Why Intellectuals Lionized Alfred Kinsey's Sex Research

“It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts.”  Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1953), 121.

Peter Thiel Says It So Clearly

10/31/16 Business Insider:

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a major supporter of Republican nominee Donald Trump, said that Trumpism "isn't crazy and it's not going away" during a major speech in front of the National Press Club on Monday....

"Real events seem like they’re rehearsals for Saturday Night Live," he said. "Only an outbreak of insanity would seem to account for the unprecedented fact that this year a political outsider managed to win a major party nomination."...

The election, he added, "is less crazy than the condition of our country."

Thiel criticized the rising costs of medicine, the country's overpriced healthcare system, outstanding student debt held by many young Americans, stagnant incomes, and the country's involvement in foreign wars.

"Now, not everyone is hurting," he said. "In the wealthy suburbs that ring Washington, DC, people are doing just fine. Where I work in Silicon Valley, people are doing just great. But most Americans don’t live by the Beltway or the San Francisco Bay. Most Americans haven’t been part of that prosperity. It shouldn’t be surprising to see people vote for Bernie Sanders, or for Donald Trump, who is the only outsider left in the race."...

"Voters are tired of being lied to," he said. "It was both insane and somehow inevitable that DC insiders expected this election to be a rerun between the two political dynasties who led us through the two most gigantic financial bubbles of our time."

"President George W. Bush presided over the inflation of a housing bubble so big that its collapse is still causing economic stagnation today," he continued. "But what’s strangely forgotten is that last decade’s housing bubble was just an attempt to make up for the gains that had been lost in the decade before that. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton presided over an enormous stock market bubble and a devastating crash in 2000, just as his second term was coming to an end. That’s how long the same people have been pursuing the same disastrous policies."...

"Voters are tired of hearing conservative politicians say that government never works," Thiel said. "They know the government wasn’t always this broken. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program – whatever you think of these ventures, you cannot doubt the competence of the government that got them done. But we have fallen very far from that standard, and we cannot let free market ideology serve as an excuse for decline."

Heresy: End Mill in a Drill Press

I am developing a new hand tool.  I have made one out of acetal that works well.  Obviously, as a commercial product, it needs to be aluminum or steel.  I need to dig a 3.5" deep 3/4" diameter hole in the workpiece, centered.  To get it really centered, the obvious choice is the lathe.  The Sherline lathe isn't spectacularly powerful. but putting a 3/4" 2 flute end mill in a chuck in the tailstock at least gives a centered start of a hole.

Obviously, you don't try to mill by moving X or Y.  Been there watched the chuck drop out. This is strictly plunge milling. I put the end mill  in the drill press, and it roughly follows the starter hole down, at least good enough for my purposes. Th At 3600 rpm, the end mill does a lot of ugly bouncing.  At 2500 rpm, it is better.  I suppose the 4 flute end mill would be a better choice for aluminum.  Would going to a really low speed work better?  This chart suggests 4482 rpm, 43 inches/min.

I thought about the mill but again, it has low power.  Would just dropping the feed rate to .1 or even .01 inches per minute do a better job?  I don't care if it takes hours to complete.

UPDATE: The 3/4" mill cuts aluminum in the CNC mill at .001 inches/minute and low motor speed.  A while back I claimed that at a low enough feed rate, this mill would cut through a battleship.  (1x10-15 ipm.) Would starting with a 1/4", then 1/2" mill speed this up?  Less material to excavate?

Sudden Increase in Accidental Gun Deaths

Dr. John Lott at Crime Prevention Research Center discovered that the sudden increase in accidental gun deaths in Tennessee for 2014 was a "coding error" and CDC admitted it, but still hasn't fixed it.

Rather than the number of accidental gun deaths in Tennessee increasing from 19 in 2013 to 105 in 2014, the actual number had actually declined to 5.  The total number of accidental deaths last year is thus 486, not 586.  While the CDC has acknowledged their mistake, they have yet to correct the numbers reported on their website.

PSPP Is A Open Source SPSS

I am trying to understand how to import data from a spreadsheet.  The manual says to define the variables this way:

PSPP> data list list /forename (A12) height.
PSPP> begin data.
data> Ahmed 188
data> Bertram 167
data> Catherine 134.231
data> David 109.1
data> end data
PSPP>

But there is no apparent command line mode that I can find.  Nor does the Data menu have any obvious way to identify variables.

Why Everyone Needs An OBD Reader

The Check Engine light came on in my wife's TrailBlazer.  I checked the usual cause: loose gas cap, but that wasn't the problem.  The OBD reader reported P0128 - Coolant Temperature Below Thermostat Regulating Temperature.  Not surprisingly, this can be a bad thermostat, but also not enough coolant.  The coolant recovery container was just below the cool fill line, so I added some coolant. My wife drove away and reports the light is off.  I did not even need to reset the error code.  That saved an unnecessary trip to the Chevy dealer and a couple hours of time.

Actually, I did need to reset the error code.  How to do so wasn't obvious.  The manual is here.

Church Accounting Software

The church that I currently attend needs very simple (intended for a not very computer saavy person) to keep track of expenses, tithes, and annual statements to donors.  That's all.  This is for a church with at best about 10-15 people each Sunday.  Can anyone recommend any free or open source programs for this?

