Month: October 2017

08:13 – It was 66.4F (19C) when I took Colin out at 0630, dark and overcast. Barbara is going to the gym this morning and then driving down to Winston this afternoon to have dinner with a friend and then return home this evening.

The guy I mentioned yesterday said he hopes I’m right but fears that there will be widespread violence extending outside the central cities. He lives in the suburbs of a medium-size city that’s had BLM protests before and fears this antifa-initiated thing could be much worse. They have a vacation cabin an hour from town, and he and his wife decided to head up there Friday afternoon and spend the weekend. If nothing much comes of the protests they’ll head back home Monday morning after a relaxing weekend. Otherwise, they’ll stay at the cabin until things calm down. Which sounds to me like a good plan.

I watched a video yesterday about canning sausage. Nothing special there, except the price of the sausage. In 2014, she’d paid $2/pound for pork sausage at Walmart. It’s now $3.60/pound, an 80% increase. I’d noticed similar increases over the last two or three years on LTS food items I’d bought. Not just at Walmart, but at Costco, Sam’s, Amazon, and so on. Not on everything–in fact, some items are actually cheaper now–but on balance prices have gone up noticeably, and continue to do so.

09:17 – It was 66.3F (19C) when I took Colin out at 0715, with full overcast and a heavy fog. We ended up getting just short of 5 inches (12.5 cm) of rain.

I got email from a reader asking what I expect to happen on November 4th, when BLM, antifa, and the rest of the racist terrorist groups are calling for “peaceful protests” (i.e., violent riots) across the US, with the goal of driving the Trump administration from power. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

The short answer is that I’m not expecting much. Pretty much what’s now become commonplace. Rioting/looting/burning in large cities, mainly by blacks and useful-idiot whites, with the cops standing by just watching. Maybe using tear gas and water cannons if things really get out of hand. Lots of property damage, burned police cars, etc., but very few arrests and a low body count.

But this is not a one-day event, and things could escalate. If the rioters restrict themselves to urban centers and blocking highways, it’ll probably just be the usual mess. But if masses of rioters start heading out from the city centers into the suburbs, things could get dicey. Middle-class people expect the police to protect them and their property. If the cops won’t do it, they’ll do it themselves. If something like that develops, there could be a very high body count, most of whom are likely to be progs.

I’d be stunned if anything at all happened in little Sparta. Progs are an endangered species up here in the mountains. The population is overwhelmingly white, conservative, and church-going, and the relatively few blacks and Hispanics generally share the same values.

But November 4th and the days following would be good days to avoid big cities and crowds. Of course, that’s true of any day.

09:34 – It was 66.1F (19C) when I took Colin out at 0625, overcast and foggy with a light mist in the air. The rain is supposed to get heavier through the afternoon and into the evening, with heavy rain and winds gusting to 45 MPH (72 KPH) overnight. Total rainfall is supposed to be 3 to 5 inches (7.5 to 12.5 cm).

We’ll work on some science kit stuff today, although we’re actually in pretty good shape already. Colin won’t get much time outside today.

We finished watching season 7 of Doc Martin last night. In one episode, I was surprised to see a character, a lunatic elementary school art teacher, ask her pupils to bring in their favorite toys for an art project. They all brought in their favorite stuffed animals, which she then attached to the board at the front of the class using a staple gun. Geez.

The title character is an MD who’s strongly Aspergers, or at least some form of ASD. I think the point of the series is supposed to be that he’s abnormal and is surrounded by “normal” people, all of whom have lovable quirks of their own. In my opinion, he’s one of only maybe four characters who are at all normal. The rest of them, far from having lovable quirks, are blithering idiots. They say in the series that he doesn’t tolerate fools gladly (or at all), and he’s certainly surrounded by fools. His wife is just annoying. She knew what he was when she married him, and yet she’s always trying to force him to behave “normally”.

09:15 – It was 52.6F (11.5C) when I took Colin out at 0715, partly cloudy. Barbara is heading for the gym and supermarket this morning, after which we’ll be doing kit stuff.

I’ve never been a member of the NRA, because I consider them anti-gun. Every time the federal government introduces new anti-gun legislation, the NRA has been right there supporting them. From the National Firearms Act to the GCA68 to Clinton’s banning “assault” weapons and magazines, NRA has at best stood by and done nothing, and often actively co-operated with the feds. With friends like them, 2nd amendment supporters don’t need enemies.

So I wasn’t even slightly surprised yesterday when the NRA officially came out in favor of regulating bump-fire stocks as Class 3 automatic weapons. Screw them. What they should be doing is fighting to eliminate all laws and regulations that infringe our right to keep and bear arms, including automatic weapons.

