Info Bleg - Rapid Transition Sights

A couple of years ago, I did a short-lived experiment with a cheap set of "Rapid Transition Sights" from eBay on my AR.  Briefly, I bought a cheap imitation of the Dueck Defense Sights and I never got them to line up well enough to use.  A problem I've never had with iron sights that aren't offset 45 degrees.  (Yeah... could it be the $30 Chicom sights aren't as good as the $250 Dueck sights?  Ya think?) 

An email ad today got me thinking about them again.  I've got to say that I still like the idea, though, and was wondering if anyone who drops by here has experience with any of them. 

The Dueck Rapid transition sights.  I understand they're popular in 3-Gun world.  Any alternatives?  I see several and have no idea if any of them are good. 

My $.02 - The Good and the Ugly

The election is over.  Control of the Legislative Branch of this Broken Republic goes completely to the Stupid Party, leaving the Evil Party in control of just the Executive Branch, and it's hydra-like network of regulatory branches.  Cut off one head, kill one branch (as if...), and two more spring up to take its place.

One of the themes of this blog is the Over Regulated State.  All I'm hearing from the newly elected "Leaders" is talk about the big things they're going to do; in my mind, it would be better if they spent the next two years throwing out every piece of legislation the administration passed. For each page of federal law passed, it has been generalized that 10 regulations are created.  The Code of Federal Regulations is so complex that lawyer Harvey Silvergate points out that every adult in the country probably commits three felonies a day.  The Heritage Foundation estimates that compliance with the increasing number of regulations sucks billions of dollars out of the US economy, with Obama's administration the most regulatory in history.

For the last five years, the president has aggressively exploited regulation to get his way. In fact, the Obama administration is very likely the most regulatory in history, issuing 157 new major rules at a cost to Americans approaching $73 billion annually.

On the good side, a favorite of mine, Mia Love from Utah, was elected to the US Congress.  A black American woman of Haitian descent with an inspiring life story (and one who will show you her citizenship papers), she is a well spoken advocate for free enterprise and self-reliance.  I first wrote about her when she became widely known after a great speech at the 2012 RNC - and the hypocritical leftists slandered her insanely.   We all know that conservatives and Tea Party voters are not the misogynistic racists that the left has been painting forever; these are the people who elected Mia, Tim Scott from South Carolina, Elise Stefanik, the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives.  Maybe this will start to be recognized by the Media? Not a chance.  But it's being noticed where it counts, among the people.

On the other hand, that disgusting pile of corruption in Colorado, Governor Hickenlooper got re-elected.  So he takes Bloomberg's money, tramples on the rights of law abiding Coloradans, and pays nothing.  The people of Washington approved I-594, the law that redefines transfers in terribly oppressive ways, creating a statewide gun registry in the process.  And not 24 hours after winning, announced they were going after more anti-gun regulations.  Most of my readers are also gunnies, but for those that aren't, "transfer" is a very specific legal term in firearms: the transfer of ownership and responsibility for the firearm.  Until this law, a transfer was thought to be permanent; essentially just a sale.  Sold under the usual lie that criminals use "gun show loophole" and private sales to get their guns, 594 makes every personal sale need to go through a background check and registration.  That's bad enough, but 594 goes even further and makes a transfer out of something as trivial as loaning a gun to friend for a class or even at the range to shoot a magazine to see if they like it.  Every simple act like that becomes a transfer under 594, requiring a trip to a gun store to fill out paperwork (it's unclear to me whether or not this is the ATF form 4173, and a NICS check), and I'm sure paying the gun shop to do so - there is a use tax that goes to the state, too.  The Vote No on 594 group that sprang up to oppose this writes:

• There is NO general loan exemption for family members or friends, even in the presence of the owner!
• You couldn’t loan your sister-in-law a firearm for self protection!
• You couldn’t loan your adult sons shotguns to go hunting!
• A person could “gift” a firearm to a family member but could NOT loan or sell it to her!

I've read that if you were to go on a business trip and leave your guns at home with your family, it can be argued you need to do a transfer for every gun, complete with trip to the gun shop.  When you come back from your business trip, you'll need to transfer them back to yourself!

There were other good things and bad.  At best, we are still a Broken Republic.  Guys like Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and the new crop including Mia Love, Tim Scott, and Tom Cotton, are all saying the right things and (at least in the case of the first three) trying to do the right things.    Going through the thousands of pages of Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the other major turds passed in the last six years to repeal them, including going through the places where tendrils of these laws extend is not glamorous or sexy (part of Obamacare was written into the TARP law, a full year before the real Obamacare passed).  But it needs to be done.

Graphic Look at the 2013 Gun Buying Bubble

The National Shooting Sports Federation posted a very dramatic look at year by year NICS background checks for January to July over the last decade.  I think it's a good period to look at because last January was immediately after the Sandy Hook shooting, and the air was thick with talk of ramming through new gun control laws. 

It's a vivid look at just how big last year's buying frenzy was.  2013 was 28.6% higher than 2012.  This year is down 21.1% from 2013, but still up 1.5% over 2012.  I assume some of the sales that would have happened in 2014 were made in 2013, but it's impossible to know how much from this data.  Suffice it to say that somewhere around 6.8 to 7.5 million NICS checks appears to be the "new normal" since 2012. Roughly twice as many guns are sold now than in 2005.   From a different perspective, I don't think the industry could have supported sales going up the same percentage this year over last.

While you can lose money and go out of business selling guns, with two exceptions, 2010 and this year, the number of NICS checks has increased every year since '05 .  The first seven months of this year are the highest sales level in the decade, except for last year.  Bear in mind that the gift giving season is ahead - Black Friday has been a hot day for gun sales lately - and the industry traditionally expects more gun sales this time of year for hunting season. Personally, I'm getting email sales offers for ammo at prices I haven't seen since '10 or '11. 

