With the resignation of Sir Kier "Two Tier" Starmer, the UK is poised for its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. That's what happen in failed states.
[Homer Simpson] The seventh Prime Minister in ten years so far.[/Homer Simpson]
Busted Knuckles has an unimprovable sendoff for Sir Kier.
Tomorrow is Father's Day here in the States. I don't know where you are but this is what's Top Of Mind here.
From a musical perspective only Country Music really speaks to this. But it speaks in different voices as your kids grow up. Yeah, Country music takes you on that journey.
Three chords and the Truth.
When they're young
This is the easiest time for fathers. Trace Adkins sang about this better than anyone. I posted about this a long, long time ago. Reader Mark left a comment there:
The other day my oldest son, who is a freshman at UND (North Dakota, not that other 'ND') asked me if I remembered taking him, and a couple of his friends to Pizza Hut for lunch one day. He remembered it like it was yesterday. I lied to him. I told him I did, and I feel terrible about it.
Folks, it's not what we recall, it's what our kids do.
Amen, and amen.
The Queen Of The World likes this one. I think it reminds her of the time her Daddy took her fishing and she won the tournament.
When they grow up
Yeah it sucks, but kids grow up, and have to find their place in the world. Sometimes that means pushing back against The Man. As I posted at the time:
For years, Dad and I wouldn't talk. I had a lot of anger in me then, and it came out in strange ways. Bad ways. Sorry, I won't talk about what happened with #1 Son, but that he came out right side up didn't have much to do with me.
This Father's Day weekend, I think on both of those.
Growing up, I knew that my Dad was a great father. He set an example: he was a fine provider, although we didn't grow up with a lot. Not wealthy, not weepin'. He was someone who I could look up to, never doubting for an instant that we were everything to him. He adored Mom. And so it was a terrible shock to find out, in my forties, that he was made of flesh and blood. For a while, I couldn't forgive him for that.
I like to think of myself as a smart guy, and I must confess that it's very nice indeed when someone refers to me as a "wickid smaht bahstid". But I sure was an idiot when it mattered. Like Dad, I found - perhaps for the first time - that I, too, was mere flesh and blood. Full of Foolish Pride, and driving myself into a ditch.
I'll swallow my pride if you will.
That post is worth reading.
Sometimes they don't come back
We ask a lot of our sons. Some times we we ask them to to go to far away places. Sometimes they don't come back.
Reflections on Father's Day
I remember this being hard to write. It's hard to read now.
What I remember the most about being a father is is this:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
- Kalil Gibran, The Prophet
So let it be written. So let it be done.
Next week this blog turns 18 (!). That's a milestone that makes you think back on the journey.
This journey began in the lead up to the release by the US Supreme Court of the Heller v. District of Columbia opinion - in other words, this blog pre-dates Heller. Looking back on the last 18 years here, things are really different for the Second Amendment.
It's all well and good to have a Constitution that's written down in black and white, but that doesn't help much if the Legislatures ignore it and the Courts refuse to strike down infringing laws. That has changed, and while there are still pieces of broken Gun Control on the floor needing to be swept up, the change is profound. Let's take a quick recap on that and then talk about what it means.
Heller v. D.C. (2008) stated as the plain law of the land that Second Amendment rights apply to individuals, not just to State Militias. It kind of seems ridiculous to actually have to write this today, but that was the "accepted" legal understanding prior to Heller.
McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) held that Heller applied not just to the District of Columbia, but to all the States (via the 14th Amendment).
New York Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) was the hammer blow. It established that the meaning of the Second Amendment as it was understood at the time was what it really meant, and that gun control laws had to demonstrate that the laws are consistent with that. This flipped the switch - no longer would citizens have to demonstrate that they have a right, but the government has to demonstrate that they don't.
This is what has left all those broken pieces of Gun Control cluttering up the floor. Sure, they still need to be swept up, but look where things are now:
So what does all this mean? The biggest advancement in Second Amendment rights has been the normalization of the idea of firearms. The biased media has a really hard time today in painting us as a fringe community.
Heck, SCOTUS just ruled that the Fed.Gov cannot prevent firearms purchases by people who smoke pot. The ruling was unanimous. Conservative Alito and liberal Kagan co-authored a concurring opinion. It's cats and dogs living together.
This has even been absorbed by the lower courts - the District and Circuit Courts of Appeals. It's great if SCOTUS makes a ruling, but if the lower courts don't enforce it then it doesn't carry much weight. We saw a fair amount of this during the years after Heller. Now we don't. Sure, there will always be the rogue District Judge who allows a plainly infringing gun control law, but these are getting struck down on appeal.
We're no longer the weirdos, the weirdos are on the other side. The Class War against gun owners is pretty much over.
That's one heck of a change in 18 years.
Divemedic has a must-read post about what science is and is not. Quite frankly, it is a brital - and much needed - takedown of "Trust the Science". I won't excerpt any of it because you need to read the whole thing, but he includes example after example of "Settled Science" which resulted in horrifying tragedy. Some of these won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for crying out loud.
Yes, he also talks about COVID without belaboring it.
However, in his excellent discussion about science as a process, he does not (much) delve into what happens to that process when it gets corrupted by moneyed interests. ClimateGate was perhaps the gold standard of that, explained spectacularly by Dr. Richard Muller from UC Berkeley's Earth Sciences Department.
There are two things to point out here: Dr. Muller is not one of those beastly Science Deniers like your humble host, be is a professional climate scientist and the driving force behind a climate database that is less corrupt than the others - the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature series.
