Trump’s Ballroom

4/3/26 New York Times article (behind a paywall, I opened the link in a private tab) reports the ballroom is really a shed for a very deep, very secure underground bunker.

Getting private sources to pay for the shed was clever. I doubt any of our enemies thought it was just a ballroom.

Just in Time for My Move to Tennessee

 The Post Office is requesting comment on allowing mailing of handguns. This has been banned since 1927. This will include:

Out-of-State Mailings by Non-FFL Owners: Non-FFL owners may mail Mailable Firearms to themselves or another person in another state for lawful activities under the following conditions. The mailpiece must: 1) Be addressed to the recipient. 2) Include the “in the care of” endorsement immediately preceding the name of the applicable temporary custodian. 3) Be opened by the recipient. 4) Be mailed using a class of mail, product, or Extra Service that provides tracking and signature capture at delivery. 

I will be able to mail all my firearms to my son-in-law to hold for me while flying there. Details on the procedures of the proposed rule changes are here.

Advantages of Having a CNC Mill

The part that holds the diagonal mirror in a Newtonian reflector is called a spider. (It has either three or four legs and a body in the middle.)

I replaced the 1960s antique Edmund Scientific spider (which had no collimation screws) a couple years ago with a very nice modern one that uses four 10-32 screws. I have never been very successful at collimation of the main mirror. When trying to diagnose the problem, i noticed that the round part through which the four 10-32 screws pass had a stripped thread.

The screws go through the round part to tip the mirror holder relative to the optical path. Obviously a stripped thread is not going to do that very well.

Fortunately, the round part with stripped screw hole was a pretty easier part to machine. The original was 1.53" diameter, .41" thick with five 10-32 tapped holes (four for adjustment; one to attach it to tge mirror holder). I had a piece of .5" thick Delrin which was easy to machine into a copy.

Once I put the new part in the spider, I discovered another nuisance: the torque to the adjustment screws was enough to repeatedly rotate the mirror holder so the laser beam would go everywhere it should except the center of the main mirror.  The only solutions would be to add a lock nut to the mirror holder where it connects to the shaft or figure out how to make the adjustment screws zero friction through the center piece. I already had it in the tube, so i adjusted for center on the mirror,:rotating the mirror holder back each time to get back to mirror center.  The final collimation step only requires turning wing nuts on the mirror cell. If I have occasion to remove this again, i may tackle one of these fixes. For now, the mirror is collimated.

Microplastics: How Much is There Really?

A recent study discovered that nitrile gloves were adding to the microplastics measurement. From Analytical Methods:

Quality assurance and control measures – including wearing gloves when handling laboratory materials and samples – seek to reduce overestimating microplastic abundance. However, commonly used laboratory gloves release non-volatile residues, including stearate salts, that exhibit vibrational spectra similar to microplastics. In this work, we illustrate that dry surface contact with nitrile and latex laboratory gloves can cause overestimations of microplastics (mean 2000 false positives per mm2) when using traditional library matching approaches.

Is there an actual problem with microplastics.  Likely less but how do we really know. A little panic goes a long ways 

Scientific Evidence of What Those of Us Saw Who Worked in Cubicles When Corporate Takeovers Happened

 3/2/26 Cornell Chronicle:

Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.

Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.

“Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

Although people anywhere can BS each other – that is, share dubious information that’s misleadingly impressive or engaging – the workplace not only rewards but structurally protects it, Littrell said. In a work setting where corporate jargon is already the norm, it’s easy for ambitious employees to use corporate BS to appear more competent or accomplished, accelerating their climb up the corporate ladder of workplace influence.

Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous – but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a “corporate bullshit generator” that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”

He then asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the “business savvy” of these computer-generated BS statements alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders. Divided into four distinct studies, the research verified the scale as a statistically reliable measure of individual differences in receptivity to corporate bullshit, then, through use of established cognitive tests, made connections between receptivity to BS and analytic thinking skills known to be essential to workplace performance. 

I Think Zero-G Reproduction Has Far More Serious Concerns

4/1/26 Smithsonian reports that experiments suggest sperm may not be successful at fertilization in zero gravity:

Near-weightlessness “causes [sperm] to flip around, to go upside down.… They don’t really know which way is up or down,” Nicole McPherson, a study co-author and a biologist at Adelaide University in Australia, tells the Guardian’s Tory Shepherd. The cells do “not really understand or know which direction they’re going in.”

I would worry also about proper bone and muscle development in utero. I think even under lunar gravity this should concern us. I remember reading in my youth about chickens raised in centrifuges having larger and more developed hearts and legs. I would worry about the opposite problem with babies carried and born in below 1 G environments. 

"Only a Screwdriver Turn Away" Japan's Nuclear Capacity

3/31/26 South China Morning Post:

"Japan has enough plutonium to make 5,500 nuclear warheads, PLA Daily says"

I can see why China is concerned. If the PRC decides to invade Taiwan and Japan steps in, Japan could probably destroy the PRC's military capabilities without assistance from the U.S. It would certainly cause thermonuclear war. This alone will discourage China doing something stupid like invading Japan.

