Travels with Gunther and Kara

Quick…where does that quote come from? 

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For those of you that didn’t figger it out…it’s a line spoken by Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm in the 1993 film Jurassic Park based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Crighton…and yes, according to the interwebs the line is in the novel as well.

Umm…where was I going with this line of thought?

Oh yeah…I remember.

There’s this Italian on twitter with a handle of Massimo who posts as. Rainmaker1973 and. He claims to be an engineer…he posts interesting stuff in the astronomy, astronautics, meteorology, and physics disciplines…and usually they’re pretty interesting. There have been several occasions when he was talking out of his rear end in our opinion from Neil or Connie’s knowledge about submarines, medical technology (oops, clinical laboratory science…she likes that term better than medical technology) or other subjects they’re relatively conversant in…but most of the time he seems pretty much on the money and usually links to original sources.

Anyway…Life Finds A Way…

One of his posts today linked to some research done by Stephen Rossiter who is an evolutionary biologist (whatever that is) at Queen Mary, University of London back in 2010 on bats and dolphins and some additional research finished this year on the genomes of those two animals.

So…what do bats and dolphins have in common.

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. Ah…you there in the back.

Yes, you’re absolutely right…they both use sound based echo ranging to navigate, avoid obstacles, and most importantly…find lunch.

It turns out that in both of these mammals there are about 200 genes that changed over the evolutionary cycle to produce the ability to create the sound pulses, transmit and receive the echo, and triangulate the location of lunch…and that they turn out to be the same 200 genes in both species. In other words…an airborne mammal and a seaborne one independently evolved the same capability in the same way.

Like Ian said…life finds a way.

Another example…again coming on a post by Massimo.

All mathematicians, practically all scientists/engineers/technical people, and some portion of everybody that doesn’t fall into one of those categories know of the existence of something called a Fibonacci Curve…which is based on the Fibonacci sequence which was discovered/invented/whatever by several folks independently. Indian research has shown that it was known as early as circa 450BC-200BC as the ancient Indian mathematician Pingala wrote about it…but that is relatively obscure and was only figured out in 1985…which is why it is The Fibonacci sequence and not the Pingala sequence. It was made more famous by…and named after…Fibonacci who was an Italian mathematician in the mid 1200s. His actual name was Leonardo Bonacci but he was also known as Leonardo of Pisa, or Leonardo Bigollo Pisano (‘Leonardo the Traveller from Pisa’ in Italian). Fibonacci was coined in 1838 by Italian-Franco historian Guillaume Libri and is a shortened version of filius Bonacci…or son of Bonacci in Italian…and his coinage was based on a 1506 Roman Empire notarized document that mentions Lionardo Fibonacci. Anyways…that’s where the name comes from…and I had no idea that the Roman Empire had notary publics available.

The Fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers such that each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers…starting with 0 and 1 as the first two numbers in the sequence. The first few numbers in the sequence are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…and well you get the idea.

The sequence appears widely in nature, music and many other scientific disciplines…for example the shells of the nautilus are based on the sequence…the most well known example is The Fibonacci Spiral  which looks like this.

And as it turns out…this is closely related to gravity, centripetal, and centrifugal force somehow as you can see in the following image.

Anyway…that’s enough science for today…lemme see what else I can free associate about.

Ah…well, just like Life Finds A Way…it is also true that Stupid Finds A Way. And by stupid here I’m really talking only somewhat about stupid and also about misleading “journalism” articles.

Vogue magazine…as you can see
here…has a profile of Olympic gymnast Simone Biles in their August issue…and a photo (well, actually two different photos depending on which version gets delivered to your door if you’re a subscriber or to your newsstand if you get it that way) of Ms. Biles. Immediately after the issue was released…you guessed it…the WAMM was out in force decrying the image on the cover. Criticism from this “broad spectrum of voices” which includes one the NYT National Picture Editor and the founder of Black Women Photographers…doesn’t seem like a very broad spectrum to me but that’s not really germane to the stupid here…anyway the photographer supposedly did Ms. Biles a disservice by the photographer who “washed out her skin tone and made the images look muted”…and this same broad spectrum says that Vogue should have hired a black photographer as it would be better from both an ethical standpoint as well as because only black photographers know how to properly light black skin.

