administration are opposed to Anne Patterson's nomination, and they will probably win that argument.  My respect for Mad Dog Mattis leads me to believe that if he feels he can work with her and trust her, that's probably adequate vetting.  On the other hand, everyone makes mistakes.  It really comes down to the question of whether Anne Patterson is really a Muslim Brotherhood supporter, or is she just a career diplomat handed a crappy job and trying to make her boss look like not-quite so big an idiot as he is?  Yet another question looming is if there will be Brotherhood ties into the Trump administration as there were into Obama's, where they were apparently embedded from top to bottom.

Anne Patterson (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Idling

The work on my CNC mill enclosure is idling a few days because of finding I was missing a couple of screws.  These aren't called out on the DVD I bought; the entire enclosure project isn't on the DVD.  There has been some discussion on the CNCZone forum about it, where I got most of the hardware list, and a handful of videos on YouTube.  While watching a couple of those videos for the third or fourth time, I noticed a couple of screws I had missed.  After spending half an hour at Lowe's looking for #6 pan head wood screws, I didn't think I'd find M3 x0.5 screws in the oddball length I need, so it was off to Bolt Depot where I got everything I thought I could possibly need, and some spares.  Like most of my Bolt Depot orders, the hardware I ordered was about half the price of shipping: $2.24 for the hardware and $4.95 for the shipping.   The hardware should be here tomorrow.

It's also idling because while cutting the clear acrylic for the front doors, I broke two pieces.  It's a comedy of errors thing.  Such comedies aren't usually funny for a while when they happen to you.  

On the positive side, the other three panels are all up and the basic enclosure is built.

The structure uses latches to hold the sides to the back, one is visible at the top of the right corner, and also uses latches to hold the sides to the chip tray.  The picture below is a detail zoom of the right side top and bottom latches, along with another L bracket with two screws in it which attaches the side to the back.  To take this apart, I remove one screw from that L bracket and one from a matching bracket on the left side, then pop latches open. 

If you look behind the mill, you'll see a PVC pipe sticking up with two 90 degree elbows on it.  Those feed the wires from outside the enclosure up into the chip tray and the tube is sealed to keep coolant from getting out of the tray. 

Once this is done, the rest of the "To Do" list becomes smaller projects.  In no particular order:

• Get oil for oiler and get it working. 
  
• Get coolant system running.
  
• Edge finder using electrical contact. 
• Limit switches
  
• Get rotary axis working
  
• Spindle speed & on/off control

It's usable for projects now, maybe like this one...  Those upgrades are primarily to increase friendliness and usability. 

My Long Taurus Story is Over

The story that began in early August of 2015 has come to successful denouement.  The short version: Taurus sent me a replacement and it's no longer a Taurus.

As I wrote last Friday, 

Today at about 5:30, my FFL called and said they had a gun for me.  The situation was all news to them, but it appears tomorrow I'll go up to the Friendly Family Licensee and see what we can work out.  I don't feel much need for another 9mm handgun, but maybe we work something out.

I may as well plug my FFL, our local shooting range with and attached restaurant that serves drinks, Frog Bones Family Shooting Center (no, I get nothing for plugging them - I just think they're a good place).   Saturday in the early afternoon found us talking with the guys at the gun counter, and they were quite receptive.  I told them I had bought the PT-145 as a .45 in an FTF sale and that I'd sent it in when word started getting out Taurus would check the guns and "repair or replace".  I told them that with it being 19 months later, I've done without it for long enough that I just don't care to replace it with a 9mm.  If Taurus had offered a .45 as the replacement, I might - might - have taken that option, but I was more interested in getting another .45 to replace it. After looking at a handful of options, we all agreed it would be best for us to come back when it was less busy, so we went back yesterday. 

Before going to the store, I had checked to see about what the PT-111 goes for online and found Buds has it for $275.  That would add $30 at the local shop: $25 FFL transfer and $5 FDLE background check.  I speculated that I bet that their wholesale price would be around $200 and they'd probably offer me that in trade.  That turned out to be exactly right.  Was it the truth?  I don't know.  I reasoned that if I never took possession of the PT-111, then it would not be a used gun and should sell for more in their store but it's unreasonable to expect they'd offer me more than what they pay wholesale when they buy that model.

So what did the Taurus morph into?  A Springfield Armory XD-s 3.3 in .45ACP.  Naturally, today seemed like a good day to take it for its first drive.  Temps were in the mid to upper 70s and the breeze around 15, so really pleasant in the shaded outdoor range.  I ran 100 rounds of FMJ (Blazer Brass) and 20 JHPs (Remington Ultimate Defense - supposedly optimized for compact handguns) through it.  Zero problems of any kind; no FTF, FTE or anything, which is what I expected.  Here's a quick portrait with Mrs. Graybeard's Sig P238 Equinox. 

I've mentioned having a Taurus Slim, PT-709 9mm, which is one of the reasons I didn't feel the need for another 9mm handgun.  I find the Taurus a bit painful to shoot due to its small width and my arthritis (the fact that compact, single stack 9s can be uncomfortable is not a revelation).  I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to spend quality range time with the XD-s because it's also a single stack, narrow gun.  Before pulling the trigger on the XD-s, so to speak, the sales guys set us up with a demo gun and free range time to test it (we just had to buy a box of their ammo).  The XD-s gives me no troubles at all.  Mrs. Graybeard has similar issues with the 709 and likewise had no discomfort with the 45 ACP XD-s at all.  I'll admit that's a little puzzling, but write it off to better ergonomics.  Perhaps the beavertail safety puts our hands into a better position. 

