...by claiming that a last stand against Biden ought to be at the Alamo. My thought, given Biden's well-known difficulties climbing the steps on and off Air Force One and elsewhere, is that it ought to be a place with steps. It would be impenetrable by the Biden team.
That, or there ought to be a voice activated door that Biden can open by voicing a coherent sentence.
Mexican authorities are rejoicing over a court decision that claims that the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act" does not apply to guns which end up in foreign nations. Now I'm not an expert on the PLCAA, but it does strike me that since all gun manufacturers must sell through FFL holders, regulated by the BATFE, responsibility for preventing those guns from getting into Mexico lies primarily with...
the federal government of the United States. It is also unclear what gun makers can do, given that they really have no control over the training and dispositions of gun dealers, nor is it clear that gun dealers can spot someone who intends to resell the gun. They could remove "scary looking guns" from their catalogs, but those are some of the most popular for purchase by U.S. buyers who have no intention of letting them leave the country.
And not surprisingly, all three judges are Democratic appointees. I'm looking for this one to be overturned on appeal and either an en banc review, or in the Supreme Court. If you doubt that it matters who you vote for, read the decision. It's appalling, right down to spelling errors.
Apparently the Russian legislature, the Duma (say it in Yiddish, it fits), is considering a law to confiscate the property of anyone who discredits the Russian military. Beyond the obvious point that the Ukrainian army might be cheerfully saying "Molon Labe" to the Russians, it strikes me that if you want to confiscate the property of someone who's discredited the Russian military or spread false information about it, I'd start with Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov, Pravda-Moscow, Izvestia, and of course the entire general staff of the Russian Army.
OK, yes, that's probably not how such a law would be interpreted or enforced, but the fact remains that if you want someone who's discredited the Russian military, there are plenty of guilty parties now collecting paychecks from the Russian government. Have at it.
Apparently the big hitch for a contract extension for Michigan concussion-ball coach Jim Harbaugh is that he wants immunity from issues related to NCAA investigations, of which there are currently two. One is minor--a meal provided to a recruit in violation of rules--and the other is the sign-stealing issue, which I see as major.
Given that Michigan has been investigated for the recruiting violations before, and Harbaugh was not punished for that, I'm guessing that this is an inadvertent confession by Harbaugh that yes, he was in the thick of it for sign stealing. At any rate, I can't bring myself to believe that he and his defensive coordinator didn't notice that the defense was in the right place an incredible portion of the time, quite a bit higher than when he was watching film as a QB for the Wolverines, as a QB for the Bears, Ravens, Colts, and Chargers, and as a coach for the Raiders, U. of San Diego, Stanford, the 49ers, and then back again at Michigan. You don't get to the top of the NFL and the top of the college game by missing these things when watching film, to put it mildly.
What's the significance? Well, in his first six years at Michigan, he was 49-23 (68% wins), and in the past three years, the Wolverines are 37-3 (92.5% wins). Two of the three losses were in bowl games, where of course the season for the opponent would be complete before Connor Stalions could visit.
It's not perfect proof, but I think the data are suggesting very strongly that without the sign stealing, the Wolverines would have kept up their pattern of losing to Ohio State and even Michigan State, and in their bowl games. In other words, it's a pretty big deal.
In Chicago, scores of Teslas are left cold and inoperable because, surprise surprise, Arrhenius acceleration is a law of chemistry and physics, and it takes a lot longer to charge, and you get a lot less useful range, when it's cold out. Bonus, for those who are concerned about the environment, is that it takes a lot more energy to charge the battery because so much of the energy is used to keep the battery warm while charging. So more or less, the efficiency of your Tesla goes down by half to three quarters when it's 20 below.
In contrast, my real cars, powered by readily available gasoline, start at 20 below with no problem (even the 1997 GMC with 270,000 miles), and they only lose about 20% of their mileage at that temperature. Who would have thought that a 26 year old 5.7 liter (350 CID) V-8 would be the ecologically sound alternative to a Tesla?
Besides me, of course. And other people who can actually do math and science.
The President of the NCAA is saying that nobody can say that the University of Michigan didn't earn their "national championship" fair and square. OK, let's give it a try:
The cheating Michigan Wolverines didn't win their championship fair and square, since in the past couple of years, they've been caught with recruiting violations and stealing signs from their opponents in violation of NCAA rules.