Huma's Weiner Again Somewhere You Would Not Expect

10/30/16 Wall Street Journal:

Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.

The FBI has had to await a court order to begin reviewing the emails, because they were uncovered in an unrelated probe of Mr. Weiner.

The Weiner probe (stop chortling) was to see if there was child porn on the laptop.  Exposing yourself to a 15 year old was probably part of, "You show me yours and I'll show you mine."  (Most people get past this by high school, but Weiner is a Democrat.  The rest of the article discussing the internal battles between FBI agents who thougght there was more to investigate and the DOJ officials who wanted this shut down is interesting, depressing, and unsurprising.  Some morsels to whet your taste:

Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said.

Would love to know more about that case before the case is buried by Obama.

The Increasingly Criminal Nature of the Federal Government

If this report were coming from InfoWars or any of a number of other lunatic fringe sources, I would be skeptical, but 10/27/16 Portland Oregonian (Portlandia's official newspaper)?

Moments after the Oregon standoff defendants' acquittals were announced in court Thursday, Ammon Bundy's lawyer Marcus Mumford stood before the judge, and argued that his client should be released from custody immediately and allowed to walk out of the courtroom a free man....

The judge disagreed and told Mumford not to yell at him:

"If they want him, they know where to find him,'' Mumford told the judge. "I don't see any paper proving their authority to hold him.''

Suddenly, a group of about six to seven U.S. Marshals, who had been either standing or seated around the perimeter of the courtroom, slowly moved in and surrounded Mumford at his defense table. The judge directed them to move back but moments later, the marshals grabbed onto him.

"What are you doing?'' Mumford yelled, as he struggled and was taken down to the floor.

As deputy marshals yelled, "Stop resisting,'' the judge demanded, "Everybody out of the courtroom now!''...

Margaret "Margie" Paris, a University of Oregon law professor and former dean, said she couldn't believe what occurred when she learned of the confrontation.

"It just blows my mind,'' Paris said. "To have a lawyer who's making an argument in court physically restrained and taken down is extraordinary. He's entitled to make these arguments. If he was repeating himself over and over, the more typical response is to hold him in contempt. But to physically accost him is just shocking.''

Call the Midwife

This is on Netflix.  It is an uplifting, edifying show about a group of midwives who working out of Anglican convent.  (I didn't know these existed.)  A mixture of Catholic nuns (not sure why this change from reality) and secular nurses provide midwifery services in the desperately poor East End of London.  You can see why the left rather went off the deep end and remains so today) when you see the deprivation and misery of the urban poor, something that our country hasn't seen in several generations.  The National Health Service is portrayed as a great boon for this population, as I do not doubt it was.

What makes this show so charming and uplifting is that it portrays a population still deeply religious in an Anglican, not terribly deep way, except for the nuns and the the secular nurses.  While addressing many issues that would become major leftist issues, it is generally done in non-arm waving sort of way, and generally remaining true to the prevailing, fairly conservative sentiments of the time.  It is unabashedly pro-life and in spite of its portrayal of poverty, still recognizes the role that poor choices play in creating poverty.

And the current midwives at Nonnattus  House watch it every week.

Death by PowerPoint

That is how a game warden I know describes meetings with federal employees.

Voting From the Great Beyond

The leftist MSM keeps insisting voter fraud is rare if at all.  10/24/16 CBS Chicago:

CHICAGO (CBS) — Susie Sallee was buried in 1998. Yet records show she voted in Chicago 12 years later.

Victor Crosswell died in 1994, but records show he’s voted six times since then.

And then there’s Floyd Stevens. Records show he’s voted 11 times since his death in 1993.

“It’s crazy,” Sharon Stevens Anderson, Stevens’ daughter, tells CBS 2’s Pam Zekman. “I don’t see how people can be able to do something like that and get away with it.”

Those are just a few of the cases CBS 2 Investigators found by merging Chicago Board of Election voter histories with the death master file from the Social Security Administration.

In all, the analysis showed 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.

Innumeracy Among Democrats

I posted a video a few days ago in which Obama claimed Obamacare would reduce employer-paid health insurance premiums 3000%.  I have almost reached the point of understanding "This is 30x smaller" to mean 1/30th of X.  But 3000%?  A 50% reduction would cut premiums in half.  A 100% reduction would mean $0 premiums.  But 3000%?  If some idiot gave me a speech like that to give, my math radar would go off, and  would demand a sensible re-write for fear of being laughed at by my audience.  But Obama is so innumerate and ignorant that he said it, and his Democrat audience was too innumerate to realize what a foolish statement this was.  It isn't just literacy tests we need for voting; it's numeracy tests.

