Saturday, January 14, 2017

Ice out there off the ground, but the streets are just wet

Which is a wonderful thing.  At this point, I'm still staying in to work on the data set.










































Maybe, just maybe, this will help put a stop to the "SWAT is the answer

to every question!" crap.
An Indiana court has overturned a man's felony drug convictions because of a SWAT team's “unreasonable” search that endangered an infant, a decision that highlights growing concerns about the militarization of routine police work. 

The SWAT team executed a “military-style assault” and detonated a flash-bank grenade in close proximity to a 9-month-old after a confidential informant told detectives that he had seen marijuana, cocaine and a firearm in the home, according to the Indiana Court of Appeals' enumeration of the facts of the case.

Throw in how they 'announced' themselves:
One second after officers knocked on the door of the house and announced themselves, they smashed the door in with a battering ram, according to the court. Almost immediately, an officer dropped a flash-bang grenade inside the doorway.

When officers entered, they found a 9-month-old baby in a playpen “very close to the door” where the grenade had gone off, court records state.

And more reason to require that, if not every officer, then every officer on such a raid have a camera:
Citing video evidence from the helmet camera of the officer who deployed the flash-bang grenade, the court found that the officer did not adequately check for the presence of infants or other vulnerable individuals in the room who posed no threat to the officers.



Media beware, your credibility is all you have

If they realize that, far too many don't seem to care.


You can hear the brains exploding.


Meanwhile, up in Canada,
The new president of the Calgary Police Association, Les Kaminski — who has spoken out against naming officers charged criminally — potentially faces criminal charges himself, CBC News has learned.

Kaminski is under investigation over allegations of perjury, uttering false documents, obstruction of justice, assault causing bodily harm and bringing false charges.
And just what(among other things) did he do?
During a 2008 traffic stop, Kaminski and other officers arrested Arkinstall. They believed at the time — though it was not true — that Arkinstall was under court-ordered conditions not to leave the province of British Columbia or consume alcohol.

Initially, Arkinstall refused to get out of the vehicle he had been travelling in. Once he did, he opened the door and put his arms up.

"Kaminski grabbed the accused by the arms and threw him like a rag-doll, face first, on to the hood of the Tahoe," said Semenuk in his decision.

"While pulling his arms forcefully behind his back to handcuff him, the accused complained about a shoulder injury and that he was in pain. Kaminski responded by striking the accused forcefully with the baton twice on the back of his neck."
Just bloody wonderful.
"There's a known anti-police sentiment. There's people that want to see us fail for whatever reason," said Kaminski.
Well, Kaminski, asshats like you aren't exactly helping the situation, are you?


A: Lewis took his integrity, wiped his ass with it and then flushed it years ago(see 'Fake accusations, yelling 'Racism!' to try to silence people, etc.).
B: So his whining about Trump not being a legitimate President is just more bullshit.
C: Like all the other leftists screaming "Russians!", he's doing that to distract from the nasty things that came out on the Democrats; that's far easier than dealing with what his clowns actually said and did.


Now this is downright interesting




It’s not that I have an issue, per se, with debates on the margins of a core issue: if you want to argue allowing teachers to carry firearms in schools risks a gun carelessly carried in a purse ending up in the hands of a student, I think we can have that debate. I can even think of arguments about guns in airport terminals that I might not agree with, but that wouldn’t bore me to death. But people like Daniel Ruth aren’t really interested in making actual arguments on the margins, or even rearguing the core debate with fresh arguments. They are only interested in public expressions of their anxiety at having lost.


The Hearing Protection Act has been introduced.  And the usual suspects are crapping their pants, as expected.

The same types who want ranges closed because noise, also don't want you to have any way to quiet your shooting a bit.

The level of stupid...

"I'll grab this puff adder and we'll get some pictures!"

Bleep.  You'd think even a city dweller in South Africa would know better.

Friday, January 13, 2017

If the weather continues to produce little-to-no ice, I will be very happy

'Course, some of the data makes me happy too.









































And this is where the ominous music starts...

