Thursday, December 26, 2019

We the People

Virginians make me proud to be an American.




https://victorygirlsblog.com/gun-grabs-virginia-idaho-ground-zero-in-fight-against-left/

Shit Storm

It seems that is is a real thing.

"    We were in the Bridger Basin in Montana to excavate the Mothers’ Day Site, a mass assemblage of small-bodied diplodocid sauropod dinosaurs. The site was beyond a rather steep hill, so we camped roughly a half-mile away in a valley sheltered by a pair of low ridges. The campsite was lovely, except for one thing: the cow dung. The dry air desiccates the patties in a matter of hours, after which they were perfectly inoffensive.

    Our work was interrupted by a teammate shouting, “Oh shit, shit! We have to go NOW!” We looked up. There, halfway between us and the Beartooths Mountains, was a featureless black wall. It grew in height perceptibly as it drew closer, second by second. We started to cover up the site, but our teammate kept hurrying us on. In just a few minutes we were running back to camp. Blotting out the western sky from horizon to zenith was that black wall. Up close it wasn’t featureless. It was a dark, roiling mass of dust and debris hundreds of feet high, like a color negative of an avalanche.

    I don’t remember if I fell down, but I do remember that I ended up on the ground at some point, because I crawled underneath the locked department van. Most of the others went for the tents instead. Just as I was getting situated under the van, the rain started to fall. The dust had cleared but the wind hadn’t relented at all, and the rain was pelting the ground at a 30° angle in torrential sheets. Glenn Storss got to the van, unlocked it, and let me in, along with two or three other excavators who had opted for the vehicles over the tents. We made the right decision; the tents were having a bad time of it. None had blown away entirely; the tent pegs were hammered right in to rocks. But the less professional and more recreational tents, like my trio of tents, couldn’t cope with the wind. One after another, the tent poles snapped in each.

    After a bit, we started to hear hard *pings* as objects ricocheted off the van, and we realized we were getting hail, steadily increasing in abundance and size. The vehicles rocked ominously and the hail fell, and the wind blew and blew and blew and we were silent. Gradually, the storm abated.

    We went out to check on Mason Jane Milam, who had remained in her tent. As we approached, she emerged, smiling ruefully, streaked with green and brown. Her tent was filled with 15 to 20 centimeters of sludge of the same colors. Cow patties had been sent aloft when the storm first hit, blowing them into Mason’s door-less tent despite all her efforts. When the rain came next, it had rehydrated the excrement and turned her tent into a bathtub of bovine sewage. "

https://gizmodo.com/we-have-to-go-now-scientists-share-their-wildest-exper-1840613542

Monday, November 25, 2019

Hong Kong

I have been following events in Hong Kong for some time.  I believe that the U.S. will have a war with China, although I pray not.  Right now, President Trump is doing a great job on the trade and economic front.

Michael Yon has been there since June and if you want a look from the ground, you can follow his site.


https://www.michaelyon-online.com/

Monday, November 11, 2019

KAG

One of my favorite things about President Trump is that he is precisely what I expected to get when I voted for him.  A bonus are the lefty heads spinning like Linda Blair's in the exorcist at high speed.


Update: H/T: http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/

Monday, August 12, 2019

No Western Civilization, No Science

"Without western civilization, you would most likely be a slave or a serf. Without western civilization, you would have less rights and justice. Without western civilization, you would most likely be living in abject poverty. Without western civilization, you would not have free market capitalism nor the industrial revolution. Without western civilization, you would have no university. Without western civilization, superstition would reign. Without western civilization, there would be no science.
(...)
But here’s the twixt, Western Civilization started only once in history and in only one place in the world: Medieval Christian Europe. Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson correctly claims, and I paraphrase, “The Bible is central to western culture and is the central document to western culture.” Simply put, without Jesus, we would never have our Bible and without our Bible, we would never have Western Civilization and without Western Civilization, we would have no science."