Now I’ve looked at the images on the cover in the linked article above…and I also googled for images of Ms. Biles and to me it pretty much looks like her skin color is about the same in both…albeit the cover images have a few more spectral highlights in them…which is…ummm…what pretty much all Vogue and other magazine cover photos have in them so as to provide some visual pop sitting on the newsstand.

No…what this is really about is the supposed “better from an ethical standpoint” of hiring a black photographer…and here is where the stupid goes off the rails.

This supposedly incompetent photographer…who doesn’t know how to light black skin despite having photographed many black folks including President Obama and his family, Whoopi Goldberg, LeBron James, Rihanna, Joan Armitrading, and Serena Williams among others. This supposedly incompetent photographer has a string of awards as long as your arm and literally dozens of photos you would immediately recognize if I posted them all here (but I can’t because of copyright of course)

The name of this incompetent boob…who clearly has no idea how to light black skin for a photograph…and clearly has no idea of how to produce final images that I’m quite sure were approved first by the photographer, then by numerous folks on the Vogue staff up to and including the publisher and Ms. Biles herself…

Annie Leibovitz…yeah, she’s incompetent all right. I can’t say that I think much of her politics but to infer that she’s incompetent and Vogue should have hired a black photographer who would know better is…well…stupid finds a way.

And yes…the twitter rabble is right…in some of the photos in the profile Ms. Biles skin does appear darker…but perhaps that is because of the mood that Ms. Biles, the photographer, the editor, and the picture editor wanted for those particular images.

Nah…it is incompetence…the WAMM has spoken.

You probably saw on the news this week how Florida has 15,000 new cases of the CoViD on Sunday and how this is clearly proof that the state opened back up too soon. However…lost in the agenda were several facts which would have enabled one to actually make a determination of whether this 15,000 number was significant or not. First…the more tests you do…the more positive results you will get and since testing is increasing then QED the number of cases will be increasing. Second…and more important really…is that the 15,000 new cases number gives no indication as to what testing method or methods were used. There are several of these and basically cases are broken down into people that have active infections and people that used to have an active infection which may or may not have been symptomatic but now those recovered people have antibodies against the virus. Now those antibodies may or may not be long lasting…that isn’t fully known yet by medical researchers…but positive antibody tests are classified as “new cases” according to guidelines…and unless you know how many of those new cases were “recovered but have antibodies” cases it is impossible to know the significance of “15,000 new cases”. I think it’s fairly safe that active infections (both symptomatic and asymptomatic) are increasing in the state…but incomplete data provided by the state is just allowing the WAMM to go on and on about “skyrocketing cases” and “the state needs to shut down again”.

Looking at the data…the spike on Sunday was on July 12…which just happens to be the weekend after the Independence Day weekend. Yes…the governor allowed the beaches to reopen as well as bars for the holiday…but he did order masks in the bars and proper social distancing. Unfortunately…too many idiots went out en masse to drink themselves into a stupor while either in a crowded bar or crowded beach and paid no attention to social distancing. So…infected on Saturday, 4 days or so to start feeling bad and go get a test, another 3 days or so for the test results to come back and get reported to the state…and magically 8 days later the number of cases goes up.

Should the beaches and bars have remained closed? Well…as I’ve said before national, state, and local leaders have to weigh both the public health issues, economic issues, and the solvency of businesses that rely on summer tourism when making these decisions…and then they make the best decision they can. That’s what the governor here did…and he allowed limiting with restrictions…which if you saw the news reports were clearly ignored by the vast majority of the folks on the beach…which were primarily fairly young adults from what I saw but then they are always a majority of the people on the beach or getting hammered at the trendy drinking establishments. Like I said…stupid finds a way.