Amazing Levels of Anger

The Washington Post ran an article about the not guilty verdict for the Occupy Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  Read the comments to see the rage and hatred the progressives have, not for this somewhat confused bunch, but for everyone not living on the coasts:

By paying 25 bucks a day who can afford to be a juror? Retired, unemployed, Fox News addled white people.

and

They should have been killed in very midst of the armed criminality. Bomb them out the next time.  The American justice system doesn't work. It is a fraud, a palative for the dumb. If we are to have a rule of law, we can't depend on a system where prosecutors won't hold offical actor accontable for murdering unarmed innocents in the street, where these characters can have their criminality validated by gormless jurors at the end of lying contest between lawyers, where the rich buy the right to violate the law and the poor are just processed like effluent in the judicial system's waste management plant.  Next time that they grab their beloved guns and want to impose themselve on the law by threating us with their guns, kill them where they stand. Snipe them from afar. Show them what real men and patriots can do.  

and

I like how people who aren't experts in Constitutional law know exactly what the founders intent was when they wrote the Constitution, Perhaps they have time travel devices to speak to the founders. Nah, actually they just interpret the Constitution their own way, and then expect everybody else to accept their interpretation, and call anybody else's interpretation wrong, particularly actual Constitutional law experts. 

and:

These terrorists should have been killed onsite or at least executed after being found guilty. This will embolden other domestic terrorists. Hopefully these scum will be killed the next time they commit a terrorist act (and we all know it's only a matter of time before they do).   Death to all terrorists, including these. Kill them ASAP. 

and:

Yes it will embolden other domestic terrorists. And we should hold members of this jury individually and personally responsible for what happens next! Unbelieveable! 

and:

The red states are the ones that are subsidized and always have been. The nation's economic engine is and always has been it's blue states. Yes...by all means...red states go. Set up your utopia. See how well Mississippi fares when it's no longer getting 2 1/2 times back for every $1.00 it contributes. Talk about grifters. 

and:

If we're lucky this will mean the Feds will become more willing to use heavier weapons in their armed standoffs with these ne'er-do-wells, 

and:

Maybe they could send in that robot with the bomb that they used in Dallas. Hmmph... Along those lines, that reminds me of the MOVE group in Philadelphia, a so-called 'radical' black power group. The Philadelphia police dropped two bombs on them from a helicopter. caused a fire causing a fire in a row house. Fire then killed eleven MOVE members and five children. The fire also destroyed 65 houses. And then, of course, contrast all of this with the Native-Americans ejected by North Dakota local 'law-enforcement' backed up by National Guard troops, complete with armored vehicles, just like Ferguson. So, I guess the lesson when you 'protest,' you should occupy the facility, be white, arm yourself to the teeth and you should have some cockamamie legal 'theory' to which other whacko, right-wing nut job lunatics subscribe. You can then destroy property, intimidate the locals and the local Federal workers, trash Native-American heritage/grave/historical areas. Appalling, simply appalling and this is the US in which we live in the first part of the twenty-first century. God help us all... 

and:

Let's face it, they got a "jury of their peers": fellow dunderheads. A jury so witless, it asked the judge whether they were to apply the charges to the multiple defendants individually or collectively. Renews my faith in the justice system, yes it does.  This will only embolden not only the lawless nutcases, but the industry groups behind the "wise use" movement and the Sagebrush Rebellion. The Koch brothers and their lackeys like Dick Armey are celebrating.

and:

RACIST WHITE FOLKS LET OTHER RACIST WHITE FOLKS WALK AFTER CRIMES   jUSTICE MEANS jUST us  

and:

This how ISIS organisations raise. White racist american legal & law enforcement system wide open for the rest of the world to see in back & white.  Though there is no difference between those tugs just like ISIS in their ways and means with the exception of white race and supposedly christian beast that they are but are dealt with differently.   

President Clinton will be allowed to preside over a police state by these whackos.

Smell and Memories

I was making pizza for the grandkids, and the smell of the sauce brought back warm memories of when my sister and I would make the box Chef-Boy-R-Dee box pizza on Thursday nights before Star Trek.  And that reminded me of when my sister and I would take our dog took Orpheus to dog training at a park in the San Fernando Valley, and we would get several bags of McDonald's french fries to share on the way home, with that distinctive smell that all 1960s VW Beetles seemed to share.

Freak Show

10/28/16 New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday entered the national debate over transgender rights, announcing that it would decide whether a transgender boy may use the boys’ bathroom in a Virginia high school.

The court is acting just a year after it established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, as state laws and federal actions on transgender rights have prompted a welter of lawsuits. In taking the case, the court signaled that it may move more quickly in the area of transgender rights than it has in expanding gay rights.

The public debate has been ignited, in part, by a North Carolina law that requires transgender people to use bathrooms in government buildings that correspond with the gender listed on their birth certificates, a statute that has drawn protests, boycotts and lawsuits.

The case revolves around how the Obama administration is entitled to interpret a federal regulation under a 1972 law that bans discrimination “on the basis of sex” in schools that receive federal money. The legal question is whether it can also ban discrimination based on gender identity.

Does anyone really think Congress in 1972 intended a ban on sex discrimination to include the transgendered?

Best of all:

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mr. Grimm, told the justices that “girls objected to his presence in the girls’ restrooms because they perceived him to be male.” The group’s brief said requiring Mr. Grimm to use a private bathroom had been humiliating and had, quoting him, “turned him into ‘a public spectacle’ before the entire community, ‘like a walking freak show.’”

Wow.  I wonder why? If the Court goes all Roe v, Wade omn us over this issue, we will have another firestorm of Americans saying, "Why do they have this much power to ignore the majority?'  There are good reasons for the Court to protect enumerated rights under the 14th Amendment, but not rights imagined up for reasons that would have left the 14th Ament Congress going, "What madness is this?"

How Immorality Bears Heavy Consequences

FBI is reopening the Clinton email inquiry.  10/29/16 New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The presidential campaign was rocked on Friday after federal law enforcement officials said that emails pertinent to the now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.