For those who are new to this data, the NICS system is the criminal background check that all retail gun sales go through.  NSSF adjusts this background check data from the FBI's National Instant Background Check System data to remove non-sales activity such as background checks conducted for concealed carry permits. This results in NSSF-adjusted NICS data being a better indicator of market conditions than overall NICS data.  Each of these NICS transactions can represent more than one gun sale, and it's simply impossible to know what the total number of new guns sold is with this data.

I'm interested in seeing how the full year ends up compared to '13.  For what it's worth, if the Evil party pulls a big fraud upset and gets control of the house and senate, expect the bubble to start up again.  

We have a new gun show within a half hour drive this weekend.  Maybe we'll  have a belated BAG day.

T'was the Night Before The Election

This is from last election - 2012.  It was true then and it's true now:

Yeah, it's the way that the Ruling Class treats regular people.  It's the way the Evil Party treats black voters, and any of the aggrieved minority groups they exploit. They pay attention to you when they need your vote, then you're back in the trunk.  The guys on that video are finally seeing it and rebelling against the Evil Party. 

Glenn Beck makes the case that we could be entering the most dangerous period in American history since the civil war.  There are persistent stories that the Obamanoids have ordered millions of green cards for a sweeping amnesty giveaway, perhaps once the new congress is in session, to drive his efforts to fundamentally transform America to conclusion.  On the other hand, Jon Gabriel at Ricochet makes a good argument in "Liberalism is Eating Itself" that the shaky coalition of those aggrieved minorities is pulling itself apart.  So which collapses first?  Does it matter?

"Prediction is hard.  Especially about the future" - Niels Bohr, physicist.

 

Something That You Might Consider

I'm sure I've never done this before, but I'd like to point out a group that I donate to so that others might consider it.  Read about them and do what you think is right.

The group is Operation Underground Railroad, and like the underground railroad in the mid 1800s functioned to get slaves to freedom, OUR works to rescue children from sex slavery and human trafficking.  They, no, we... consider ourselves modern abolitionists.  OUR was started by Tim Ballard, ex-CIA, a former human trafficking investigator for our Fed.gov.  Tim wanted the freedom to do more on his own to fix this problem and started OUR.  Since then, Tim has partnered with veteran special operators and others who can do these specialized and dangerous sting operations.

In early October, a few weeks, ago, they rescued 123 sex slaves in Columbia; 55 of them children.  As Glenn Beck has supported them with a lot of donations from his charity company, Mercury One, an embedded reporter wrote about the operation here.   Tim and one of his leaders appeared on The Blaze TV; a summary and 10 minute video are here.

Tim Ballard with two of the children from an earlier rescue.  The small child, face blurred, was being sold as a sex slave.   

I've supported them for two years now, as long as I've known they existed.  They're better men than I; if I were in a place where men were trying to buy children to rape, I'd kill them.

On This Day Yesterday In History, 1909

I saw posted on electronic trade magazine EDN's "This Week in History" page that on  November 1, 1909, "The Machine Stops" was published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review.  I had never heard of the story, but I understand it's still read in some college classes.  I downloaded a .pdf and read it yesterday around doing other things.  At 25 pages, it's a an easy and good read.  I didn't post this yesterday, because I hadn't read the story, and didn't know if I wanted to recommend it to you.  I do.  

"The Machine Stops" is technological apocalyptic fiction.  To borrow from the EDN story (first link)

The story follows a mother and son who live on opposite sides of a world where humans live in underground cells because they can no longer live on the surface of the Earth. The cells have buttons and switches to request everything one might need and communicate through systems similar to modern instant messaging and videoconferencing.

The global Machine is a system everyone uses to access electronic information from their cell, reminiscent of the Internet. The only actual books are instruction manuals to operate the cells, and all forests have been destroyed.

In a time where radio was just coming around, Forster predicted technologies still decades, if not a whole century, away.

It opens describing the mother, Vashti, as "a swaddled lump of flesh" and "about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus".  Unmentioned years of living almost completely inert lives has left people unable to do almost anything for themselves: the Machine supports life in every way.  Their goal in life seems purely "ideas" - new intellectual pleasures.  They don't want experiences.  They don't want first person reports of historical events.  They want to be as far removed from those events as possible: "Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation".  Being human, with that innate urge to worship something, they begin to deify the Machine, even though men built it.  And even though men built it, and everyone had but one book, about the Machine, as the Machine slowly disintegrates, so does human life slowly disintegrate with it.

It's a good read, really ahead of its time for 105 year old story.  And as a Science Fiction Hall of Fame story, it has been made into visual productions, movies and TV shows, so that someone else's imagination of how everyone and everything looks replaces your own imagination.  This image is from the BBC's 1966 TV Production.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

According to the Independent (UK), during studies of how the country could function after a nuclear war, a government Science Officer suggested they recruit psychopaths to maintain order. 

What could possibly go wrong with a stellar suggestion like that?  It's from a Scientist! Jane Hogg, a scientific officer in the Home Office said:

”These are the people who could be expected to show no psychological effects in the communities which have suffered the severest losses.“

Ms Hogg suggested psychopaths would be "very good in crises" because "they have no feelings for others, nor moral code, and tend to be very intelligent and logical".

I suppose I could see the advantage in not freaking out when surrounded by death and destruction, because you just don't care, but... YHGTBSM.  When have you ever heard anyone say, "Gosh, things are messed up.  We sure need a psychopath around here!"

Thankfully, her colleagues voted her down.

Good Weekend to Unplug

No, really.  Unplug your phone, unplug the TV, just do anything it takes to avoid the last minute campaign idiocy. We're getting our first real cold front of the season tonight through tomorrow.  The coolest it has been since last April was 59 a few weeks ago.  Sunday morning is forecast to be 43.  That's always accompanied by strong winds, so there will be no fishing, unless I figure out a place to take the boat that's sheltered enough.  Otherwise, I'm unplugging the phones and spending the weekend in the shop.  I'm building a new fishing rod; I can use the time. 