As intimidating as they might sound, vampire bats aren’t usually in the business of bothering humans for their blood. In fact, the hairy-legged vampire bat species was thought to feed almost exclusively on birds.

But researchers have discovered that hairy-legged vampire bats in north-east Brazil have managed to kick things up a notch - they’ve been caught feeding on humans by night, and that’s something no one even thought was possible.

"We were quite surprised," Enrico Bernard from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil told New Scientist.

"This species isn’t adapted to feed on the blood of mammals."
Surprise!




These people really are insane

Just a week before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the star of upcoming ABC miniseries of When We Rise, Rosie O’Donnell, has revealed a new plan to stop him: martial law.

On Wednesday, Trump’s archenemy O’Donnell urged the President Obama to implement a military government that would suspend all laws in the United States until Trump is cleared from any allegations of involvement with the Russian hacking scandal.
I rather think that any command-level officer who accepted such an order could look forward to being court-martialed and- at the least- thrown out of the service.

Come ON, people, how many of you are stupid enough to actually think this is a good idea?   Any who do, go get your meds checked, because they ain't working.


Few days ago hit the range

and gave that rear rest bag a try.  Worked nicely.  After a few shots and the beans packing a bit I did find that it needed more filling, but nothing that couldn't be worked around for the day.


"Laws are for the peasants to obey, not us."

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser, is refusing to allow emails from one of his private accounts to be made public, even though a federal court has ordered him to do so.
Makes you wonder just what he's worried about hiding, does it not?


Remember when leftists actually cared about freedom of speech and such?

Me neither.

Speaking of,
A left-wing group that is planning a massive protest on Inauguration Day openly admitted during a press conference Thursday that their intention is to prevent the peaceful transition of power. The group, #DisruptJ20, held the press conference to proudly announce their plans to obstruct the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20.
Response:



Thursday, January 12, 2017

Oh yeah, whatever could go wrong here?

Mice that kill at the flip of a switch may reveal how hunting behavior evolved hundreds of millions of years ago.

The mice became aggressive predators when two sets of neurons in the amygdala were activated with laser light, a team reported Thursday in the journal Cell.
Geez, guys, don't let any get out; the little bastards are enough of a problem now.


A: Obama finally found some illegal immigrants he doesn't want here.  Of course, it's because they're fleeing communism and like the idea of freedom.
B: There was never a problem getting Cuba to agree to take back people who had arrived in the U.S.; the problem was- is- the Cuban government keeps either imprisoning or killing them.
C: This miserable bastard keeps finding more ways to screw people before he leaves.


"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if many Democrats and other countries all cried out in fear at once."

Without going to ridicule or bad language, the only comment I can make is

European history?  Ever heard of it?  ANY of it?

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Why "This came from the USGS(or IRS, or FBI)!"

doesn't mean squat anymore.
Officials with the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have yet to tell Congress they’ve punished a pair of scientists behind nearly two decades of data manipulation at a federal lab or what’s been done to prevent more of it, according to a key congressman investigating the scandal.
...
Gohmert’s panel has investigated the issue since June 2016, but hasn’t uncovered many answers. The USGS gave the subcommittee a batch of documents, but many were completely redacted, making them useless.

Once again: an awful lot of social workers

need to be hanged.
From the you-can't-make-up-this-crap file, county officials are paying Lynberg & Watkins, a private Southern California law firm specializing in defending cops in excessive force lawsuits, untold sums to claim the social workers couldn't have "clearly" known that dishonesty wasn't acceptable in court and, as a back up, even if they did know, they should enjoy immunity for their misdeeds because they were government employees. 

Let's have an excerpt from the arguments:
Trott: How in the world could a person in the shoes of your clients possibly believe that it was appropriate to use perjury and false evidence in order to impair somebody's liberty interest in the care, custody and control of that person's children? How could they possibly not be on notice that you can't do this?
Lin: I understand.
Trott: How could that possibly be?
Lin: I understand the argument that it seems to be common sense in our ethical, moral . . .
Trott: It's more than common sense. It's statutes that prohibit perjury and submission of false evidence in court cases.
Lin: State statutes.
And on.  And on.  You really need to read it all for the full, shitty flavor of what these bastards did.  And just what kind of garbage the lawyers are trying in the name of helping their clients get away with it.

