I'm sure soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will be duly impressed

Apparently, a couple of the reasons for not having an officer on top of the building from where Trump was shot  are that it was "too dangerous" to have him on a sloped roof (as roofers scratch their heads, doing that for a living), and then when that was laughed out of the public forum as ludicrous, apparently whistleblowers claimed that someone was up there, but came down because it was too hot.

The temperature in Butler, PA maxed out at 83F.  I'm pretty sure that our soldiers who served in Iraq, where the mercury routinely hits above 110F, will be playing a song of compassion for the poor guy on the world's smallest violin.  Granted, a white roof will reflect heat, but dealing with uncomfortable heat is part of the job, and small town police officers deal with much higher temperatures while providing security around the beer tent at every county fair in the lower 48.

So either the culture of the Secret Service has significantly changed from "will take a bullet for the President" to "don't make me sweat for the President", or they're still lying, and actually were working to endanger a former President.  I'm guessing a little bit of both, because people who will still take a bullet for that role probably aren't going to back down on the truth.  

It's a scary time for our country. 

Brilliance from the Windy City

According to Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, culpability for horrendous murder rates in Chicago lies with.....President Nixon, who of course died about 30 years ago in 1994.  Although I suppose some of Nixon's policies might have something to do with crime rates today, I'd dare suggest that governmental actions of the past 50 years, starting with Chicago's longtime discrimination against gun rights and continuing to poor policing, might have a bit more to do with it.

Perhaps even more amusingly, Johnson extols the record of Lyndon Johnson, who during his first 20 years as a lawmaker (1937-1957) opposed every civil rights bill brought to his attention, enacted the "Great Society" laws that to this day are the bane of poor people of all races, and who of course got the country deeply into the Vietnam War, prematurely ending the lives of about 7000 black soldiers and maiming tens of thousands more.

Nixon, on the other hand, was a staunch supporter of civil rights throughout his career.  One might wonder whether certain portions of the progressive left are in fact trying to injure those they claim to be trying to help.

Charge your electric car? Maybe not.

            A new study indicates that an average of 20% of electric vehicle chargers will be non-operational at any given time.  Now as someone who's worked in electronics reliability for the past 25 years or so, I've got a few thoughts on this.  First of all, as you might guess, a 20% offline rate means that necessary margin is not built into the product.  It is analogous to the failure rate of race cars, really, and is something you would never accept for your Camry or Golf Sportwagen (my car).  This is especially bad when one realizes that a charger is not exactly a complicated piece of equipment; it's a heavy duty DC power supply with a meter, a microprocessor, a screen, and a few buttons.  The meter on your home, combined with the transformer on the pole or in the green box nearby, serves much the same function, just with alternating current.

So what is going on with electric car chargers?  Really, the same thing that I noticed 12 years back with CFL lightbulbs (rest in the toxic waste dump), that because getting the product out there was so politically important and urgent, they didn't do the correct reliability engineering or testing.  Then combine that with the fact that they're often in the worst possible setting, like a garage without ventilation, or worse yet in the sun with no active cooling for the transformer and power supply.  I'm guessing the inner components may be getting hot enough to "leave skin behind" if you were unlucky enough to touch them, and suffice it to say this kills electronics reliability.  The old engineer's adage was that 5C increase in temperature halved the life of any device, and we're talking probably five to ten times that amount.

In other words, electric car chargers are a lot like older Ferraris, looking very sleek and fashionable, but really bound to spend a lot more time at the repair shop than actually doing their job.  It's yet another reason to get government out of the business of deciding what we drive.

Pure genious from the World Anti-Doping Administration

WADA, which manages anti-doping efforts for the IOC worldwide, has just admitted, apparently, that about 23 Chinese Olympic swimmers (3/4 of the team) tested positive for "low levels" of trimetazidine, an angina medication which also changes the way the body uses glucose and fat for fuel.  Now WADA has apparently bought the explanation that it was "contamination" (doesn't everybody occasionally get angina medications in their groceries?), but if I approach this from a statistical point of view, when I see everybody having similar low levels of a drug that has a half life in the body of about eight hours, my best guess is that all of the team was given a much higher dose of the drug a few days earlier.  On purpose.

Worth noting as well is that this is not something, given different food preferences, that can be explained by "oopsie, something fell into the fried rice in the cafeteria."  So what do we have here?  In my view, what we have is a partial resurrection of the Communist bloc flouting of IOC doping rules.  

A huge threat from North Korea?

Evidently North Korea and Russia have signed a mutual defense pact, and the Soviets Russians are now apparently threatening to arm the North Koreans if South Korea provides weapons to Ukraine.   I'm sure that the South Koreans are quaking in their boots as they consider all those T-34s and Mosin-Nagants that will augment the vaunted North Korean artillery--fed by shells that, when sent to Ukraine to be used by Russia, quickly got a reputation for actually destroying the artillery pieces into which they were fed.

Yes, Mr. Putin, you may have nukes which may or may not work.  But you've been proving to the world that otherwise, your country is a paper bear.  

Putin delenda est!

We need "loser pays" and a lot of disbarments

 Take a look at this excellent column regarding the case of Jack Phillips, the Colorado cake baker who has been repeatedly sued and prosecuted by the state despite Supreme Court rulings establishing that, yes, First Amendment protections apply to the messages created by cake decorators.

More or less, the state appears to be ignoring the Supreme Court for a simple purpose; to make the process so painful that their policies will be implemented simply out of fear of losing one's livelihood one billable hour at a time.  The response needs to be swift and emphatic; if a prosecutor or plaintiff's lawyer ignores Supreme Court precedent and proceeds to lose again at the Supreme Court or other federal court, they lose their law license and are liable for damages to the defendant.  In the same way, state court jurists whose decisions are found to contradict Supreme Court precedent, and then proceed to lose again at the federal level under the same precedent, need to lose their law licenses and pensions.

