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Rust Never Sleeps

h/t Captain's Journal

The only enemies your guns have are rust and politicians.

Now that Virginia is on statewide home lockdown orders, let's tally up the successes from that big Gun Woodstock rally back when Kung Flu wasn't a thing, shall we?

(RICHMOND, VIRGINIFORNIA) The bills signed by the governor on Friday are: 

• Senate Bill 70 and House Bill 2, which establish universal background checks in Virginia
• Senate Bill 240 and House Bill 674, which establish an Extreme Risk Protective Order, allowing authorities to temporarily take guns away from people deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others
• Senate Bill 69 and House Bill 812, which reinstate Virginia’s one-handgun-a-month law
• House Bill 9, which requires gun owners to report their lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement within 48 hours or face a civil penalty.
• House Bill 1083, which toughens the penalty for leaving a loaded, unsecured firearm in a reckless manner that endangers a child 

[Gov. Blackface Babykiller] proposed amendments for other bills without signing them into law, including:
• Senate Bill 35 and House Bill 421, which give local governments more authority to ban guns in public spaces, like public buildings, parks, recreation centers, and during permitted events
--- The governor requested amendments clarifying the exemption included in the bill for institutions of higher education
• Senate Bill 479 and House Bill 1004, which bar people with protective orders against them from possessing firearms and require them to turn over their guns within 24 hours
--- The governor requested amendments recommended by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance to allow judges to hold the person in contempt of court if they fail to comply

Bummer. Say, that's quite a box score, though! VA went from Zero to Califrutopia, in one swell foop. Gov. BB seems to be quakin' in his boots. "We stopped the AWB!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it now, does it? Sure is a good thing the jet-fuel geniuses behind that January rally spent that whole month planning that shindig, instead of spending time (that they don't have now  - thanks, Kung Flu!) to organize militias at the county level to actually oppose any such nonsense. Surgical mask and gloves optional, but strongly recommended.

Maybe in two or three more months - if we're all really lucky with the pandemic and all - somebody might look into doing that this time around, as something that has a much better chance of actually working, and focuses on the acknowledged strengths available at the local level in 95% of the state, before the dumbass Gun Woodstock sucked all the oxygen out of the party.

Or, you could hold another rally. Maybe next time, masks at the capitol will be mandatory, instead of banned. (As long as they're N95s.)

That will show your legislature who's the boss, and it'll be just the thing to calm the Normies down right on the heels of a pandemic, and the outset of a monster economic recession/Depression: seeing a bunch of jaspers waving rifles around outside the state capitol. It's sure to sway average folks to that side of the argument, you betcha.

Just look how well it worked on the legislature.

Better luck next time around with Plan B. Maybe act like time wasn't infinite, this time.

And FFS, once you're not on lockdowns and stay-at-homes any more

Stop playing in the street.

Nothing you want is won there.

 

You'd have thought a decade and more of total hippie failures would've taught people at least that much about it.

Two Paths

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost

John Wilder (yes, THE John Wilder) has a great post today on adversity and perseverance.
As usual, RTWT.
We'll be here when you're done.

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never – in nothing great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense."  

– Winston Churchill

Yeah, and Sylvester Stallone was on his second trip around the studios, who had all rejected his script for Rocky multiple times, and so broke he was about to be evicted from his crappy one-bedroom apartment, before he finally found someone who’d make the movie and let him play the lead.
Which only turned out to be the Best Picture of 1976.

But, natzsofast, Guido.

The illustrations we chose can make a big difference in the story we tell.
So let's give equal time to an opposing view.

Let us also remember another guy’s story of failure.

Bob was an executive, not a failure, per se. But he hadn’t really made his mark and hit the top tier.
So he spearheaded the drive to create a revolutionary new car, for one of the top auto makers in the world.
Anyone who knows cars knows it as the Edsel.
Yes, Bob was truly one of the best and brightest.

