Congrats to OldNFO

Blogging 19 (!) years. 

1500 dogs rescued from Wisconsin puppy mill

Wolfgang would welcome the outcome, but would want to bite the old owners.

The breeder lost his license but likely won't go to jail.

Animal rescues in Minnesota are welcoming dozens of beagles into their care this week from a biomedical research breeding facility in Wisconsin.

Late last month, Big Dog Ranch Rescue and The Center for a Humane Economy announced they bought the beagles for an undisclosed sum from Ridglan Farms near Madison.

The purchase followed a settlement with Wisconsin state regulators where Ridglan agreed to give up its breeder’s license in exchange for avoiding criminal charges.

"Researchers" - we all know what that means, don't we Dr. Fauci?  Odd isn't it that cruelty to animals often precedes cruelty to humans ...

And this part is infuriating: 

But [Special ProsecutorGruenke did find that Ridglan allowed non-veterinarians to perform eye operations on some animals without general anesthesia in violation of Wisconsin’s animal mistreatment law.

 

Wolfgang would definitely want to bite that SOB.

 

 

Interestingly, this is the first post tagged Blinded By Science where actual blinding by scientists was involved.

Buddy Guy - Mustang Sally

I don't know if this is on everyone's Top Ten list of great blues songs.  I suspect it is on everyone's list of Top Ten Blues Songs to Sing at Karaoke. 

Massachusetts demonstrates the futility of gun control

Via Insty, here's proof of the utter futility of gun control:

A man named Tyler Brown opened fire on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Mass., this week, turning an ordinary Monday afternoon into a rolling ambush near Harvard and MIT.

Middlesex DA Marian Ryan said Brown, a 46-year-old Boston man (notice no doctor was needed to identify Brown as a man), fired roughly 50 to 60 rounds from a rifle at vehicles on the roadway.

A Mass Statie and Our Hero (legally carrying, natch) shot the dirty perp.  So well done!  And I hear you ask, what's the tie in to gun control.  This:

Brown didn't appear from thin air; his criminal record included a 2020 shootout with Boston police, and he had pleaded guilty to charges tied to armed assault with intent to murder. He was reportedly out on probation when the Cambridge shooting unfolded. 

OK, so Massachusetts is run by dumbasses.  Dude was out on parole for armed assault with intent to murder, and he shot up a bunch of stuff, including a Massachusetts State Police cruiser.

But here's the punch line:

[The perpetrator] survived with non-life-threatening injuries and faces serious charges, including armed assault with intent to murder. [Emphasis mine - Borepatch]

This time he'll be sorry! 

Some Masshole judge will release him in 4 or 5 years.  But more gun control is just the thing.  Oooooooh kaaaaaay.

It's quite a mystery why all the retarded Massachusetts liberals think they're so much smarter than we are.  The evidence is against them. 

 

No, the Climate Change Establishment has not changed their approach

Friend Burt emails me to say that the U.N. Climate Panel Quietly admits Its Doomsday Climate Scenarios were completely "Implausible".

They've been admitting this for years and years.  Here's a post from the archives from 2019:

Climate scientist Judy Curry testified before Congress, and this is really interesting:

Some people (including one of the Members) took issue with the following statement in my testimony:

“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”

I referred to AR5 WGII:

“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21stcentury is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”

The IPCC is the same "U.N. Climate Panel" getting headlines today.  The IPCC Assessment Reports are the "State of the Science" reports they release every five years.  They are considered the Gold Standard for establishment science, and they've been very quietly burying exactly this point for a long, long time.

The only thing they've given up is keeping these scenarios for the screaming headlines.

The only thing interesting here is why they are doing this now?  I think it's the mad dash to AI, with AI datacenters springing up everywhere.  Each of these has a ravenous power appetite, and the (very wealthy) folks behind AI have told the IPCC to tone down the climate alarmism.

Money talks, so the mainstream climate science establishment walks. 

Downstream prosperity

Via Chris Lynch, this is a very interesting post: 

You’ve probably heard of the PayPal Mafia. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 its founders took the money, scattered, and built the next generation of digital monopolies.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir and seeded Facebook. Reid Hoffman set up LinkedIn. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen started YouTube. Max Levchin founded Affirm.

Elon Musk—who had merged X.com into PayPal two years earlier—went a different direction. He took his payout and leased a small warehouse in the El Segundo area of LA.

He bolted a sign on the front that read “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.”

We all know where that's gone. 

Most people still think SpaceX is “just” a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk “way” of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.

After meeting dozens of SpaceX graduates in warehouses across LA, I’m convinced:

The SpaceX Mafia will create more wealth than the PayPal Mafia—possibly more than all of Silicon Valley combined.


If you can track only one alumni group in business today, this is the one. SpaceX is the new Harvard.

A hedge fund buddy of mine told me: “I’d pay real money for a database of ex-SpaceX employees.”

The article then goes on to list four companies founded by SpaceX alums - the "SpaceX Mafia" who are already solving really hard (and expensive) problems.  Only two are space companies. 

 Highly, highly recommended.

The 2026 sports photo of the year

The horse on the left is Golden Tempo, a 23-1 long shot who won the Kentucky Derby.  The jockey is Jose Ortiz who won the Kentucky Oaks race yesterday - only the ninth jockey to win both in the same year.

The horse on the right is Renegade, at 4-1. The jockey is Irad Ortiz, Jr., Jose's brother.  Irad has won the Belmont Stakes twice.

That's a horse riding Dynasty. 

Efficiency and the Space program

danielbarger left a comment to yesterday's post about Starship:

As long as we are limited to chemical rockets where 90% of the weight is fuel and rocket with only 10% payload we will never be able to make use of the solar systems resources efficiently. The problem is there is no viable alternative...not even a theoretical one. It's an enormous hurdle to becoming a space faring species.

I have two comments.

1.  Efficiency factors into the price.  Starship may get the cost of payload to orbit down to $50/pound.  That's what King Crab costs.  It's hard to call this "inefficient" when it is reducing cost by three orders of magnitude.
2. Agreed with danielbarger and others that this does not get us to Interstellar travel.   The DC-3 didn't get us to the moon, either, but it was a damn fine start.  

I'd like to see where things are 30 years from now.  For sure we won't still be on Starship but we will be a lot further ahead than we are now.  And guaranteed people will no longer be optimizing for mass.

Casey Handmer covers this well in the post I linked to:

Consider the two critical metrics: Dollars per tonne ($/T) and tonnes per year (T/year). Any effective space transport cargo logistics system must aggressively optimize both these metrics simultaneously. Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Constellation 2.0 as described above [NASA's SLS-to-the-moon program - Borepatch] would be more like $4b/T and 2 T/year.

Not only is this architecture obviously worse than Starship, it’s also significantly worse than Apollo or any existing lunar delivery system. For example, the Blue Moon lander could be flown on Falcon Heavy, delivering perhaps 10 T to the surface for <$200m. Indeed, the Constellation architecture is worse than the current state-of-the-art by roughly the same factor that Starship promises to be better. That is, it takes the key metrics of $/T and T/year and runs as far as possible in the wrong direction. It is also a programmatic dead end, since none of the individual components can be upgraded in a meaningful way without restarting development of the entire system from scratch. It’s an expensive, interlocking failure.

I'd say that Starship is an enormous efficiency improvement.