Doom and Gloom From TDS-Suffferers Seems Not to Be Working

The doom and gloom crowd about the Irsn war (most notably at the Wall Street Journal) seems not to be working. The DJIA yesterday was up more than 2%: 1/2% today so far. 

It seems to me that Trump has given the Europeans some defense from Iranian IRBMs landing on their cities. Now, if only they could see their way to protecting their oil supply through the Strait of Hormuz. But they can rely on us to do all the heavy lifting while they mollify their Muslim populations.

I Wonder Why This is Not Getting More Attention

 3/30/26 Union-Bulletin:

LOS ANGELES — The case of a lifetime started with a putrid smell and a green garden hose sticking out of the side of a supposedly vacant warehouse in California farm country.

Inside the sprawling building on I Street in Reedley, code enforcement officer Jesalyn Harper found vials filled with liquid — some marked in English or Mandarin, others with just a code — that bore frightening labels such as “Malaria,” “COVID-19” and “HIV.” Refrigerators, lined up in columns along a wall, had labels that read “blood” and “Ebola.”

As she walked deeper into the warehouse, passing lab workers filling pregnancy test kits, she located the source of the smell that had brought her there — droppings from 1,000 lab-tested mice, she told The Times during a recent interview. The workers were nice enough, she said, but when she started asking questions she could feel the mood change.

“I realized I’m in trouble, and I need to get out of this building without tipping them off that I’m scared,” Harper said.

Her discovery blew open an elaborate criminal case with ties to California, Las Vegas and China. The investigation in Reedley found that the lab was part of an elaborate scheme to import COVID tests from China and pass them off as American made.

But there are some who fear the operation was much more complex than that. A congressional committee uncovered payments topping $1 million made to the operator of the Reedley business from banks in the People’s Republic of China.

No, Another Internet of Things Item I Do Not Need

 Kickstarter is trying to drum up funding for "The first garment that tracks your sleep."

My BiPAP does that already, thank you very much.

YouTube Has Everything

A World War Ii history guy decides to live on reproduction C and K rations for three days. And yes, there is a company that makes them. 

How Much of the TSA Lines Was Anti-Trump Propaganda?

 I am pleased that TSA employees are again getting paid but it appears that a lot of them did the right thing and kept showing up for work anyway.  My wife, daughter and her family flew  Boise to Los Angeles and back again this last week. At Boise, quick movement through TSA Precheck. Two minutes at LAX.

Who Woulda Thunk It?

Tuberculosis used to be a big problem in America.  I can still remember very earnest and sober health class films about TB in 8th grade. (The film was already pretty dated; i suspect the public health problem was close to being dated.)

3/29/26 Fox News warns that there is a problem again with TB:

A potentially deadly disease known as "the white plague" has been rising in the U.S. since the pandemic, health officials have warned.

Tuberculosis (TB) gets its nickname from the pale appearance of those affected with the disease in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, according to historical medical literature.

After a dip in 2020 with the onset of COVID – likely due to underdiagnosis and reduced screenings, according to health experts – cases of TB have increased every year since.

Of course the doctors interviewed emphasize COVID-19 screwed up everything (because we panicked over a disease that was really only a serious risk to a small part of the population who needed extraordinary protection). They do finally acknowledge the elephant in the room:

Another factor is a return to international travel and increased migration from countries where TB is more prevalent, according to Vivekanandan.

Gee, do you think admitting millions of people from the Third World without even a pretense of medical screening might increase exposure to a population that has not been immunized could be dangerous. Not as dangerous as losing control of Congress!

Avocados

3/28/26 Yahoo News article explains how humans replaced giant ground sloths as the method for spreading avocados.  Really interesting story:

"The avocado both looks and feels strangely overbuilt: its flesh is abundant, and its seeds are enormous. In fact, its proportions seem fundamentally mismatched to the modern world. There aren’t any animals alive today that are known to swallow the fruit whole; by extension, there are no animals that could disperse its seed effectively. Yet, having slip through evolutionary cracks, the fruit still persists. It’s globally cultivated and culturally beloved, but biologically speaking, it’s somewhat puzzling."

Nebula Filter

Nebulae have distinctive dust clouds with some frequencies dominant. Especially under light-polluted skies, it is nice to bring up those frequencies at the expense of other frequencies. 

So I bought this Asttomania Nebula filter. Yes, it brought tge Nebula out by r reducing transmission of other frequencies. 

46th Anniversary Today

When Babylon Bee Hits It Out of the Park

3/29/26 Babylon Bee:

LEGOLAND, CA — Representatives from LEGO gathered at Legoland in San Diego to unveil a new series of building sets called ‘California Home' that requires kids to fill out building permits and wait two years before starting construction.

Have You Ever Wanted to Work With 21st Century Material?

