Is Trump de-funding the Left?

Hmmmm:

Trump is defunding the left and lowering its status

The EPA will no longer take science advice from “scientists” who receive stupendous amounts of money for climate doom.

During the Obama years, the EPA packed the CASAC panel. Twenty-four of its 26 members are now agency grantees, with some listed as principal investigators on EPA research grants worth more than $220 million 

Environmentalists, predictably, sued, alleging this policy would change the “science” advice away from environmentalism – as obviously it would. 

In 2016, the World Bank announced it would spend 28% of investments on climate-related projects by 2020, which is roughly three hundred to four hundred million dollars of American taxpayer money per year. All Climate related projects, as near to all of them as make no difference, are scams that enrich political activists, and again, Trump cut this out.

A horde of journalists have lost their jobs, and their status. 

Trump is now taking aim at “Disparate impact” If he succeeds with “disparate impact”, there are going to be mass layoffs of bitter angry aging cat ladies with vast unpaid college debt and credit card debt from Human Resources, radically curtailing the status, wealth, and power of the left.

I'm not sure that I entirely buy this argument, but if Trump does to this what he's doing to regulation (eliminating several for each new one) then in the next 2 (or 6) years there could very possibly be more unemployed Leftists.

Update on the deadly Houston no-knock raid

Here's a quick update on the corruption that has come to light in the Houston Police Department.

It looks like the Houston PD are ending no-knock raids.  Maybe.  Kinda sorta.  If you believe the Houston Police Chief.  I guess you can color me skeptical - the Organs of the State rarely give up power voluntarily - but we can hope.

The Stonehenge quarries found

This is a pretty cool bit of archaeology detective work:

Both craggy rock outcrops are the petrified remains of a long-past volcanic eruption. The lava cracked as it cooled and hardened, like mud in a dry lakebed, and those cracks reached well down into the deposit, so the cooled lava ended up in a cluster of vertical pillars. (The Giant's Causeway in Ireland is another well-known example of that process.)

That geological coincidence made the work of quarrying much easier than in Egypt. There, at around the same time, workers were chiseling blocks out of solid bedrock. In Wales, the quarry workers just had to wedge a column apart from its neighbors at the joints (it's difficult not to imagine peeling a really big piece of string cheese, honestly).

Pearson and his colleagues found some evidence of how they did it, thanks in part to the almost-universal human tendency to drop things and forget to pick them up again. The ancient quarry-workers left behind mudstone wedges and stone hammers, which they would have driven into the cracks between the pillars to carefully pry them apart. The wedges were precision tools for delicate work; mudstone is considerably softer than the rhyolite and dolerite columns, and Pearson says that made a difference.

"An engineering colleague has suggested that hammering in a hard wedge could have created stress fractures, causing the thin pillars to crack," he said in a statement to the press. "Using a soft wedge means that, if anything were to break, it would be the wedge and not the pillar."

The first steam locomotive - 215 years ago

On this day in 1804, Richard Trevithick debuted the world's first self propelled steam locomotive at the Welsh iron mill at Pen-y-Darren.  It pulled five cars loaded with ten tons of iron and around 70 iron workers nine miles, at a speed of five miles per hour.  It was so heavy that after three trips its weight broke the rails and it ended its life as a stationary steam engine.

It was followed with other - and better - locomotives: The Rocket, The Flying Scotsman, The Mallard, the Shinkansen and the TGV.  But it was the first, which is what we remember.  This is a reproduction.



There is a magic to all of this.  Castle Borepatch lies near (but not too near) a trunk line and it's possible in the dead of night to listen to the horn of the Night Train.  It's the sound of nostalgia.  Sure, airliners get you there faster but I'm not sure that anyone ever wrote a song like this for a Boeing.

Even the UN IPCC says we're not headed for climate disaster

At least not any time soon.  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).”

In hindsight, I should have hit this a bit harder.

For those who haven't been following along at home, let me give some background.  The UN IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the body who produces Assessment Reports on the state of the climate every five years.  This collects what is considered the best consensus science.  The last Assessment Report is Assessment Report 5, or AR5.  The section that Curry quoted is Working Group 2 (WGII) which (being to lazy to look up) is the report for government policymakers, providing guidance to those considering new laws.

So Curry quoted the consensus science intended to inform policy makers to Congress, and that guidance says "no disaster any time this century".  I will bring this up next time I'm in a discussion with the Usual Suspects™.