10 Christian Beliefs that Ignited the Scientific Revolution


Sunday, June 9, 2019

Socialism

"Socialism begets communism, and communism is evil. It’s as evil as its nationalist cousin Nazism, and between Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Josef Stalin, has murdered more people even than the Nazis killed. It reigned longer and in more places, leaving piles of dead everywhere it took power. It still exerts thuggish control over North Korea, China, Cuba and to a great extent Venezuela. There is no excuse for anyone who lived through the Cold War to support any form of communism or its socialism cousin now. But many do. It’s fashionable in academia and the media and a growing chorus in the Democratic Party."
(...)
"2019 marks 30 years since communism cracked up. Thirty years on, are we really going to forget what we won, and why? Will the world wake up in time?"

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Marriage in Alabama

I agree that if you and your spouse consider yourselves married then the state shall acknowledge the marriage.  It is a simple matter of liberty and the state has no other legitimate purpose than to uphold individual liberty.

"Advocates say the new law will require judges to treat all marriages as equal under Alabama law. Critics say it provides cover to biased judges and harms the wedding industry."
https://www.al.com/news/2019/05/alabama-lawmakers-pass-bill-to-end-marriage-licenses.html

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/331461/

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Ancient Roman Engineering

                       Analogy between an invisibility cloak and ancient Gallo-Roman theaters.
Stephane Brûlé et al.
                                           
It is interesting to see how nature guides the path of our structures and makes me wonder what forces shaped ancient buildings.

"Co-author Stephane Brûlé, a civil engineer at a Lyon-based company called Menard, demonstrated the possibility of this kind of large-scale acoustic and seismic cloaking a few years ago with colleagues from the Fresnel Institute in Marseille. The researchers drilled a periodic array of boreholes into topsoil and discovered that sound waves reflected most of their energy back toward the source when they encountered the first two rows of holes. Brûlé noticed a similar foundational structure while on holiday in Autun (a town in central France), thanks to an aerial photograph of the semicircular structure of a Gallo-Roman theater buried under a field.

When Brûlé superimposed a more detailed archaeological photograph of the theater's structure over an image of one of the invisibility cloaking metamaterials he and his Fresnel colleagues had made in the lab, the ancient theater's pillars lined up almost perfectly with the microscopic elements in the metamaterial. He discovered similar overlap with images of the foundational structure of the Roman Colosseum and other, fully enclosed amphitheaters from the same era.

Roman engineers may not have done this deliberately; they could have just been lucky, according to Brûlé. Or they might have noticed over the centuries that certain structures were more resistant to earthquake damage than others and modified their designs accordingly. "Rigorously, we cannot say more for the moment," he told Physics World."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/study-says-ancient-romans-may-have-built-invisibility-cloaks-into-structures/

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

No Corn for Ethanol-Gasoline Mixtures

It is time to remove the market distortion for corn that is the government's economic incentive to produce more corn.  If we insist on burning gasoline-ethanol mixtures, it should make energy, hence economic sense.

"· It takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol.

· Corn requires a whole lot of fertilizer, and the runoff goes into the Mississippi River and runs down to the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey.

· A gallon of ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy of a gallon of gasoline; hence, your miles per gallon will decrease if you use gasoline containing ethanol.

· Making corn into ethanol for our cars is tantamount to burning our food, and it is driving up the cost of the food left to eat. Corn is a staple food for hogs, cattle, sheep, and chickens, so the cost of all meat and poultry are going up, along with the cost of corn itself.

· Ethanol loves water and soaks it up from its environment, so it can’t be shipped in long-distance pipelines with gasoline, because the water will corrode the piping and pumping machinery. The ethanol will dry out pump seals. Consequently, it has to be transported in trucks at a higher cost and mixed with the gasoline near the end-use consumer market.

· The only good reason for making corn into ethanol is for whiskey." https://www.econlib.org/the-chemistry-of-ethanol/ 

Mental Illness Expressed

Transgenderism is a mental illness and pretending otherwise does a disservice to those who suffer from it.

"In 1961, at age 12, I was one of two-dozen black children who integrated an all-white junior high school in Richmond. White parents jeered me outside the school, and inside, their kids stuck me with pins, shoved me in the halls and pushed me down the stairs. So when the group of Google employees resorted to calling names and making false accusations because they didn’t want a conservative voice advising the company, the hostility was reminiscent of what I felt back then — that same intolerance for someone who was different from them."