In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said the emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, which law enforcement officials said was an F.B.I. investigation into illicit text messages from Mr. Weiner to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, is married to Huma Abedin, the top aide.

How appropriate. After showing this story, the New York Times played an ad for Goldman Sachs.

Nice Email

The Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog often gets either spam comments or people who want the death of a felonious loved one to disappear (no way: your crimes will outlive you) and more rarely good guys who are afraid of the negative publicity for being a good guy with a gun.

Today, I received email from a civilian defender thanking me for publicizing his pizza self-defense.

Feeling Mischievous

A friend sent me this:

"Town Hall Meeting on Gun Violence and Trauma"Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016; Washington, D.C.6 p.m. to 8 p.m.National Press Club529 14th St NW; Washington, DC 20045
The gathering is described as "the second of a three part national series that examines the trauma caused by gun violence, particularly in communities of color.  This segment will focus policing, training, and trauma. It will examine how the drug war and fiscal policies contribute to high risk policing."Announced speakers include a lawyer for Philando Casttile's family; the head of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health; a woman described as having "suffered the loss of 28 loved ones to gun violence"; law enforcement officers; lawyers representing victims of police violence; etc. Their usual suspects.

Feeling mischievous I thought it would be fun to do:
"Town Hall Meeting on Gun Violence and Culture"Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016; Washington, D.C.6 p.m. to 8 p.m.National Press Club529 14th St NW; Washington, DC 20045
Part of a series that examines the trauma caused by gun violence, particularly its rarity in communities of pallor. 

Doing Something Right

Getting 2000-3400 pageviews per day.  That adds up to enough to pay for my ISP, I think.  Even more amazing: almost 3.5 million pageviews since I rebooted the blog several years ago, after the RightHaven fraud attack.

I Was Never Keen on Bundy and Friends...But...

This makes it clear that they had some legitimate complaints.  10/27/16 Los Angeles Times:

In a stunning loss for federal prosecutors, the leaders of a 41-day armed standoff at a national wildlife refuge in Oregon last year were acquitted of federal charges Thursday.

Brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five others had been charged with conspiracy to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs by occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon’s sparsely populated high desert early this year.

A jury found them not guilty, setting off celebrations outside the federal courthouse in Portland. A man waved the American flag at passing traffic as someone blew a horn in celebration and a man trotted by on horseback while holding a flag.

The Rats Are Abandoning The Sinking Ship?

From MSNBC (the most aggressively left network):

Share this with your Clinton-supporting friends.

Gee, I Thought They Were Sincere, But Misguided Muslims

From AFP:

Khazir (Iraq) (AFP) - Jihadists with the Islamic State group were shaving their beards and changing hideouts in Mosul, residents said, as a major Iraqi offensive moved ever closer to the city.

With pressure building on the 10th day of the Mosul assault, Western defence chiefs were already looking ahead to the next target -- IS's other major stronghold of Raqa in Syria.

Recent advances on the eastern front have brought elite Iraqi forces to within five kilometres (three miles) of Mosul, and residents reached by AFP said the jihadists seemed to be preparing for an assault on the city itself.

"I saw some Daesh (IS) members and they looked completely different from the last time I saw them," eastern Mosul resident Abu Saif said.

"They had trimmed their beards and changed their clothes," the former businessman said. "They must be scared... they are also probably preparing to escape the city."

I thought the beards were required by their odd form of Islam. Perhaps they are preparing to be refugees moving to America.

All Sorts of Criminal Actions

Emacs Gurus

I am trying to set up my emacs init file to do these things:

1. A command make which saves all open buffers opens a shell in compilation-mode and does a make in the shell.

2. Bind C-X C-E to make

3. Bind next-error to C-X C-N.

Here's what I have:

(compilation-mode)
(fset 'make
   [escape ?x ?s ?h ?e ?l ?l escape ?x ?c?o?m?p?i?l?a?t?i?o?n?-?m?o?d?e return ?
m ?a ?k ?e return])
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-e") 'make)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x n") 'next-error)

Almost there:

(fset 'make
   [escape ?x?c?o?m?p?i?l?a?t?i?o?n?-?m?o?d?e return escape ?x ?s ?h ?e ?l ?l return ?m ?a ?k ?e return])
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-e") 'make)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-n") 'next-error)

The next-error command doesn't seem to work.  Otherwise works.  Nope.  ESC-x make rings a bell in the shell.

Again: almost there.  The C-x C-n binding works, but says no more errors when they are showing in the shell.  C-x C-e works, but beeps at the end.

(fset 'make
   [escape ?x ?s ?h ?e ?l ?l return ?m ?a ?k ?e return])
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-e") 'make)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-n") 'next-error)

UPDATE: After much digging, this turned out to be what I needed:

(fset 'make
[escape ?x ?c ?o ?m ?p ?i ?l ?e return])
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-e") 'make)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x C-n") `next-error)

The first two lines define a macro that runs the compile command using make -f in the shell.

The next two lines bind C-X C-E to the make macro and C-X C-N to the next-error command. 







Just Updated My Court Citations List

Here.

Deep Jaw Chucks

(I made the mistake of accepting Google's suggestion "deep throat chuck" which had nothing to do with machining but a lot about a relative by marriage.)