The only people who object are, of course, Climate Change Deniers.  Heh.

Bill Gates on the utter stupidity of the Environmentalists

Physicist Luboš Motls finds an interview where Bill Gates illustrates why it's simply not possible to provide 100% (or even close) electric power from solar and wind.  He starts with a quote from Gates' embedded video interview and then expands on the math calculations:

Here’s Tokyo, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23 GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.

Exactly. Just check the numbers, roughly. They talk about some metropolitan area around Tokyo so lots of people are involved. 27 million sounds fine. And each of them needs almost a kilowatt of power at each moment – most of it is not "personal energy consumption", however. 3 days is 72 hours, 72 times 23 is 1656. We need 1656 gigawatthours. Solar doesn't work, the weather is bad. The wind turbines should better be stopped and protected because the cyclone could break them. OK, you need a prepared charged battery with 1656 gigawatthours for those nice three days (or some really long and good cables from another part of the world with generous inhabitants who are willing to share a half of their energy). 

One kilowatthour of Tesla-like battery used to cost $1,000 but the price went below $200 in a recent year or two and the Tesla CEO dreams about $100. Great. Let's use $200 per kilowatthour. 1656 gigawatthours is 1656 million kilowatthours which would cost 1656 million times 200 which is some $330 billion for those batteries whose only purpose is to satisfy some brainwashed morons' view that renewable energy should rule the world (and they probably reject nuclear energy as well because Greenpeace told them to do so). And it's just one Tokyo metropolitan area, some 1/300 of the world population.

But he's not done with the math.  He discusses how many lithium batteries you would need to provide everyone in the world with the same 3 day's electric storage that we're talking about for Tokyo, and how this would take ten times more than the world's entire lithium reserves.  Then he switches to a discussion of how you create the steel needed for all the wind turbines - most of the power for making steel comes from direct coal burning at the steel furnace.  If you don't use coal, where does that power come from?  He closes with a key point:

The production of steel and cement and the operation of airplanes requires a lot of concentrated and reliable energy that is delivered in real time. If there exists no viable alternative physical scheme where the concentrated energy comes from, then no financial schemes or Ponzi schemes can successfully replace the bulk of the existing system with an equally viable but would-be "cleaner" alternative.

Let me elaborate on this point.  The perceived legitimacy of government and social institutions (such as environmentalism) has been collapsing over the last 20-30 years.  That trajectory has a very clear landing point:

This is how you get Donald Trump.

Now it is unlikely in the extreme that environmentalists will stop to reconsider their agenda just because it strengthens Donald Trump, but they should at least be smart enough to understand this is what they are doing.

But they're not smart, even a little bit.  They can't do basic math, and quite frankly they don't care.  This is all about upper middle class virtue signaling to other upper middle class types that they're not the horrible declassé Deplorables.  It has a very Ancien Régime vibe to it.  They really don't care about what's happening outside of their sale des miroirs because what really matters is whether they get the proper deference from the Comte de Lyon.  After all, the peasants are revolting, n'est-ce pas?

And so the reaction.  Trump is merely the American manifestation of a world wide rejection of a grotesquely out of touch and clearly stupid "elite".  Doug Ford in Canada, Nigel Farage and Brexit in the UK, the yellow vests in France, the collapse of Angela Merkel in Germany, the unlikely alliance of left wing and right wing parties in the Italian government, and the alliance of Eastern European governments against the EU are all expressions of a rejection of the old norms.

Nothing illustrates the stupidity of the old order more than this obsession with "renewable" energy.  Australia - the most aggressive in implementing a Green New Deal - has the highest electricity rates in the world and spent a billion dollars for a single day's power in a single state because that power simply failed.  A new term has emerged in the European Press - "energy poverty" - describing how escalating electricity rates due to their Green New Deal forces people to choose whether to eat or heat their house in winter.  We've seen where this ends up, and it's not pretty for the "elite".

Quite frankly, the best outcome of a Green New Deal is more Donald Trump.  At worst, the tumbrels will roll again, the better to feed Madame Guillotine.

Image par la Wik

I guess that this is what we should expect from a failed education system that no longer teaches the great sweep of history, an "elite" that doesn't require any actual real world success to qualify for membership, and a hermetically sealed intellectual bubble that rejects facts in favor of status-seeking feelings.  Looking at these idiots, it's impossible to forget Tallyrand's comment about the Bourbons restored to the French Throne after the fall of Napoleon: they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

If we're going to shut down the government again, how about the ATF?