This is about as good a resolution as I could have hoped for.  It took a long time for the system to resolve the issue, but Taurus supplied me, not the original owner of the gun, with a replacement for it that I was able to use as a trade in for something I'm more comfortable with.  I think some of that delay was due to the settlement issues with the various plaintiffs.  Taurus first told me they were going to replace my gun in November of '15.  The extra year delay appears to have come from the lawyers and various plaintiffs in the class action settlement against Taurus. 

Calling in a Rain Check

Busy day, which thoroughly got away from me.  So a cartoon of the day. 

Michael P. Ramirez

Recommended Reading on Civil War 2.0

On Thursday,  Tam posted a link to a very thought provoking and rather long piece on a blog I'd never heard of:  Days of Rage on Status 451.  The author pokes at many things going on that lead to the widely stated thought that we're in the low-intensity phase of the second civil war in our country. I haven't actually finished reading it, but I will when I'm done here.  The title, "Days of Rage" was the title of a book about the violence of the early '70s (for reasons that aren't clear to me, much of what people consider "the 60s" actually took place between '68 and '72).  “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

As I always do, I'm going to pull a few quotes here to whet your interest to go read it.

One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.

Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.
...
You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”
...
The FBI was up SDS’s ass, and Weatherman’s. They harassed the core cadre. Beat them. Threatened them. This does not dissuade revolutionaries. Weatherman started doing crazy stuff with SDS: street brawls, public nudity, sexual orgies, ordering established couples to break up. If you think it sounds like a cult, you’re right. This is literally cult indoctrination stuff. They were remaking people, seeking the hardest of hardcore.
...
Institutions are one of two major assets that the Left has and the Right lacks. The other is Shock Troops.
...
My point is: did you notice the Left and the Right use fundamentally different tactics?

This is no accident. They’re different cultures. The Left and Right don’t just want different things. They also have different abilities, goals, resources, and senses of propriety. Meaning contemporary political violence from the Left and from the Right will look very different.
...
People tend to think that the Right will be an awesome, horrific force in political violence. The SPLC’s donations depend on that idea. Righties tell themselves that *of course* they’d win a war against Lefties. Tactical Deathbeast vs. Pajama Boy? No contest. Why, Righties have thought about what an effective domestic insurrection would look like. Righties have written books and manifestos!

It’s horseshit.

The truth: the Left is a lot more organized & prepared for violence than the Right is, and has the advantage of a mainstream more supportive of it.

The whole thing goes 48 screens on my desktop, here.  Column widths are about what I run (close to 100 characters per line).  On the other hand, it's rather interesting.  I was unaware that Puerto Rican separatists shot up congress in 1954 and tried to assassinate Harry Truman in 1950.  The same group was behind a wave of bombings in the '70s.  They were well trained, probably by Cuban intelligence, and well-disciplined bombers.  The biggest asset they had, like all leftist groups, was support from mainstream organizations.  Their biggest benefactor was the Episcopal church.  Heck, I was a young adult while this was going on, but reading it feels like reading somebody else's history.  It's not just that I was too busy trying to get into adulthood, and trying to get my life going; it's like a memory selectively destroyed by our culture.  The author talks about not remembering any of this, too.   

Final words to Status 451

There’s a famous case where a shadowy group was after a high-value, high-status target who used his considerable resources to retreat. The group couldn’t get to him. So they targeted everybody associated with him: Friends. Family. Staff. Lawyers. Sympathetic journalists. Eventually, that utter devastation of infrastructure led to the death of the high-value, high-status target, whose name was Pablo Escobar.

That’s what I’m really scared of. Killing like that, on repeat. It’s my nightmare scenario. I know it’s unlikely. But — and this is the stupidest part of this whole thing — after 2016, I’m a little superstitious, and I’m wary of omens.

The shadowy group that unleashed carnage on Pablo Escobar’s Institutions had a name.

They were known as Los Pepes.

Info Bleg for My Fellow Bloggers

I've been thinking of maybe switching to another system for running comments other than the built in Blogger tool. I've seen one or two people talk about migrating Blogger comments over to another tool and have some questions. 

Could someone give me some practical experience tips with this?  I'd like to know if this is more likely to be a one day or one month effort (more than one?), different options and, really, the types of things you learn from doing it more than the things I could get from a search engine.   Are you happy with how it worked out?  Would you still do it? 

My main motivation is to give folks the option to make small corrections and edits for a few minutes after they post a comment. 

(free clip art)

Are You Enjoying the Ammo Glut of 2017?

I get ads all the time for more ammo, and I couldn't help but notice this one for a Remington "Bucket o' Bullets" in .22LR; 1400 rounds for $80.  (No, I didn't order one - truth be told, I haven't opened the last one I bought).  That price is on par with what was being asked in 2013, if you could find one, and I know that because 18 months ago I posted this:

Just about 22 months ago: November 28, 2013 to be exact, Midway USA was running a sale on these: Remington "Bucket O Bullets", 1400 rounds of .22LR.  The price was $60 - at a time when the next closest price was $20 more and gun show vendors were asking $90 for a brick of 500 - and it was listed as OK to backorder.

I told the story of waiting on a backorder with Midway until it expired, and then another 10 months.  The day I wrote that piece, I ordered one of those buckets for $100.  In a way, I'm really happy to see the $80 advertised prices again.  It seems to mean .22 is still sliding down, even if it's in fits and starts.

I'm routinely seeing 9mm in the $10/box range, .223 at 30cents/round - including shipping- and everything seems plentiful.  Before Christmas, I got some Federal Eagle 45 for about $12/box, after a mail in rebate.  I know it's rough on the manufacturers, but Life is Good for ammo buying.

One of the pieces of scuttlebutt I heard was on Michael Bane's podcast when he quoted a gun store owner as saying, "if I gave away an AR-15 with every concealed carry gun I sold, I might be able to reduce my inventory enough".   The daily gunwinner.com newsletter has had fully built ARs for $399 - I assume shipping, FFL and all those other fees still apply, but "starting at $399" is pretty good place to start from. 