The standard Sherline lathe chucks don't have enough grab to hold several inch long acetal workpieces.  Acetal is very slippery.  My shop assistant is taking machining classes, so he is rapidly passing me in knowledge.  We used a 6" 4-jaw chuck that I bought some years ago.  This required adding riser blocks to the motor and tool holder to get clearance off the bed.  I suspect that some one makes either long jaw, or very powerful compression 3-jaw chucks with a 3/4"-16 thread.  Suggestions?

I suppose another solution would be to buy another Sherline chuck and drill a hole through each jaw and then screw a sharp pin through it so it isn't just friction holding it in. It appears that 4-jaw chucks exert more clamping force than 3-jaw chucks: four points of contact, not three.

Core problem: with jaws pointing out, the 3" chuck is supposed to go up to 1 3/8" diameter.  At 1 1/4",  it was marginal.  I reversed the jaws, which is supposed to go from 2 1/4" up. Works as long as I cut slowly.   Sherline suggested wrappimg some sandpaper around the acetal.  Works wonderfully well.

What Was That Horrible Sound?

My wife was out for a walk in Horseshoe Bend (the nearest town to us), and she heard a horrible sound that at first she thought was the pained cry of a horse breaking its leg in a gopher hole.  Her friend walking with her is married to a game warden and is an Idaho girl, explained that was a bull elk bugling.  Shortly thereafter, the female elk responded.

I Seem to Remember a Protest on a Bridge Involving Race

Selma?  Today we have this racist madness at play in the People's Republic of California:

Students at the University of California, Berkeley held a violent protest on campus Friday to demand additional segregated “spaces of color” for non-white students.

A video of the protest shows demonstrators repeatedly heckling white passersby, barring them entry to a key bridge on campus by forming a human chain while simultaneously allowing students of color to pass unmolested.

At one point, the video even shows a protester refusing to allow an older white man to cross the bridge, eventually directing him to cross by way of a creek that flows underneath the bridge.

Just a few moments later, another white man attempted to cross the bridge by forcing his way through the crowd, only to be surrounded by a mob of students who began shouting expletives at him as they pushed him back in the direction he had come from.

Time and again, white students and professors were denied entry to the bridge as they were surrounded by aggressive protesters shouting “go around!”

Apparently, protesters were angered because one of their “safe spaces” was relocated to the basement of a building where it had previously occupied the fifth floor. When protesters were asked about the motive for their demonstration, though, they refused to be recorded, leaving little to no explanation for the rationale behind such an aggressive protest.

Live Well, So That Others Have A Job

The motto "live simply, so that others may simply live" is a popular idea among those criticizing consumerism.  When I worked at HP, there was a group of wealthy liberals that used that slogan.  This makes sense if you have >$200K household income, as was quite typical with two HP employees married.  Now, if you have more money than you know what to do with, and you spend some of that income to help the poor, there is much merit to it.  But there is another strategy.  Spend your money on things that give jobs to people who work.  In that case, living well by spending money will create jobs for those who might not have them.

Those Horrible 19th Century Factories

An 1840 description of the young women working in the Lowell, Mass. textile mills:

I happened to arrive at the first factory just as the dinner hour was over, and the girls were returning to their work; indeed the stairs of the mill were thronged with them as I ascended. They were all well dressed, but not to my thinking above their condition : for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful of their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated with such little trinkets as come within the compass of their means. Supposing it confined within reasonable limits, I would always encourage this kind or pride, a worthy element or self-respect, in any person I employed ; and should no more be deterred from doing so, because some ' wretched female referred her fall to a love of dress, than I would allow my construction of the real intent and meaning of the Sabbath to be influenced by any warning to the well­-disposed, founded on his back-slidings ou that particular day, which might emanate from the rather doubtful authority of a murderer in Newgate.

These girls, as I have said, were all well dressed, and that phrase necessarily includes extreme cleanliness. They had serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks, and shawls; and were not above clogs and pattens. Moreover, there were places in the mill in which they could deposit tbete things wilboot in­jury ; and there were conveniences for washing. They were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment or young women : not of degraded brutes of burden,...

The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of. Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance: no doubt there were. But I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power.

They reside in various boarding-houses near at hand. The owners of the mills are particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the possession of these houses, whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thorough inquiry. Any complaint that is made against them, by the boarders, or by any one else, is fully investigated ; and if good ground of complaint be shown to exist against them, they arc removed, and their occupation is handed over to some more deserving person. There are a few children employed in these factories, but no many. The laws of the State forbid their working more than nine months in the year, and require that they be educated during the other three. For this purpose there are schools in Lowell; and there are churches and chapels of various persua­sions, in which the young women may observe that form of Worship in which they have been educated.

So, what ferocious capitalist apologist wrote this?  Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, (Paris: A. and W. Galignani & Co., 1842), 1:80.  

The Bully Party

Scott Adams:

I’ve been trying to figure out what common trait binds Clinton supporters together. As far as I can tell, the most unifying characteristic is a willingness to bully in all its forms.

If you have a Trump sign in your lawn, they will steal it.

If you have a Trump bumper sticker, they will deface your car.

If you speak of Trump at work you could get fired.

On social media, almost every message I get from a Clinton supporter is a bullying type of message. They insult. They try to shame. They label. And obviously they threaten my livelihood.

We know from Project Veritas that Clinton supporters tried to incite violence at Trump rallies. The media downplays it.