There's so much idiocy everywhere, I'm starting to twitch.  I haven't counted, but I think I get about 20 solicitations for contributions every stinkin' day from everyone from the Stupid Party, to organizations like FreedomWorks, even to Florida's schizophrenic ex-Republican Governor, now Democratic Candidate, Charlie Crist, the man who truly puts the Goober in Gubernatorial. While current Governor Rick Scott is no great communicator and a crappy politician, not being a career politician isn't necessarily a bad thing.  He has helped bring lots of companies into the state, bringing in about a million jobs.  Crist left the Stupid Party to run for Senate last time as No Party Affiliate, and then joined the Evil Party to try and get his old job back.  I can't understand how this can possibly be a close election, but they're saying it is.  So Charlie's most recent employer,  ambulance chaser John Morgan, donated tons of money to get a "Medical Marijuana" constitutional amendment on the ballet, a sure way to get out the abysmally low information Evil party voters - it has been tried in several states so far.  (Florida has a peculiar system where laws that can't be passed can be made into constitutional amendments on petition, and then amended by a super majority.  We get truly absurd laws, like the pregnant pig amendment, out of this). 

I get phone calls from Mike Huckabee telling me I need to go vote.  Whoever donated the money that paid for that call, that was a waste of your contribution.  I get phone surveys on my voter attitude. I let the answering machine cut them off.  When I get to work in the morning, I have those same messages on my voice mail. 

Nationally, we get things like the Evil Party saying Stupid Party candidates want to ban birth control.  I'm unable to find verifiable instances of this at all.  We get things like the "Potty Mouth Princesses", a truly awful ad funded by some feminist idiots who thought it would be "edgy" to dress up a bunch of little girls in princess outfits (one or two look to be 6) and have them drop F-bombs while reciting all of the same recycled and disproven stats they always cite about women earning less than men, large percentages having been raped, and all women being systematically discriminated against.  The war on women card seemed to work last time, so they're trying it again.

I've said here many times that I hate day to day politics, and I've said that I think the role of money is overplayed.  Honestly, if you pay attention and know anything about the candidates, do the ads affect you at all?  If you're in Colorado, is there anything an ad could say about Cory Gardner that would make you vote for Udall, or vice versa if you prefer Udall?  If you're sure of your values and what you believe, does it matter if the other guy is yelling at you from the other side of the street?

No.  Turn it off.  Get outside.  Go to the range.  Go fishing.  Clean your guns.  Do anything to get away from it.

Drug Delivery Systems Go Sci Fi

According to an article in industry magazine Microwaves & RF, drug delivery systems which seem like they're out of a Sci Fi movie are landing on the market now.

Drug-delivery methods have achieved science fiction status following news of two breakthroughs: A wirelessly controlled contraceptive chip that can be implanted in women, and pills that are able to text medical professionals and caregivers that patients have taken their medicine. Whereas this may sound like a storyline from an episode of “Star Trek,” what we are talking about are here-and-now realities.

Let's tease those apart.  Wirelessly controlled contraceptives?  It's a system that's implanted in a woman's body and can be turned off or on under control of a wireless link (the new topic of Body Area Networks is pretty actively researched these days).

A computerized contraceptive chip implanted below a woman’s skin could be wirelessly activated or deactivated for up to 16 years. The chip, which is about the size of a thumbnail, releases a 30 microgram dose of the hormone levonorgestrel—commonly used as an oral contraception.

This one is a year or two away, and raises more questions than answers.  Strangely, its development was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  There are no known studies that can tell what 16 years of being housed in the human body might do to the chip, and no known tests to emulate that.  Dispense 30 micrograms daily?  Seems like a pretty precise measurement to be made every day in this hostile environment for 16 years.  And why 16 years?  If a young woman starts on a contraceptive at 16, that covers her to 32.  Is that enough?  Perhaps they should try for a shorter service life and refill or replace the device more often.  Finally, like all wireless systems, someone better pay attention to the idea of malicious software or undesired parties turning the contraceptive on or off against the desires of the woman.

The texting pill is a bit of a misnomer; it doesn't actually send the text.  These are devices made by Proteus Digital Health.  The idea is that a small exposed silicon chip is in or on the pill.  The exposed chip has a pair of dissimilar metal pads that will become a battery when an electrolyte - stomach acid - fills the space between them.  That powers the pill long enough to send a message to a patch that the patient is wearing to say the medication has been taken, and the patch then does the communication.  There are no details on exactly what the chip in the pill sends; from a big picture view, it could be a simple signal that tells the patch "I've been swallowed", but that only works if it's the only pill that has been taken.  If the person is taking multiple drugs, it might be good to send the drug name and dosage.

While I've heard the often-cited statistics that large numbers of seniors forget to take their medications (their memory is addled by the medications they're taking), this goes from Sci Fi to Twilight Zone for me.  Or even creepier.  I can only approve of this sort of thing if its voluntary and the person taking the pills wants the reminder.   If our liberty begins with the idea that we own ourselves, putting monitors into our bodies to report when we've done something is about as serious an attack on liberty as there is.  If you want to take the smart pill, be my guest; I just don't want it legislated or mandated.  

Climate Scientists and Gun Control Nuts Use This Tactic

(I suppose the "twenty teens" way of saying that should be One Weird Trick Loved By Climate Scientists and Gun Control Groups)

Miguel at Gun Free Zone posts a link to Reason, where Grant Duwe, a well respected researcher on mass shootings, fisks a much-quoted study on mass shootings from Mother Jones (sorry, mama, no linkies).  It turns out they use the same basic trick climate scientists use to adjust temperatures.  They understate the number of shootings in previous decades to make the recent ones look worse. 