While I'm on the topic of happy gun news, remember this? 

I've groused here about the Taurus Millennium recall a few times, most recently in December, and how I've been without my PT145 since August of '15.   This may be premature congratulations, but last Wednesday as I was having a lunchtime cup of tea, the phone rang and Caller ID said Taurus International.  The nice young lady verified who I was and informed me a new replacement for my pistol is in the works, and I should have it "in 2-3 weeks".  I was given a choice of a few models, and settled for a PT111.  She said they did not have a .45 pistol to offer, and my choice was essentially this one in 9mm or a PT140 in 40S&W.

Today at about 5:30, my FFL called and said they had a gun for me.  The situation was all news to them, but it appears tomorrow I'll go up to the Friendly Family Licensee and see what we can work out.  I don't feel much need for another 9mm handgun, but maybe we work something out.  I was telling a friend just last night that if they had made it in under 2 weeks, I'd give them extra "grace and class" points.  If they had taken 3 weeks, then, well, no extra points for them.  Now that we're at twice the estimated time, I'm back to the "never another Taurus" camp.  FWIW, the day they told me that was February 1, so it's 4 weeks. 

Possible Breakthrough in 3D Metal Printing?

Design News headlined this story as, "Teen Invents Liquid-Metal 3D Printer With Potential to Transform Manufacturing", and while it's technically true, he was a 19 year old college student. I probably would have worded that as "College Freshman Invents ..." but that's probably quibbling.

It's important enough as it is.

Regular readers will recall that I did a story on the first 3D printed metal 1911 from Solid Concepts back in November '13 when that story broke, and I've been following developments with printing metal since then.  That printer was a rather expensive industrial level printer based on the concept of Direct Metal Laser Sintering, which uses a bed of powdered metal and then uses a laser to very precisely heat and fuse the powder into usable metal.  The motion of the laser creates solid metal in the powder and grows the part layer by layer.  Even with that cost barrier to adoption, metal printing has grown to have a big impact, particularly in aerospace.

The story here is an entirely new way of 3D metal printing, printing molten metal itself, in the form of precisely controlled droplets of molten metal that solidify as the metal is laid down.

Five years ago, Zachary Vader was a 19 year old student at the University at Buffalo (NY).  Realizing that the really fun and interesting parts of engineering school wouldn't come until his fourth year, he worked on other projects.  He designed a micro-gas turbine generator and soon came to the conclusion that it would be too expensive to produce.  That led him to decide to that 3D Metal Printing was the key to getting costs down.  Zach had a resource that it's arguable nobody else would have: his father, Scott.  Scott happened to be a pioneer in 3D printing fiberglass and was familiar with how 3D printers work.  Scott had the idea of using molten metal and controlling the droplets much like an inkjet printer.  The metal would be controlled by magnetic fields, a field known as Magneto Hydro Dynamics, or MHD.  Zach and Scott formed Vader Systems, basically a family company. 

From Design News:

The breakthrough in Zachary’s invention came when he thought to expose molten metal in a confined chamber with an orifice to a pulsed magnetic field, the Vaders said. The transient field induces a pressure with the metal that ejects a droplet, which was the key to making droplets of liquid metal eject from a nozzle.

Now Vader Systems is producing and marketing the machine Zachary invented, with the younger Vader serving as CTO of the company. Scott Vader is CEO while Zachary’s mother, Pat Roche, is the company controller.

The machine represents a major leap forward in the ability to print 3D objects in metal, according to University at Buffalo engineers. While other metal printers exist, most use a process of laying down powered metal and melting it with a laser or electron beam. This process is flawed because some particles of the powder do not get melted, creating weakened spots.

In the Vader Systems machine, called the Mk1, an electrically pulsed magnetic field permeates liquid metal in an ejection chamber and creates circulating electrical currents that interact with the magnetic field to produce a pressure that squeezes a droplet out of the ejector nozzle.

Vader Systems is promoting their "Mark I" version, saying "Production in 2018", so it's still under development.  The prints look like they could stand quite a bit of finishing, but I'm not sure that's their emphasis.  Still, they quote some impressive stats that they say it will make. The fact that they can print one pound of aluminum per hour at a "90% cost reduction" compared to laser sintering is the kind of quantum leap 3D metal printing needs.

Build envelope
12” x 12” x 12”
(300 mm x 300 mm x 300 mm)

---

Material Capability
Aluminum and its alloys
(4043, 6061, 7075)

---

Droplet Range
200 to 500 micron

---

Build Rate
1 lb per hour based on 500 micron droplet size

---

Speed vs Powder Bed Fusion
2x Faster

---

Part cost vs Powder Bed Fusion
90% Reduction

---

Vader Systems seems to be a mix of the startup and University at Buffalo researchers, which will very likely get them to market faster than just the father and son team could make it.

The Vaders have secured UB engineering faculty and students to work closely with them. Scott Vader reached out to the university after he and Zachary already were working on the invention in the basement of their home. Now the company has three faculty advisors and have won grants from UB’s Center for Industrial Effectiveness and Center for Advanced Biomedical and Bioengineering Technology, as well as and a National Grid grant through UB to further develop and promote their technology.

Vader Systems also has hired several engineers based on its connections to UB, is looking to hire more, and is currently setting up its production facility and business infrastructure in Getzville, N.Y., near Buffalo, Vader said. “Additionally, we’re establishing strategic partnerships and working with our early customers to deliver our first systems,” he said. 

The current  home printers that work in plastics are said to be quite a bit higher quality than the early printers from ten or even five years ago.  I suspect we're going to see metal printing go through a similar improvement ramp in the next few years.