So best and bright that JFK made him Secretary of Defense, and then his failures kicked into high gear.
He thought a war in South Vietnam was not just necessary, but winnable.
He thought the F-111 would make a great airplane, for both the Air Farce and the Navy.
He made the Army buy the M-16.
And he thought drafting literal retards would be great for battlefield success.
Anyone reading this can google how those brilliant stunts turned out.

After such a lifetime of failure, you’d have thought Bob would have retired 0-for-Ever, but he was just hitting his stride.

Bob moved on to the World Bank, and came up with the genius idea to lend billions to Turd World countries like Mexico, and dozens of others, knowing they had no way to repay it, ever.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are thus three morals to this story:

1) Don’t be Bob.
2) Sometimes, your first failure is nature’s way of telling you to go home, stick a gun in your mouth, and do humanity a favor, by taking one for the team.
3) Know which thing Failure is telling you.

Because sometimes failure, like with Edison, is just teaching you 999 ways not to make a light bulb.
Other times, like with Bob, failure is telling you that your greatest service to humanity would be as a soil supplement.

There's Always Someone Who Never Gets The Word

"Those six thousand ships you say they haven't got?"

"WELL,THEY'VE GOT THEM!!!"

Whether it's invasion fleets and Werner Pluskat's commander at Normandy, giant sharks and small-town mayors, or weaponized drones and drone experts, there's always somebody who'll tell you it can't happen.

More than a year ago, here and over at Peter's Bayou Renaissance Man blog, I and numerous other posters pointed out that drones were going to be successfully weaponized, and kick the ass of soft targets.

A self-proclaimed subject matter expert, who for decorum I shall not point at directly (you can figure it out yourself without too much effort) explained we had to be wrong, because using drones to attack, in my example from TWO years ago, oil refineries (among other targets) with explosives or incendiaries couldn't happen, ever, because they couldn't lift enough to ever get the job done.

It was simply UNPOSSIBLE!

Sh'yeah.
And the Titanic was UNSINKABLE.

Mea culpa. Weaponizing drones is unpossible.

Oops.
Looks like somebody forgot to tell the Yemeni rebels that this could never work.

 

But let's give the expert his due: they didn't stick with piddly little hobby drones with 1lb payloads. Hell no.

These guys have money.

The built big, long-range drones. Launched perhaps from 900+ miles away.

Y'know, like people with huge backing will do.

This time.

 

I would feign humility at being so right, if it didn't happen so frequently.

This isn't an accident, or blind guesswork.  And nobody is right 100% of the time, including me. But this was Eddie Murphy-at-a-Klan-rally obviously going to happen.

I look at things, draw rational conclusions, and extrapolate data in what appears to me to be a reasonable direction and distance.

And I called this sort of thing in 2017. So did Peter. So did others.

Hell, Tom Clancy called a terrorist using a jetliner as a missile in 1994, seven years before 9/11, and he was just a well-read insurance agent with an active imagination.

But it was the guy who was sure it couldn't possibly ever happen because of his own expertise on drones that missed this by a country mile, 180° in the wrong direction.

 

Now cue the next round of "See? I told you no one could do anything with COTS drones from Best Buy!" Which will be true, until it isn't. Because not everyone who wants to bomb a refinery (or something bloodier) has the backing of Iran, and millions of dollars of assets to fund it. So when someone drops a soda can thermite bomb over the LNG terminal at San Pedro/Long Beach, and it looks like a nuclear mushroom cloud going off, remind yourself it's still unpossible.

 

Because who'd want to do that?

Oh, I mean, besides the jihadi on a tight budget.

 

Dear Mayor Vaughan,

 

Consider your ass bitten.

 

FROM TWO F****** YEARS AGO, GENIUS!
NOW can we close the goddam beaches and holler "Shark!"?
Or was this just a figment of our over-active imagination too???

Technology doesn't have a side.
It merely has applications.

Stupid Idea Dept.

Story.

Finally, He Didn't Build That

 

And the latest "correction" may have just a wee bit to do with the Fed raising interest rates by more in Trump's term so far than what they did in all eight years of HopeyDopey's entire administration.