The first problem with the Mother Jones list, which contains 67 cases, is that it significantly underreports the incidents occurring between 1982 and 2013 that meet its definitional requirements. The data I've collected show there were 114 mass public shootings, which means the Mother Jones list missed more than 40 percent of the cases that took place in the U.S. during this 32-year period.

The warmists do the same sort of thing in their data adjustments.  This story is about Australia, but the execrable James Hansen of NASA has done the same thing to the US.  And a little more. 

Manipulation looks like this.  I combined the two graphics in that Reason article.  The top is actual numbers,  the bottom is what Mother Jones reported.   They make it look almost hockey stick-like. 

I'd say, "I wonder where they got that idea", but, well, you know.

The Last Vacuum Tubes Just Got Put on the Endangered List

If you're "of a certain age", say above 45 as a rough guess, you probably know what vacuum tubes are even if you're not an electronics geek.  Chances are you remember the TV or radio warming up for 20 seconds before the program started.  If you were a child in the 60s, you might have even taken vacuum tubes from a TV set that wasn't working up to the store to test those tubes on a drugstore tube tester.  I actually still have two tube-based radios in the ham shack, and run them from time to time, although my "everyday" operation is on modern, feature-rich, solid state radios. Mrs. Graybeard has a prized collection of several tube-based Zenith Transoceanic radios. 

Solid state: transistors, silicon diodes, FETs, integrated circuits, and other devices, have been replacing vacuum tubes in electronics since at least the time of that first transistor radio I wrote about last week.  Today, the only places they're used is in industrial and military electronics that are both operating at extremely high frequency and extremely high powers.  While there are a couple of niche markets where vacuum tubes are still strongly used: high end audio and instrument (like guitar) amplifiers, and there's a very active vintage radio market, where they're referred to as "boatanchors".
 
If you're not active in those areas, I'd bet that the only vacuum tube in your house is the power amplifier in your microwave oven.  The only other one you're most likely to have is a CRT. 

Microwave ovens use a tube called a magnetron, an invention that dates back to WWII.  The ovens work in a frequency band close to the WiFI band at 2.45 GHz, and generate thousands of watts of power; your microwave is probably around 1000 Watts output.  On the other hand, aircraft have used solid state transmitters for Collision Avoidance Systems just below that frequency, around 1000 MHz, since the 1980s.  The last TCAS system I worked on generated 1000W and used just three power transistors.    

You probably have gathered where I'm going: semiconductor maker Freescale (formerly Motorola Semiconductor) has announced a line of transistors designed to produce solid state microwave ovens.

The product of interest is Freescale’s new MHT1003N, a 250 watt LDMOS transistor for 2.45 GHz that provides a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 58%.  ...  Using the MHT1003N, manufacturers can use from one to eight of these 250 W units to build a microwave oven with the desired power level.  And the magnetron’s 4 kV power supply goes away in place of a supply of 28 to 50 volts.  Furthermore, the crude on-off control of the magnetron can be replaced with full variable power control.  Using multiple antennas, one per amplifier, provides better coverage of the cooking chamber.  This allows food to be cooked more precisely while the unit operates more efficiently.  And the product lifetime is significantly greater.

LDMOS - Laterally Diffused Metal Oxide Semiconductors - are a type of silicon transistor construction first developed in the 1990s.  They're falling out of favor in the last couple of years, being replaced by GaN - Gallium Nitride - which offers better efficiencies and better microwave performance.   Changing the power supply from that 4000V supply to a 28 or 50V supply will take the largest weight in a microwave oven out; its power transformer.  Going solid state with several amplifiers, each running its own antenna promises better, more even cooking, better power control, fewer issues with hot spots and power loss as the oven ages as benefits to the user. 

You can be sure these will be quite a bit more expensive for the early adopters, but historically, it looks like the handwriting is on the wall for vacuum tube microwave ovens. 

I'm not sure it's actually on the market, but a company called Midea has previewed the first consumer microwave oven based on the Freescale transistors, back in June.    

Cutaway view of a magnetron - old RF guys call them a Maggie.  Wikipedia photo.

The Fed IS The Recovery and The Economy

Came across an interesting chart today with a good video explanation of what it all means.  First, the chart:

The raw data here is from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, which has a nifty web site for extracting and plotting your own data.  This plots the Wilshire 5000, the adjusted Fed monetary base and effective Federal Funds rate.  The Adjusted monetary base, in red, is the amount of cash in circulation, in Billions of $.  The Wilshire 5000, plotted in dark blue, is another one of those indices of the stock market; this time the 5000 biggest companies on the NY Stock exchange, so 10x the size of the S&P500, and a really broad measure of the market.  In order to scale it so that it's proporitonal to the monetary base, the value of the index is multiplied by 46.  Finally, in a greenish color is the effective Federal Funds rate; and to scale it so that it looks like it's in basis points, it's multiplied by 250.  Are you good and confused? 

All of the recessions since about 1950 are shown as vertical gray bars, and you can see that the Fed tried to lower the funds rate and stimulate the economy after each one - although they were always badly timed. 

The point of this is most easily seen on the right side of the chart, after about 1990.  The bull market run up of the stock market and burgeoning economy are traced by the Whilshire 5000 (blue).  The adjusted monetary base is increasing, but slowly perking along.  The Fed funds rate hovers around 1000, dipping below in the recession of 1990 and then going to around 1500 (1 1/2%) through most of the decade.  Then comes the tech bubble pop, which leads into the recession of 2000 and the Fed dropping the funds rate to try to stimulate the economy.  Leading to the bubble/boom cycle starting in '02 and ending in the crash of '08. 