It's All Closing In

The enclosure that is.  And speaking of closure, when I last mentioned the difficulties I was having, there was some room for closure on how I accomplished things.  It was mostly done by widening the slots in the extrusion rails with what I call a "circus trick" cut.  This may be strictly my term, I haven't heard other engineers use it, but it's a term I use for something that works once or twice under more careful conditions than usual, but isn't something you'd like to do every day.  The 64" rails were done this way.  And, by the way, the occasional cut on something too big to fit on your mill is absolutely part of any machinist's bag of tricks.

First, looking right and down the rail, you can see that it actually went under the chuck on my big lathe.  

Looking the other way, you can see that the cutting was done with the rail in my mill vise.  This is the second cut in the series of four required on the 64" rails. 

The rail is 64" long and I was only able to cut about 16-1/2" at a time.  I would set the mill table to -8.5 inches, toward the left end of the table's range, and then cut to +8 or +8-1/2 inches.  I have a "feeds and speeds" calculator for my phone, and it recommended a feed rate of 12.8 inches/minute.  (Since it was actually a very gentle cut, I was taking just tiny chips off of about .045" on either side of the slot, I later sped that up.)  I'd cut the 16", retract the head out of the slot and run the table to the left limit again, then slide the rail down until the spot where I had stopped cutting was just about at the cutter and repeat.  Think of that as doing a carriage return and line feed, like the old typewriters, except with a CNC mill. 

I didn't think to do a video while I was cutting the long rails, and it would have been a few minutes long, but here's a video of me cutting a short rail.  These are the vertical rails in the enclosure, and they're all 23-5/8" long.  Some of the rails had two slots cut on opposite sides of the rail, while others only had one slot widened.  In this case it was the mill set to -6", cut to +6", then flip the rail end for end, do the CR LF, and cut it the second time.



The long rails could only get three cuts before I ran out of room on the left side of the mill and had to do the manual CR LF and swap that rail end for end.

I built the back wall of the enclosure today, and even though it has four panels instead of two (like the sides I did), it took less time than one of the side panels.  Some of that is undoubtedly better methods, but some of it is the widened slot, too. 

Now that I have three walls out of four, it will be a big improvement once I get it assembled.  I spent several hours today more accurately modeling the front of the enclosure, which is all clear plastic and has folding doors that close to keep splatter out of the shop, and open for access.  I also spent time watching the videos on Hoss' channel to make sure I understood things.  I found a mistake I had made and spent some time cleaning up after that. 

Scumbag Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters

Today, Townhall ran the headline story that not only did the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors leave an amazing amount of waste behind, they abandoned dogs.

There's a special place in Hell for people who abuse animals - and it's often the first sign of someone who will transition to abusing humans. 

The environmentalists came to North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and lost. Now, as the cleanup of their protest camp begins, authorities have found it to be a disaster zone. There’s enough garbage and human waste to fill 2,500 pickup trucks. With the ending of the winter months approaching, they fear the spring flooding could wash this waste into the Missouri River, polluting it and other waterways. Yet, efforts to prevent an environmental disaster before the spring have hit another obstacle. Besides leaving heaps of garbage, protesters have left their pets.

After they found the first few dogs, cleanup efforts were halted and a rescue organization came in to search for more abandoned pets. 

Two dogs and six puppies were found and rescued at the main Dakota Access Pipeline Camp by Furry Friends Rockin Rescue.

The rescue has been working hard to catch ALL the animals that were left behind at the camp, but Furry Friends Rockin Rescue isn't giving up on these abandoned pets.

Furry Friends reports that the sound of the heavy construction equipment being used to clean up after the protesters is scaring the dogs and they're hard to find.   There are still protesters in the camp, all subject to arrest, but the majority have left.  The state of North Dakota offered protesters a sweetheart deal including health checkups, hygiene kits, meals, and bus tickets out of state.  One report I heard last week said protesters were being offered a ceremonial arrest if they wanted a picture to post to Facebook or other ego booster.  In my mind, the state bent over backwards to be kinder to the protesters than they deserve. It's only encouraging the bad behavior. 

MORE UPDATED INFO from North Dakota Joint Information Center:

Travel Assistance Center Established for Protesters

Bismarck, N.D. – The North Dakota Department of Human Services, North Dakota Department of Emergency Services and the North Dakota Department of Health have partnered to set up a travel assistance center. This free service will provide protesters with support as they prepare for their return home.

The transportation assistance center will offer personal kits, water and snacks, health/wellness assessments, bus fare for a return trip home, a food voucher, hotel lodging for one night, and a taxi voucher to the bus terminal.

Transportation will be provided from the protest camp to the assistance center.

All camp residents are encouraged to take advantage of these amenities.

Travel Assistance Center Flyer

Greetings,

If you don’t have means to return home, you can receive a ride to the Travel Assistance Center in Bismarck, where you will receive:
· Free health and wellness check-up
· Personal hygiene kit
· Voucher for a one-night stay at a designated hotel in Bismarck
· One $15 meal voucher for Kroll’s Diner in north Bismarck
· Ride voucher from the hotel to the Bismarck Bus Depot the next morning.
· Jefferson Lines bus ticket (Good for non-local destination. Must be in the lower 48 states.)
After you receive your supplies, you will be given a ride from the Travel Assistance Center to the designated hotel.

NOTE: No pets will be allowed.

I don't think that's why those dogs were abandoned.

(Photo from Townhall)

On Cellphones, Radios, Motors and Waterproofing

A few years ago, I posted a story about having one of those bad days that ends up costing a lot of money.   To shorten the story somewhat, while returning to dock, I got into one of those "America's stupidest home video" moments - feet on the deck while stretching out to reach for a piling - and fell out of the boat into the saltwater lagoon.  There's only one positive thing I can say: I didn't get hurt.  I can't say the same for the iPhone 4s in my pocket, which never worked again, and had to be replaced.