Asking for a friend.

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 19, 2019

Police corruption in Houston

Lawrence has a very interesting update on the "no knock" raid in Houston that went catastrophically wrong: both homeowners dead and five officers wounded.  It's long and detailed (spoiler alert: it appears that one of the Undercover officers made the whole thing up, lied to the Court to get the warrant, and that this isn't the first time he's done it).  Here's his sum up, but you should read the whole thing:

So it turns out that two people died and five cops were shot in a no-knock raid of an alleged dealer’s house where no significant narcotics were found on information provided by, well, possibly no one. Something obviously stinks here.

There's no word that describes this other than "appalling".  Prosecutions should result.

Top Gun 2: Does the Military hate Hollywood?

om Cruise?  There's a sequel to Top Gun in the works, with a lot of the original cast back (Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer) and even featuring Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" song.  Filming is under way right now.

But there's a lot of scuttlebutt that Cruise has pissed off the rank and file:

Tom Cruise is filming Top Gun 2 on the mighty USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), a US Nimitz class super carrier. The crew has been ordered to not look at Tom Cruise or to talk to the arrogant Scientology OT. Tom Cruise will make a fortune from Top Gun 2 pretending to be a US Navy officer and yet he shows no respect to for the men and women who serve aboard the Theodore Roosevelt.

Tom Cruise has the same arrogant behavior going on in Scientology: No one is allowed to look at him or talk to him unless he grants permission.

Scuttlebutt from the crew of the “TR” has made its way onto social media — and special thanks to my colleague Intergalactic Walrus for making today’s article possible due to his timely commenting at the Underground Bunker.

Now it's probably good to be skeptical of the site since it's strongly anti-Scientology.  However, Cruise has a history of disrespect for the military:

Famed actor Tom Cruise recently said that his job is comparable to being deployed to Afghanistan, according to court documents obtained by TMZ.

 I know people at NAS Lemoore, and will ask what they hear - filming will be there later this month.

The best and worst US Presidents

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off.  So sorry Abe and George, we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up the annual Borepatch's bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character." 

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D. 

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2. 

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate Donald Trump) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, imprisoning US citizens in concentration camps, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

Truth

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 17, 2019

Arcangelo Corelli - Concerto Grosso in D Major

Archangelo Corelli was the one who helped create and popularize the sonata and and concerto, and today's selection is one of his most famous concertos.  Born on this day in 1653 in the Papal States, he had a long career in Rome and directly influenced both J.S. Bach and George Frederick Handel.  He was so famous that people from later ages made up anecdotes about him: for example, Rousseau told how Corelli went to Paris as a young man but was chased off by Louis XIV's court composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully.  Rousseau seems to have thought that this demonstrated the corruption of society, although there seems to be no evidence that Corelli ever went to France.

Rest in Peace, Bruno Ganz

Bruno Ganz, the actor who played Adolf Hitler in the film "Downfall" - and which has the scene of Hitler ranting that has been turned into its own Internet meme - is dead at 77.  I have a post tag for "Hitler Video" because there are almost three dozen of them that I've posted.  Here is the original scene:



This one may be my very favorite parody version of them all (yes, it's about Global Warming):



Or this one abut Global Warming.  I'll have to give back my Nobel Prize ...



And of course, there was one for Obamacare.  Hitler is infuriated that his insurance got canceled even though "If you like your Doctor, you can keep your Doctor."  And he was going to buy a Harley with the $2500/year that Obamacare was going to save him.  Heh.



Of course, there's a Computer Security one, too:



Here's an interview with Ganz on all the parody videos that have been made.  He was pretty tickled by them:



Thanks for the performance, Mr. Ganz, and for all the fun that resulted.  Rest in peace.

Self-Driving cars: unsafe at any speed

A Tesla on autopilot drove itself into a wreck.  The failure mode is interesting:

Yet another example came to light on Monday when a driver in North Brunswick, New Jersey wrecked his Tesla on a highway while the vehicle was in Autopilot mode. According to a report published by News 12 New Jersey, the driver said that the vehicle "got confused due to the lane markings" at a point where the driver could have stayed on the highway or taken an exit. The driver claims that Autopilot split the difference and went down "the middle", between the exit and staying on the highway.