I was about to change the designee on my Amazon Prime smile account. I thought it was the NRA ILA, which was the group I specified when I first set up Amazon smile. (Not that ILA was great; they simply hadn’t done anything egregiously bad lately, and they were the only supposedly pro-gun group offered as an option when I originally signed up with smile.) Turns out, a year or 18 months ago I’d changed my designee to the Second Amendment Foundation, so I left it as it was.

Barbara and I finished re-watching the first series of James Burke’s Connections and got started on Connections². Season One, which ran in 1978, started with Burke sounding like a prepper. He first covered the Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965, which for him at that point was little more than a decade in the past. He pointed out the fragility and interconnectedness of our electric power network, how subject it was to cascading failures, and that a long-term, widespread electricity failure could kill tens of millions. He then walks us back through what that would mean, eventually ending up standing behind a horse-drawn plow.

The irony, of course, is that here we are forty years on, and our electrical grids are much, much more subject to catastrophic failure than they were in the 60’s and 70’s. And we have half again the population now that we did then, and all of those people are even more dependent on reliable electric power. As just one example, in 1978 a fair percentage of public water systems were still gravity-fed, and so could continue to provide water even without electricity. Nowadays, almost 100% of public water systems–including ones in small mountain towns like Sparta– use pumped storage, which does require electric power to function. When those big golf-ball water towers run out of pumped water, all of the people who depend on them are SOL.

When this series first ran, I thought of James Burke as a pretty radical leftie/prog. He was then, and still is, although some of what he says in this series would nowadays get him branded as a hide-bound conservative/Nazi.

If one thing still establishes his leftie/prog credentials, it’s his insistence through the series that genius plays little or no role in innovation and invention. In fact, the whole series is built around that concept. Burke reminds me of Obama’s You didn’t build that.

According to Burke, the key issue is that a critical mass of discoveries exist that are just lying around waiting for someone to combine them into something new and innovative. If Isaac Newton or James Watt or William Henry Perkin hadn’t done it, Ed the Regular Guy down the street would eventually have figured it out. Wrong.

Unless Ed TRG happens to have both curiosity and a genius IQ. All kinds of discoveries have lain around for years, decades, centuries, and even millennia, waiting for a genius to happen by and notice them.

The example I always use to illustrate this is the discovery of smelting metals. In areas where copper ore was exposed at the surface, some of our early ancestors happened to use chunks of that ore to build fire circles. Everything necessary was present: the copper ore, the heat of the fire, and the carbon from the charcoal needed to reduce the copper ions to metallic copper.

And I’m sure that for a thousand years, if not ten thousand, many people noticed the little beads of red metal that appeared around such fires. Chances are, they collected them to use for jewelry, but thought no more about it.

Then one day, a genius sitting around the fire started thinking about those tiny beads of copper and started wondering if they could get more of them. He or she may have experimented for an hour or a month, doing different things with the ore, fire, and charcoal, but those experiments eventually yielded metallic copper in large amounts. And that changed the world.

This is the way things work. Regular people take advantage of things they find lying around; geniuses wonder WHY that stuff was lying around and then do something about it. Burke even uses a classic example, Fleming and penicillin.

How many thousands or tens of thousands of times did someone culture bacteria and have the culture spoiled by a growth of Penicillium notatum mold? How many thousands or tens of thousands of times did that scientist mutter, “SHIT!”, and just throw out the culture and start over? It took Fleming to notice that the growth of P. notatum was suppressing the growth of the bacteria and wonder why that was happening. And, again, that changed the world.

09:21 – It was 48.3F (9C) when I took Colin out at 0645, partly cloudy. Barbara’s driving down to Winston today to have lunch with a friend and run errands. She’ll be back mid- to late-afternoon.

Someone posted a link to John Ringo’s take on the LV shooting. An adverse reaction to a psychotropic drug makes as much sense to me as any other proposed explanation, and more than most. A very high percentage of the US population are on such drugs, from the very old all the way down to children.

Teenage boys in particular are very likely to be prescribed these drugs for behavior modification of so-called conditions like ADHD or aggressiveness that are in reality just a normal part of being a teenage boy. But it’s by no means just teenage boys. Men and women of all ages, teenage girls, and children are all routinely prescribed these drugs, despite the fact that severe side effects up to and including mass murder are known risks.

Things were better back before such drugs were common. Sure, there were mentally ill people, but a much larger range of behaviors was tolerated. If Aunt Edna suffered bouts of manic depression or Uncle Bert was a bit odd, well people just kept a close eye on them. If they became a danger to themselves or others, they committed them to a loony bin. But we didn’t have tens of millions of people under the influence of psychoactive drugs, any of whom could blow up at any time.