Also: Why so many people loathe, despise, and flat-out hate lawyers: see Lin above.

For some reason, none of these things surprises me;

Not what the murderer is, not that the administration won't talk about it, not that most of the media won't touch it.
The Ft. Lauderdale Airport shooter is a Muslim convert who years before joining the U.S. Army took on an Islamic name (Aashiq Hammad), downloaded terrorist propaganda and recorded Islamic religious music online, according to public records dug up by the investigative news site of an award-winning, California journalist. This is pertinent information that the Obama administration apparently wants to keep quiet, bringing up memories of the Benghazi cover up, in which the president and his cohorts knowingly lied to conceal that Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Special Mission in Libya.
Hey, lying is what they do best.


As a presidential candidate, Obama made clear that, along with "dumb wars," he firmly opposed unauthorized wars. That December, in a candidate survey on executive power conducted by reporter Charlie Savage, Sen. Obama stated plainly: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
So, was he lying about what he thought then, or is it different when he does it?

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

The progressive letting it all hang out

The title is "I love America, it's Americans I hate".  Give you any clue to what's to come?
...The time for civil discourse and debate is over, they say; the only course left now is resistance. A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.
From someone who probably screamed 'Insurrectionist!' or something similar when someone pointed out the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment.

And just how much time do you think they'll spend at the range learning to use the guns they despise?  Assuming they actually buy them.

Like a lot of people, I'm still trying to figure out what policy to adopt, and what marginal role I can play, in the incoming dystopia. My official policy toward a Trump administration is straightforward enough (even if implementing it won't be): Defy, paralyze, and undermine it in any way I can. What's going to be more complicated is formulating some coherent attitude toward the 62 million of my fellow Americans who elected that administration. How to reconcile my convictions with the actual human beings — family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors — who voted for this man?
From one of the people passing around that poster that 'Saying you'll work against the President is TREASON!' 
Of course, that was when a Democrat was President.

A vote cast for Trump is kind of like a murder; there may be context to consider — a disadvantaged background, extenuating circumstances, understandable motives — but the choice itself is binary and final, irrevocable. There's a case to be made that it's indefensible; that his supporters have forfeited any right to be respected or taken seriously.
'Taken seriously' is the least of his contempt.
The conservatives of the heartland have lashed back against the coastal elites' condescending, classist prejudices by defiantly confirming them: that they're pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases, easy dupes for any demagogue who promises to bring back the factories and keep the brown people down. 

Ignorance and bigotry are actually the best possible motives for having voted for Trump — they are at least honest, if not honorable. But I don't believe all Trump voters are ignorant, or bigoted; most of them are just evil — evil being defined not as anything so glamorous as beheading journalists or gunning down grade schoolers, but simply as not much caring about other people's suffering.
And there's the final: if you voted for Trump, you're EVIL.  And you can do anything to fight Evil, right?

Toward the end he tries to- somewhat- soften this, but I don't really buy it; he'll give some tolerance to the two people he knows(that he knows of) who voted for Trump, but that's probably it.  After all, he knows what's Right and Wrong, and everyone who cast a wrong vote is WRONG, and must be made to suffer for it.

Asshole would probably have been a fine commissar back in the Soviet Union, when he'd be able to kill people guilty of wrongthink and be praised for it.

Yes, the link is to Insty.  If you want to read the whole thing, he's got the link.

Hope! and Change!! through Socialism!!!

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced Sunday that he has decided to raise the monthly minimum wage by 50 percent from 27,092 bolivares to 40,638 bolivares, the latter amount equivalent to about $60 at the official exchange rate of 678 bolivares per US dollar.
"Our money only has value as low-quality toilet paper, BUT YOU'LL BE GETTING MORE OF IT!"