If you go out to buy a waterproof phone, radio, or any other item, you're going to run into two kinds of salesmen.  One will say, "sure it's waterproof".  The other will say something like "It's rated to IPX67", or "it can be submerged in a puddle or a few feet of water for half an hour".  Avoid the first salesman.

Industrially, people are very reluctant to say waterproof because they want a definition to test their products to.   For example, consider the term waterproof camera.  It means something different to someone going out on a boat and wants to make sure their phone's camera will work if it gets hit by water drops than it does to someone who wants to go SCUBA diving in 60 feet of water. 

The manufacturing world has largely gone over to IP codes: the International Protection Marking, IEC standard 60529, sometimes interpreted as Ingress Protection Marking.  On a product, the codes are denoted by the letters IP and two digits.  The first denotes being sealed against solids or particles, and the second denotes being sealed against liquids.   The first digit can run from 0 to 6 and literally runs from entry of something larger than a hand down to dust particles:

Level sized	Effective against	Description
0	—	No protection against contact and ingress of objects
1	>50 mm	Any large surface of the body, such as the back of a hand, but no protection against deliberate contact with a body part
2	>12.5 mm	Fingers or similar objects
3	>2.5 mm	Tools, thick wires, etc.
4	>1 mm	Most wires, slender screws, large ants etc.
5	Dust protected	Ingress of dust is not entirely prevented, but it must not enter in sufficient quantity to interfere with the satisfactory operation of the equipment.
6	Dust tight	No ingress of dust; complete protection against contact (dust tight). A vacuum must be applied. Test duration of up to 8 hours based on air flow.

The second digit can run from 0 to 9 with a special suffix:

Level	Protection against	Effective against
0	None	—
1	Dripping water	Dripping water (vertically falling drops) shall have no harmful effect on the specimen when mounted in an upright position onto a turntable and rotated at 1 RPM.
2	Dripping water when tilted at 15°	Vertically dripping water shall have no harmful effect when the enclosure is tilted at an angle of 15° from its normal position. A total of four positions are tested within two axes.
3	Spraying water	Water falling as a spray at any angle up to 60° from the vertical shall have no harmful effect, utilizing either: a) an oscillating fixture, or b) A spray nozzle with a counterbalanced shield. Test a) is conducted for 5 minutes, then repeated with the specimen rotated horizontally by 90° for the second 5-minute test. Test b) is conducted (with shield in place) for 5 minutes minimum.
4	Splashing of water	Water splashing against the enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effect, utilizing either: a) an oscillating fixture, or b) A spray nozzle with no shield. Test a) is conducted for 10 minutes. Test b) is conducted (without shield) for 5 minutes minimum.
5	Water jets	Water projected by a nozzle (6.3 mm) against enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effects.
6	Powerful water jets	Water projected in powerful jets (12.5 mm nozzle) against the enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effects.
6K	Powerful water jets with increased pressure	Water projected in powerful jets (6.3 mm nozzle) against the enclosure from any direction, under elevated pressure, shall have no harmful effects. Found in DIN 40050, and not IEC 60529.
7	Immersion, up to 1 m depth	Ingress of water in harmful quantity shall not be possible when the enclosure is immersed in water under defined conditions of pressure and time (up to 1 m of submersion).
8	Immersion, 1 m or more depth	The equipment is suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which shall be specified by the manufacturer. However, with certain types of equipment, it can mean that water can enter but only in such a manner that it produces no harmful effects. The test depth and/or duration is expected to be greater than the requirements for IPx7, and other environmental effects may be added, such as temperature cycling before immersion.
9K	Powerful high temperature water jets	Protected against close-range high pressure, high temperature spray downs. Smaller specimens rotate slowly on a turntable, from 4 specific angles. Larger specimens are mounted upright, no turntable required, and are tested freehand for at least 3 minutes at distance of 0.15–0.2 m. There are specific requirements for the nozzle used for the testing. This test is identified as IPx9 in IEC 60529.

As you can see it's rather specific in what it says the product is protected against, and there's an additional column that I omitted which talks about how these things are tested!

As I alluded to above, many VHF radios are rated to IP67, sometimes called IPX7.  There's no rating for dust because it's assumed that anything sealed against water is going to be sealed against dust and particles as well.  I've seen ads for smartphones that imply a certain level of waterproofness, the commercial showed them being washed in soap and water, but no IP ratings on them.

A practical application of this subject that's important to me right now is waterproof stepper motors.  Mine aren't.  In my last couple of years at work, I got involved with evaluation and testing of stepper motors (the radar antennas were moved by stepper motors) which were rated to be extremely resistant to water spray and corrosion.  For this to work, the motors had to designed to meet tough specifications from the start.  It wasn't possible to take a standard part and just dip it some sort of coating.  The motors were rated to MIL-STD-202G, a salt spray test with varying test times.  Their motors looked better at 10 days than the competition at 2 days and survived all of our tests without missing a step. 

There are hobby-level motor suppliers who will apply some sort of brushed on or dipped coating over much of the motor for a fee.  They can't seal where the motor shaft comes out of  the body or it won't turn.  Based on how such coatings performed on our aviation radars, I'd say it's not worth bothering to get this.  Squirt some RTV around where the wires leave the body of the motor to seal it, and realize it's about as good as you're going to get.  The motors aren't intended to be submerged (IP67 or X7), but the experience of many people seems to indicate that they can handle some splashing. 

To complicate things, there are other standards, like the older NEMA (National Electronics Manufacturing Association) ratings.  NEMA 6 looks like it would be a worthwhile level to try for, if a NEMA rating is all you have.

I Don't Get the Whole "Repeal and Replace" Bit

My version goes like this.  Picture your doctor telling you that you have a tumor that's destroying your {insert organ name here}.  Then he tells you the treatment is to remove it and replace with a different tumor.  Who wouldn't say "WTF???" to that?