 I mentioned that my wife put the kibosh on carbon fiber composite machining. The dust gets everywhere and it is not the healthiest stuff to have blowing around, even if you are wearing a respirator. Before I put these pieces on eBay, I though I would all of you a chance to buy these pieces. You will be amazed at its lightness, stiffness, and tensile strength. I do not really have a price for any of these. If you can pay me for postage, that would be fine. These are all Dragonplate Economy Plate CFC:

Random scrap, mostly 1/2" and 1/4" thick. I have no idea for what these little scraps might be used, but they are amazingly stiff and strong.

2 6x6x1/8" glossy:

2x6 x 1/2 matte:

3 1/2 x 6 x1/8 glossy

6 x 2 1/4 x 1/4 glossy

6 x 2 x 1/8 glossy

I have no idea (my notes do not match the picture sequence)

1 1/2 x 2 3/4 x 1/4 matte

2001 A Space Travesty

Someone decided that the idea of the Naked Gun comedies crossed with Men in Black and a 2001 would be funny.

I watched aboutx30 minutes and decided it was a tragic failure. Leslie Neilsen's deadpan delivery is awesome.  (If you arr sn antique you remember when he was known as a dramatic actor and a good one at that. 

Nielsen can not save this. It is vulgar in ways that make Airplane and Naked Gun seem subtle.  The sight gags are cute, but not enough of them to overcome the vulgarity 

Gravity

I am sorry I did not see this in a theater. It is an exciting adventure story where there are no bad guys, just heroic people trying to do the best they can in a bad situation. 

Never complain about your job ,or the commute, after watching this.

Pro-Life Extremists Used to Claim Abortion Caused Lifelong Trauma

Do why the need for abortion doulas? 7/24/23 Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest:

An abortion doula provides physical and emotional support to a patient during their abortion process. It's an added level of care outside of the actual medical care where providers are attuning to whatever the patients' needs are, to make them as comfortable as possible during the process. That can look like making sure they're warm enough or making sure that they have food or drinks or just whatever is going to make them feel supported. The doula can step in and advocate for the patient and offer the patient options. This also looks like some level of physical support with breathing exercises or visualization exercises to help take the patient's mind off any pain or discomfort that they may be experiencing because, sadly, with any medical procedure, there can be some level of discomfort. The abortion doula is there to really walk them through that.

How many medical procedures require that level of support. Certainly not after an appendectomy or double bypass to use two examples that I know well. There are women who feel guilt later about the destruction of "a clump of cells" thst might someday have turned into baby.

Thank Goodness Most Spear Phishers Are Stupid

 They do not realize that firebaseapp and on.microsoft.com in an email address means filter it directly into spam folder.

Why Linux is not Replacing Windows Anytime Soon

I s pent most of my career using Unix for software development or being sys admin for a herdof Sun workstationx. Unix/Linux has many virtues.

A friend who is not technical has just switched from Windows 7 (don't laugh, he is moving his email from AOL after 36 years).. He wanted a regular backup of his files to a USB hard drive.

Okay, how hard can this be? Somewhere there is a program either GUI or shell-based that does this, right?  Not that I could find. After a lot steps that brought back memories:

1. Set up mount of USB drive in /etc/mount. What? HNo atomount or autodiscovery? You run lsblk to see what devices are attached, determine which is the USB drive, copy its 8 hexadecimal digit UUID and several other close to magic fields. (I started to remember what UID and GID mean as I fiddled.)

You rediscover that mount is a very picky program. How many spaces between parameters, Running sudo mount -a may not identify errors, just silently fail. How would it be to make a mount editor that prompts you for the parameters ands adds them to /etc/mount?

3. The backup script using rsync was fairly straightforward.

#!/bin/bash

# Mirror backup to USB drive (vfat friendly)




BACKUP_BASE="/mnt/usb-backup/Backups"

LOGFILE="$HOME/backup.log"




echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') - Backup started" >> "$LOGFILE"




# Check if USB is mounted

if ! mount | grep -q " /mnt/usb-backup "; then

echo "$(date) - ERROR: USB not mounted at /mnt/usb-backup" >> "$LOGFILE"

echo "ERROR: Please run: sudo mount /mnt/usb-backup"

exit 1

fi




mkdir -p "$BACKUP_BASE"




# === Directories to mirror - Add more here if needed ===

declare -A DIRS=(

["/home/$(whoami)/Documents"]="$BACKUP_BASE/Documents"

["/home/$(whoami)/Pictures"]="$BACKUP_BASE/Pictures"

)




echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') - Starting rsync mirror..." >> "$LOGFILE"




for src in "${!DIRS[@]}"; do

dest="${DIRS[$src]}"

if [ -d "$src" ]; then

echo "→ Mirroring $src" | tee -a "$LOGFILE"

mkdir -p "$dest"

rsync -aAX --delete --info=progress2,stats2 "$src/" "$dest/" >> "$LOGFILE" 2>&1

else

echo "Warning: $src not found" >> "$LOGFILE"

fi

done




echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') - Backup completed successfully" >> "$LOGFILE"

echo "✅ Backup finished successfully!"

echo "Log saved to: $LOGFILE" 

Adding an entry to crontab was simpler than mount but it still screams for a tool to help you add an entry. Some of why Linux remains user-indifferent is that for a lot of geeks it is the same theory as stick shifts: "It keeps the riff-raff out." 