We also know Clinton’s side hired paid trolls to bully online. You don’t hear much about that.

Yesterday, by no coincidence, Huffington Post, Salon, and Daily Kos all published similar-sounding hit pieces on me, presumably to lower my influence. (That reason, plus jealousy, are the only reasons writers write about other writers.)

Gee, what other political party was known for bullying?  Trying to remember.  They wore brown shirts.

A Mean and Nasty Remark About Millenials

Aetna's CEO explains why millenials aren't buying health insurance:

"As the rates rise, the healthier people pull out because the out-of-pocket costs aren't worth it," Bertolini said. "Young people can do the math. Gas for the car, beer on Fridays and Saturdays, health insurance."

Of course with the $5000 deductibles, it does seem like that health insurance is more pretend than real, so perhaps this is a rational decision. The Hildebeast is still defending Obamacare; it just needs a few fixes.  The Republicans who said it wouldn't work?  What do they know?

Yet Another Reason Young People Are Going to Vote Democrat

So how did the Republicans destroy Obama's dream?

Clinton's Enormous Lead & Trump's Damage to Down Ballot Races

10/26/16 Bloomberg:

In the U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent Marco Rubio leads by 10 percentage points...

Donald Trump has a slim advantage in Florida as critical independent voters narrowly break his way in the must-win battleground state, a Bloomberg Politics poll shows.

The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found. In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent.

Among independents, Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent in a head-to-head contest. When third-party candidates are included, Trump picks up 1 point with independents while Clinton drops to 37 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson taking 9 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein getting 5 percent.

"Vote Early, Vote Often"

Not just a joke.  10/25/16 CBS4:

DENVER (CBS4)– An ongoing CBS4 voter fraud investigation has uncovered a dozen cases where Coloradans are suspected of voting twice. Previous CBS4 Investigations revealed ballots cast in the names of Coloradans who had been dead for months– sometimes years- before votes were cast in their names.

In six of the new cases, voting records show the same people voting twice in Colorado elections. In another six cases, people are suspected of voting in Colorado and another state during the same election cycle...

“You’d be surprised how often people double vote,“ said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. “Two of the cases are serial double voters. I think people discover they can get away with it and keep doing it.”

Kobach says his office is “aggressively prosecuting” double voting cases because it’s a crime that “can’t be caught ahead of time.”

He says after each election, Colorado and Kansas crosscheck voters to identify double ballots and clean up their databases. But Kobach still believes 10,000 people are registered to vote in both Colorado and Kansas. 

These are longstanding practices in Chicago, and likely an issue in other Democrat-controlled hellholes.

Tammany was so efficient at election fixing that between 1868 and 1871, the votes cast in the city totaled 8 percent more than the entire voting population—"the dead filling in for the sick," as one contemporary wag put it. Historian Denis Tilden Lynch describes how thugs would go from one polling place to the next, impersonating citizens who hadn't yet voted.

When I ran for Santa Monica City Council many years ago, I found evidence of dead voting.  The system is rigged.  If President Clinton wins, I will regard her as the President of the dead.

So That's the Reason For Physician Assisted Suicide Laws

From Legal Insurrection:

About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law. It fully went into effect this June, with the opening of the first clinic. While there is no data on the number of California assisted-suicides, Oregon recorded over 130 last year as part of their legalized physician-assisted death program.

Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would bewilling to pay for assisted suicide instead.

Well, it is cheaper, but not as cheap as sending out an insurance agent with a gun.

Remember when Sarah Palin was lambasted for warning about "death panels"?

PBS, Leave Those Kids Alone!

Yes, I'm parodying a Pink Floyd song.  10/24/16 PJMedia:

Watching television with your children is a great way to learn about their likes and dislikes and what resonates with them. For example, the other day my son wasn’t feeling so great, so I declared it a pajama day. After some rather unenthusiastic play, he grabbed his favorite Curious George stuffed animal and headed for the couch, his way of telling me he just wanted to zone out and cuddle. I complied and we tuned into Sesame Street.

My son quickly went from relaxed to confused. His brow furrowed as a series of puppets including Elmo, Abby, Cookie Monster and Grover got into an argument over how boys and girls could play dress-up. The narrative, a dress-up club on Sesame Street, was quickly lost amidst the puppets talking over one another about how boys and girls should play dress-up. One puppet kept screaming that girls needed to be princesses while boys needed to be superheroes. Grover and Elmo suddenly wanted to play tea party and then, Cookie Monster burst onto the scene in a tutu declaring himself to be a ballerina.

Your tax dollars at waste.

Just a Wild Coincidence I'm Sure

10/24/16 Wall Street Journal:

The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.

Here's Why Some of Us Won't Quite Believe a Clinton Victory

10/24/16 Gateway Pundit points out that Democrat VP candidate spoke in West Palm Beach, and 30 people (including journalists) showed up.  Trump spoke to 20,000 in Tampa; Pence's rally in Salisbury, NC was packed.  Now rally attendance doesn't prove a lot, but if Clinton spoke here in Horseshoe Bend, I would not drive the six miles to it.  But if Trump spoke in Boise or even Mountain Home, I would be there for the historic significance.  (I can just remember JFK in a parade/rally thing in 1960.)

The fix is in.