Put simply; "the process is the punishment" needs to be severely punished.

Mergers out of control

 Boeing has admitted that they have retaliated against whistleblowers, making a Babylon Bee article about the same no longer completely satire, but partially reality.  Ugly reality is that when a company achieves majority position in their field, they do have the power to tell workers "Well, if you don't like it, you can be a greeter at Wal-Mart", and that is a powerful disincentive to tell the truth about what's going on.  It is also worth noting that if you are in the business of large airliners, you have Boeing and Airbus, and that's about it.  "We can suck as bad as our one competitor, take it or leave it.", more or less.

Hope for Alzheimer's patients...?

Dean Ornish of UCSF appears to have come up with a free way of improving the outcomes of Alzheimer's patients; more or less a sound diet, exercise, and interaction with loved ones.  To paraphrase Dave Ramsey,  "It's beans and rice time", and make sure you take a walk with loved ones afterwards.

Given that I'm going to visit my father-in-law this weekend, who's just had a stroke, this sounds about right to me.  As I've suspected--and been taught--for decades, there is a lot that one can do for your health that doesn't necessarily involve a doctor--and is very often delicious, too!  Just skip the "Hurricane" when you have your red beans & rice.  

And in Hockey....

There is apparently a women's professional hockey league, and apparently, the #1 draft pick for Minnesota's team, Britta Curl, is in trouble for having stated in public that "transwomen" (men cosmetically altered to sort of look female) don't belong in the sport.

Now I understand the desire of "transwomen" to be accepted as female, but the fact remains that hockey is a contact sport (although the women's game does not allow checking, I'm told), and males (XY) are 25% heavier, 10-12% faster, 8% taller, and up to 80% stronger than females (XX).  So in this case, it's not just a case of unfair competition, but of people likely getting seriously hurt.

And on the off chance that Miss Curl is reading, welcome to Minnesota, and we desperately need sane people here, especially in the Twin Cities.  Praying for you to do well! 

On women's fashions

Viewing the mess that is womens' fashion these days, this column by Laura Hollis really hits home.  The killer quote from Ms. Hollis mother is apt:

Designers used to love women, and it showed.  Today's styles make it look as if they hate us.

Along the same lines, I've joked for years that it's long past time to take women's fashion back from designers who....are not women, and are not attracted to women.  Given that the vast majority of women are not the size 0-4 that most runway models are, shouldn't what we see in the fashion magazines reflect their actual bodies?

New wave diplomacy?

If reports be trusted, the latest in North Korean diplomacy, or perhaps low scale warfare, appears to be "littering".   I would suggest that the response to this new wave of diplomacy ought to be derisive mockery, starting with wondering how a starving country like North Korea actually got enough trash and balloons to send south to South Korea.  Maybe they bought it from Russia in trade for defective munitions that destroyed Russian artillery pieces in Ukraine.

Yup, derisive mockery it is.

But can she skate?

With all the cheap fouls being committed against Caitlin Clark lately, her team is seriously considering putting an enforcer on the court.  Humorous to think, first of all, that not only has Miss Clark elevated the level of play in the WNBA (at least when she's not being flagrantly fouled) and sold far more tickets than the WNBA has previously been able to sell, but she's apparently already turning it into the NHL.  

With a bit of luck, WNBA fans could be treated to this soon:

Another sign of white supremacy

 If I were black, I'd be telling Mrs. Bubba to give me some "white supremacy".  Seriously, the perpetrator of this idea is, apparently, University of California Santa Barbera professor Sabrina Strings, and she notes that she has had a series of "bad relationships".  

My pro tip for her and others who have had a a series of bad relationships; look in the mirror.  You get a mulligan for one or two, but at a certain point, you've got to say "I'm looking for love in all the wrong places."  Yes, I'm saying Ms. Strings needs to give "three chords and the truth" a try.

A bit of perspective

A bit of thinking about Alvin Bragg's case suggests some very sobering thoughts about it.  For starters, the team of 15 people worked for a couple of years on it, and ordinarily, those prosecutors would have tried about 100 cases....apiece.  In some cities, prosecutors get up to 1000 cases per year.  Conclusion?  There are most likely thousands of violent criminals walking the streets of New York who are out there because the DA chose to pursue a misdemeanor paperwork violation.  So if you've recently been mugged or worse by a New York thug, you have, in part, Alvin Bragg to blame.

Also very interesting is the case of Matthew Colangelo, who left his job as acting associate attorney general to join Bragg's team in 2022, and who has been instrumental in....according to the article....coordinating cases against President Trump to keep him off the campaign trail. 

Now there is little chance of this getting--rightfully--to a prosecution of Colangelo, Bragg, and others, but as one would infer from the burst of legally tenuous prosecutions at this time, there is a concerted effort to keep Trump off the campaign trail, and it strikes me that if a payoff to Stormy Daniels amounts to an illegal campaign contribution, so does leaving the DOJ to join a legally tenuous investigation in New York City.  Colangelo's case is especially problematic because as a rule, leaving the DOJ to join Alvin Bragg's staff is a serious drop in pay, prestige, and career possibilities--unless there is, of course, a big payoff that has been promised to him.

In short, we have here clear indication of illegal campaign contributions, quid pro quo arrangements that amount to bribery, and RICO violations--all likely bound up in the person of Matthew Colangelo.  Now with the current DOJ, charges are not even remotely likely, but just to place things in perspective.

Great achievements in parenting!

Or perhaps, a great failure. I have taught both of my sons to tie a tie without bringing them to tears.