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Trump's Threat

"Therefore, it seems to me there is only one logical response to the president’s threat — or promise. For non-sanctuary cities and states, it would be: “Thank you, President Trump, for not saddling us with the costs of this crisis.” For sanctuary cities and states, it would be: “Welcome to all illegal immigrants. And thank you, President Trump, for rewarding us with all the benefits they bring.”"

Read the whole thing:

Sending immigrants to sanctuary cities has consequences — and that's a good thing

Monday, April 15, 2019

Illegal Immigration

"The other day I noticed for the first time that I have a lot more fear of an oncoming car in rural California than I had of intersections in Libya; a lot more worries about a wild stray dog wandering into my yard than I did while living in Greece; a lot more anxiety of being shot or robbed than I did when visiting the current Middle East; and a lot less hope of being treated promptly in extremis at the local emergency room than I would have expected in Eastern Europe."

Read the whole thing:

Are There Any Limits to Illegal Immigration?

Friday, March 15, 2019

Getting Back on the Horse

These are some hardy men.

"NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin, who both survived a dramatically aborted Soyuz launch last year, were joined on the smoothly-executed trip by NASA astronaut Christina Koch.

The rocket blasted off without incident from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and docked at the ISS less than six hours later, more than 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the Earth at 01:01 GMT, a few minutes ahead of schedule.

During a live broadcast via high-definition cameras aboard the ISS, the mission commander Ovchinin reported that the mooring mechanism was engaged. A NASA commentator then confirmed the "capture."

The liftoff was closely watched after the two men's space journey was cut short in October when a technical problem with their Soyuz rocket triggered a launch abort two minutes into the flight."


Here is the failed MS10 launch:

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Quantum Monism

I have always been a bit disturbed by the many worlds view of parallel universes.  I could not make any sense of it and it offended my reasoning as to how the universe operates.  Upon reading an article in "Scientific American", a missing piece of information fell into place and suddenly the universe was whole again.

"Both quantum monism and Everett’s many worlds are predictions of quantum mechanics taken seriously. What distinguishes these views is only the perspective: What looks like "many worlds" from the perspective of a local observer is indeed a single, unique universe from a global perspective (such as that of someone who would be able to look from outside onto the entire universe).

In other words: many worlds is how quantum monism looks like for an observer who has only limited information about the universe. In fact, Everett’s original motivation was to develop a quantum description of the entire universe in terms of a "universal wave function.” It is as if you look out through a muntin window: Nature looks divided into separate pieces but this is an artifact of your perspective."

You can read the entire article here:

Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

Sunday, February 24, 2019

America's Mandarins

Imperial China was run by bureaucratic scholars.  They studied and strived for credentials in order to climb the ladder of achievement in the Chinese bureaucracies.  Driven by Progressive policies, the United States has been moving steadily toward this model for some time now.  The result is a ponderous federal bureaucracy that is unanswerable to the People of the United States.   These policies are anathema to the founding principles of the Unites States.

The pendulum of change is beginning to swing back in reaction to this historical crime.  There is and will be much strife as the modern-day mandarins fight to keep the power they have taken.  Hopefully, we will avoid an all out civil war and economic ruin.

Below is an article that exemplifies these American mandarins and their mindset.

"I know you’re working on that book about the new socialism, and I think it will be timely. It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. I’m not a gung-ho America First guy—I’d be an expat in a second if I could get my wife on board—but the K-12 textbooks have gotten insane. They really do stress the failures of the country, the bad angle of every story, the endless aggressions-in-hindsight that form the modern wokescold.
Look, I get it: this country has done terrible things. We continue to do terrible things. But there are no pure good guys and pure bad guys. We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity."

Click here for the article: Life Among The Wokescolds

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Does a Beresheet on the Moon?


The SpaceIL team with the lunar lander.
 Photo: SpaceIL
I looks like we will find out in a week or so.  "The $100 million joint venture between SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. was financed mostly by Jewish philanthropists including Morris Kahn, SpaceIL’s president and a founder of Amdocs Ltd., and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. The probe ended its “ride share” on SpaceX after 38 minutes and, if all goes according to plan, will land in the Sea of Tranquility on April 11, the project’s leaders said several days before the launch."(https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/one-giant-step-for-israel-as-probe-set-to-lift-off-for-the-moon#gs.QaWsfBK3)

It will land on the moon between where Apollos 15 and 17 missions remain.  I do not know if they will be pointing a camera to look for the Apollo sites but if they do and we see the images I would consider that to be awesome in itself.

