Category Archives: Science/Engineering

Barry kills more jobs

This time it’s the loss of an estimated 3,900 direct and indirect jobs for construction of a new coal-fired electric power plant in Corpus Christi. Barry’s EPA doesn’t like coal, remember, so they killed the permit for the project, despite the fact that most 42 percent of American electricity is created by burning coal.

I suppose the EPA would rather folks in Corpus cut back on their use of electricity or else hook up to such intermittent (and very expensive) power sources as wind generators and inefficient solar cells. More likely, though, the bureaucrats simply don’t care. D.C. is enjoying an economic boom on our taxes, though it’s mainly the pols and the rest of the 1 percent who are rolling in the dough.

UPDATE:  This is only the latest Texas power plant to be closed by King Putz’s EPA. Five others also are on the block. One in Pasadena, one in Lone Star, two in Mount Pleasant and one in Pittsburg.

DiFi’s assault weapons lies

Not that she’s the only one. The Clintons also have been telling “assault rifle” lies since 1994. No one with a loud-enough voice, other than the NRA, certainly no one in the Democrat media, has ever called them on it.

Comes now Ted Cruz, our newest Texas senator, to set the record straight:

“Real assault weapons—machine guns—are already functionally illegal, and they have been since 1934. [DiFi’s gun bill] would have done nothing to prevent the terrible murders in Newtown, but it would limit the constitutional liberties of law-abiding citizens.”

DiFi’s life in the Leftist bubble worlds of D.C. and San Francisco has led her to try to ban tens of millions of commonly-owned AR-15s,  shotguns and handguns. She’s blind to the real world of gun ownership these days, says Mr. Eddington at Shooting For Liberty:

“The popularity of guns like the [semiauto] AR-15 has exploded in the last decade, with millions of Americans using ARs for hunting, target shooting, competition, and home defense. The AR-15, a relatively uncommon rifle when I was growing up, has become mainstream among shooters.

“The power of the gun rights movement has grown since the 1990s because gun culture has been spreading far and wide among people who defy the stereotype of what a gun rights supporter is supposed to be. Just as an anecdote, when I go to the NRA Headquarters Range in Fairfax I see blacks, whites, and Asians all shooting together—not just overweight white guys in John Deere hats.”

Will this stop DiFi? Of course not. But I doubt even she expects her proposed law to pass. She’s probably mainly trying to fire up the base for the congressional elections of 2014. Meanwhile, she’d settle for banning manufacture of 10+ round magazines, and some spineless Republicans doubtless will go along with that. Enough of them? Maybe.

And that would be a pity. Because it will only limit law-abiding people, not criminals, not the insane, and not even the body guards who protect the pols who always hold themselves immune from the laws they create for us.

The magazine makers, meanwhile, already are on double shifts making new 10+ ones that can be grandfathered in to any ban. One thing old DiFi is good for is capitalistic profits. All you have to do is keep the 10+ magazines cleaned and oiled and they’ll last for decades. So even that law is stupid.

But then, maybe, Cruz or someone like him finally will launch a workable effort to get insane monsters like the Newtown shooter off our streets and into the help they need. And take down those damned “gun-free zone” signs at school entrances. You know, a real solution to our intolerable mass killings instead of more attempted disarming of the law-abiding?

UPDATE:  In New York State and Canada, defiance of new gun registration laws already is gathering strength. This is what government overreach will do. The bureaucrats, even the cops, are simply outnumbered. Molon Labe, suckers!

MORE: DiFi’s gun ban exempts herself. No surprise, really. The pols always exempt themselves from the new laws the rest of us must obey.

Best use for dogs

Hardly anyone uses them for hunting anymore, so all they do is litter the streets, sidewalks, and lawns with their poop. For every one dog lover who picks up Fido’s poop on their walk about town, at least ten do not.

Not to mention the annoying barking. So either bring back the Cyanosphere (above) and its quiet, environmentally-friendly (and sustainable, need we say sustainable) locomotion, or euthanize the pesky critters. I could do with fewer cats, too, but at least cats use litter boxes and rarely howl.