What A Laser Targeting System Looks Like

h/t Irish

Remedial Jurisprudence 101

For the perennial Baby Ducks out there:

In the Watergate Scandal, it took 26 months from the initial crime to bring down President Nixon, from June of 1972 to August of 1974.  And that was with a co-operative state's evidence witness, and a handy set of taped conversations establishing all the elements of the criminal conspiracy fully in hand. It took even longer than that to successfully prosecute the 48 co-conspirators, another few months after that to sentence them all, and most of them didn't go to prison until 1977, over 3 1/2 years later.

As Casey Stengel was wont to reply to the idiots who regularly vexed him, "You could look it up."

And that was after DC police arrested five guys for a burglary in progress, and charged them with multiple felonies.

For comparison, the first referral of probable criminal activity was only this week sent from Sen. Grassley's Senate Intel Committee to the current DoJ for further investigation.

So for you silly witless wonders carping that no one's going down in flames already, cool your effing jets, verstehen sie?

You only sound retarded for yipping and yapping that "nothing has happened", after all of five minutes.

If this is you, pay heed. If not, roll on.

Big Brother Is Here

h/t WRSA

Karl Deninger is (understandably) just a tad upset:

(Market Ticker) "The stupidity of Americans never ceases to amaze me.
Not only is Beelzebezos trumpeting the "blowout" buying of Alexa devices (going into homes) he is also made note of "far field" voice recognition for various other manufacturers.
Far-field eh?  You mean like being able to hear and process your voice across not just a room, but from a different room in your house or office?
Yeah, that would be "far field", and if you don't recognize the problem with that immediately and destroy any such device you find anywhere you happen to go where it isn't disclosed that it's present before you enter you're a real, first-class idiot.
That people would willingly bring these devices into their homes (and worse, offices!) is astounding to me.
I'll say this right now -- if you ever invite me into your place of residence or business, don't disclose you have one of these things before doing so (if you do disclose that I won't be coming over or inside!) and I find it I'm going to make lots of little pieces out of it -- immediately.
I suspect it would not be hard to figure out what frequencies this thing has some secondary oscillators operating at and thus make a reasonably-sensitive "Alexa detector" that can find these devices very rapidly so they can be targeted for an immediate and solid impact from my shoe."

Waitwaitwait…an internet-connected hidden microphone that you install in your life yourself that can receive and store your voice (and everyone else’s within range) digitally, voiceprint and content, and can recognize it from several rooms away, and putting them in millions of sites around the country, on a non-secure platform, doubtless with government trapdoors built-in…what could possibly go wrong with that?

“Alexa, go f**k yourself. And your NSA minders with you.”

The only use I can see for this thing is Cloward-Piven:
get one, put it in a vacant building off-site, and flood it with canned-voice chatter of pseudo-terror cells, wait to see who comes calling, and stream the video comedy that ensues.

Link to the list of trigger words the feds are actively monitoring for, purely for script-writing purposes:

Trigger words for NSA/surveillance agencies

And a reminder, Google Translate will read out anything you type into the block, in any language you choose. In its voice, not yours.

Have fun, boys and girls.The last time I had this much fun was getting my niece a second Furby, and putting it near the first one behind some pictures. My brother hated the first one.

Caching: When Reality Bites People In The @$$

Internet Soopergenius takes on Reality, in this case Remus' suggestions this week regarding caches:     

   czechsix | October 31, 2017 at 19:48 |             

I’ve got to say that his idea of supply caches being a standard distance and heading from camps – is a terrible idea.

•     Aesop | October 31, 2017 at 20:42 |

  
  

  Show your work.
  Note he didn’t say to leave that information on a card on your front door when you split.
  •     czechsix | October 31, 2017 at 21:10 |

    
    

    The folks that you have to be concerned about when dealing with caching and hides aren’t the ones that’ll be reading a note on your front door.
    So standardizing cache locations and hides is a good thing? So if one is found, then two are found…then someone figures out that, hey – maybe when we find either a cache or a hide site, we can backtrack to the other element?
    Bad idea. At the least shift cardinal directions, distances, etc. Make a system of it that you’re familiar with, but for the love of Pete, don’t make things easy on pursuers.
    As to showing my work, that’s akin to telling folks to cache things a standard distance and direction from each site – ain’t gonna happen, lol.