Then there are the out and out lies in support of an agenda…like whether or not voting by mail is a good thing or a bad thing. Like most other debates…there are pros and cons on both sides and each side has some valid points while ignoring the valid points that the other side has. Connie and Neil voted absentee many times through his Naval career…but I have to agree with the side that says that there is a potential for fraudulent balloting if the state mails every voter an absentee ballot. Not necessarily a fact that it will happen…but there is a higher possibility. There are ways around this…and most states and localities have rules on requesting, submitting, and validation of absentee ballots to try and eliminate these as much as possible…but the other side is vehemently against these rules in general as well as being vehemently against voter ID laws.

Now me…I have no problem with voter ID laws…after all you need an ID to buy booze, cigarettes, lottery tickets, drive a car, cash a check, and many other things in modern life…and voting is (a) the right and responsibility of all citizens as well as (b) one of the most important things we do in life…so I have no issue at all with requiring a voter to prove who he/she is before voting so as to verify that they are citizens of the US and thereby eligible to vote as well as to ensure that he/she votes once and only once. 

However…the other side has at least a semblance of a valid point that getting an ID is costly…so it is my opinion that the state issued ID for voting purposes as well as booze purchases and all the other things requiring an ID listed above should be relatively inexpensive and available at any DMV office or county courthouse. The only thing that needs to be paid for is the relatively inexpensive birth certificate to prove citizenship…not necessary if you’re a naturalized citizen but then you were provided proof of that when it happened and the relatively low cost of the ID itself. Yes…it might require the voter to take time off from work…and it might require transportation to the ID issuing place…but let’s be real. None of that is very expensive…and the same costs are applicable to everybody that needs the ID…black/white/brown/yellow, man/woman, rich/poor, whatever. For the other side to claim that voter ID laws are “systemic voter suppression” is just disingenuous as they’re ignoring the fact that voting is one of the most important rights we have. Speaking of ID though…since multiple forms of “they probably already have one of these” ID are accepted…if the poor suppressed voters in the inner cities have no ID…I wonder how they buy their Colt Malt Liquor or lottery tickets…or drive their car?

Where was I going with this…oh yeah, absentee ballots. There is an article
here…the headline says “100,000 mail-in votes went uncounted in California’s primary”…and the first couple of paragraphs…which is all most people read if they get past the headlines before going straight to the comments section to voice their outrage…kind of imply that these ballots were rejected by state officials and that “highlights a glaring gap in the state’s effort to ensure every vote is counted”.

It then goes on to talk a bit about how this is a debate between making sure that every vote is counted and the efforts of Republican lawmakers to suppress the vote…and how absentee voting rules need to be relaxed to ensure that every voter gets a mail in ballot in the mail and has a chance to have “every vote counted”.

Now I’m all for having all the votes counted…but first one has to make sure that they’re valid ballots. At the polls this is generally done by crossing the voter’s name off of the list for the precinct…but in today’s “let’s allow them to vote anyplace” environment I guess they make a pencil and paper list for folks not registered for that precinct…and I’m not sure how a voter is prevented from going to every precinct and voting more than once as given the efficiency of most government bureaucracies I’m not convinced they would get found out if they did but whatever.

Finally…the article gets down to the reason the ballots weren’t counted…and amazingly enough, assuming you managed to read that far…it wasn’t due to voter suppression…it was due to voter stupidity.

Of the 100,000 ballots that were rejected…it was actually a total of 102,428 which was about 1.7% of the 7 million ballots returned…70,330 of them failed to be returned within the specified time limit which was on or before Election Day or within three days after Election Day. Another 27,525 either did not have the voter signature on the clearly indicated line on the envelope or else the signature on the envelope did not match the signature on file for the voter…which means that someone else signed it for them which is against the law. There were more than 800 ballots received that did not actually have the ballot inside the envelope. For those of you who’ve never voted absentee…you fill out your ballot which is then placed in a sleeve to hide it from view and the sleeve is placed in the envelope. The outside of the envelope is filled out with your name, address, and signature across the flap where it is sealed and then it goes into the mail. On receipt of the ballot…it is first examined to see if the outside of the envelope is correctly filled out with the matching signature and that the voter is a properly registered voter…if not it goes in the rejected pile and most states re-review those to have a second review on signature match criteria. If it matches…the envelope is opened and the sleeve is removed and typically the sleeve goes into a sealed box that is locked up when not actually being filled with sleeves. The envelopes go into another sealed box for later review if necessary…but there is no correlation between a sleeve in the one box and the envelope in the other box to ensure the voter for an individual ballot remains anonymous but verified registered.

