Silicon Valley Redneck

Hm. The misreporting was worse than it seemed.

Details here.

The story that was making the rounds yesterday, wherein a purported journalist described in detail his experiences in visiting a gun shop and firing an AR-15, was obviously bogus in many respects.  Smell of sulfur?  Really?  And, while it's been a couple of decades since I fired one of those things, I'm quite certain that the recoil of an AR-15 won't bruise your shoulder no matter how wrongly you hold it.  Seriously.  The effective recoil is practically in Daisy BB gun territory.  His terrifying account was clearly fantasy.

Well, it turns out he was lying about pretty much every other aspect of his visit to the gun shop, too.

Flashback.  Early 1990s.  One of the columnists for the San Jose Mercury News told of his experience with a group of local shooters.  They took him somewhere out in the hills to shoot at a variety of targets, including balls of aluminum foil tossed in the air to be shot at with rifles.  When he asked where the bullets were ending up, the guys gave him a blank look.

On the BBS (this was the pre-Internet days) a couple of days later: an account of the same outing as told by one of the shooters.  Basically, everything after "some guys took me shooting last week" was a lie.  They had in fact taken him to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club, where there's a range staff, and they're very particular about safety; the shenanigans he described would definitely not have been tolerated there.

When contacted for an explanation of where this bizarre fantasy account had come from, he explained that he'd initially written it up just as it had happened... but the editors had made him change it.  Because the honest account didn't fit the paper's official perspective.

 

In other news, more young people now get their news from social media than from TV.  This, presumably, is meant to be a Bad Thing.  But, given that newspaper news has been wildly inaccurate (even when not outright dishonest) for decades, and TV news is even worse... maybe this is an improvement?  At least there isn't a cartel controlling the content, no matter how hard Facebook and Twitter may try.

In case there was any doubt

To any who were paying attention, it's been obvious since she was Mayor of SF back in the 80s that Dianne Feinstein is a Fascist.

And yet California elected her to the Senate, and, despite everything, she still keeps getting re-elected.

Well, now she's calling for censoring the Internet, to remove, among other things, all copies of The Anarchist Cookbook.

Double-take.

Yes, that Anarchist Cookbook.  The pile of crap so wildly inaccurate that it's commonly believed that the CIA had a hand in writing it, with the goal of encouraging anarchists to blow themselves up or poison themselves, or at least to waste their energies on super-weapons that just won't work.

Ayup.  Fascism and aggressively malignant ignorance go together.  Not only does she not realize that the book in question is less than useless to terrorists, but she completely fails to comprehend that the Internet is international, and large parts of it are completely outside U.S. jurisdiction.

Unless she's proposing to bomb servers where offending content is hosted... or create a Great Firewall of our own?

Permissive action links

Once again, some team of super-geniuses has come up with a grand plan for smart guns, while having no idea of how guns work and why.

The latest, it seems, it that guns shall have embedded electronics that enable firing only if they receive a correctly-coded authorization signal via WiFi.

The code would have to match the uses for which the gun is authorized: personal defense, hunting, Secret Service only, and so on.

This is meant to prevent mass shootings or some such.

How many ways can this go wrong?  I mean, apart from dead batteries, and the possibility that someone who's actually seen the innards of a gun will figure out how to bypass the whole electronic mess?

Well, let's take hunting, for example.  How's the WiFi coverage for the entire state of Montana?

Or personal defense.  Applies at home, right?  So your home has to have the WiFi beacon to authorize your gun to fire there.

So what's to keep someone from sniffing the authorization packets for his home-defense gun, and broadcasting a counterfeit edition from his cellphone's WiFi?  Or just carrying his home beacon with him?

Or consider a special secure only-government-guns-work-here zone.  What's to keep someone from jamming the beacon, so none of the authorized guns work anymore, strapping on a brace of 1875-vintage revolvers and a couple of bandoleers of .45LC, and going on a shooting spree?