Altho even the Cyanosphere could have a poop or noise problem, without a doggy bag attachment and a muzzle. You could forgo the topper, the parasol, and the petticoats, tho they do add a nice, antique touch to the ensemble.

Wright’s Chaos Chronicles and Hermetic Millennia

Science Fiction and Fantasy author John C. Wright is quite the storyteller. I recently finished his new Hermetic Millennia (the sequel to his scifi Count To A Trillion) wishing the third book (of a projected five) was already done, instead of having to wait a year or more for the continuation of this series on interstellar travel and human evolution. A Tex-Mex gunslinger hero also doesn’t hurt.

Last night I finished Orphans of Chaos, the first book in an earlier fantasy collection of his and immediately moved on to its sequel Fugitives of Chaos, with just as much anticipation as for the science fiction, though in a different way. The Chaos stories are a sort of Harry Potter for adults enlarged by the physics of relativity and theories of multiple universes.

I  had previously read his Golden Age series, space opera mixed with hard science, chiefly about biotechnology and networked computers.

All these books are informed by Wright’s seemingly immeasurable imagination, his mathematics, astronomy and literary education, his love for Greek myth, the history of religion, and (delight of delights) a Libertarian political sensibility you don’t often find in scifi or fantasy nowadays. Leftists beware.

I could say more, but you get the idea. Don’t except an easy read. Wright packs more ideas into a paragraph than most authors do into a whole story. But do try the books, you won’t be sorry.

Infantry’s oldest enemy: mud

“Afghan peanut butter turns treads into sleds,” is war correspondent Michael Yon’s caption on this photo of a combat vehicle stuck in the mud in his post Amber of War. It’s an old lesson the Pentagon seems never to have learned.

I slept in the mud in Vietnam a few times on night ambush in ’69 and recall once trying hopelessly to get a jeep that had slid off the road out of the mud, but I was lucky not to have to hump through it hour after hour, day after day.

I’m not surprised there are books about it. None, however, seems as focused or as complete as Mud: A Military History, which Yon recommends and I am reading. Whoever invented body armor, heavy packs and persnickety machinery like M4s that need constant cleaning should as well. (But probably won’t.) It’s not the soldiers who have lost our recent wars, but the leadership—so-called.

Gotta get a Glock?

So, I’m thinking of replacing my aging S&W .38 revolver with something newer. A semi-auto, for sure. Before the wackos pass a ban on them. I doubt they could but, then, I never thought Barry, the high-unemployment, food-stamp president, could be re-elected.

Since we’re talking home protection here, rather than range or carry, should I shop for stopping power or would that be, ahem, overkill? Maybe a 1911 like the one I carried in the Army, but spiffier in, say, all-black, or would a .32 Baretta be nicer? Smaller, for sure. Could do with a smaller gun safe.

Glocks just seem too trashy, too Saturday-night-specially. Or am I being prejudiced or something?

Meanwhile, it is to laugh that Barry & the Looners (sounds like a grunge band) are out to ban “assault rifles” and high-capacity mags. Heh. Go for it, morons, I say. It’s strictly feel-good legislation to make the Progressives think they’re getting closer to the totalitarianism they so crave.

For that special fiddle gig

The Thompson submachine gun was a fully automatic piece of work whose extensive use by gangsters during Prohibition, and mobsters subsequently, led to a federal ban on automatic guns about 1936. The law has been in force ever since.

Which you might not know if you watch the Rube Tube. Its supposedly sophisticated commentators often contend that automatic guns are freely available. When corrected they turn (somehow) to the notion that semiautomatic guns are just as bad. Which may be why some of our more dimwitted politicos are out to ban semiautomatic weapons.

Nothing about semiautos, however, equals the firehose effect of a one-trigger-pull full auto. Especially not a Tommy gun, with or without a concealing fiddle case. Rat-a-tat-tat.