Somehow, I don't think this is going to work.


I hope this pans out.
Researchers at King's College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine – the mineralised material under the enamel.

Teeth already have the capability of regenerating dentine if the pulp inside the tooth becomes exposed through a trauma or infection, but can only naturally make a very thin layer, and not enough to fill the deep cavities caused by tooth decay.

But Tideglusib switches off an enzyme called GSK-3 which prevents dentine from carrying on forming. 

Scientists showed it is possible to soak a small biodegradable sponge with the drug and insert it into a cavity, where it triggers the growth of dentine and repairs the damage within six weeks.

Back in the 70's there was a song: Freeze a Yankee

Nobody will have to do a thing, they're doing it to themselves.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York is expected to confirm on Monday that the state has reached an agreement to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which sits less than 30 miles north of New York City, by April 2021, state officials said.
You know what they have to replace it?  Nothing.  Gov. Howler is counting on unicorn farts and buying electricity from Canada.  As the guy at Reason says
So your plan is to shut down an American energy plant of high repute and replace its output with hydroelectric power from Canada? That’s exactly the opposite of promoting domestic energy independence. And the idea that it won’t affect utility rates is a pipe dream as well. New Yorkers already pay the highest utility rates in the country outside of Hawaii and they’re only going to go further up because of this.

I'm sure the usual screamers are trumpeting their victory over Radiation.  Because they're stupid.  Too bad the plant can't be moved to supply people not in NY effingCity.  The people who didn't want Gov. Howler controlling their lives.

Thought I remembered something, and I found it; piece from last year on the idiots in that region apparently preferring freezing in the dark to nasty pipelines and such.


Short version: The 'social justice' types are eating each other.  And not in a fun way.

Monday, January 09, 2017

Short version: "How dare you actually report news

that we don't approve of!"


Every clown involved in this ought to have to pay the damages out of their own pockets.
Not to mention needing to be fired.
Did the Parma Police Department laugh off the joke? Of course not. This is America. In America, we're civilized. We know that the purpose of power is to punish people who mock us, especially if we are law enforcement officials.

No, the Parma PD arrested Novak, had him charged with the felony of "disrupting public services", and forced him to go to trial, where he was promptly acquitted by a jury that did not understand that in America we value deference to armed people with badges more than we value due process or freedom of expression.





Sunday, January 08, 2017

The EUnuchs are unhappy about it;

the Czechs don't give a crap.
Now the country's interior ministry is pushing a constitutional change that would let citizens use guns against terrorists. Proponents say this could save lives if an attack occurs and police are delayed or unable to make their way to the scene. To become law, Parliament must approve the proposal; they'll vote in the coming months.

The Czech Republic already has some of the most lenient gun policies in Europe. It's home to about 800,000 registered firearms and 300,000 people with gun licenses. Obtaining a weapon is relatively easy: Residents must be 21, pass a gun knowledge check and have no criminal record. By law, Czechs can use their weapons to protect their property or when in danger, although they need to prove they faced a real threat.
Which makes them like here: you have to demonstrate real fear for your life to use lethal force. 

After months of contentious negotiations, the EU passed a compromise last month; the Council of Ministers will confirm the measure this spring. All member states will have 15 months to comply with the new gun restrictions.
List of GFW wishes follows.

Anyone else get the feeling that, much like some countries saying "Screw you" and building fences, the EUnuchs are going to have problems enforcing this in some places?

As has been noted before, a small spring

under a little tension can somehow violate the rules of physics and vanish.

And, sometimes, reappear in "How the FUCK did it get there?" places.

This does not include the screw and spring(separate incidents) that rolled off the table and vanished.  As in "Move everything and go over the entire room with magnet and light and THEY'RE FREAKING GONE!" vanished, never to reappear.

Be it noted that reassembling a Stevens Favorite

can be a first-class PITA. 

Helping work on one, the later version has a spring-loaded plunger in the ejector; you have to compress it a bit to get the block pivot screw in, and the angles are not friendly.  But the sucker works.