That sets the stage.  Around late '08 to '09, you can see a dramatic change in the patterns of the chart.  The adjusted monetary base goes from poking along (at too high a rate for sane people!) to going vertical, an incredibly fast, almost infinite, rate of change.  Likewise you see the Fed rate drop to essentially zero, their famous ZIRP or Zero Interest Rate Policy, where it has stayed ever since.  And you can see the Wilshire 5000 and the monetary base going up in lock step.  In fact, the author says those two curves' correlation coefficient is 0.97.  A correlation coefficient of 1 is perfect and you basically never see that. I don't think I've ever seen one as big as 0.97. 

Now notice the spacing between the gray bars.  Notice that they're always less than a decade apart?  Some of them are only two years apart (1980 and '82).  Now, they've been telling us that the recession has been over since '09, which says we should be running a really healthy economy right now.  Instead, what we see is that the Fed is creating money and that money is being used to pump prices: although this only shows the stock prices, the same seems to be happening for real estate prices.  Further, if the recession really ended in '09, we're five years out and therefore either midway, or less!, from the next recession.

Go watch that video.  You know how many of keep saying this isn't going to continue, that a really bad collapse is coming?  Look at that chart again: the Fed has already run interest rates to zero, what are they going to do next time?  They've already created about $3 1/2 Trillion.  What can they do next time?  Create 10 trillion?  $20 Trillion?  Direct deposit a million dollars in everyone's bank account? 

It's nothing less than the death of the dollar. 

The Police State Can't Exist Without...

I think it's an obviously true statement that the police state can't exist without the full cooperation of the judicial branch.  If the judicial branch would start restricting things like Civil Forfeiture, those would start to go away.  If they would start getting involved in the excessive use of SWAT raids and the increasing rise of warrior cops, that would decrease. 

With that in mind, it's interesting to read about the Supreme Court's refusal to hear a case this session which had the potential to restrain what seems to me (and IANAL) to be an egregious violation of civil rights.  Perhaps the most unique aspect of this is that the dissent against the judgement was filed by conservatives Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and statist Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

The case is called Jones vs. The United States, and centers around a trio of drug dealers: Joseph Jones, Desmond Thurston, and Antwuan Ball.  The three were tried for distributing cocaine and also conspiracy to distribute drugs (I have to assume this is another example of prosecutors stacking charges so they can be sure to get a conviction).  The jury convicted them of the lesser charge of distributing, but acquitted them of the conspiracy charge, which brings a harsher sentence.  Here's where it goes bizarre in my view: the judge then, despite the acquittal, sentenced them to that harsher sentence from conspiracy. 

Got that?  They were sentenced for a crime a jury had found them not guilty of!  The Supreme Court, refused to hear the case.  It seems to set the absurd precedent of someone being charged with a crime, tried by jury, declared not guilty, but then being put in prison regardless of the jury trial's outcome. Why bother with the show trial? 

The dissent in pdf format is here, and the important part is on pages 14-16.  Justice Scalia says, in my words, that the court has previously ruled that this sort of sentencing based on a judge's determination of fact is illegal and must be put aside, but they had always promised to clarify the law when an appropriate case got to the court.

We thus left for another day the question whether the Sixth Amendment is violated when courts impose sentences that, but for a judge-found fact, would be reversed for substantive unreasonableness. 551U.S., at 353; see also id., at 366 (Stevens, J., joined in
part by GINSBURG, J., concurring)  (“Such a hypothetical case should be decided if and when it arises”)...

Then Justice Scalia goes on to say...

This has gone on long enough. The present petition presents the nonhypothetical case the Court claimed to have been waiting for. And it is a particularly appealing case, because not only did no jury convict these defendants of the offense the sentencing judge thought them guilty of, but a jury acquitted them of that offense.

A dissenting opinion, even from the supreme court, is just that.  It's an opinion written on paper that has no effect on how laws are prosecuted or not.  They left in place the apparatus of the police state, that anyone tried of a crime and found innocent may still be subject to a harsh penalty on the whim of the judge. 

Many of us are voting for judges right now.  If only we could find where they stand on issues like this!

Bright Days, Range Days

It was what I call chamber of commerce weather today: the kind of weather they like to brag about.  Beautiful blue skies and pleasant temperature; roughly 65 at daybreak and 85 for the high.  To be honest, we can get this kind of day from now until April or May, most years. 

So off to the range to knock off a little rust - from us, not the guns!  We hadn't taken the shotguns down in long enough that neither of us could remember, so that was first order of business, followed by running a box of 50 through the EDC guns.  It's actually been since early summer that we did that, too.

Our club suffered severe flooding a few weeks ago, and the waters haven't fully receded.  My favorite place, the 200 yard rifle range, was still closed due to standing water.  There's a 50 yard generic use range, that tends to be used for long guns, although handguns are allowed.  I've never tried to shoot rifled slugs 50 yards from my smooth bore Mossberg before, so I tried a box.

That's the last 3 of 5, as I started to get used to the sights.  No rear sight.  A small fiber optic dot front sight like this.  Not bad out of an 18" barrel; I could get get used to these.  Oh, and the "measles" are from a few rounds of Wally World bird shot from that box in the foreground. 

(Mrs. Graybeard insisted on the clown nose)

You know, every time we go shooting, I always leave with a smile on my face and saying, "That was fun!  We should do this more often."

'tis The Season

Not that season, the Halloween season.

I can't say I'm much of a Halloween freak, like the guys down the block with spiderwebs, ghosts, and all sorts of things in front of their house.  I didn't even know they had Halloween lights to hang outside!  Obviously, I can't say I pay much attention to it at all.  If some adults want to dress up funny once a year, who am I to object?  I have to admit, dressing up your preschool-age daughters as little prostit-tots fills the air over my head with Looney Tunes-style question marks, but if an adult wants to dress the part for a party, that's entirely different. 

To me, a highlight of the season is that I get to see the fresh work from Jon Neill at the Neill Studios.  Without a doubt, year in and year out, he carves the most amazing pumpkins I get to see.