Urologist Tomorrow

I am hoping this catheter will be removed for good. Inflamed prostrate gland usually shrinks back to normal in 1 to 2 weeks after appendicitis. This is really unpleasant.  The only good side is there are no nighttime needs to urinate. The downside: carrying around a reservoir when you go to bed and get up and a leg bag during the day,  both which require periodic emptying. You will remember the leg bag because it is like wearing a 1 pound weight on your leg after a while.

From watching TV ads, it appears that there are people who have a permanent recurring need for catheters. I cannot imagine what would preclude surgery to fix whatever underlying condition has put them in that state.

UPDATE: Catheter removed.

This May Be a Lifetime Comet

Comet MAPS will be appearing in April. This is a member if a Sun-grazer family. A couple 19th century members of the family were visible in daylight. (As I recall, one never came out the far side.) These are called Sun-grazers because they get within 100,000 miles of the Sun's surface.

A Reminder of What Universities Give America

 3/26/26 Daily Caller presents an Instagram video (which is why I have not included it here:

Shocking video from a radical anti-Iran war protest in Philadelphia showed participants explicitly supporting Islamic terror groups and calling for “cheers” every time an American servicemember comes home “in a casket.”

It also calls for support for Hamas and Hamas. Remember who hates women. 

Does Bad Diet Cause Obesity?

 If you wander through YouTube, you will videos offering many explanations for why Americans are obese today, when they were not in the 1950s. Certainly, my recollection is that in my elementary school classes (1963-1968) it was usually one kid in each class who was fat. (By junior high, that was me.) Pictures of 1950s and 1960s American seem healthily skinny. But did fat people not get photographed?

United States Long-Term Trends in Adult BMI (1959–2018): Unraveling the Roots of the Obesity Epidemic

. 2024 Jan 9;21(1):73. doi: 10.3390/ijerph21010073

As you will not be surprised to see, obesity in America has always been a poor people's problem. But look at the BMI in 1960 through 1980. What did Americans eat back then? Steak, potatoes, hamburgers, hot dogs, butter in and on everything, milk shakes, cookies, cakes, pancakes, sausage, bacon: You know, a really fattening diet. Care to throw your hypotheses into the comments? 

Solution is Obvious

California Attorney-General complains that Baird v. Bonta (9th Cir. 2026) will provoke fear:

“Allowing the open carry of firearms in densely populated counties creates unnecessary anxiety, terrorizes children, and instills fear throughout our communities."

I agree that open carry likely will terrify the sheep that inhabit California cities. SolUtion: Remove obstacles for law-abiding people to receive concealed carry licenses. Concealed carry scares no one.

Another Victory in a Case On Which I Worked

 Baird v. Bonta (9th Cir. 2026):

For most of American history, open carry has been the default manner of lawful carry for firearms. It remains the norm across the country—more than thirty states generally allow open carry to this day, including states with significant urban populations. 1 Indeed, several of our Nation’s largest cities and states recently returned to unlicensed open carry by explicitly authorizing it. For example, Texas reauthorized open carry without a license in 2021. 2 Kansas likewise transitioned back to allowing open carry without a permit in 2015. 3 And other states that placed restrictions on open carry in recent decades have also removed those burdens.4 Similarly, for the first 162 years of its history open carry was a largely unremarkable part of daily life in California. From 1850, when California first became a state, until the Mulford Act of 1967, public carry of firearms in California (open or concealed) was entirely unregulated. And when California first deviated (or considered deviating) from this practice, its reasons for doing so were less than morally exemplary. The first restriction on public carry that California contemplated was a concealed-carry ban in 1856—which was intended to apply only to “Mexicans,” who were considered dangerous. See The Rise and Fall of California’s First Concealed-Carry Law, NRA Institute for Legislative Action (Jan. 1, 2013) (citing John David Borthwick, “THREE YEARS IN CALIFORNIA” (1857); Roger D. McGrath, GUNFIGHTERS, HIGHWAYMEN, & VIGILANTES: VIOLENCE ON THE FRONTIER (1984)), https://www.nraila.org/articles/20130101/the-rise-and-fallof-californias-first-concealed-carry-law.

Eventually, in 1967 California first criminalized the peaceful open carrying of a loaded handgun in the Mulford Act—legislation that was also tainted with racial animus. See Mulford Act, 1967 Cal. Stat. 2459 (codified as amended at various sections of Cal. Penal Code); Cal. Penal Code § 25850 (2024). Passed during a period of significant racial unrest, the Mulford Act was a legislative response to the Black Panther Party’s activities, which included openly carrying firearms to protest police behavior in AfricanAmerican communities. See Thaddeus Morgan, The NRA Supported Gun Control When the Black Panthers Had the Weapons, HISTORY (last updated May 28, 2025), https://www.history.com/articles/black-panthers-guncontrol-nra-support-mulford-act. The catalyzing event occurred when “30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, ‘The time has come for Black people to arm themselves.’” Id. The California legislature disagreed and responded by passing the Mulford Act. Id. Yet even then, it remained legal in California to openly carry a handgun, so long as it was unloaded. See Mulford Act, 1967 Cal. Stat. 2459.