So…those 100,000 ballots that weren’t counted…stupid finds a way.

I can only imagine the problems the PRC will have in the fall since Governor Newsom signed a law requiring a ballot be mailed to every one of the 21 million registered voters in the state…and I can pretty much guarantee you based on governmental bureaucracy morons that if a person voted both in person and via the mail in ballot they would have a very good chance of being undetected.

Back in the day when Neil and Connie were first married and through most of his Navy career they were registered voters in Florida. When he retired in the early 90s they re-registered in Virginia…but we received absentee ballots for just about every election held from then up until we sold the house in VA and because SD registered voters. So…they could have voted twice and gotten away with it. Never did…but it is illustrative of the problems that one side says could happen and we need to make provisions to eliminate them…while the other side says we need to make every vote count without making sure they are valid votes or even allowed to vote.

There’s a controversy in Florida over whether or not convicted felons in the state can vote in November…the court case is currently pending. Back in 2018 the states voters passed Amendment 4 which restored the voting rights of most convicted felons. The amendment states that “any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.” Notice that the amendment says nothing about fines and restitution being paid. Subsequent to this…the legislature passed and the governor signed a law that required fines and restitution to be paid as well…since when sentence is imposed it includes some combination of prison, probation, fines, and restitution…the important thing is that the financial penalties are part of the sentence. That makes perfect sense to me…after all the judge says “I hereby sentence you to and puts in the things in the sentence including fines and restitution”…so to me it is perfectly clear that the financial penalties are part of the sentence.

Naturally…the WAMM and Democratic Party sees it the other way…which is what their lawsuit is about. Me…I think that legally the state is right and the courts will rule that “I hereby sentence you” includes all of the following restrictions regardless of whether all of the restrictions are listed in the amendment text. Stupid finds a way…here illustrated by the poorly written amendment…but then this is the same party that had their leadership say about the Obamacare Act…”we have to pass it so we can see what is in it”. 

On the RV sales front…we’ve had our rig listed for sale on rvtrader.com but so far have only had a half dozen inquiries. All but one of them we responded to the initial inquiry and never heard back from them…but then we had the last one which actually turned out to to be at least a semblance of a real offer…at least until we started talking about it with…well let’s just call him E.

When we priced the rig we went through the NADA pricing guide and got the average retail price for a rig our age, make and model, and equipment and then compared that to several known sales of similar age and configuration of New Horizons rigs…and then priced ours a bit under the average retail price hoping to encourage buyers.

So E comes in and asks a few questions which Neil answers and then decides to put in an offer. He says that he “ran the numbers”…and never revealed how he got those numbers…and proceeds to declare that the actual worth is about 12K less than our asking price…so he offers to put that much in escrow plus another 5K to cover our paying for the transport of the rig to Idaho for his approval using escrow.com…they also offer a title/payment transfer service to protect both sides.

E’s idea is that he puts the offer plus 5K in escrow, we send in the signed title to escrow.com, and then we arrange for transport to Idaho for his approval of the rig as specified in the inspection report. He sends us this email at ab out 1800 Idaho time and the next morning at about 0600 Idaho time we get another email specifying that he has 3 quotes for the transport from 2800 to 5,250 and has a quote for inspection of 500. At this point we start to get funny thoughts as getting those 4 quotes overnight…for a person who said on the phone that he just sold his house and needs the RV asap to live in…well getting quotes that quickly overnight and offering more like wholesale price rather than retail price starts to smell like a guy looking to flip the rig and make some profit. Nothing wrong with that…but be honest about it.