The car then drove off the road and collided with several objects before coming to a stop. The driver claims that he tried to regain control of the vehicle but that "it would not let him".

Insty is skeptical, but I'm not.  This is exactly the kind of situation that you should suspect the software could handle badly: confusing input from signs or lane markers leading to a failure to navigate the car on a safe route.  It's not a software bug, it's a gap in the algorithm used to control the car.

I'm not sure that this is solvable, either.  The way software developers handle these "edge cases" is (a) ignore them if possible (I can't see Tesla being able to do that, or (b) write a special case condition that covers the situation.  The problem with the later option is that there can be hundreds of these special cases that need to be coded in.  That makes the software a huge bloated mass that nobody can really predict how it will work.  Validation becomes really hard and QA testing becomes essentially impossible.

And this is without postulating software bugs - this is all trying to make the algorithm suck less.  Of course, the more code you have to write, the more bugs you will have - remember that validation becomes really hard and testing well nigh impossible?  You'll have an unknown number of potentially fatal bugs that you probably won't know about.

Until we have a different type of computer (probably one that is not based on von Neumann architecture).  If you want to get really computer geeky (and I know that some of you do), automotive autopilot problems are almost certainly NP-Hard.  For non computer geeks that means if you want to code one of the then good luck - you're going to need it.

The bottom line: I have absolutely no intention to ever trust my life to software that is NP-Hard.  I know (and admire) many software developers, but this is flying too close to the sun.  Someone's wings will melt.

From the Department of Dodgy Climate Statistics

This is hilarious:

Looking at short trends in the global surface temperature data, the analysis shows that global temperature has not increased under Republican presidents, only Democrats.

LOL.

There's an old saying in statistics that if you can use three variables you can derive an elephant, and if you have four variables you can make him dance.  I posted almost exactly ten years ago about dodgy stats in climate science.  What's funny about this is the same folks who would have disputed the term "dodgy" in that post would absolutely use the term here.

The earliest commercially practical color photography

Image de la Wik

The first black and white photos date to the 1820s and the first color one to 1842, but color photography wasn't practical as other than a laboratory exercise until the Lumière brothers patented a strange Autochrome technique in 1907.  A glass plate had various colored starch granules applied; the granules acted as color filters allowing actual practical color photography - as the 1917 Nieuport 23 fighter shows.

It's surprising what we have from this period, for example Mark Twain from 1907:

It's interesting just how old some still common technology is.  I posted years ago about Thomas Edison's recording of Brahms himself playing one of his compositions.  The recording comes not on wax cylinder but via Youtube, just as the photos above are on your computer screen rather than printed on paper.  But they are both still recordings and photos, from over a century ago.

Not to mention the first four engine strategic bomber from way back in 1913.

The Laws of the Universe impose limits

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 12, 2019

Hacker takes over Google Nest security cam

Talks to family's baby:

An Illinois couple said a hacker spoke to their baby through one of their Nest security cameras and then later hurled obscenities at them, CBS station WBBM-TV reports. Arjun Sud told the station he was outside his 7-month-old son's room Sunday outside Chicago and he heard someone talking. "I was shocked to hear a deep, manly voice talking," Sud said. "My blood ran cold." Sud told WBBM-TV he thought the voice was coming over the baby monitor by accident. But it returned when he and his wife were downstairs. The voice was coming from another of the many Nest cameras throughout the couple's Lake Barrington house. "Asking me, you know, why I'm looking at him -- because he saw obviously that I was looking back -- and continuing to taunt me," Sud said. Later that night, Arjun Sud noticed the Nest thermostat they have upstairs had been raised to 90 degrees. He suspected the hacker was behind that too. Nest's parent company, Google, said in a statement that Nest's system was not breached. Google said the recent incidents stem from customers "using compromised passwords exposed through breaches on other websites."

Let me, err, Google Translate that last bit: Google said that if you use one of these damned things you'd better be a security expert or J. Random Hacker will set your house temperature to whatever he wants and teach your baby interesting vocabulary.

Your mileage may vary, but I will never have one of these things in my house.  And I am a bit of a security expert, thank you very much.

Now that's marketing

This is awesome.

What the heck is wrong with the Virginia Democrats?

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 9, 2019

I was a Democrat in the 1970s and I didn't think that sort of thing was funny.  But that was in Maine.