You can watch SpaceX launch and rocket recovery in the video below.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Ludwig van Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata ( 3rd Movement ) Tina S Cover

Wonderful

Watershed Cartography is Fascinating

I have always been fascinated by maps.  From the road maps I used until GPS navigation became common to the topographic maps we used for land navigation in the service.

These maps by Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs are works of art.

Spread-eagled across the central part of the United States, the Mississippi's drainage basin covers all or parts of 32 U.S. states (and two Canadian provinces). The easternmost point of Ol' Man River's catchment area is really far east: Cobb Hill in northern Pennsylvania. Here rises the Allegheny, tributary of the Ohio, which in turn flows into the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. Image: Grasshopper Geography


Monday, January 28, 2019

Mmmm, Coffee!

I usually drink a pint of espresso every morning.  Seeing articles such as this one is always heartening.

"Coffee, it seems, prevents or somehow leads to the repair of damaged DNA, at least according to the findings of some researchers from Bratislava. Their paper, published in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reported that drinking 500 ml of freshly brewed, dark roast coffee every day for 4 weeks resulted in a 23% reduction in DNA "strand breaks" (1).

Their study involved 100 healthy men and women recruited from a general Central European population. The subjects were randomized into a coffee group and a water group. (No double-blind placebo design was necessary because we're all going with the assumption that DNA isn't susceptible to the placebo effect.)

The scientists concluded that "...the regular consumption of a dark roast blend has a beneficial protective effect on human DNA integrity in both men and women.""

Tip: Drink This Much Coffee to Repair DNA

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Friday, January 18, 2019

Shutdown Silver Lining

Aside from watching President Trump humiliate Nancy Pelosi et al., there are many useless government drones re-evaluating their career choice.  I came across this interesting take on the shutdown from a federal official still on the job, without pay.

"The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.

On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.

Why would they? We can’t fire them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a decade."

(...)

"The president’s instincts are right. Most Americans will not miss non-essential government functions. A referendum to end government plunder must happen. Wasteful government agencies are fighting for relevance but they will lose. Now is the time to deliver historic change by cutting them down forever."

Read the whole article: I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Hate Speech

"What is again odd about these examples of open progressive racist, cultural, and class contempt for the American interior, is not just how ubiquitously politicians and journalists voiced them, but also how candidly and indeed confidently they repeated notions of smelly, toothless, ape-like, lazy “garbage people.” In that sense, who hated Trump and what he represented also explains precisely why so many went to the polls to elect him, and perhaps also why Trump’s own uncouthness was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them.

What does all this hate speech signify?"
Read it all here: A License To Hate

HT: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Saturday, January 5, 2019

BMF into ARA

I realize this is a re-post but sometimes I just feel the awesomeness and that is that.  I watched C-5 Galaxies flyover me for months and even rode in on one.  This, however is simply something more bigger.  I recorded this aircraft coming into Acadiana Regional Airport one day.   Oh, turn your sound up.
You can see more here: https://www.youtube.com/user/chipanderson

Friday, January 4, 2019

The Farside of the Moon

You may wonder why the Chinese chose the farside of the moon for their "explorations".  Wonder no more.  They are there in order to counter the planned American presence at L2 in 2021.


Here is a link to the NASA 'site: https://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html

Thursday, January 3, 2019

Build that Wall

NBPC Vice President Art Del Cueto on border security: “It has nothing to do with political parties. You all have to ask yourselves this question, ‘If I come to your home, do you want me to knock on your front door or do you want me to climb through that window?’”
Would you like me to Knock?
Click on image for the video.

AvEx and FedEx

In New Iberia, Louisiana Aviation Exteriors(AvEx) paints aircraft at Acadiana Regional Airport. Here is an example of the work that they do for FedEx. https://about.van.fedex.com/blog/every-plane-bears-a-name/

R.I.P. Daryl Dragon