The whole thing makes so much negative sense... well, this is what happens when Smart People inhabit a total bubble and believe that everything they need to know is contained within that bubble.

I'm reminded of my days at a small business-software company, and the copy-protection schemes we came up with.  Many of them would have worked most excellently, if only we'd been able to install special hardware on all the unauthorized computers.

Cluemeter reading: negative.

Hey, look!  You can shut down a major transportation hub just by choosing a silly name for your smartphone's WiFi hot spot!

And some of the comments on the story... oy.  These bozos should go work for the Boston PD, motto "Bombs are covered in blinky lights, therefore anything with blinky lights on it is a bomb."

And the Penguin's henchmen always wore thug uniforms that said "HENCHMAN" on them, so....

Afterthought: Maybe I should change the SSID on my phone's hotspot from "NSA HONEYPOT #360971" to "Ebola patient tracker CA6892" or something.

Paging René Magritte

From a tale of school-admin idiocy:

The school district says it has a very strict policy forbidding students from wearing any clothing that has a weapon on it….

Has a weapon on it?  We're not talking mini-revolver belt buckle, here.  The article of clothing in question was a T-shirt with a picture of a weapon on it.

If the school administrators can't tell the difference between a picture of a thing and the thing itself, maybe we should give them a picture of a school to administer and get some new administrators.

(Via Insty.)

WTF hypothetical of the day

Spotted here:

"What if I'm out walking my dog and someone attacks me because she's right here producing a date rape drug," questioned neighbor Karen Cox. "I don't feel safe anymore."

What is this I don't even...?

Quick, send that neighbor to the legislature.  She makes as much sense as the average politician, i.e., less than none.

Now, here's an exercise in irrelevance

Mr. Justice Stevens proposes to insert a few words into the Second Amendment, thus:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

Now, this goes to the heart of the collective-rights interpretation of the Second Amendment... and the reason this interpretation is absurd in the first place.

According to the Collectivists, the Second Amendment is only meant to prevent the Federal Government from disarming the various State militias.  But, since the State militia powers were already spelled out in the body of the constitution, this makes no sense, unless one believes that those powers might only apply to some sort of unarmed militia, whatever that might be*.

So: were we to make the proposed change, what, exactly, would the New! Improved! Second Amendment mean?

1. The Federal Government is forbidden to disarm itself?
2. Soldiers on active duty are allowed to carry weapons?

OK, so interpretation (2) is already being violated.  So this totally makes sense, right?  The whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to prevent military bases becoming victim-disarmament zones?

 

And here's a happy thought:

Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.

For any currently fashionable value of "this area", right?

 

Considering some of the logic that comes out of the courts, maybe we should pick judges at random out of phone books.  Hey, if we have that Constitutional Convention, there's an amendment I'd like to suggest**!

 

* I suppose I shouldn't laugh; considering some of the amazing feats of sophistry demonstrated by the Court over the past couple of centuries, "unarmed militia" might not be much of a stretch.

** Along with picking legislators the same way.  And going back to picking juries that way, as opposed to carefully screening them.

Yeesh!

So there's this story about how some chemistry demonstration called "The Rainbow Experiment" (which is a demonstration, not a proper experiment), involving little dishes of methanol mixed with various salts to produce pretty-colored flames, sometimes goes wrong and results in students getting seriously burned.

WTF?  Really, the amount of methanol involved, in a few little open dishes, should have basically zero potential for injuring anyone more'n a few inches away.

So I click through to the source, and watch the first bit of the vid, and...

I.  D.  Ten.  T.

Seems one of the flames was getting a mite puny, so the teacher went to add a bit more methanol.  Pouring it on.  Direct from the.  Gallon.  Jug.

Hello?  Pouring a flammable substance directly from a large open container onto an open flame?  Where was that teacher when the brains were being handed out?

(Yeah, I've done some dumb stuff with flammables in my time, but even I'm not that dumb.)

Upper-class twit of the year: no contest!

This here photo:


proves beyond any possible doubt that Obama is The One.

