Glo-bull Warning

Whenever you hear someone ranting on about "climate change" (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), just remember:

The ground temperature data is falsified.
The satellite temperature data is currently being falsified.
The ice cores are lied about.
The tree rings were from one side of one tree.
The models are bupkis.
The data is hidden.
The sources are deleted.
The code is obfuscated.
Simple questions and contrary opinions are shouted down.
Questioners are labeled as heretics and threatened with death.

There is no science in their "science".  It's political religion all the way down.  
Marx is a jealous god.

Real drug rehab

Every drug rehab facility you've ever heard of is an scam.  Those 30, 60, 90 day programs?  They do no good whatsoever in 99.44% of cases.

Successful drug rehab requires a minimum of 9 months in a specialized facility. And that is only for the well behaved people who want to be there, and have a serious consequence if they fail to pass the program. It takes 90-120 days for the average druggie to finally admit to himself that he actually has a problem, and that problem is the drugs. Rehab starts the day after that breakthrough. The average stay is 12-15 months.

Real rehab centers have to teach druggies how to be human. This is neither easy, quick, nor cheap. Once they have mastered how to human, then they are taught how to be an adult.

The staff to patient ratio is around one to one. Staff members are on a two year rotation, because they burn out fairly quickly.

How do I know this?  I was lucky enough, in the Army, to be selected to be my unit's urinalysis drug testing program coordinator.  (Better known as the piss test NCO.)  And we were located near both the drug testing facility for the East Coast, and one of the two successful rehab facilities in the entire country.  Yes, there are only two.  The one in Maryland is the biggest, and can handle up to a maximum of one hundred and twenty patients at a time.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way!

The purpose of government is to establish a minimum level of social compliance, enforce contracts, encourage trade, protect life and property, and to punish villains.

Government is force.

Force is pain, suffering, and death.

If you aren't willing to inflict pain, suffering, and death in the defense of your nation, you have no right to any say in how the government is organized and managed.

Happy Independence Day!

Today is the day to look back and remember what America once was, and wonder how we let it go so wrong, and ponder on how to make it right again.

Faithless, treasonous politicians should be hanged on the lawn of their Statehouse on this day each year.  Because of course there will be at least one loud mouthed, anti-American traitor in Congress every year.  And if not in Congress, then surely at least one State will find itself burdened with a Quisling.

Oh, and what he said, with spurs on.

Useful Idiots

It is entertaining and enlightening that the overgrown children clamoring to remove all borders are also demanding that they be protected from the harmful influence of alternate ideas being spoken in their vicinity.

The Soviets quite rightly described this group of people as “useful idiots”.

Needful things

I would really like to buy a Henry Long Ranger in 6.5 Creedmoor or .243 Winchester.  They're under $1,000 retail, and reportedly shoot about a minute of angle out of the box.  They use detachable box magazines, with a capacity of 4 rounds (5 for the .223 version).

Henry Long Ranger



I simply can't afford that right now, or in the foreseeable future.  But it sure is attractive.  And it's a potent thousand yard gun that won't scare the Fudds.

Geometry is everything

Or, rather, everything is geometry.  Quantum physics and relativity are expressions of geometry.  The reduced Planck constant is the radius of a circle, or the amplitude of a photon.  The Planck constant is the circumference of a circle with the same radius, and is the momentum of a photon.  In Newtonian physics, the energy of an object would be proportional to the volume of the circle with this circumference.  (For the special case of a photon, imagine the circle lying entirely on the imaginary plane, orthogonal (perpendicular) to the real number line.  We only experience real-number events, so the photon has no energy, only momentum.)

Geometry is simple.  Calculating geometry with numbers and formulas is hard.  The simplest form of calculation is trigonometry.  Trigonometry is well understood, especially for flat (Euclidian) space.  Euclidian space is what you learned in high school geometry.  It's the space where parallel lines never meet.

It's when you go beyond simple Euclidian geometry that things get not only weird, but difficult.  General relativity is the application of the conservation of both momentum and energy to a curved space-time.  Sounds simple when you say it like that, right?  It is, until you start trying to work out how to do the math.  This was why Einstein was a genius.  He not only came up with the theory, he actually worked out the math.  He had to reinvent some of the math, because in his day, non-Euclidian geometry wasn't universally taught.

Speaking of which:  Why in the world isn't linear algebra explicitly taught as a freshman college course?  It could be taught in high school, for crying out loud.  A firm grounding in vectors and matrix manipulation would be an incredible help as a prerequisite to physics.  This is a major failing of the educational process.