One would figure that the president of the NCAA would have enough self-awareness to realize that a lot of people would assume that a program subject to multiple rules investigations might not have won fair and square, but apparently not. So I think we can dispense with the notion that the NCAA is about "student"-athletes who might know how to think.
But that said, college football is dying to me in many ways. Is this a sport, or a competition to see who can have the most tattoos? Is this an amateur sport, or are championships going to be determined by the amount to which corporations and alumni sponsor their team's athletes? It's never been pure as the driven snow--the 1987 MSU Spartans that I cheered on to the Rose Bowl had a lot of players on the muscle juice, and a few of them were arrested for very real crimes--but the mercenary spirit of the game seems to have grown exponentially since I was a young pup. It's pretty sad, really.
Georgian Orthodox church has icon of Joseph Stalin defaced. Um, they honored the atheistic mass murderer of tens of millions of his own people....why?
Pro tip; if you're venerating atheists who've killed millions of innocents, it's time to find a new church that treats genocide as the sin that it is. Yikes.
In similar news, this article refers to the "Leningrad military district", although St. Petersburg/Petrograd has had its original name since 1991. Let's do the math; with Putin, it certainly appears that Communism is trying to make a comeback. Let's hope and pray that that comeback is every bit as successful as the Bee Gees in the early 1980s.
A children's hospital in Cincinnati is teaching their staff to lie and hide the fact that they're starting gender transition therapies with children from their parents. This is a spectacularly bad idea, because smart parents can look up the names of the staff with whom their children are interacting and make a good guess about what's going on, and furthermore, the best thing that can happen is that families will start to assume, rightly, that any staff involved with gender disphoria will be lying to them. Smart parents also will make certain conclusions when they get the bill, but not the explanation of services, or receive an explanation of services that makes no sense. That is, ahem, billing fraud, which can be a felony.
The worst thing that can happen is something that I'm predicting will happen; angry parents are going to visit the clinic and prevent further violence against their children with a 100-230 grain dose of cooper clad lead administered to the center of mass on some of the staff.
No doubt that gender disphoria is not an easy thing to handle, and those who have it have a horrendous rate of suicide attempts--40% by some accounts. But saying "we'll go ahead and hide what we're doing from everybody involved" simply serves to destroy the credibility of medical professionals in an age when the response to COVID, sometimes in a way that will lead to severe violence.
There has been a degree of hullaballoo (technical term) over the attempts, often successful, of "Satanists" to put their "monuments" in places like state and federal Capitol buildings, consisting to a great degree of "artwork" which resembles little more than some of the artwork you'll see on some science fiction books and at Renaissance fairs.
So apart from whether they really believe in pagan gods, or if they're just atheists and agnostics seeking to make fun of Christians, what they're doing is showing that they're doofii. Who am I to stop them? Let them do it!
Jeff Jacoby makes the case that the Endangered Species Act has ironically created an incentive not to save endangered species, but rather to eliminate them as soon as possible--to shoot, shovel, and shut up. The number of endangered species has gone up by a factor of 12, 11 species have gone extinct, and only 57 have recovered--and those mostly resulting from the DDT ban and the Clean Water Act, which required certain wetlands to be preserved, helping many bird species to recover.
It's long past time to take Congress by the lapels, shake them well, and tell them "Don't 'just do something', think through the economic consequences before you act!". Just like the Violence Against Women Act appears to have resulted in more violence against women, and just like federal supports of electric vehicles are creating many billions of dollars of bricks in winter, apparently the Endangered Species Act is creating a lot of dead and even extinct animals.
Heckuva job, Congress. Again, think it through first.
I've basically assumed that the degradation of performance of electric batteries in things like electric cars and buses is pretty much just Arrhenius acceleration, but this article about electric buses in Scandinavia being parked because they could not run at all at -34C (about -30F) indicates that what is afoot is not just deceleration of production of electricity, but rather a phase change that makes them into extremely expensive "bricks". Oops.
And it gets that cold pretty often here in Minnesota and Wisconsin....sorry, Tesla owners, you've been had.
One of my favorite California jokes involves a man on the plane to LA, moving because of a job transfer, sad because he thinks the state is totally different from others, thinking of the gangs, the earthquakes, the landslides, the wildfires, waste on the sidewalks, and of course a loon (donated by Minnesota?) in Sacramento locking the place up while having parties at "The French Laundry" (not to mention any names...). This man is blessed--for a moment--by another man who tells him that when he finds a nice place to live with a nice school district and a nice neighborhood with good neighbors, he'll find that California is just like any other place, just with better weather.