We have another several emails back and forth talking about the escrow and Neil explains to him that we want to protect both sides and that if we have signed over the title and sent it in to escrow.com, don’t have the money, and give physical custody of the rig to the transport service for him to approve in Idaho before the funds get released provides no protection to us at all. We told him that one of two methods would work. He could fly down and close the same here and then transport was on his dime…or we could use the escrow service to swap the signed title and the funds and he would then have title to and ownership of the rig here in Florida and he could arrange transport. He claimed that “if he has the title then we could give the transport company some old piece of junk rather than what was on the title”…Neil explained to him that would mean we could go to jail for auto theft or fraud or whatever and we had no interest in that. Neil reiterated the two sales closing options that were acceptable to us…and further stated that he would be happy to serve as his agent to give the keys and rig to the transport service or that E could pay the campground manager a couple hundred bucks to take possession for him and give it to the transport service.

That’s the last we heard from E.

So…still for sale at this point.

A couple more images from the past since I got no new ones.

Snow Egret with his golden slippers…I think this one was from up in SC someplace as it doesn’t look like the right vegetation that we would see here in southern FL.

Connie on a hike…this one is definitely from SC so the others probably are as well.

Interesting things found on the net

Everybody has heard of fire breathing dragons…but I betcha never seen a fire breathing polar bear before. And didja know that a polar bear is actually not white at all…it’s jus’ a trick? Yep…the fur is translucent and the coat is about 5 or 6 inches thick…and the skin underneath is black because in the cold climate the black skin absorbs more heat from sunlight than white would…this is also why the fur is translucent so the sunlight will penetrate through to the skin. Ima tryin to lern y’all sum stuf every day ya know.

Those readers who are familiar with the 23 novel science-fantasy series “The Dragonriders of Pern” written originally by Anne McCaffery starting in 1967, jointly with her middle son from 2003 until Anne’s death in 2012 and by the son thereafter will…as do I…(a) wonder just where the heck in the arctic they found firestone, (b) will recognize this as a male since chewing firestone makes females sterile and hence they use nitric acid sprayers to eliminate thread instead, and (c) will recognize that the cold adaptations of a polar bear make him most excellently suited for the cold of between. (Editor note: green dragons are female but they chew firestone and are sterile since their smaller size means they are unable to keep up with golden dragons on mating flights…bronzes, browns and the smallest blues are male…there’s also a single white named Jason which is either male or neuter as gender isn’t specified…but I digress.)

You’ve seen some talk on the news about defunding the police since a lot of their missions are better handled by crisis counselors, meter maids, or social workers. We think this is probably a good idea as police aren’t trained for some of the situations they’re placed in…but in order to do it you’ll need a whole system setup so that social workers are on shift and available 24×7. And they’ll need to proceed to the call either with or along with the police response because you never really know from the 911 call exactly what services are required…and since the social workers will be unarmed and are female more likely than not they really need officers along in case a situation turns violent…I would not want to be the chief of police in a city where the police did not respond, the social worker did, and the social worker got raped and murdered by the psycho. Anyway…

I need me sum of dees back to school supplies.

Jus’ wunderin here…

In other news tangentially related to this one…apparently another cause of the rampant systemic racism in the justice system is because cops, prosecutors, juries, and judges have an implicit bias against AAE…that’s African American English…or what a progressive would call the inability due to lack of education or refusal to speak in complete sentences that make sense. Case in point…Neil grew up in the south and we lived in Charleston SC for awhile so he is quite familiar with southern, black southern, and normal patois and he also has a passing familiarity with Gullah which is a pigeon English spoken on some small islands off the coast of GA or SC…can’t remember which. Anyway…back when he was a contractor working at Suitland Federal Center in MD which is over in a prosperous but majority black part of town south and east of Washington DC…he and a USMC buddy of his frequently went running at noontime off of the base. Down near the river right across from the old RFK Stadium where the Redskins used to play there was this little store with a sign out front that advertised “B and S…Market, Deli, Liquor Store, and VD Clinic”. Normally he and Rick would be shirtless and in shorts and running shoes only…and there were these two…well ancient is the best description of their age that comes to mind…anyway there were these two elderly black gentlemen that sat outside the store on the veranda most days in rocking chairs. Every time Neil and Rich went past these two gentlemen waved and called to them…they were obviously being friendly so Neil and Rich waved back and answered them. 