Except: upper-class twit?  The infamous state-funeral selfie shows President Zaphod Hussein Некультурный Beeblebrox to be a no-class twit.

And, to have two sophistercated Euro-peon Prime Ministers participating in the clowning-around?  Our modern ruling class doesn't even bother keeping up appearances.  I don't think they have any conception of appropriate behavior.

Hey, guys?  There's a reason we have a Vice-President.  Wearing a dark suit and acting respectfully somber at state funerals is his job.  (Oh, wait.  It's Biden.  never mind.)

Afterthought: just in case anyone failed to match the title with the pose, here's the official YouTube vid.

WTF??????

I'm sorry, perhaps the title is unclear.  Allow me to restate it, in the largest available font:

WTF??????

I refer, of course, to just about everything going on these days this item in the WaPo, and in particular to the test mentioned, whereto a PDF is linked from the article (for those too lazy to find the link, it's here).

Go on.  Look over that test.  If your reaction is anything other than

WTF??????

I can only surmise that you hold an advanced degree in a subject that doesn't involve math in any way*.

Apparently, just for the purpose of the early-grades Core Curriculum, there's been a proliferation of friendly-non-mathy-sounding terms, such as "number sentence" and "subtraction story."  Oh, and "Use cubes to solve**."

I can see, offhand, just three problems with such terminology:

1. They're nonstandard, and will be of no use later on.
2. It's not at all clear what these terms are supposed to mean.
3. They add unnecessary complexity to the problem at hand.

I can see how these might be considered advantages in some regards.

For example, it greatly reduces the advantage of choosing one's parents to include STEM types, as no one with a STEM background will be able to make heads or tails of the new terminology.  This makes it all fairer, right?

Also, as with nonstandard file formats, it promotes vendor lock-in.  Which is good, right?  Like standardizing on Microsoft Word, or nonportable Bronze-Silver-Gold health plans?

Not clear, from the information presented, how much of this is really due to Common Core per se, and how much is test-and-curriculum-vendor interpretation... but that test and the teaching materials which must be behind it were clearly created by a team of imbeciles.

 

* Nor communication.  Nor any skills amenable to objective evaluation.

** Actually, I can think of a couple of things that could mean, in context.  First, it could mean "Use little cubical tokens to represent the items in the problem," and, second, it could mean "Roll the dice to choose an answer."

Getting it even more wronger

Via Insty: Matt Yglesias proposes fixing middle-class retirement savings.

By making the middle class pay more into Social Security.  Or forcibly collectivizing retirement savings into government-run pension plans.  With special extra mandatory savings.

(Wait, hasn't that idea been bouncing around Sacramento lately?  Force most private-sector workers to pay into CALPERS, ostensibly so their retirement will be taken care of, but mainly as a temporary bailout for the underfunded government pension plan?)

Here's the thing: the past couple of decades, this country has had a severe case of malinvestment.  And: it isn't the little guys, with their own money, doing it.  Large-scale malinvestment happens when you have a small number of fund managers deciding how to invest vast amounts of other people's wealth, with an incentive system that separates risk from reward.  (See also: CALPERS investing in the big Sand Hill Road venture-capital firms.  And losing.  Further: politically-motivated investment decisions based on social engineering rather than sound money management.)

Officially abolishing private investment decisions and handing everything over to the same damn idiots who brought us the dot-com bubble, the subprime-mortgage bubble, the insolvent state pension funds, and negative real returns on Treasury bills... yeah, that's great public policy.

And then there's this: I haven't been able to save anything toward my retirement lately - even if there were any positive-return investments available to non-insiders - because I don't have the money available.  If the Feds weren't "borrowing" (at a negative real interest rate) sixteen-point-mumble percent of every damn dollar I earn, I'd have cash available for investing in stocks, building up my own business, or otherwise making preparations for a better future. 

And I'd be making my own decisions, with my own little bit of money.  If I screw up my retirement planning, it affects me and a few other people.  If the central planners screw up....

