Brilliance in the judiciary

Faced with the impending end of SNAP (food stamp) benefits due to the government shutdown, a federal judge has apparently ordered workers from a to be determined federal agency that may not exist, and who are not currently being paid, to send out SNAP payments/checks from a fund to be determined that also may or may not exist.

Funny me, I'd thought that involuntary servitude was banned with the 13th Amendment, and that if you're going to be spending money, maybe that ought to start with Congress, per Article 1, and ought to be directed through federal departments that actually exist and from resources that are actually known.  One thing I know for sure is that when federal judges act against the 13th Amendment, they ought to be removed from the bench and disbarred.  Crazy chicanery like this needs to have a serious penalty.

AI needs a little bit of work

I decided to take a look at my Twitter feed today, and was surprised to see that a number of supermodels had moved to my town just to be near me, and they'd figured out how attractive I was from my Twitter feed.

The one problem is that the picture shown in my Twitter feed is of a bird.  So either AI is having some real trouble differentiating birds from handsome men, or there are some people out there whose sexual preferences are really, really sick.   

Glad I'm not a Muscovite

Check out the picture of Russian air defense around the Kremlin here.  Apparently the height of technology for Russian air defense is a machine gun mounted on a western pickup, and Muscovites can look forward to periodic rains of 7.62mm (or maybe 12.7/.50 caliber) bullets raining town on their neighborhoods.  If you look at a map of Moscow, you will see that within the range that these bullets can be fired, there are literally millions of people.

We might joke somewhat bitterly that one of the most dangerous places in the world is to be "protected" by the Russian military.  Hopefully Russians wake up soon to the huge danger their dictator and his minions pose to them.

A fun project

One of the difficulties today in terms of footwear is that for whatever reason, many manufacturers don't have the good quality leather which will take a dye without excessive surface treatments--more or less, the lack of leather quality is quite literally covered up with a heavy polyurethane treatment, resulting in a shoe that is far less breathable and flexible.  Comfort takes a hit.  Part of this, I'm convinced, is because we don't eat much veal anymore, and some of the best hides for shoes do come from young cattle.

So for fun, I took a sanding block (sandpaper over foam) to one such pair of shoes, and was able to remove not only the grime from mowing, but also a good portion of the polyurethane (though not so much that one could see the base leather.   Putting them on was a revelation--it was a lot more like the high quality shoes I've bought in the past.

So if you've got some leather shoes where appearance is not key--don't do this with patent leather dress shoes for obvious reasons--and you'd like to get a little more comfort out of them, you can give this a try.  I used about a 120 grit sandpaper for this purpose.

An idea born of totalitarian idiocy

If current Russian president Vladimir Jugashvili Putin wants to show that his thinking is better than that of the Soviet era--where escaped Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko noted that they were trying to grow maize in Siberia--he could do little worse than the evident proposal to make a tunnel between Siberia and Alaska.  

How so?  Well, look at a highway map of Alaska, and then move over to the Russian side.  If you look closely, you will see that there is something pretty obviously missing.

Roads and railroads to the area.  

And of course, there is a reason for this; it's incredibly difficult to build roads on permafrost.  To get to Welsh, Alaska, you can take a boat (in summer), a plane, or, when you've got diptheria antitoxin to deliver and a good dog named Balto, a dogsled.  To build roads on permafrost, you're talking a similar amount of money as was spent on the Alaska Pipeline--$8 billion in 1974, or about $52 billion today.  The Russian side would be even worse, so we're really talking about somewhere north of $100 billion when....if there really was a market for U.S.-Russian trade, ships could embark from the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Vladivostok and arrive in Seattle. High speed rail in California looks positively intelligent in comparison.

The reality here is that such a proposal is a gambit by Putin to soothe the ego of our President and get him to sell out Ukraine.  If it were, by some tragedy, actually built, it could also serve as a highway to achieve something Putin's minions are hoping to see; Alaska again as a territory of Russia.  Let's hope and pray neither happens.

PSA for cyclists

This is the helmet of a young friend of mine who learned the hard way that hitting big bumps at 30mph leads to road rash.  Thankfully, apart from cuts and scrapes, he's going to be OK, but notice here that the helmet is pretty well cracked.  Without the helmet, it of course could have been his skull.

Thanks again, Mom

Back when I was a young skull full of mush--now I am an older skull full of the same--my mother responded to my asthma and allergies by getting me on the swim team, under the notion that the moisture would do me good.  I never seemed to figure out how much good it was doing me at the time, but yesterday, I hit the pool after a rougher day breathing and....

...well, you're right again, Mom.   

A real risk of marijuana

A study of drivers who died due to car crashes finds that about 42% of them showed signs of recent use of marijuana and THC, with a mean THC level of 30.7 ng/ml, about six times the legal limit in Colorado.  Compare this with only 15% of Americans using cannabis in any form, and it would seem that we are starting to see significant evidence that THC indeed impairs safe driving.  The next step, in my view, is to see what percentage of those fatalities also included alcohol or other drugs, and to determine what portion of users use THC at this level.

I write this as someone who is generally friendly to the notion that marijuana is nowhere near as dangerous as opioids, and I stay by that view, but we simultaneously ought to realize that the use of THC, a mild hallucinogen, will not be without consequences.

An interesting claim

Apparently Joy Reid, in decrying an alleged plot by the GOP to end the income tax and allow people to earn as much as they want, is trying to connect efforts to end the income tax with Jim Crow and the like.

Which is interesting, because the architect of the income tax, Woodrow Wilson, is also the person who returned Jim Crow to the federal government.  So if I'm going to make a correlation, I'd argue that the income tax and Jim Crow go hand in hand.  Yes, there was pervasive discrimination even before Wilson, but Wilson further entrenched it in the federal government, and in doing so, probably gave Jim Crow a good portion of another 40 years of existence.  The large increases in the size of the federal government further gave Jim Crow new life.

That said, if only the GOP were going to end the income tax.  It costs close to half a trillion dollars per year just to administer and comply with it, and its heavily progressive nature discourages building businesses that would employ people--people like poor blacks that Reid claims to care about.  In doing so, it also introduces patently false ways of doing accounting which, again, put productive Americans out of work.

Regarding her notion that "you can earn as much as you want", quite frankly, if that were possible, I might have given it a try, and it's really basic economics that gets in the way.  Sad to say, I do not earn the wages that Michael Jordan and Tom Brady earned simply because I've never been able to handle a basketball or football the way they did, not because of a lack of desire to earn more money.

Amateur hour in the White House

Russian stooge Dmitry Medvedev taunts President Trump by noting a lack of U.S. submarines near Russia, to which Trump responds that he's moved a couple nearby.

Amateur move.  If you want to do psy-ops, you've got to respond with "Well, as far as you know.", or some such thing.  Uncertainty and doubt--especially in light of the fact that U.S. submarines are famously quieter than the Russians--can be far more effective than bluster.