As I was telling my wife about this, I suddenly remembered 1980.  Democrats were not enthused about Jimmy Carter (who had beaten the much harder left Teddy Kennedy), but I recall that there was general agreement that Carter was going to narrowly win.  Reagan, the ignorant and evil Republican, beat Carter quite completely.  The result "Morning in America."

Alternatives to Civil War

I suspect that President Clinton may cause civil war in the United States. Her campaign promises for much stricter gun control laws passed by executive order and Australian-style confiscation are not going to go over well with most of the population west of the Mississippi, and even some of the population east of the Mississippi. One result is likely to be bloody confrontations with federal law enforcement agencies, and potentially, guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks on federal agencies.  Are there any alternatives to civil war?  Continuance of open borders and attempts to enforce transgender bathrooms are already creating substantial upset as the Trump campaign has shown.  At some point, the billionaires and their Democratic & Republican puppets are going to lose their control.

I have been thinking about this pretty seriously since I finished reading Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Secession is pretty clearly not going to happen at least in the initial phases of any sort of resistance.  In spite of all the Democrats' hostility towards the death penalty, I am sure any governor who had such a bill on his desk would recognize the risk of an overreaching federal judiciary treating secession as treason, which is a capital crime, written into U.S. Constitution, Article III, sec. 3..  And I am sure Democrats would suddenly be full of enthusiasm for it.  Of course the Art. III, sec. 3 definition of treason is "levying war against [the United States], or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."  Resisting laws not pursuant to the Constitution, without warlike acts, can hardly qualify as either.

What makes more sense would be for state legislatures to pass Federalism Enforcement statutes, generally of this form:

Statement of Intent

This is not an act of secession, but an attempt to restore the division of powers between the national and state governments provided for in the Constitution of 1787, with most matters of primarily local concern reserved to the state governments, and only matters affecting multiple states or citizens or foreign relations within the domain of the national government.   While the Bill of Rights was originally intended as a limitation on the national government, the Civil War and its aftermath demonstrated the hazards of relying on majority rule to protect minorities from majoritarian excesses, judicial expansion of the "privileges or immunities" clause and anti-originalist extension of the "equal protection" clause have created its own set of minority oppression problems, sometimes at the hands of majorities, unrestrained by federal judges who are partial to oppression of religious minorities.  While majority oppression remains a problem at the hands of the state legislature, it is at least closer to the electorate, and more readily correctable by regular elections than when imposed by unelected lifetime tenure federal judges who mistake their personal preferences for Constitutional law.  At the same time, a lawless desire to rewrite the laws of Congress by executive orders and "signing statements" have created the absurd situation of the national government refusing to enforce the law of the land while federal judges prohibit states from enforcing these now largely meaningless laws.

What Is the Proper Division of Power in a Federal Republic?

1. The primary responsibility for the health and welfare of the people of each state is the state government and its subsidiary governments.  This is the reason that the U.S. Constitution limited the powers of Congress,  in Article I, sec. 8, clauses 1-17 of the U.S. Constitution, leaving other powers to the states.  In addition, Amendment Ten: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." .

2. Art.I, sec. 8, clause 18:"the necessary and proper" or "endlessly elastic" clause has clearly been abused to absurd levels to extend the national government to areas that would have been recognized as unjustified tyranny by the original thirteen states that ratified the Constitution and which necessarily create conflicts with the principal of federalism.

3. Art.I, sec. 8, clause 3, upon which Congress' authority to regulate interstate commerce, even when a farmer is only growing wheat for his own consumption [Wickard v. Filburn (1942)], was originally intended to preclude states from interfering in commerce between states [Gibbon v. Ogden (1824)].  Commerce crossing state lines is within the authority of Congress to regulate, but not simply any commerce that might indirectly impact commerce in other states.

4. Article V asserts that the U.S. Constitution and the laws "which shall be made in pursuance thereof... shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding,"  Our position is that laws contrary to the U.S. Constitution's very limited authority cannot be considered "in pursuance thereof," much like unconstitutional laws cannot be considered legally binding.

Limiting National Government Power

To protect the rights of the people of [fill-in-the blank] State, all officials of this government, including law enforcement officers, will not only refuse to assist federal officials in enforcing laws that violate the rights of its people, but will actively assist its people in the exercise of their rights as articulated in our state constitution [for Idaho, Article I through XXI].  The Attorney-General will provide legal defense in cases where federal law enforcement prosecutes our residents for actions where federal authority is not explicitly listed in Article I, sec, 1-17 as well as defending state officials and employees prosecuted for providing assistance.  Attempts to arrest persons contrary to this will be vigorously opposed by law enforcement agencies, and if necessary, the unorganized militia of the State of [fill-in-the blank].

Attempts to enforce laws outside the U.S. Constitution's limits on federal power within this state are unlawful and will be resisted with the minimum necessary force.  Existing decisions of the Supreme Court of Idaho and its inferior courts stand.

We also call for a Convention of the States to clarify the misappropriation of power that several generations of well-intentioned but erroneous Congressmen, Presidents, and federal judges have made.

DDD Can't Use the GDB Debugger

DDD is really just a graphical front end to a variety of dumb debuggers.  By default, it uses xdb, which is not in this Debian release, or accessible by any method I have tried.  Okay, -gdb flag should used gdb.  But it doesn't.

Occupy Wall Street and Wall Street Make Their Peace

10/22/16 New York Times reports the millionaires are going for Wall Street's candidate, Hilary Clinton.

