Too dangerous for the infantry

Once upon a time in Iraq, my CI/HUMINT team got a squad of infantry (and their Stryker armored vehicle) to support us on a mission. When we got to town, we had so many people, I didn’t know what to do with them all. We got an amazing amount of work done. We did the scheduled meet plus three targets of opportunity, in addition to chatting with people on the street and talking to the kids who always gathered around the vehicles. It was great. And as always, we bought lunch for the support crew. Getting to eat local (not DFAC) food was always a treat.

After we got back to base, we got busy writing the many reports such a mission creates. About an hour later, the base XO slammed into our room, screaming “The days of you assholes going into town are over!” After I explained to the moron major that is what we did five days a week, every week, in order to develop the intel that kept them alive and servicing targets, he calmed down a little. Eventually he admitted that the infantry squad had complained to their company commander that what we did was dangerous. They were too afraid to go out with us “intel pogues” ever again.

So we went back to taking a couple cooks, clerks, or maintenance guys out with us in soft sided HMMWVs, like we had been doing.

Memorial Day 2025

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the American fight for independence and freedom.

Remember them.

School waste

Public schools waste money like geese waste grass.  Perhaps waste is the wrong term - hemorrhage?  Incinerate?  Gluttonously devour?

The average public screwel takes in something like $15,000 per pupil.  Assume a rather small class size of 20 students per teacher.  That's $300,000 per year, per class. 

Let's assume that that one class spends $30,000 per year on facilities.  Buildings are expensive.  Give the teacher an annual salary of $70,000, with another $30,000 in benefits.  (This is a very generous wage for a job that almost anyone could do with little or no training.)  Assume you spend $1,000 per student on educational materials (books, paper, crayons, etc.) every year.  What do we have so far? $150,000.

You need more than a teacher.  You need a librarian, a music teacher, an art teacher, and a gym instructor.  You need a nurse and a janitor.  You need a principal, and he needs a secretary.  You need a bus driver, and she needs a bus.  Let's say they each cost the class a remarkably generous $10,000 per year.  That's another $100,000, for a total of $250,000.

Where does the other $50,000 go?

It doesn't go to lunches.  Those are paid for separately.  The lunch ladies are contractors.

Where does the money go?

It goes to feed a ravenous bureaucracy, primarily composed of card-carrying Leftists who hate you and your children.

Anti-spin is anti-time

Regular matter particles have an intrinsic spin defined by the right-hand rule. Form a fist with your right hand, thumb pointing upward. That’s spin up. Rotate your wrist 180 degrees so your thumb points downward. That’s spin down.

Antimatter particles have properties exactly opposite to normal patter particles. They’re 180 degrees out of phase. They’re mirror reversed. Positive charge becomes negative charge. Spin becomes anti-spin, therefore right handed spin becomes left handed spin.

The implication is profound. Anti-particles have anti-spin, which must be anti-time. When we examine anti-particles, we see them have spin up and spin down, just like normal matter. This is a fundamental limitation of our testing methods. A right handed up spin looks like a left handed down spin. A right handed down spin looks like a left handed up spin. If you make fists with both hands, thumbs pointing up, you see them curling in opposite directions. Your mirror self looks exactly like you, but with everything reversed. Your right hand is your mirror twin’s left hand.

That implies that the subjective measure of time is expressed by the intrinsic spin of a particle. Matter has positive time. Antimatter has negative time. This is the only way to make the mirror universes match and be internally consistent.

An electron has spin up or down and positive time, which combine to +up or +down

A positron has spin up or down and negative time, which combine to -up or -down.

This is why the Dirac equation derives negative energy particles. This comes from the four component spinor: +up, +down, -up, -down. Feynman correctly interpreted these “negative energy” particles as positive energy anti-particles moving backwards in time.

But the time they’re moving backwards through isn’t the objective, universal tick. (In our positive time, normal matter universe, objective time only flows forwards.) It’s the subjective tick of each particle, wholly constrained by the strictures of relativity. An anti-particle’s negative sign shows it as acting in opposition to the universal tick. Similar terms multiply to a positive. Dissimilar terms multiply to a minus. Both universes are exactly equivalent, although opposite. (In the anti-universe, time flows backwards, and what we consider antiparticles are the norm and act in concert with the reversed time flow.)

In each universe, down-oriented neutrinos interact through the weak force with normal particles. Up oriented neutrinos interact with antiparticles. There is no way to tell which universe you’re in.

Spin is quantized. I have previously shown that spin 1 particles (bosons) are time neutral, while spin 1/2 particles (fermions) carry either positive or negative time. It’s the simplest way to make the equations balance, and it even makes sense.

Copenhagen interpretation delenda est!

Perverse Incentives

So there I was, way back when, at the Presidio of Monterey, California.  We built a small obstacle course near the top of the hill. Shortly after it was completed, we received news that a common (to the area) flower was going to be added to the federally protected list the next fiscal year.

The area around our shiny new obstacle course was loaded with these flowers. Come October, nobody would be allowed to step foot anywhere near the place. The EPA was trying to take our fun away!

So, after spending a productive day with a bucket and shovel, there weren’t any of those flowers anywhere near the obstacle course any more. Problem solved.

NCOs boldly go where officers fear to tread.  We take care of business - just don't ask us how.

Black holes are maximally weird

It’s apparently black hole week. I will therefore write about black holes.

Given the nature of the potential energy field (better known as spacetime), it has a maximum energy density at the top, and zero energy at the bottom. You can’t have less than nothing. Nature abhors debts.

Therefore, a black hole is a hollow shell of maximal energy density surrounding… nothing. Nothing at all. A region with zero potential energy. The event horizon contains all the energy (and information) of a black hole. It gets slightly larger every time another particle falls onto it with a splat.

source

You see, the potential energy field contains all the energy that every other field and particle draws from. So, when there is no potential energy left in a region, nothing can enter that region. There simply isn’t any energy for anything else to exist in that place. (Field gradients don’t count, because they aren’t physical, and their energy budget has already been paid.)

Therefore, a black hole is not an infinitely small singularity (which indicates a problem with the science), but rather a discontinuity. It’s crunchy on the outside, hollow on the inside.

By the way, this model also allows black holes to move and spin according to existing physical laws. They are maximally weird, but no weirder.

Copied from my Substack.