I’m sure the pharma industry has spent a lot of money to hide the role that such drugs have played in suicides and murders both retail and wholesale. Drug companies make billions of dollars on these drugs, so it’s in their interest to have as many people as possible taking them routinely.

It’s the FDA’s job to ensure that drugs are “safe and effective” before they’re approved for use. By and large, they’ve done a decent job at ensuring they’re effective, although not necessarily any more effective or even as effective as out-of-patent drugs that don’t make any money for pharma companies. But I think the FDA has fallen down badly on ensuring that they’re safe.

When most of us hear about the latest outrage, we rightly suspect muslim or antifa or BLM terrorism. But often, particularly with school shootings and similar events, it eventually becomes apparent that neither politics nor religion were motivating factors. Someone just flipped out.

But the question that’s almost never asked, let alone answered, is: “why did this person flip out?” The normal tacit assumption is that a certain number of the population are nut cases, so a school shooting or whatever is an Act of God, kind of like a tornado, unpredictable and unpreventable. Sure, sometimes people try to attribute the event to bullying or other social interactions, but most just shake their heads and figure these things happen.

Although it almost never makes it into the news stories and follow-up analyses, my guess is that most or all of the mass killings that occur and weren’t due to religious/political motivations are in fact caused by adverse reactions to psychoactive drugs. Presumably the pathologists run drug screens on the bodies of the killers, but I don’t remember ever hearing the results of those.

Oh, the news may mention in passing that the killer was on such a drug, but they minimize its contribution to the event. Here, for example, is an article from the Denver Post mentioning that fluvoxamine, an SSRI, was found in the body of one of the Columbine shooters. But the article emphasizes that there’s no reason to think the presence of that SSRI had anything to do with the shooting.

Then there’s Adam Lanza and the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. The pathologist in that case reported that no drugs were found in Lanza’s body. But what they don’t mention is there’s no such thing as a Star Trek tricorder. The only way you’ll find a drug is if you look specifically for that drug. And pathology screening protocols don’t include looking for specific psychoactive prescription drugs. If you don’t look for it, you’re not going to find it.

09:22 – It was 48.1F (9C) when I took Colin out at 0615, dark and mostly clear.

We’re left with mostly unanswered questions about the Las Vegas mass shooting, and no way to separate fact from lies and spin. ISIS claimed responsibility for the shooting, claiming that the alleged shooter was a recent jihadi convert, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. The large “arsenal” of automatic weapons initially reported now seems likely to be standard semi-auto black rifles equipped with slide-fire stocks.

If you’re unfamiliar with those, they’re simply replacement buttstocks that use the recoil of the rifle to pull the trigger rapidly and allow a semi-auto black rifle to fire 900 rounds or so per minute. They’re completely legal and uncontrolled. As far as the government is concerned, a semi-auto rifle equipped with a slide-fire stock is still a semi-auto rifle, just one that has a very high cyclic rate. They even come with a letter from BATFE that so states, in case a user runs into a state or local LEO who thinks such rifles are Class 3 weapons.

When I read this morning that the shooter had used bump-fire stocks, I admit that my first inclination was to order one this morning, figuring they’d soon be banned, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. I have a fair amount of experience shooting selective-fire and automatic weapons. I’ve fired probably 50 or 100 different models over the decades. They don’t impress me for civilian use. Military use, yes, but then the military has logistics pipelines to keep them fed.

The cyclic rate of a typical selective-fire or automatic weapon is 10 to 30 rounds PER SECOND. Most serious preppers I know keep anything from 1,000 to (rarely) 5,000 rounds for each of their battle rifles. On rock-n-roll, you can go through that many rounds very quickly, and you don’t have a military logistics chain to resupply you. You can’t afford, in any sense of the word, to waste the ammo.

Seeing the pictures of the LV shooting victims saddens me. Given that it was a country music concert, essentially all of the victims were probably Deplorables. Good, Normal people, in other words. Mostly young people. The faces were mostly white, as you’d expect, but there were a fair number of blacks and Hispanics and Asians in that crowd as well.

Most of the crowd fled or attempted to flee when the shooting started, as you’d expect, but there were more than a few heroes as well. One guy, black as it turned out, dragged 30 victims out of the line of fire before being hit himself. He deserves the civilian MoH. Progressives are always trying to incite racial hatred, but when the chips were down here, race didn’t matter. Whites helped minorities, and vice versa. That’s because, contrary to the prog party line, Normals don’t generally care much about race.