Count on an appeal to an en banc panel by California but this is then likely to end up before the Supreme Coiurt. 

En banc petition filed. No word on action yet 

How in the Hell Does a Quadruple Amputee Aim and Fire a Gun?

3/23/26 ABC News:

"Quadruple amputee cornhole champion facing murder charges in fatal shooting"

He is a corn hole champion as well. Both of three seem implausible if not impossible. 

"Dayton James Webber, 27, is accused of fatally shooting the front seat passenger of his vehicle during an argument in La Plata, Maryland, on Sunday and then fleeing to Virginia, according to the Charles County Sheriff's Office."

How do you drive a car without limbs? Mouth controls?

Finderscope

I mentioned that I needed to reduce the length of one part of the assembly. While doing so, I switched from PVC to aluminum tube. It took some work to find the right diameter. My wife suggested that rather than try for white, I should go for bright polish and it does look very nice this way. 

I was planning to blacken the interior of the aluminum tube parts. It seems to be optically fine for now. If it does not present itself optically well tonight, I will disassemble and blacken.

Right now, it is optically quite sharp and I expect it will work well for the intended purpose: wide field low power.

I Am Home

The surgery sites are finally registering pain. Not bad enough to get the Norco Rx filled and just a bit more than Tylenol can silence. The catheter is both more annoying and a sharper pain when in certain positions.  And a 250 ml of urine sloshing about in a bag on your ankle is annoying, but at least there are nighttime visits to the toilet. Although I would gladly trade that for this nuisance.  I should get priority seating with my urologist to find a solution to this inflamed prostrate gland.

A Shockingly Positive Japanese Perspective on Trump's Pearl Harbor Joke

Click over and read.

Musk Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is

3/21/26 Axios:

"Elon Musk said Saturday he'd be willing to pay the salaries of TSA agents during the Homeland Security shutdown, as President Trump suggested the possibility of using ICE agents to keep airports moving instead..  

"

• "Based on TSA's headcount, Musk paying officer salaries could run more than $40 million a week, a rounding error for the world's richest person."

Sure not a rounding error for TSA employees!

Not A Particularly Important Story, But I Still Got a Laugh

3/18/26 Yahoo News:

'The rise of the 'good-enough dinner': Why Gen Z is ditching the perfect meal prep for 'girl dinner' and 'boy kibble'...

"Even Harry Styles weighed in on these popular eating habits. During a recent interview with Brittany Broski’s Royal Court, he joked, “My sister always talks about the idea of girl dinner. Boy dinner, I've discovered, is just eating a rotisserie chicken over the sink.”

What a Drag It Is Getting Old

What i thought was constipation which causes what is known as urgency urination (you feel the need but nothing comes out) turned out to be a prostate gland that has blocked the urethra.  It is was miserable.  The Urgent Care got me in quickly and when I could not produce a urine sample they did a bladder scan and saw that there was no shortage of urine. They attempted to insert a catheter which was not as bad as I expected.  

The problem is benign prostrate hyperplasia not cancer  I am in ER now.

UPDATE: The ER fiest attempt at inserting a Foley catheter was both very painful and unsuccessful. For a second attempt with a smaller diameter, they used what sounded like "Gyrojet" that applied lidocaine and I think may have enlarged the path. The next try at the catheter was unpleasant but not desperately painful.  

Relief! My bladder is no longer screaming at me. The catheter is a little annoying at insertion point but not really painful.

Next, they ran me through a CT scan to look for bowel obstruction.  My daughter reminded me that some ago, I had a partial bowel obstruction which they fixed by medication. They are also looking for kidney stones (and I suspect bladder stones).  

I was supposed to leave Saturday for a cruise to Cabo San Lucas with my daughter, son-in-law, grandkids and son. That is not going to happen.  I have a urine bag attached to that catheter and the prospect of traveling with this stylish fashion accessory does not sound pleasant.  I am hoping my urologist will advance me in the queue for an appointment next week.

UPDATE 2: The ER doctor suggested antibiotics for the appendicitis which is about 50% successful in Europe. The surgeon made the case that because about 50% of the time you still need to remove it within two years, we should just remove it and nit have it reoccurring at what might be a less convenient time  it was done pretty quickly. Unfortunately, the inflammation it caused to the prostate gland did not diminish enough to remove the catheter so I an srill here this evening and I will need to have my urologist so a Roto-Rooter of the urethra through the prostrate gland next week. This will be a great nuisance  

The PA thinks the antibiotics probably have reduced inflammation enough to remove the catheter here and let me out.

Stories That Make My Day

 3/18/26 Breitbart:

On Tuesday, California agreed to a settlement with the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, and other plaintiffs, and will pay over $1.3 million to cover the plaintiffs’ attorney fees.