Why should we want to replace it?  Why wouldn't we just want to burn it to the ground and do everything we can to create a free market in medical care?   From what I can see, the problem with healthcare is over regulation and a thoroughly broken market because of it.  This brokenness has been building for over a hundred years.  Naturally, anything that took a hundred years to break is going to be hard to unscrew. 

(Michael P. Ramirez cartoons). It's going to feel this slow no matter what, but the Stupid Party pulled a major stupid by passing House bills to end Obamacare over 40 times, but not bothering to have a backup plan ready to drop in place.  It's not like they haven't known since November 8th that Trump was going to be president and this was high priority.  Obamacare wasn't written after he was inaugurated, it was written in advance; parts of it years in advance.  It was deliberately and strategically made hard to repeal. 

The stunning reminder to me of how fubar everything is was in a short story about California Senator Kamala Harris on the Blaze.  There have been reports that the coming reform cuts federal payments for Medicaid.  It boils down to this astounding statement.

But according to Harris, the Medicaid rollback would be detrimental to Californians because “1 in 2 Californian children depend on Medicaid,” the junior California senator tweeted Friday.

Half of the children in California are on Medicaid?  Half?!?  I don't think you could find a bigger indictment of California or of Democratic policies than that.  Unlike Harris, I don't define success as having half the population on welfare.  Success is getting them off welfare. Something needs to be done for those children, but is the solution to enlarge the welfare state or direct efforts to getting them out of poverty? 

Few people alive today have any memory of a working healthcare market; even fewer than the number of people who can envision a world without constant inflation.  There was a great interview last week, on Tucker Carlson's show in which the guest, Steven Weissman, former president of Palm Springs hospital in Hialeah, Florida, was making this point about the market being broken and nobody being able to know the prices for procedures or tests.  Go watch that video. 

Not Going as Smoothly As Hoped

I've been working on the enclosure for my mill since the post last Saturday, and it isn't exactly going effortlessly.  Smooth isn't a word that I'd use.  I spent a lot of time verifying dimensions and then cut the aluminum extrusion to length, then cut all the opaque plastic panels.  Finally, I cut the two wider transparent panels so that I could build the side panels.  These seemed like an easy place to start. 

I have the two side panels built.  These are one opaque and one transparent panel in a frame with a divider between them.  The rendering looks like this

The way I tried to build these was to build the top and bottom rails first.  These are 35" pieces of the 15mm extrusion this is built from.  They get stamped steel L brackets which require four M3 5mm screws and M3 nuts, and I mounted the L brackets that go in the ends, tightening only the two screws that anchor the bracket to the top or bottom rails.  I left the bracket in the middle loose until I got the plastic panels in the right places.  I put a few (~2 to 4) extra nuts in each segment in case I want to add something at a later date.  The L brackets attach the three uprights to the top and bottom rails.  It might be better at this point to show you a finished panel so that maybe you can see these details. 

The main difficulty is that the white corrugated plastic (Coroplast) is 4mm thick nominal, while the groove in the extrusion is 3mm wide.  The "all you gotta do" answer is to slit the ends of the corrugations and the length of the sides, and then it slides together easily.  Not quite.  My idea was to slide the white plastic panel into the slot in the extrusion along the right vertical piece, into the groove in the bottom and then slide the middle upright onto the panel.  That was troublesome.  Because the plastic is being compressed into place, it works better if you slide the extrusion along the edge of the Coroplast, except that it gets a bit harder to slide it every inch as the friction increases.  Getting the entire edge in place at once turns out to be essentially impossible, but with patience, pressure, and small jeweler's screwdriver to help center the panel, it can be forced into the groove all the way around.  Once the white half was made, I slid the acrylic into the left side, and that was enormously easier.  It's 2mm thick in a 3mm slot.  Even with the corrugations slit to make the Coroplast more compressible, it's rough to get in the slot. 

The second one took a bit less time, but was still rough to do.  I did most of it with the pieces lying horizontally on a convenient flat surface (our freezer) and alternated between that and standing it on edge on the floor.  Mrs. Graybeard was a great help and did  a lot of the fussy details of assembly.  In places where my height and strength advantage would help, I took over.  

The back panel is going to be rough without building some sort of fixture to help assembly, or some other changes.  The most direct would be to widen that 3mm slot so that the 4mm plastic fits into it more easily.  I haven't worked out just how to do it on any machine, but I have a 3/16" end mill, which would make the slot 4.76 mm wide.  Widening the slot would make assembly much easier. 

So What's a Good Chronograph?

Another info bleg post. 

I need a Chrono.  I've reloaded a few times, but never measured velocities on what I loaded.  That's like missing half (or more) of what reloading is all about. 

I've done some reading and with the typical chronographs, like the one shown below, a very common complaint is that they can be erratic in some situations.  The white plastic pieces are to diffuse the daylight and provide even illumination.  Passing clouds seem to bother them.  They won't work indoors without adding LEDs to provide the backlight because indoor lights flicker with the AC power line. 

Typical chronograph, a Caldwell G1.  I"d need to add a tripod, and I'm not sure this model has the features that I'd like. 

Caldwell seems to have come up with a solid idea for improving their Chrono by turning it upside down.   They're said to be usable indoors without extra purchases, but the tripod that's included is widely reported to not be very stable, and if there's one thing I can count on is wind.  Wind and passing clouds are very common around here.

It's a feature rich design, but will be over 2x the price of something like the previous model.  More if I need to replace the tripod (probably need to).

I will need to be able to set it up and have it not fall down.  I'd like to be able to control it and get readings from it remotely;  whether that's by wires or by wireless is a "don't care".  I'd really like it to be as solid in performance with passing clouds and the bright, hostile sun, as can be.  Indoor use is low priority, since my club is all outdoors, and I pay enough there that I have little incentive to go to indoor ranges.