Got it.
It's bad because you say so, Secret Squirrel.

Which assumes somebody would first have to find not one, but two caches, and then extrapolate the existence of all the others from that starting point. And then find them.

If someone finds two of your caches to begin with, you have bigger problems than trying not to "make things easy" for whoever's finding them.
Like being that big a stumblefuck idiot.

So rather than exhorting someone "Don't be an idiot", you figure to take down an entire post because (insert magical hand-waving here) you said the Underpants Gnome will find your stuff.

Thanks for sharing, and the clarification.
I've been reading Remus for years, and you for mere seconds, and I already sussed out which one of you makes more sense, and might know what they're talking about.

And not for nothing, but I'm guessing you never played "Battleship" a lot.

Because no one who had the merest grasp of real-world caching, let alone a kids' 10x10 X-Y grid, would ever try to extrapolate winning the entire game from one datum point.

I'll make it easy for you: If I bury a Toyota Corolla, there are 360 or so car-sized points in a single acre map to find it. Or, a problem 3 1/2 times harder for getting one single hit in a game of "Battleship", which starts with a statistical 1% chance.
If I bury the Corolla in a square mile, it's 640 times worse than that: one chance in 230,400. Or a 0.000434% chance of finding one buried car-sized object (let alone a trashcan-sized cache). If I make it an area three miles square, you have one chance in 2,073,600 of finding one buried car-sized object. In an area the size of a  township 6 miles square, you'd be looking at one chance in 8,294,400.

To find something the size of a car.

If I drop the cache to the more realistic size of a 55-gallon drum (a not unreasonable suggestion), your chances of finding one such cache in that area drop to 1 in 248,832,000.

To find just the first buried 55 gal. drum o' stuff.
For reference, the odds of winning the Powerball are currently
calculated to be 1 in 292,000,000.

And you'd have to find two such drums. And then (Aha!) cleverly deduce that all the other caches were on identical radials and distances.
(I'd go easy on you, and leave that problem in degrees, rather than mils, which come 6400 to the compass rose instead of only 360).

Which, at 3 miles' distance from a point at the center of that notional township-sized parcel, gives someone only about 44,800 possible burial sites for a drum-sized cache at the 3-mile mark. Yeah, good luck finding one, let alone two, even at the vastly reduced odds of 2/1000ths of a percent (squared, if you expect to find the second one).

So from a bare chance of finding two such caches being a combined
1 chance in 85,264,000,000,000,000, which is one million times more than the sum total of every human finger currently extant on the entire planet, you're telling me somebody should worry because someone might be able to tell which two fingers in the entire human race are doing the same thing at the same time, right now.

You'd have to leave either a note on the door, with a marked topo map, or else flag your cache sites with a 24-hour strobe light and neon arrow pointing at the site to give anyone a chance of finding the first one.

(Talk to some geocaching guys, and try telling them the target is located somewhere in the above 36 square miles, under the small tumbleweed:

Or here, it's next to the pine tree:

Do let us know what their answer to that poser is. I'm guessing the suggestion offered will be both impolite, anatomically impossible, and/or involve one or more of your relatives.)

The average person can walk about 3 mph. If they had a metal detector, they could cover a strip 5' wide and 6 miles long in two hours, and they could search the entire area in that notional township in only a year and a half, provided they never slept, took meal breaks, or stopped to pee. For eighteen months. A more likely rate of 9 hours a day six days a week means they'd need only 6+ years to search the entire area, once. Assuming no overlaps or mistakes. And that nobody hiding there all that time notices this, and interferes with them, or moves the caches.

The TL;DR version: no chance in hell anybody's finding anything even one time, unless someone is a total idiot, or random happenstance. Two is up there with catching unicorns. While riding the Easter Bunny.

I'm guessing math's not your game, Ike.
I know! Let's have a spelling contest!