The settlement arose from a lawsuit that was filed against California’s Marketing Firearms to Minors Law, which crossed into First Amendment territory by banning firearm advertisements.

Breitbart News quoted Ninth Circuit Judge Kenneth Lee’s September 2023 majority opinion against the law, where he wrote “…that [the Marketing Firearms to Minors Law] does not directly and materially advance California’s substantial interests in reducing gun violence and the unlawful use of firearms by minors. There was no evidence in the record that a minor in California has ever unlawfully bought a gun, let alone because of an ad.”

I am pretty sure Judge Lee meant ever unlawfully bought a gun throuigh licensed dealers. I have no doubt that many have done so from other gang members. This is a big win for my friend Don Kilmer who pursued this absurd case for a number of years. 

In a larger sense than just guns: the idea that advertising sells people stuff they do not already want is absurd. If advertising can create demand, explain the failures of the 1950s Edsel, the IBM PCJr,, and New Coke. At most advertising influences choice: do you want our over-sugared breakfast cereal? 

I am sorry for California taxpayers, but there are consequences to electing idiots.

7 Tons Incoming

We are supposed to be watching for these. 3/17/26 Channel 19 News:

"CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - A fireball lit up skies across Northeast Ohio Tuesday morning after a seven-ton asteroid entered the atmosphere and broke apart over Medina County, NASA confirmed.

"The space agency said the meteor was first detected at 8:57 a.m. off Lake Erie near Lorain. It traveled more than 34 miles through the atmosphere before breaking up, with some fragments falling to the ground."

Admittedly, 7 tons is pretty small but because KE=1/2mv**2 and anything hitting our atmosphere is moving at 25,000 mph, the energy is truly frighteningly stupendous. 

On the plus side, look for burned rocks in your back yard.  If they are magnetic, even better. These are valuable if authenticated. If you think you hit pay rock, call your nearest university geology department. They want to check it for residual radiation and they can tell you if you got lucky.

Finished Shirer's Berlin Diary

It is a truly astonishing slice of eyewitness history. Like all eyewitnesses, you have to remember that they see only one part of the scene. But what is recorded is still valuable to anyone writing a secondary work on the subject.

One surprise for me is his late 1940 discussion of the T4 program to murder everyone who was in some way not sufficiently advanced to be part of the master race: the developmentally delayed; congenital defects; the incurable. Shirer mentioned that he heard numbers of 100,000 thrown around and thought this was likely too high. History has shown it was too low.

What i found interesting is that families of the dead ran paid death notices that in subtle ways hinted that something was not quite believable about these deaths. There were lots of these death notices in newspapers until the government stopped allowing them.

Shirer also indicates that while most Germans were generally supportive of the war at the start, sentiment was beginning to change by mid-1940. A jok he heard was that a plane crash killed Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. "Who was saved?" "The German People."

He also recounts the wooden bombs story that i am sure you have heard, but in a different direction. As Shirer was told by a Luftwaffe officer, the Germans had constructed decoy aircraft made of wood. British Intelligence had enough local agents to drop wooden bombs.

This is one of those great stories that I really doubt no matter which air force did it. Why burn fuel and risk planes and air crews to do this? It is still a great story.

The Guy Who Resigned From Trump Administration Over Iran War

 3/17/26 New York Times tells a story that suggests his decision is a bit more complex and sad than some have portrayed it:

In his resignation letter on Tuesday, Joe Kent, a top counterterrorism official, criticized the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. But he also mentioned his “beloved wife,” a Navy linguist who was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in January 2019.

Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent was 35.

Chief Kent was assigned to Cryptologic Warfare Activity 66, a Navy unit that supports the National Security Agency and military special operations forces. She was supporting the latter at the time of her death....

On Jan. 16, 2019, Chief Kent was meeting with a source at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, when a suicide bomber killed her and three other Americans.

Chief Kent was posthumously promoted to senior chief.

“She should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there,” Mr. Kent said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. “And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts.”

In his resignation letter, Mr. Kent cited what he said was Israel’s influence over the Trump administration’s policies. Some lawmakers called Mr. Kent’s remarks on Israel antisemitic, and critics mentioned his support for conspiracy theories.

Mr. Kent wrote that he “cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” adding, “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

The desire to avoid a ground war is completely understandable. Trump seems to share that view. 

UPDATE: Breitbart is reporting:

Former director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Joe Kent is reportedly being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for “allegedly leaking classified information.”

Shelby Talcott, a White House Correspondent for Semafor, reported that according to “three sources,” Kent, who resigned from his position on Tuesday, is being investigated by the FBI. The alleged investigation “pre-dates his departure.”

It Always Helps to Look at Confounding Factors.

 I found this on X:

What is the truth of the matter? We heard all about the original report with the mainstream media screaming "racism" or at least arguing we need more black doctors because they seem to do better at keeping black newborns alive. (The implication of that latter is that lower standards for black medical school admissions are both okay and necessary, despite being truly racist.)