Any Florida reloaders care to comment on what a good chronograph is?  Anyone? 

That Old Revolving Door Still Be Revolving

Meet Mary Jo White.

As that web page points out, Mary Jo White is the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, appointed in 2013 by Barack Obama.  Actually, "was the chairman" is the proper tense because she left the agency upon Trump's inauguration and is now headed back to where she came from before she headed the SEC, the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, the New York-based law firm whose litigation department she previously headed.

“I got a call at 12:01 on Jan. 20, asking me to rejoin the firm,” said Ms. White, whose departure from the S.E.C. took effect that day. “And since I had a speech in San Diego, I used that time on planes to decide whether I wanted to practice law again.”

(12:01?  AM, I presume?)  You see, Ms. White's job at Debevoise & Plimpton was defending companies from the Securities and Exchange Commission.   She went from defending corporations against the SEC to regulating and policing corporations at the SEC, and is now going back to defending those corporations from the SEC again.

Wall Street on Parade puts it this way:

The news is also highly significant because it will mark the fourth time in four decades that Mary Jo White has spun through the revolving doors of Debevoise & Plimpton (where she represented serial law violators) to government service (prosecuting serial law violators). 

If you're feeling dizzy, that's why it's called the revolving door.

The New York Times adds this little tidbit.

One of her chief lieutenants in that effort, Andrew J. Ceresney, also rejoined Debevoise after serving with her as director of the S.E.C.’s division of enforcement.

I wonder if young Mr. Ceresney will be her successor in revolving the door between the SEC and Debevoise & Plimpton?  It's like the revolving door between the fed.gov and Goldman Sachs that led to them being referred to as Government Sachs.  

For his part, President Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer from the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, to replace White.  Clayton, who has not had his confirmation hearing, is expected to push for less regulations easing the burden on IPOs and the disclosures involved.

He has already laid out a capital formation agenda to Trump surrogates who interviewed him, a source familiar with the process said. And he has expressed interest in tackling some regulations involving accounting and compliance procedures that financial industry players say get in the way of deals and initial public offerings.

The firm of Sullivan & Cromwell has defended some of the big (TBTF) banks but I don't see allegations he was involved personally.  It appears he has less of the cozy relationships than Mary Jo White with Debevoise & Plimpton, and less than the Government Sachs Employment Complex. 

Some Numbers on the European Radioactive Iodine Story

An interesting little story popped up this week about radiation being detected across Europe, spreading from Norway to Spain.  In a way, it's as strong a click bait headline as anything they could put up, but there are some interesting details about this.  The US dispatched a specially modified aircraft, called a WC-135 to the area.  Think of it as a KC-135 (Boeing 707) modified to sample and monitor for radiation.

An interesting part of this story is that the isotope being reported is Iodine 131 which has the rather short half-life of  8.04 days (.04 days is just under 1 hour).  That means the release of this material has to have been rather recent.  It was reported by the French nuclear agency (ISRN) on February 13th that it was first detected six weeks prior to that.

Iodine-131 (131I), a radionuclide of anthropogenic origin, has recently been detected in tiny amounts in the ground-level atmosphere in Europe. The preliminary report states it was first found during week 2 of January 2017 in northern Norway. Iodine-131 was also detected in Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain, until the end of January.

Anthropogenic, of course, means that it's typically only created by human efforts.  Certainly, it could have come from a fission bomb, but there are global networks to detect nuclear tests and they don't report anything suspicious.  Where else does it come from?  It turns out that this isotope is routinely produced for medical testing.  Could it be a lab accident?  

Let's ignore that for a moment and talk numbers.  The ISRN report says

In France, particulate 131I reached 0.31 µBq/m3 and thus the total (gaseous + particulate fractions) can be estimated at about 1.5 µBq/m3. These levels raise no health concerns.

What's a µBq/m3?  It gets a bit dense with details for a bit here, so I'm going to lift most of this explanation  from PJ Media's Charlie Martin.  That abbreviation represents a rate, and means 1 micro (millionth of) 1 Bequerel per cubic meter.  A Bequerel is a measure of how much radioactive material there is. 1 Bq means that one atom is decaying every second.  Saying 1.5 micro Bequerel implies one millionth of one atom is decaying but that just can't happen; atomic decay only applies to whole atoms.  To turn that into a whole number, you have to multiply the whole thing by 2 million, which says 3 atoms are decaying in 2 million cubic meters per second.

Two million cubic meters is a big volume, but does it help you visualize it better if I say 3 atoms are decaying in 70.63 million cubic feet?  Does it help if I convert that to 528 million gallons?  Neither of those help me visualize this large number, but Charlie Martin used an interesting example.  Remember seeing the picture of a German airship called the Hindenberg?  It had a volume of 200,000 cubic meters.   That's convenient because it means 10 of these Zeppelins would have 3 atoms of Iodine 131 decaying. 

Perhaps that's not a convenient visualization.  I find a lot of people have heard of the Banana Equivalent Dose (BED), an indication of the amount of radioactivity contained in a typical banana.  There's a little unit shuffling here (we're not talking cubic meters, after all), but it turns out that a BED is 15 Bequerels, or five times as much radioactive decay as in 10 Hindenbergs. 

The French ISRN stated almost immediately the levels were so low that this 131I is not a risk to health, and we see it's about equal to eating 1/5 of a banana.  Those agree since we know bananas aren't dangerous, except possibly calorically, if you have 27 bananas in one pie all in one sitting. 