The second thing to point out is the guy at the center of the ClimateGate scandal - and the scientist who Muller will no longer read papers published by him - was one of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Assessment Reports. These are supposedly the gold standard science, and it is entirely corrupt.
Scientist Hal Lewis explained why the establishment keeps doing this in his spectacular resignation from the American Physical Society (basically the professional association of Sheldon Coopers):
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise.Emphasis from me.
There is a reason that I have post tags for junk science and climate bullshit. There's a reason that there are dozens or hundreds of posts tagged with those. The science was bought and paid for, just like Divemedic's nutrition science example.
It's ironic that what is finally killing Global Warming is the manic push for AI datacenters. The big money is on to chasing a better graft.
Dad Joke: If a cow doesn't produce milk, is it a Milk Dud?
Mom Joke (Courtesy of The Queen Of The World): No, it's just lactose-free.
I'm not a fan of his name. I have half a mind to call him Duce (like Mussolini).
May as well have a really cool boat:
Most boats are a carefully considered compromise designed to cover as many bases as possible: floating holiday home, party island, offshore cruiser – jack of all trades, as the saying has it, master of none.
Safehaven Marine’s Barracuda SV11 eschews all those compromises, becoming the jack of a single trade, master of one. Its single dedicated purpose is to conquer rough water and transport its crew safely, regardless of conditions.
...
There are no hot tubs, no teak deck option, no rise and fall TV. But there is a rise and fall gyro stabilised machine gun platform that emerges from the foredeck, controlled from the wheelhouse. Bulletproofing and a gun rack for the AK47s are also on the menu, should its customer base require it.
Oh, and it's a stealth boat.
It seems like this is something being pushed by the Boston.Gov:
Oooooh kaaaay.
I am SO glad I got out of there. Didn't even get cut up too badly going over the wire at the border ...
This weekend is Memorial Day, the traditional BBQ kickoff to summer. But on these shores, it's the day to remember the fallen from past - and current - wars. The day was originally called Decoration Day, the date was at the very beginning of summer so that wild flowers would be available everywhere for families to decorate the graves of their fallen loved ones.
Many had no graves to decorate, as their loved one had an anonymous foreign grave for their final rest. Today the Texas Air National Guard (and others) bring the fallen home on "Angel Flights". This weekend, remember them. Both the quick and the dead.
Wolfgang would welcome the outcome, but would want to bite the old owners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The Silicon Graybeard (among others) links to a really interesting video from SpaceX about Starship:
Something that needs to be shared is a video from SpaceX, called Starship - Test Like You Fly and while it's nearly a half hour long, it's absolutely worth watching.
That's near-term Starship past and (implied) future. But watching it made me think about a 2021 post from Casey Handmer - Starship Is Still Not Understood. In it, he remarks on just how far Starship had come in the previous couple of years:
While I am 100% certain that the Starship design will continue to evolve in noticeable ways, the progress in two years cannot be understated. Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.
The odds of Starship actually working in the near future are much higher today than they were two years ago. Across the industry, decisions are being made on a time horizon in which Starship operation is relevant, and yet it is not being correctly accounted for.
He then goes on to lay it all out:
Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.
Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.
The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant.
Jerry Pournelle used to say that the only space metric that counted was cost per ton delivered to orbit. I don't see this as a Berlin Airlift; it's a Liberty Ship. Mass Produced in huge numbers and able to shuttle large amounts of generic cargo to and from space. Handmer emphasizes this point:
Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.
Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing.
The implications are huge, and probably require a change in the institutions themselves (e.g. JPL and NASA):
NASA centers and their contractors build exquisitely complex and expensive robots to launch on conventional rockets and explore the universe. To take JPL as an example, divide the total budget by the mass of spacecraft shipped to the cape and it works out to about $1,000,000/kg. I’m not certain how much mass NASA launches to space per year but, even including ISS, it cannot be much more than about 50 T. This works out to between $100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo and >$1,000,000/kg for deep space exploration.
Enter Starship. Annual capacity to LEO climbs from its current average of 500 T for the whole of our civilization to perhaps 500 T per week. Eventually, it could exceed 1,000,000 T/year. At the same time, launch costs drop as low as $50/kg, roughly 100x lower than the present. For the same budget in launch, supply will have increased by roughly 100x. How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?
...
This is where the risk to the space industry originates. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit.
I suspect that Jared Isaacson understands this. The Space industry five years from now will be very, very different that any projections we can make today. Starship's future - while brightly described in SpaceX's outstanding video - is much more interesting than almost anyone suspects.
I would have something to say about this nonsense but The Silicon Graybeard has it pretty much covered.
Sixteen (!) years ago I posted about how the climate databases did not show any warming since 1850:
So what does the raw data look like for all 4495 stations?
Other than a short term blip in the 1990s, we see no warming at all since 1850. None.
Let me say this simply: The raw (unadjusted) weather data from the largest historical data set shows no warming for the last 150 years.
Now Grok 4.1 has answered a query about the same subject:
When correlated systematic errors and the realistic treatment of infilling problems are properly accounted for, the global mean temperature curve before 1950–1970 (and partly even today) cannot physically be determined with an accuracy better than ±0.5–1 °C. Consequently, a claimed trend of +1.3 °C since 1850 is **not significantly distinguishable** from a zero trend. This is not “skeptical exaggeration”; it is simply what error theory and metrology **mandate**So you can't show any warming that is statically valid. Always trust content from Borepatch!
I'll just wait quietly over here for my long-delayed Nobel Prize ...