I Am Not Entirely Thrilled With Hungary's Prime Minister ORBÁN

 But this is also concerning:

EXCLUSIVE BREAKING: FACEBOOK RESTRICTS ORBÁN POSTS WEEKS BEFORE HUNGARY’S ELECTION As Hungary heads toward a crucial April election, Facebook is reportedly restricting posts from the country’s Prime Minister. The move followed a call by an opposition party (Tisza Party) member, a former Meta employee, urging supporters to mass-report his content. Meanwhile, Tisza leader Péter Magyar has disproportionately high engagement figures, outperforming global figures, despite operating in a much smaller, language-limited country Péter also used a personal “professional mode” profile rather than a political page, contrary to Meta’s long-standing guidelines, potentially bypassing limits on political content. Questions are also emerging around how Meta moderates political content in Hungary. A regional Meta official has publicly shared positions aligned with mainstream European narratives, including pro-Ukraine messaging and content seen as anti-government in Hungary. If Hungary’s largest social platform keeps restricting Orbán’s content while opposition accounts seem inflated before the election, serious questions arise about free speech and democratic integrity. This requires an urgent investigation. I’ve seen political interference by social media companies in other countries, and I really hope this is not happening in Hungary.

Others have responded that this oversimplifies what Facebook is doing and that this is in part the  consequence of new rules about political ads:

The claim of Facebook specifically restricting Orbán's personal posts lacks clear confirmation in recent reports. Instead, Meta suspended several pro-government Hungarian news pages (e.g., county newspapers) in late February 2026, weeks before the April 12 election, sparking interference accusations. Péter Magyar's Tisza Party leads polls and draws massive crowds, with high organic engagement on Facebook likely from genuine momentum against Orbán's long rule, not proven inflation. Meta's EU political ad ban (since Oct 2025) affects both sides; Fidesz circumvents via loopholes and grassroots "digital fighters." Bias concerns exist on all platforms, but evidence points more to broader moderation (including pro-Orbán outlets) than targeted censorship of Orbán alone. Urgent scrutiny of Big Tech in elections is fair democracy demands transparency from all players.

At least part of why Péter Magyar is a thorn in Orbán's side is a scandal involving child sexual abuse:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has yet to comment on the resignation of two of the most prominent politicians of the Fidesz party – President Katalin Novak and former justice minister Judit Varga –  as he continues to maintain a low profile amid the biggest scandal rocking his government since taking office in 2010.

The child sexual abuse scandal is threatening the very foundations of the regime, Political Capital wrote in a note.

 In a nutshell, the story goes back to April 2023 when Novak gave pardons to two dozen people, including convicted terrorist Gyogy Budahazy, an influential figure of the far-right and now aligned with the parliamentary party Our Homeland. Novak also pardoned Endre Konya, the deputy director of a children’s home in Bicske, central Hungary, who used blackmail to force young boys to withdraw their testimony against the director, who had abused them sexually for years.

The Dutroux scandal exposed some worrisome problems with the Belgian law enforcement agencies.

The power of really big companies to affect elections is worrying. While a defeat of Orbán would also be a defeat for Russia, I think Facebook power is also worrisome.

 

Remember the Black Knight Scene From Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Where having lost both legs and arms to King Arthur he insists that combat is not over? 3/17/26 Daily Mail:

Iran's supreme leader says the US and Israel 'must be brought to their knees and accept defeat' before any peace deal can be agreed, Tehran claims - with new Ayatollah still yet to be seen

In case you have forgotten here.

It's All About China

3/16/26 The Hill article explains that Trump's apparently chaotic foreign policy is anything but.  It is all about preparing the battlespace with China. Word reading in full.

I Do Not Generally Support Outing People

But when it is the head of a nation that hangs homosexuals, it is delicious. 3/16/26 New York Post:

WASHINGTON —  President Trump was stunned to learn last week that US intelligence indicates new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei may be gay — and that his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, feared his suitability to rule the Islamic Republic for that reason, The Post can reveal.

Trump couldn’t contain his surprise and laughed aloud when he was briefed on the intel, according to sources.

Today's Machining Lesson

The attempt to cut the slice went poorly because the direction of motion and velocity unscrewed the chuck from the rotary table. It was not enough to come off but enough that the tube moved away from the endmill. Solution: cut in a clockwise direction so it does not loosen.

The Count of Tesla

My wife and I are watching a sumptuous 2024 version of the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. This is one the great novels and well worth your time to read.

It has been several years since I read it. Complicating my ability to tell how closely they are following the book, I watched a YouTube video recently that researched the real life case in which Dumas based it. The guy seeking revenge in real life was not a fabulously wealthy count, but the essential story of a guy wrongly accused of being part of a Bonapartist plot who was sent off to prison without a trial was there.  There are some problems verifying the existence of the victim from the department's records, but the summary of the case written by a Paris police archivist upon which Dumas relied seems to be real, with the conspirators and their children suffering the revenge seem to be real. By comparison, the novel is dark with a couple moments of the vengeance seeker showing compassion. 