The question, then, is still "where did it come from?"  131I is actually an important medical isotope, used for treatment mainly of thyroid disease -- thyroid cancer or Grave's disease. When it's used, the patient basically eliminates it through urine, and yes, the urine has to be treated as low-level radioactive waste, but inevitably a little bit escapes, especially places where maybe they aren't quite as careful as in the United States. Then it gets into the atmosphere, possibly from spray treatments of sewage, or something that creates an aerosol. 

It almost certainly wasn't from a nuclear weapons test, and there's a good discussion of why here.  In short form, other signs would have been detected. 

The most likely scenario, then, is  that some patients were given 131I for a thyroid disease, and went home.  Within a few hours, they urinated most of it into the sewer system, where some of it seems to have been discharged into the environment.  Maybe something malfunctioned at the sewage facility.  The radioactive decay will be gone within a couple of months (8 half lives would be 64 days) but was never a health hazard.  The only reason we know about it is that we can detect radiation at such absurdly low levels.

Clues From Deep in the Earth Found in Ancient Pottery

In what appears to be a neat example of detective work, activity in the Earth's magnetic field has been measured with unprecedented accuracy in time, by measuring magnetic particles embedded in nearly 3000 year old pottery.  The paper appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, often known as PNAS, from a team of researchers the majority of whom are at Tel Aviv University in Israel.  A friend sent me this link from NPR, although the story has been picked up fairly widely.

About 3,000 years ago, a potter near Jerusalem made a big jar. It was meant to hold olive oil or wine or something else valuable enough to send to the king as a tax payment. The jar's handles were stamped with a royal seal, and the pot went into the kiln.

Over the next 600 years, despite wars destructive enough to raze cities, potters in the area kept making ceramic tax jars, each one stamped with whatever seal represented the ruler du jour.

So what do ceramic tax jars have to do with knowing the magnetic field?

All those years ago, as potters continued to throw clay, the molten iron that was rotating [in the core] deep below them tugged at tiny bits of magnetic minerals embedded in the potters' clay. As the jars were heated in the kiln and then subsequently cooled, those minerals swiveled and froze into place like tiny compasses, responding to the direction and strength of the Earth's magnetic field at that very moment.  [text added - SiG]
...
Political instability provided another handy recording, because the royal seals stamped onto the jars changed often enough to allow the researchers to narrow down the timing of those magnetic records to windows of about 30 years.

"Instability — or even better, wars and destruction — are the best for us," says Ben-Yosef. (Peaceful transitions are nearly impossible to spot in sedimentary layers, but something like a burned city makes a clearly visible dark line. And the Assyrians had a knack for destroying cities.)

Interesting results come from this research.  To begin with, it correlates with other measurements, since the invention of the magnetometer by the great Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1832, showing that the magnetic field is getting weaker.  The usual estimate is that the field is 10% weaker today than "normal", but this research shows that fluctuations over fairly short periods were seen 3000 years ago.  

When Ben-Yosef and his colleagues studied 67 jar handles spanning from the late 8th century B.C. to the late 2nd century B.C., they found that the Earth's magnetic activity has been a lot choppier than people expected.

For example, the jars indicate that in the late 8th century B.C., the core went a little crazy. The intensity of the magnetic field spiked to about double what it is today.

"It was the strongest it's been, at least in the last 100,000 years, but maybe ever. We call this phenomenon the Iron Age spike," Ben-Yosef says.

Then, it weakened quickly after 732 B.C.E., losing about 30 percent of its intensity in just 30 years.

Importantly, the spike in magnetic activity has been verified elsewhere.  Geologist Steven Forman of Baylor University has also found evidence of a magnetic spike about 3,000 years ago, based on his study of Hall's Cave in Texas.  In Forman's work, though, there were no handy dates stamped on things, and his estimate of "3000 years ago" is less precise than the paper in PNAS.  They probably measure the same event, but without precise measurements in Texas, or some other scale, I don't know how they'd know.

As I wrote last August,

All of our lives, most of us have heard that the Earth is "due" for a North-South magnetic pole reversal with the experts saying the poles have flipped many times and it has been too long since the last flip.  The story I recall hearing was that it took a long time to happen; more like centuries than decades, and certainly outside typical lifespans.  Nowadays, there seems to be some belief that it could happen very quickly; on human timescales.

It's a bit of our gallows humor, but Mrs. Graybeard and I regularly joke that at our ages any membership could be a lifetime membership and any subscription could be a lifetime subscription, so when I see an article saying the poles could reverse "within our lifetimes", I'd like them to be a bit more precise.   Still, it could well be that the process has already started, and might even have been going on throughout our entire lifetimes.  Earth will probably go through a period of magnetic chaos before the poles reach their (more or less) permanent positions and that could well be within the life of people reading this blog.  It's possible there could be more than one of each pole for some time so that a compass would point to two different "norths", making navigation by compass impossible.  Birds and other critters that use magnetic particles in their bodies for navigation will have a hard time, and migratory patterns would be seriously disrupted.

For one view, I'll go back to the original article.

It's counterintuitive, but massive fluctuations like the Iron Age spike, Ben-Yosef says, indicate there's nothing to worry about when it comes to today's weakening magnetic fields. Fluctuation, he says, must be the norm for our planet's magnetic field, not a harbinger of apocalypse.

For counterpoint, I'll slightly modify what I wrote last August

No one alive has ever seen this happen, so everything they think they know comes from looking at old rocks and computer models.  None of these are verified by comparison to an actual, witnessed event.  Whether the TEOTWAKI situations that you'll read about would really happen or not is just as hard to say.  There don't appear to be mass extinctions associated with previous reversals, so it appears life muddled on through somehow.   A technological civilization might require more than just "muddling on somehow", though.  

I'm hoping that with a weakened geomagnetic field, auroras may become visible farther south.  I seriously want to see auroras some day.

 

A jar handle bearing the tax stamp of one of the ancient kingdoms (photo from NPR - image courtesy of Oded Lipschits).