If you’ve never given any thought to where your Halloween pumpkin carving skills might take you, you might not have heard of Jon Neill, a famous sculptor and pumpkin carving master who creates some of the best Halloween pumpkin carvings we’ve ever seen.

Neill, who is now a member of the Laguna College of Art and Design, began his career in movies as an artist for clients like Michael Jackson, Jurassic Park, and Universal Studios.

Neill does some amazing work.  Take this one, which is kind of plain for Jon:

There's a video of him carving one of his scarier looking pumpkins here.  Jon's work is a highlight of the year.

I Note In Passing

I note in passing that it's turning into fall for most of the country.  Well, it's turning into fall here, too, but you'd never notice it.  Fall just means the humidity is a bit lower, and it's not fully Crematoria.  It's averaging low to mid 70s at daybreak to mid 80s for the high.  We've had a couple of days where the low approached 60, but nothing you'd consider a "chill". 

And I note that the outdoors shops are running a flannel sale.  If we have a "flannel season" in the Silicon Swamp, it's a week or two in January but probably not two consecutive weeks.  I think there have been stretches of maybe a full five days where it was called for.  I have a flannel chamois shirt I bought a few years ago; I'd be surprised if I've worn it 5 days. 

Meanwhile, since I was overcome with some busy today, my favorite cartoon of the week:

 

Techy Tuesday - Remember the Biolite Kickstarter? Did You Buy In?

Back in Mid-June, I did a post about a Kickstarter campaign I found for a Biolite BaseCamp stove.  I took the bait and bought one, knowing I wouldn't get it until late September or early October.

Well, it's here, and so far I'm underwhelmed.

The attraction of the Biolite stove isn't that it's a nice little woodburning stove to cook on - I have at least two of those - the attraction is that it has a thermoelectric generator that will charge things you would charge with a USB charger: 5V at 1A.  The stove has a little panel on it with status LEDs that tell you the charge state on its internal 5V 2.2 AH battery, and the intensity of your fire.  This is the only picture of it I could find (and didn't think to take my own).  (Biolite photo you can see lots of other pictures of it at their place.)

The battery status is on the left (four LEDs) while the fire is a 2 LED fire.  My issue is that I've never been able to charge the internal battery and get it to go past the second LED.  We've run the thing more than three hours spread over two occasions and have yet to see the internal battery charge.   Most of that time, I've run it at fire levels I'd never want to grill on.  We've connected the charger to an iPhone and a Kindle and neither one charged.  The charger would only turn on briefly, when the battery was at the second LED, then turn back off. 

My impression is that it's defective and I've initiated contact with their Customer Support folks, who asked for some more details. 

Did any of you guys also get in on this kickstarter?  If so, is yours working better than mine?  If there's interest, I'll let you know what's up with it. 

 

The Three Gun Meme

I don't know about y'all, but I found the discussion of grail guns on Borepatch's place to be an interesting diversion.  I didn't really start out having a grail gun, just a handful of guns I'd like to shoot, but there was a lot for my imagination there.  I'd like to shoot a Barret M82A1, but I'd also like to try an Armalite AR-30A1 in .338 Lapua Magnum, and a high zoot Palma rifle (.308) like the one at the bottom of this page.  Since those are current production guns, I guess I just don't dream big enough. 

This meme came from Cheaper than Dirt over the weekend.  If you could only have three guns and 300 rounds of ammo for each one, which ones would they be?  Their staff roundly chose a Glock 19 in 9mm, an AR-15 and then the pattern got a little spread going.  Of course, my reaction was to ask what the scenario is: is this for urban survival, an African hunting trip, or just what?  Is that 300 rounds for each forever?  No such information was given.  So here's my take on it.  None of these are grail guns; they're pretty ordinary.

• Handgun: a Springfield XD Subcompact in 9mm.  Figure in the wide availability of 9 mm and it's a natural.  This is Springfield Armory's equivalent of the G19, but it fits my hands better.  For me, it's a natural shooter.  Conceptually, it's a "ho-hum".  Same as most of their staff. 
• All purpose:  Mossberg 500 and a couple of barrels.  A longer barrel for hunting and a shorter one for self-defense or "social work".  My 300 shells would need to include some rifled slugs as well as buckshot and birdshot, say 50 slugs, 100 buckshot, and 150 assorted bird shot.  Again, a ho-hum.  Several staff chose 12 ga. pump guns, but they all went with Remingtons. 
• Rifle: Remington 700 in .30-06 or .308.  This was tough one for me.  AR or bolt action?  I like my ARs, but I went with the bolt action thinking of the Scout Rifle concept, a rifle equally adept at hunting and as a battle rifle, capable of taking down pretty much any North American predator, four or two legged.  

My 30 year old Remington 700 in .30-06, as currently modified.

Watching the Markets and Twitching

Me twitching?  No, no, no.  But many people are.

Bill Bonner's free newsletter opened the other day with the subject, "The Most Dangerous Market Since 2008" - and this was early Thursday before the market recovered slightly on Friday.  But a single day or week doesn't make a bull market, no matter how bad it looked.  The problem is that the Federal Reserve Bank is running the market by supplying virtually unlimited amounts of money to the TBTF (Too Big To Fail) banks, who get it first.  The US stock market is absurdly over priced!  As Bonner says:

First, as we have been warning in these pages, it is overpriced. Ned Davis Research puts the Shiller P/E or CAPE (cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio) of the US market at 23 – well over our limit of 20. Mebane Faber calculates it differently, and comes up with 25. Robert Shiller, who popularized the metric, puts it at just over 24.

By way of comparison, that makes US stocks about twice as expensive as shares in Britain. The CAPE for the British stock market is about 12.

And compared to Russia, US stocks are four to five times more expensive, per dollar of cyclically adjusted earnings. The Russian stock market trades on a CAPE of just 5.

