Need a Reason to Skip Your Workout?

It is dangerous.   I was re-racking a 35 pound weight and my finger did not get out of the way in time.

It hurts a lot worse than it looks.

Props to Windows 10

 Some friends were late to dinner last night because their oven part way through cooking red potatoes, downloaded an update and rebooted.  Windows 10 at least asks if this is a good time.  Appliances do not belong on the Internet!  (At least it did not interrogate them about what subversive was going to be eating the meal.)

Lessons Learned Putting a Flat Edge on These Rings

This is the setup I am using to put a flat bottom on the rings to simplify screwing them to a flat base.

I have a spacer between ring and chuck and I would still have preferred a bit more space between mill and chuck.  Next time, I will start with a 1" thick ring, cut the flat spot, then back to the lathe to remove the half inch closest to the chuck.

Maybe simpler would be to put the ring in the vise and slice off a chord then use the setup above to drill the adjustment screw holes.  I will do that for the other ring.

I chewed up that ring cosmetically and put the adjustment screw holes at the wrong positions.  There are 180 degrees in a triangle and they form a triangle, right?  But they are around a circle so that should be 120 degrees apart.  The extra holes will not be visible and slicing 1" slices of 3 1/8" stock on the chop saw is harder the shorter it gets.

More lessons: cutting a chord is harder than it looks.  Acetal is not Teflon, but it is very slippery and hard to hold securely in a mill vise as the mill cuts across even at  .1 inches/minute.  So I am cutting across the edge.  This is multiple steps and I see no reason to write code for a rare operation. 

I may have just tried too deep a cut.  .05" seems to work.

Extortion

 I am really impressed how many late 1ate 19th and early 20th century mass murders seem to be of Italian-Americans with arson and explosives.  The Mafia was already a major problem in Italian-American communities before Prohibition increased their wealth and power.

Batavia, N.Y. (1919)

09/25/1919: Restauranteur Carlo Trimarchi had received three threatening letters.  He apparently responded incorrectly, so the murderer (extortionist?) set off a bomb in a house that Trimarchi owned and occupied.  Trimarchi, his wife, and their two sons were injured as “the house was literally blown to pieces.” Their tenants on the second floor, Joseph Battagli, wife, and son died.

Category: residential

Suicide: no

Cause: unknown

Weapon: explosives[1]

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[1] "Bomb Kills Three; Father, Wife And Babe Dead," Bridgeport Times And Evening Farmer, Sep. 25, 1919, 1.

I have classified this as cause unknown because while the threatening letters were probably extortion,  "Nice restaurant you have here.  It would be a shame if something happened to it."  But fortunately, the Sullivan Law made it harder to intimidate small businessmen with a gun.

The California Attorney-General Appeals Benitez's Decision

 From their press release:

SAN FRANCISCO – California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Governor Gavin Newsom announced today that the state has appealed a recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in Miller v. Bonta that declared California's assault weapons laws unconstitutional. The Attorney General will also ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to stay the district court’s ruling, which would extend the current 30-day stay of the decision and leave the laws in effect throughout the appeal process.

“Equating firearms that have been used in many of the deadliest mass shootings in this country with Swiss Army knives has no basis in law or fact,” said Attorney General Bonta. “The ban on assault weapons will not put an end to all gun violence, but it is one important tool the state has to protect the safety of Californians while also respecting the rights of law-abiding residents who choose to possess firearms. We have appealed the district court’s ruling and will continue our defense of the state’s commonsense gun laws.”

My reaction: "Equating combustible materials that have been used in one of America's largest mass murders (larger than any firearms mass murder) with motor fuel has no basis in law or fact!" 

The Untrustworthiness of the Offiiclal News Media

 6/9/21 Substack article by Glenn Greenwald, the last honest leftist journalist:

For more than a year, it has been consecrated media fact that former President Donald Trump and his White House, on June 1 of last year, directed the U.S. Park Police to use tear gas against peaceful Lafayette Park protesters, all to enable a Trump photo-op in front of St. John's Church. That this happened was never presented as a possibility or likelihood but as indisputable truth. And it provoked weeks of unmitigated media outrage, presented as one of the most egregious assaults on the democratic order in decades.

This tale was so pervasive in the media landscape that it would be impossible for any one article to compile all the examples. “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op,” read the NPR headline on June 1. The New York Times ran with: “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church.” CNN devoted multiple segments to venting indignation while the on-screen graphic declared: “Peaceful Protesters Near White House Tear-Gassed, Shot With Rubber Bullets So Trump Can Have Church Photo Op.”...

All of this came crashing down on their heads on Wednesday afternoon. The independent Inspector General of the Interior Department, Mark Lee Greenblatt, issued his office's findings after a long investigation into “the actions of the U.S. Park Police (USPP) to disperse protesters in and around Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, on June 1, 2020.” Greenblatt has been around Washington for a long time, occupying numerous key positions in the Obama administration, including investigative counsel at the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General and Assistant Inspector General for Investigations at Obama's Commerce Department.

The letter released by Greenblatt's office accompanying the report makes clear how far-reaching the investigation was:

Over the course of this review, our career investigative staff conducted extensive witness interviews, reviewed video footage from numerous vantage points, listened to radio transmissions from multiple law enforcement entities, and examined evidence including emails, text messages, telephone records, procurement documents, and other related materials. This report presents a thorough, independent examination of that evidence to assess the USPP’s decision making and operations, including a detailed timeline of relevant actions and an analysis of whether the USPP’s actions complied with governing policies.

The IG's conclusion could not be clearer: the media narrative was false from start to finish. Namely, he said, “the evidence did not support a finding that the [U.S. Park Police] cleared the park on June 1, 2020, so that then President Trump could enter the park.” Instead — exactly as Hemingway's widely-mocked-by-liberal-outlets article reported — “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow a contractor to safely install anti-scale fencing in response to destruction of Federal property and injury to officers that occurred on May 30 and May 31.” Crucially, “the evidence established that relevant USPP officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential Presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day."

Gender Confusion is Not a Disease; Whiteness Is

 5/27/21 Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association:

Abstract

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

Keywords racism, envy, groups, aggression 

Those keywords make me think projection.