Getting it exactly backward

Here's this, from MoDo:

The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do.

Bzzt!  No, his job is to take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

Making domestic policy is exactly nowhere in the President's job description.  To the extent that the making of domestic policy at the national level is authorized at all, that job is assigned to Congress.

The President is responsible for carrying out the policies made by Congress.  That's what "executive" means.

Presenting the temporary chief exec with a kingly crown both doesn't work and is extremely dangerous.

Yeah, this makes lots of sense.

Among the pre-written Demands For Government Action is a perennial favorite: we should require loaded-chamber indicators on all guns!

Um.

Do the people who keep proposing this have any clue at all what they're talking about*?

A loaded-chamber indicator is a subtle little thing, intended to provide a properly-trained user with reassurance that the weapon is indeed ready to go bang when needed.

It's not something that shouts out to the unaware, "DANGER!  This gun is loaded!**"  (Imagine a revolver, with six such voices calling out simultaneously.  Or asynchronously.)

If you've had appropriate training, and are familiar with the particular weapon, the loaded-chamber indicator is useful, in specific circumstances... but it does not in any way prevent negligent discharges.

If you aren't proficient with the weapon in question, the loaded-chamber indicator is of no use whatsoever.

And... this is now being pushed in response to intentional misuse of a weapon.  ("If only he'd known it was loaded!  Maybe then he wouldn't have kept on pointing it at people, one after another, and pulling the trigger!")

* No.

** Though, if they did work like that, it could alert bystanders, after the fashion of belling the cat.  It would also make life more interesting for cops, what with their guns constantly shouting out a warning to evildoers.

The real trickle-down economics

Spotted on Yahoo:

The Federal Reserve needs to do more to keep money flowing through the economy because the recovery hasn't been forceful enough, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, a known backer of additional easing, indicated Monday.

Yeah.

Dude, the high-level capital markets are saturated.  Governments and large financial institutions are already borrowing at negative real interest rates.  Banks don't want more money - or at least they don't want it enough to pay more than a pathetic fraction of a percent interest on deposits.

In aeronautics, this is called a stall, and continuing to haul back on the stick is called pilot error.

In politics, allowing people to keep more of their earnings in the hope that they'll spend it on things they want is sneeringly called "trickle-down economics."

What then shall we call a policy of shovelling money into governments and banks, in the hope that it will somehow end up on Main Street?  And what shall we call it when its only results are to drive up our collective debt and drive down the value of our retirement savings, and its proponents insist that the only possible course of action is more of the same?

Incompitude

A small-businessman of my acquaintance (no, not me) recently spent a couple of days on the phone with sundry representatives of a bank which, on advice of my parrot, I will not name, but refer to only as "Hell's Cargo."

SB has personal checking and credit-card accounts, and business checking and credit-card accounts, with HC.

The adventure began when he attempted to use HC's on-line banking system to transfer funds from business checking to business credit card.  (Apparently the business credit card is more of a debit card, or a prepaid credit card, or some such deal.  My own business credit card is a real credit card, but then I'm not dealing with Hell's Cargo.)

He set things up, and clicked the magic button.  The specified funds promptly evaporated from business checking, but, a few minutes later, had not materialized in business credit card.

Well, oops.  He'd selected the wrong destination, and moved the funds to his personal credit card account instead.  Except... that account hadn't been credited yet, either.

And so, SB called HC, and found himself conversing with an array of HC Customer Service Representatives.  As I understand it, the multi-day conversation went something like this:

SB: Hi.  I accidentally transferred some funds from my business checking account to my personal credit card account, and I need to get the money into my business credit card account so I can place an order before the noon cutoff.

CSR1: I can't do that.  The money isn't in your personal credit card account yet.

SB: Yes, I was wondering about that too.

CSR1: It will take one to three days for the transaction to post.

SB: But the money left my checking account instantly.

CSR1: And it will take one to three days to arrive at your credit card account.

SB: How's that?