Lessons for the day:

We read other people's websites because none of us are smarter than all of us, and other people's posts make us think.

We read some of the comments on other people's websites for the same reason people watch Dr. Phil or watched Sally Jesse Raphael or listened to Dr. Laura: so we realize we're not only not the stupidest jackass on the entire planet, but probably not even in the Top Ten Million People on that list.

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

 

If you listen to everyone on the internet, you can learn a lot. If you Krazy Glue your tongue to your cheek first. Having striven mightily to cling to documented reality while I do my ponderings of late, it's time to salute some Real American Geniusii. Who have mastered such minutiae as geometry, ballistics, the physics of sound and light, and criminal forensics with less documented expertise than even the c.v. of having stayed once at a Holiday Inn Express.

This post is dedicated to all the people who have told the internet that no way could someone lacking at minimum a weaponology engineering Ph.D. and SEAL team budwesier or SF tab, master a complex weapons system like the AR-15 sufficient to hit an area target measured in acres, using a weapon of which the fundamental principles were taught to people like McNamara's 100,000, and several tens of millions millions since then, with this pinnacle of Western instructional material:

 

And to everyone who assured unseen teeming hordes reading that grainy, bouncy, cellphone shakycam videos are useful tools of analysis for parsing out muzzle flashes from near full-auto firing strings 400m away whilst the source video camera with the resolution of a crackerjack magnifying glass and a focal length and lens size measured in single-digit millimeters is spun around like the head of an owl on crack, inside a brightly-lit concert arena troubled by some hundreds of incoming rounds, and pointed at a neon-draped glass walls hundreds of yards away, on the Vegas Strip, at night.

Or the ones who can listen to shitty monaural audio from same, their tiny low-quality microphones moving around at the speed of panic, and pick out individual weapon signatures, while listening to primary sounds and echoes from strings of fire, the sounds having proceeded outward, bounced off two 43-story glass walls, towards a multi-acre concrete lot, and picked up there by the still-open mikes of a concert sound system's amplifiers and speakers, helpfully aided by the sounds of people banging and handling their phones as they ducked, weaved, bobbed, prattled, soiled their pants, and bounced on the ground amidst the beaten zone of an active shooting machinegun range.

And the ones who, based on a few released photographs, have already analyzed all the data and information of a crime scene that will keep actual forensic analysts with years of training and decades of experience - dozens to hundreds of them, doubtless - busy and fully employed for weeks to months, starting with an exact tally of the number of cartridges of a multi-room suite gleaned from a glimpse at a fractional shred of that scene, at an unknown time, and without any idea when the photographs were taken, or whether any evidence at that point had been bagged, tagged, removed, or anything else.

 
 

Inspectors LeStrade, Clousseau, and Professor Fate: humble I, foremost among your adoring legions agape at the mysteries of Internet Science, offer you this ceremonial crown and throne

 

as a token of my personal esteem for the boundless metric fucktons of exquisitely refined 100% pure Derp you have shat out onto the internet, from the bounty of your wisdom, analytical legerdemain, and unfathomable reserves of perspicacity, through the incredible obstacle of your heads being firmly shoved well up the exact fount of your delivered Wisdom's orifice.

 

We poor, miserable, ignorant monkeys can but gawp in wonder and stare in undisguised envious awe at how you take subjects beyond the grasp of we mere mortals, and display for us the wonders of your mystical and awe-inspiring powers, in whipping all of science and technology into shape, and making it dance for our entertainment like a ferocious beast cowed in the circus Main Ring by the sheer force of your towering intellects.

 

Let it never be said of you eagles of education, you masters of mysteries, you lords of time, space, and all human knowledge, that you didn't have a hat!

And in further recognition of your awesome powers of cogitation, and your natural leadership and command of elucidation of the masses, you clearly need a scepter fully the equal of the crown and throne bestowed so recently unto you.

 

Which we grant you herewith, with all rights and benefits appertaining thereunto:

We appoint you all honorary Th.Ds: Doctors of Thinkology!

The choir will now sing your theme song,

and we'll retire to the faculty lounge for some punch and cookies.