Anyway, what does this have to do with Elon Musk? Recall that part of why he spent billions to buy Twitter and then spent millions to get Trump elected was that the transgender industrial complex used "he'll commit suicide" to mutilate Musk's son. Musk has used his wealth that dramatically dwarfs Monte Cristo's wealth to take revenge on an industry thay destroyed his son.

Unlike the protagonist of Dumas' novel, to my knowledge Musk has not taken personal revenge on the people involved, except to the extent that he has destroyed this money making criminal enterprise.

I Was Not Successful at Using My Parting Tool

I wanted to cut a piece of aluminum tube down to 1.23" length but I could not find a feed and speed that parted it without pulling the tube out of the chuck. I thought of using the chop saw but I feared it would bend the fairly thin wall tubing while cutting it.

So I mounted it on the rotating table.

I needed to make very slow and shallow cuts because again the chuck is unlikely to hold the tube as tightly as it should. But why write a program specific to this operation? So I wrote a program called mksub that accepts zStart, zStep, and zEnd parameters as well as a string of gCode commands to execute at each step of Z. In this case, a move to degree 0, then to degree 360, and back to 0.

This is general enough that almost relatively simple gCode command can be repeated to any arbitrary depth with only a trivial change in the Makefile.

Perhaps the Caliphate of Lesser Britain is Farther Away Than We Thought

Just watching a YouTube video of B1s lining up and taking off from RAF Fairford a couple of days ago.

I Went Shooting With my Son-in-Law Today

It is so nice having an entire range to ourselves. We were using one of those diagnostic targets that show you your likely error if you are hitting left or right down or up. Very helpful. 

The PPK/S is so accurate that I can fire at the 25 yard silhouette target as fast as my finger works and make every shot hit. The Browning Hi-Power not quite so much.

The PPK/S performed flawlessly with PMC hollow points.  The American Eagle kept failing to fire (perhaps 20% of the time). These will become range ammo only so that I can practice failure modes.

If you carry a pistol for self-defense (why else would you do so?) you should plan on shooting at least a box or two a month to stay proficient. 

You do not want to shoot at a bad guy and hit an innocent bystander. This both bad press for gun owners, and a civil suit looking for a target. To my surprise, analyzing antigun propaganda, they seldom find licensees doing this. I suspect most licensees know when to leave and when to shoot.

Unlike a rifle, handguns are intrinsically not easy to shoot accurately, except at conversational distances, where most of the need exists. Shoot the ammo you carry, at least to verify you are hitting to point of aim and that you are confident that your spectacularly expanding JHPs will reliably feed and extract. If your practice rounds are the same weight and manufacturer, hitting point of aim with FMJs should not be a problem.

I am a member of Homedale Rod & Gun Club. If you live in the Boise area, I strongly recommend that you consider membership. It is not expensive and often completely empty during the week. We have metal plate targets on the rifle range to 500 yards. The only downside compared to an indoor range is pit toilets, and as bad as you can imagine.

While cleaning the PPK/S, I accidentally pulled the trigger while attempting to get the slide back on the receiver. This creates a serious difficulty. SuperGrok told me something should have been obvious: put a cleaning rod down the barrel to force the hammer back and then the slide unjams.

Insomnia

I am not sure if these are lone wolves or sleeper cells. First, the attack on a synagogue, ISIS supporters throwing pipe bombs in New York City, then this. 3/12/26 New York Post:

A heroic ROTC student fatally stabbed the crazed ISIS-linked gunman who opened fire inside an Old Dominion University classroom Thursday, preventing further carnage, law enforcement sources said.

Shooter Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, gunned down an instructor before the unidentified cadet jumped into action to put an end to the suspected terror attack on the Virginia college campus, according to sources.

Joliah had a prior conviction for attempting to aid ISIS. His first name is, of course, a coincidence. 

Photographs and Memories

I just woke up from a dream so powerful that I had that i had to write it down to share. The dream involved working somewhere where some of the people with whom I worked in my 30s at startups in Northern California were still around. 

There had been a wedding for one of my crew. I went on an emotional bender and failed to show up for work or call in sick for several days.

I suddenly found myself stuffing a time sheet taking those days as vacation into a cigarette box even though I have never smoked with a note explaining that the wedding brought memories of the best years of our lives, long but rewarding hours, first houses, children, happy marriages. (Best years of my life in spite of not yet being rich.) Somehow, I had a few inches of movie film with those positive memories to put into it for mailing (you know with stamps). The Jim Croce song "Photographs and Memories" was the sound track.

Verse 1]

Photographs and memories

Christmas cards you sent to me

All that I have are these

To remember you

[Verse 2]

Memories that come at night

Take me to another time

Back to a happier day

When I called you mine

After Much Struggle, the Android Tablet Controls the New Mount

I thought that i had installed the ExploreStars app from PlayStore. Actually I had installed something also from Explore Scientific that controls some utterly unrelated products. Once I found what I needed to install it all seems to work. Now I just need clear skies.