CSR2: Sir, the funds were promptly loaded into an armored car in Wells, Maine.

CSR3: And are en route to your credit card account in Mitchell, South Dakota.

CSR1: When the armored car arrives and the funds are verified, your account will be credited.

SB: I'm on a deadline here.  Can we just change the destination from personal credit card to business credit card?

CSR4: It will take one to three days to arrive at your credit card account.

SB: Can we cancel the transfer and start over?

CSR5: Sir, the funds are already on the armored car.

CSR4: Your personal credit card account will be credited in one to three days.

CSR1: After which, we can reverse the transfer.

CSR3: And the funds will be returned to your checking account in one to three days.

CSR2: After which, you can transfer the funds to your business credit card account.

CSR6: Which will take one to three days.

All of which is just great for a small business.  Hey, the company's entire supply of working capital is going for a ride on the Gordian roller-coaster, so SB might as well just take the rest of the week off, right?

And I have to wonder how HC gets away with helping itself to use of its customers' money during the 1-3 days it takes to process an intra-bank transfer.  (No, I don't really wonder.  It's called "regulatory capture.")

Doonesbury logic

1. All these years we haven't checked voter IDs nor scrutinized registration lists, we haven't seen any voter fraud!
2. Therefore, there's never been any!!
3. Therefore, any attempt to detect or prevent voter fraud can only be RAAAACIST!!!

That does sum up this week's theme, right?

Let's hear it for the Supreme Court!

Yes, our wonderful SCOTUS has ruled that you - yes, you, Mr. or Ms. Unemployed and Broke American - can be compelled to pay hundreds of dollars a month to Big Finance for the privilege of breathing.  And!  While you can't legally be penalized for non-compliance, you can be taxed for non-compliance.  Even if you have no income.  How this doesn't fall under the "capitation or other direct tax" clause escapes me, but apparently it's allowed by the general taxation power (which is only to be found in the Special Edition of the E Plebnista*, along with the general police power and the President's power to declare war).

* Which is kept locked away in an ornate trunk, safe from the prying eyes of the unworthy.

A grand case of the stupids

This story, much linked of late, reports that on yet another underperforming "green jobs" program:

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

But wait!

Suppose it actually did what it says on the label: "created or saved" 65,000 jobs.

It would still be costing $594,000 per job "created or saved."  And for how long would those jobs exist?  Just until the subsidy ran out?  Two years?  Six months?

Yeah, yeah: it's not a direct subsidy, just a loan guarantee that puts the taxpayers on the hook in the event that these ventures fail.  How likely is that?  Or is that even considered a legitimate question?

 

The stupidity-enrichment centrifuges must be working overtime

Following links from TSM this morning, I arrived at this tale of fire extinguishers, and the banishment thereof from English apartment buildings (excuse me, blocks of flats).

Notable quotables:

Dorset Fire and Rescue defended the move, saying: 'Obviously, in some cases, an extinguisher could come in useful but, with new building regulations, every escape route should be completely fireproof.'

Yup.  Right up until someone actually moves into the building and piles a bunch of excess cardboard under the stairs.  Or the landlord covers up damaged carpet with incompletely-fireproof throw rugs.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents backed their removal because different extinguishers should be used on different types of fire.

Riiiight.  And those cheap 1A; 10B:C extinguishers I keep scattered around my house would be totally inappropriate for use on a flaming block of magnesium (or, for that matter, uranium), for which you'd want a D extinguisher.  For anything you're likely to encounter in a residential setting, though, the basic multi-purpose extinguishers are just fine.

Your politicians at work!

California may not have a budget, but that could never stop our esteemed state legislature from pursuing higher priorities.  Like, say, mandating noisier cars.

Yup.  Makes lotsa sense.

Oh, and the beneficiaries of this wouldn't so much be the 116,000 blind people... more the vast number of idiots who can see, but who don't bother looking where they're going before wandering in front of cars.

If we're intent on creating Nerfworld, why not just mandate Nerf cars?