Sell US, buy Russia?  If you're chasing yield, it may not be a bad idea.  Since the flow of the really big money is what moves the market, it's worth looking at an index of the "Core Holdings" of these big investing corporations.  These are the ones that they rely on the most.  This chart, from the daily Stocktiming.com newsletter, shows the climb in the prices remaining in a well defined channel until about August, when it started going largely sideways.  You might remember the Dow hitting it's nominal peak (not adjusted for inflation) back in Early September. 

The drastic drop below its lower (or support) line is a red flag warning.  This was Thursday's data, so not 100% up to date, but it's unlikely Friday's rally changed it much.  So if these banks are getting out of their core holdings, where are they putting their money?  Russia?  Europe? 

From MarketWatch, we get this comment:

Facts are hard to dispute but easy to spin. Already, the Russell 2000 is in a 10% correction. Judging by history, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shouldn't be far behind. A major correction or crash would be definitive proof this market is wearing no clothes.

Failed rallies are extremely significant. Previously, whenever there were major or minor selloffs, buy-on-the-dippers would come in and change the market's direction. On a chart, you'd see a distinctive "V" pattern as buyers overwhelmed sellers. This pattern has continued for months – until recently.

On the market's worst days, the Fed would conveniently appear with a new QE program or a promise to keep interest rates low for a considerable time (that's getting old). Soon, though, these bandages will not work. Failed rallies mean the party is almost over and a bear market is getting closer (and may even have arrived).

Is this a bear market or just a correction?  It's only down around 7%.  It has been argued (and reported here) that we're well overdue for a big correction.  A target DJIA number tossed around is 6000, which can be seen on the charts at that post, and that would mean the market goes down by over 60%.   Blood in the streets.

Scared of the market?  I am.  But what's the alternative?  Bonds?  From Zerohedge:

•   IRELAND SELLS 10-YEAR BONDS AT RECORD-LOW YIELD OF 1.63%
•   GERMAN 10-YEAR BUNDS RISE; YIELD FALLS 2 BASIS POINTS TO 0.88%
•   DUTCH 10-YEAR GOVERNMENT BOND YIELD DROPS TO RECORD-LOW 1.021%
•   PORTUGUESE 10-YEAR BOND YIELD DROPS TO RECORD-LOW 2.942%
•   FRENCH 10-YEAR GOVERNMENT BOND YIELDS DROP TO RECORD-LOW 1.214%
•   U.S. 10-YEAR NOTE YIELD DROPS TO 2.296%, LOWEST SINCE JUNE 2013
•   SPANISH 10-YEAR BOND YIELD DROPS TO RECORD-LOW 2.038%
•   FINNISH 10-YEAR YIELD DROPS TO 1% FOR FIRST TIME ON RECORD

Anyone who would be buying government bonds denominated in dollars from a central bank committed to devaluing that currency needs to have their head examined - but that's what's happening.  In the last month, two of the last remaining inflation hawks in the Federal Reserve governing committee have retired (or been drummed out).  Janet Yellen now has nobody trying to tie her hands back except herself.  While these two governors had been arguing to continue tapering the Quantitative Easing (money creation) at $10 Billion per month, the board voted to reduce the tapering to $5 Billion/month.  In plainer English, they're not arguing to not create money out of thin air, they're arguing to create $10 billion less per month, and that's too radical for the Fed!  In fact, there are those on the Fed who think we need to drop interest rates even further, and since they're essentially zero, that means more QE. 

So here we are in the mildest of corrections (if that's what this is) and already Fed member James Bullard (head of the St. Louis bank) said we need to extend QE.  QE4?  And that's what propped the market back up on Friday.

Tell me the Fed doesn't completely own the US market.  

Time will tell if this was a minor burp in the market due to concerns over Europe or Ebola or "... an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato..."(to quote Scrooge), or if it's the beginning of the snap back that the market patterns predict.  Jim Rogers, who's a pretty good investor appears to think it's the snap back.  He says, "It's time to sell everything and run for your lives". 

(Usual disclaimer: I'm just some dood on the intertubes with a blog; if you're listening to me for financial advise, you're really stoopid).

"You Never Want to Let a Crisis Go To Waste" - Ebola Edition

Everyone knows the Rahm Emmanuel quote, and I'm sure it popped into everyone's heads with the lunatic fringe left saying Ebola is all the Republicans' fault because if they just let us have a surgeon general, this wouldn't happen.  Along with all the usual suspects (cough... CNN... cough MSNBC) chiming in chorus. The president, showing his usual approach, nominated an "Ebola czar" without a medical background, and no relevant experience: Ron Klain, whose only experience has been political, having been Chief of Staff to both Joe Biden and Al Gore.  Yeah, that's some qualifications right there. Plus, we're treated to the head of the NIH saying if those mean old Republicans hadn't cut his funding, why he'd have had an Ebola vaccine on the shelf and ready to use.  Riiiiiigghht.

There's a lot wrong about this stuff; in fact there's absolutely nothing right in any of that.

Let's start at the top.  Yo!  CNN, in answer to your "We need a surgeon general right now" piece.  We already have a surgeon general right freaking now.  Meet Acting Surgeon General, Rear Admiral Boris Lushniak, M.D., M.P.H.  RADM Dr. Lushniak served as Deputy Surgeon General from November 2010, until July 17, 2013, when he assumed the duties of Acting Surgeon General.  RADM Lushniak started working in the National Health system in 1983, right after getting his M.D degree and about the time controversial Surgeon General nominee Vivek Murthy was going into first grade (Murthy was born in 1977).  To say RADM Dr. Lushniak has much more experience than Murthy is a gross understatement; he has been an MD pretty much as long as Murthy has been capable of organized thought. 