Wouldn't It Be Cool If America Were Like Venezula...

With an opposition political party?  10/23/16 Yahoo News:

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly in a rowdy session on Sunday vowed to put Nicolas Maduro on trial for violating democracy, days after authorities nixed a recall referendum against the unpopular leftist president.

The measure is unlikely to get any traction given the government and a compliant Supreme Court have systematically undermined the legislature, but it marked a further escalation of political tensions in the crisis-hit OPEC nation.

Chrome Desktop Notifications Are Annoying

This claims to turn them off, but it doesn't.

An Amazing Piece of Music

You may recall the use of this in Interview with the Vampire, a movie that made me want to scour my soul with steel wool and bleach afterwards.

Colt Revolvers

The letters between Colt and their "Allies" (big distributors) contain some surprises.  Colt as late as 1874 was still making both cap and ball revolvers and metallic cartridge revolvers.  For reasons that elude me, the metallic cartridge revolvers are called "Breech Loaders."  But the cap and ball revolvers are strictly speaking breech loaders as well.  They were loaded into the cylinder, but this is still behind the breech.

Enlighten me.

The Myth of Early Gun Marketing

Both Bellesiles and Pamela Haag's new book. The Gunning of America, claim that there was really no civilian gun market until the big gun makers like Winchester and Colt created one.  Part of what the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund's research grant is paying for:

Among the pieces of evidence cited by Haag in defense of her claim is that, “A letter book in the archives of Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company reveals detailed, fractious bickering over how many guns the dealers should be expected to ‘push.’”[1]  She points to p. 174 of the Allies letter book.[2]  (Colt used the term “Allies” to refer to what were clearly distributors or wholesaler of Colt products.)  Examination of those pages reveals how Haag’s failure to read in context and her emotional desire to blame gun ownership on the capitalist class has led her astray from the facts.  The reference to “push” is: “We fail to see that the ‘facts’ warrant the closing sentence of the letter therefore do not concede all that is set forth in reference to the ‘Line’.  But as we do not propose at present to discust [sic] the merits and push of the Allies on the goods covered by the agreement, we rest.” [emphasis added][3]  The closing sentence of the letter to which this was a response is: “It is hoped that you will readily accede [sic] to our request, when the fact is conceded that the Line upon which we have the Discount, is not only smaller – but also, that notwithstanding our best efforts the sale of this class of Arms has decreased.”[4] Colt’s desire for its distributors to “push” its product is clearly referring to one particular product line whose sales were decreasing, and therefore the distributors were asking for a better profit margin.

Examination of other correspondence between Colt and its distributors and from Colt during this period suggests that there was no need to “push” the products. “[Proposed contract] [w]ould meet the unanimous consent of the allies & in the long run be more advantageous to the Colt Pat Fire Arms Co- The quantity should be 150 to 175 per month at the outside assorted viz.   22 cal [125]. 32 cal [30] 38 cal [5] 41 cal [15] with privilege of taking more of the larger or less of the smallest if demand required it.”[5]  The bracketed numbers were quantities of each revolver caliber requested per month written above the caliber.  A letter of January 24, 1874 from Colt to the Allies also shows that the quantities of revolvers under discussion, and the hardnosed pricing from Colt, do not suggest of a problem selling Colt revolvers: “[F]or we have between 4 & 5 thousand Pistols on hand and in the works.  The price named to the Allies (5.25 less 8%) is the lowest price we shall quote for them.   We have 1486 New Pocket BL [breech loading] Rim Fire and 408 do [ditto] do [ditto] pistols that we will sell to the Allies at 5.00 Each net 60 days.” [6]  A June 29, 1874 letter from the Allies to Colt: “Please accept this order from each of the subscribers for two hundred OM [Old Model] 7 Shot Revolvers at $2.99 each, weekly for one year.”[7]  Three Allies signed the letter, so this was an order for 31,200 revolvers a year.  On August 22, 1874 Colt confirmed an order from the Allies for “Ten Thousand (10000) new model 7 shot Pistols to be delivered within Twelve months from Sept 1^st/74 at the net price of Five Dollars and Thirty five cents (%.35) each.  The first delivery of 1000 Pistols to be made in November 1874.”[8]  A December 30, 1874 letter to Colt ordered “Five thousand (5000) of the new 30 cal Revolvers.”[9]

---

[1] Haag, Gunning of America,  xv.
[2] Ibid., 408 n.10.
[3] Colt Collection, RG103, business file, box 11A, correspondence, Allies letter book, 1873-1880, from Hugh Harbison to Allies, October 30, 1877, p. 174 of letter book.
[4] Ibid., Willard and Seaver, Sec. [of Allies] to Hugh Harbison, October 17, 1877, p. 173 of letter book.
[5] Ibid., Colt Allies to Colt Patent Fire Arms Co., June 26, 1873, p. 15 of letter book.
[6] Ibid., Hugh Harbison to [illegible], January 24, 1874, p. 22 of letter book.
[7] [Allies] to Colt Fire-Arms, June 29, 1874, p. 25 of letterbook.
[8] Colt Fire-Arms to [illegible], August 22, 1874, p. 31 of letterbook.
[9] Hugh Harbison to Colt Patent Fire Arms, December 30, 1874, p. 39 of letterbook.