The man then says "Say, Bob, thanks for the encouragement--by the way, can you tell me what you do for a living?"
Bob's answer; "I'm the tailgunner on a bread truck."
And recently, a gang in Compton made my joke a reality by driving an SUV into a Hispanic bakery and looting it. Hundreds of people thought it was a good idea to commit felony breaking & entering, destruction of property, and more.....for panecitos? And judging by their faces, they were neighbors of those who owned and worked at the bakery. You want to pull them aside and say "hey, if you want to have nice things, you can't be doing this."
Or more bluntly, the bread truck seriously needs a tailgunner.
Clarification: I've had and enjoyed panecitos from a local Mexican bakery. I just prefer to purchase them rather than risk jail time by destroying the bakery and stealing them.
Minnesota cities are apparently learning the hard way that the batteries on electric buses do not work well in cold temperatures. That's the bad news, but the worse news is that Duluth's low temperature today is only 24F, and in the real part of winter, Duluth routinely sees -40F. So those buses are pretty much out of operation until April. What a shame that the state of Minnesota doesn't have a first class university system with engineering schools where experts in the matter could inform transit officials of the ugly reality of thermal (Arrhenius) acceleration and its impact on batteries. For that matter, an ordinary city bus with a "mere" 50 gallon tank can go about twice as far and refuel in five minutes. So why anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me.
Oh, wait....really, the ability of human beings to look past the obvious is quite amazing. In other such news, here's a fascinating article by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that is remarkable for something it shows, and even more remarkable that the researchers don't really comment on how remarkable it is. Take a look at the graph in the "highlights" section of the first page, and you should notice two remarkable things.
First, in 1976, nearly as many men were murdered by their spouses/lovers as were women. Given that violent crime is generally speaking about an 80-90/% male phenomenon, it is really remarkable that women in the mid-1970s were just about as murderous as were men. Perhaps we ought to blame disco for this? But note; only passing interest is paid to this by the DOJ, presumably because it interrupts the narrative of "blame the male."
Next, from 1976 to 1997 or so, the rate of "androcide" plunges by about two thirds, and again, the DOJ does not offer any hypotheses as to why this might be. To me, this is appalling, since if we understood what went on, we might be able to replicate it and save hundreds of lives annually.
But that noted, my hunch is that we're not going to be able to replicate it. If you look at history, the big thing that was happening in family law in the 1970s was that states were adopting no fault divorce, as lawyers around the country had noticed that perjury was rampant in divorce cases as spouses desperate to get out of bad marriages were accusing their spouses of adultery, abandonment, and abuse. It's also at this time that most states got out of the alimony business, reducing the "cash haul" for divorcees.
And so my hunch is that the big reason that androcide rates dropped--and femicide to a degree as well--is that a fair number of men who were "married to crazy" suddenly could afford to divorce crazy without financial ruin, and the conditions that were leading to androcide were defused. This is certainly something I can glean from my (no kidding) reading of mid 1980s era "Ms. Magazine", where the writers and editors complained vociferously about how men who were divorcing their wives were making out like bandits, and compared to at fault divorce with alimony, they certainly were. Also worth noting is that women might have been less likely to "divorce crazy" because of financial vulnerability--something the feminists would also have told us at the time.
And unfortunately, the men (and women) who divorced crazy are now dying off, so it's going to be hard to interview them and figure out "how did you come to realize that your marriage was not just bad, but dangerous?".
Worse yet, when I looked up intimate partner murders in 2017, I found about 1500 women and 700 men had been murdered by a spouse or lover, generally of the opposite sex. That's an increase of about 15% for femicide and 40% for androcide, which means that femicide is more or less keeping pace with population growth, and androcide is going along at twice the rate of population growth. We might somewhat bitterly joke that the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 has achieved its goal of promoting violence against women and men alike.
More seriously, I think these statistics reflect the fact that intimate relationships are uniquely difficult because the heart is involved, as well as shared assets, and (e.g. "you and me 4-ever") partners also have the innate assumption of permanence. Couple that with the fact that only 10% of intimate partner murders are preceded by recent violence, and you're going to see it's a hard nut to crack--and that the nutcracker we're using now is basically made of balsa wood.