The problems with Murthy, though, only start with him being too young.  First, he hasn't really done anything noteworthy in his career (my interpretation of his background here);  he's just not distinguished enough to be Surgeon General at 37.  There's no "Murthy procedure" known by surgeons far and wide; there's no "Murthy test" that internists use to diagnose something.  He was never "Dean Murthy" of Prestigious Medical School (or Ordinary Medical School); he was never department head of any hospital, or chief surgeon or chief anything.  With the exception of being a little too far to the "Quackademic" side of medicine, he comes across as really ordinary.  He doesn't appear (to me) any more qualified than my own Family Practitioner to be Surgeon General, and probably not more qualified than my cat's veterinarian.

Murthy's really big problem is that he started down the "guns are a public health menace" rabbit trail and keeps pushing it.  That, naturally (and thankfully) got the NRA, the NAGR, and everybody else on our side against him.  Which, as night follows day, turns the narrative into "that nasty old NRA is getting another godlike Obama appointee blocked!", and "those evil Tea Party zealots like Rand Paul are keeping us from having a surgeon general!" - totally ignorant of the fact that we have a surgeon general.

So how does a rather ordinary guy like Murthy  get picked to be nominated at all?  Of course it's a trick question!  This is Obama: Murthy was picked for his political activity.  He was picked for starting Doctors For America, a money bundling, pro-Democrat/pro ACA group that helped lobby to get the ten pound turd of Obamacare passed!   

Which brings us to the newly-appointed Ebola czar and former chief of staff for numbnuts Biden and "even numb-er nuts" Gore.  Because we absolutely need an Ebola czar.

Guess what?  We already have an Ebola czar, too!

Not ten years ago, the federal government created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The head of that department is Dr. Nicole Lurie, who is still very much on the job - despite the fact that no one has mentioned her, no one has interviewed her and no one has brought her forward as the doctor in charge of the "emerging diseases branch" of the NIH.

As National Journal rather glowingly puts it, “Lurie’s job is to plan for the unthinkable. A global flu pandemic? She has a plan. A bioterror attack? She’s on it. Massive earthquake? Yep. Her responsibilities as assistant secretary span public health, global health, and homeland security.” A profile of Lurie quoted her as saying, “I have responsibility for getting the nation prepared for public health emergencies—whether naturally occurring disasters or man-made, as well as for helping it respond and recover. It’s a pretty significant undertaking.” Still another refers to her as “the highest-ranking federal official in charge of preparing the nation to face such health crises as earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, and pandemic influenza.”

So why doesn't everybody know about Dr. Lurie?  You'll have to ask Obama about that.  Maybe his Top Men don't even know her office exists.  And maybe it has to do with corruption her office has been involved with (this is the Obama administration, after all):

There are a few interesting things about the scandal Lurie was embroiled in years ago. You can—and should—read all about it in the Los Angeles Times‘ excellent front-page expose from November 2011, headlined: “Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal: A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.” This Forbes piece is also interesting.

The donor is billionaire Ron Perelman, who was controlling shareholder of Siga. He’s a huge Democratic donor but he also gets Republicans to play for his team, of course. Siga was under scrutiny even back in October 2010 when The Huffington Post reported that it had named labor leader Andy Stern to its board and “compensated him with stock options that would become dramatically more valuable if the company managed to win the contract it sought with HHS—an agency where Stern has deep connections, having helped lead the year-plus fight for health care reform as then head of the Service Employees International Union.”

The award was controversial from almost every angle—including disputes about need, efficacy, and extremely high costs. There were also complaints about awarding a company of its size and structure a small business award as well as the negotiations involved in granting the award. It was so controversial that even Democrats in tight election races were calling for investigations.

Last month, Siga filed for bankruptcy after it was found liable for breaching a licensing contract. The drug it’s been trying to develop, which was projected to have limited utility, has not really panned out—yet the feds have continued to give valuable funds to the company even though the law would permit them to recoup some of their costs or to simply stop any further funding.

The Los Angeles Times revealed that, during the fight over the grant, Lurie wrote to Siga’s chief executive, Dr. Eric A. Rose, to tell him that someone new would be taking over the negotiations with the company. She wrote, “I trust this will be satisfactory to you.” Later she denied that she’d had any contact with Rose regarding the contract, saying such contact would have been inappropriate.

So, let's review:  we don't need a surgeon general right now because we have one in the job.  The current nominee isn't being held up because "rethuglicans are mean", it's because he's not really qualified.  We don't need a new Ebola czar because we have one already, and while the one we have is only marginally qualified (largely by her experience), the one Obama nominated is completely unqualified.

The other big lie you hear now is that the NIH is underfunded.  This is the quote you'll come across:

“Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”- Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

The slide, such that there is one, is caused entirely by the inflation the government is trying to create (through the Federal Reserve's QE).  I read that the NIH’s budget has increased from $29 billion in 2007 to $30 billion this year, which we'll call a cut because of the inflation caused by the Fed.  But that's overlooking an important fact:  vaccines don't just happen;  you don't just pour federal dollars in a blender and out pops a vaccine.  It's difficult, slow work.  In the last decade, the NIH has prioritized other diseases, principally AIDS, over Ebola; it's only natural when all the Ebola outbreaks in history have killed 1/1000 of the number killed by AIDS in 2012.  If you don't have infinite resources (which you never have) do you go after the big killer or the little one?  And don't forget all the insane stuff NIH has spent their money on:

• $702,558 grant for the study of the impact of televisions and gas generators on villages in Vietnam.
• $175,587 to the University of Kentucky to study the impact of cocaine on the sex drive of Japanese quail.
• $55,382 to study hookah smoking in Jordan.
• $592,527 to study why chimpanzees throw objects.
• Last year there were news reports about a $509,840 grant from NIH to pay for a study that will send text messages in “gay lingo” to meth-heads.
• And who can forget the money spent on the study of why lesbians tend to be fatter than gay men

It looks like the NIH isn't underfunded so much as they're really poorly managed.

But looking at that list, does anybody else get the impression the NIH is full of fat, older lesbians having problems with hot flashes?