And to this day…despite being from the South where these two gentlemen were obviously from and thus he should have known…he has no idea what those two gentlemen were actually saying…maybe they wuz speaking AAE I guess.

And finally…this one which Connie’s choir director posted and I thought it was appropriate to pass along as I know that several of our regular readers are choir singers at their church of choice.

Cyas.

Yup…the WAMM (woke and media mob) is just keeping on with their demands, misleading headlines, tear it down mentality and such. But before we get to that…

Not much new going on around here. We got some groceries from Walmart…had a Sunday morning pickup and it was pretty easy. We got most of what we ordered with only about 3 out of stock things and a couple of substitutions…although why they thought that oranges would be a good substitute for grapefruit I dunno…but I guess they’re both citrus so mebbe that was it. Neil went on a couple bike rides, we grilled a lamb roast, did some laundry…and that’s pretty much about it. 

Oh yeah…Neil finished the garage and we can park the car in it but I think I mentioned that last time.

So last week we lost Aunt Jemima, the Cream of Wheat Chef and Uncle Ben’s…and Snap, Crackle, and Pop are on the chopping block…so let’s see what else is going on in the erase history movement.

Hmmm…the great grandson of Nancy Green says that erasing Aunt Jemima is erasing his family history and is wrong.

Eskimo Pies…yep, they’re gone too…I don’t think Inuit Pies has quite the same ring to it.

The University of Florida…ya know that team know as the Gators…they have…or at least they used to have…a cheer called the Gator Chomp where they put their arms out and moved them up and down in a parody of an alligator opening and closing his jaws while chanting “Gator Bait”. This has been deemed racist because according to those doing the deeming it recalls a time when black children were skinned alive and used for bait to catch alligators. A NY Times article from 2014 found that there was “evidence” that this happened but did not provide any in their article. Snopes.com which is a pretty reliable truth or lie research site on the internet…they concluded that despite widespread dissemination of representations of this from the 19th and 20th centuries that this does not mean that it actually happened and that no evidence of it was found in press reports of the time…and that while might have occasionally happened there is no evidence that it was widespread…but that it was both plausible and possible. So…maybe it happened and maybe it didn’t. Despite this lack of evidence…the Gator Chomp has been ruled and deemed as racist…despite the fact that it was invented by one of their football players during their first National Championship season in the mid 1990s…the player…who just happens to be black…said after an unexpected victory “If ya ain’t a Gator…you’re Gator Bait”.

Doesn’t seem all that racist to me.

Both of Mohammed Ali’s adult children say that he would not b a supporter of the current BLM…because he (a) thought that all lives mattered and (b) never met a person he didn’t want to be friends with. Sounds to me like he was a frustrated RVer…who as we all know don’t believe anybody is a stranger, they’re just friends he hasn’t met yet.

Morgan Freeman…yeah, I don’t think he’s a big fan of BLM either although I haven’t seen a quote from him on it. However…he is on record as being against Black History Month because he believes it is just part of American history.

I saw the following statistics on a page about the Civil Rights Act of 1964…and although we can read in the news how all Republicans are racists…ya wanna know how the vote on that bill went in Congress? In the House…final vote was 69% of Democrats in favor and 82% of Republicans…and in the Senate it was 61% Democrats and 80% Republicans…so just who’s the racist? You did know that it was the Democrats in the South after the war that invented the KKK…and that the Reconstruction efforts were led by Republicans…right? Go ahead and look those little tidbits up.

So in addition to the Confederate statues being destroyed…and Confederate Speakers of the House having their portraits removed from the Capitol…they’re also going after Teddy Roosevelt and Father Junípero Serra who founded the missions in CA back during the Spanish colonial days. They’re too racist apparently…along with Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, and countless others who the WAMM has decided are evil. Me…I’m still wondering when they’re going to rename that tall statue on the Mall in our nation’s capital to the Obelisk of Wokeness…as well as rename the District itself…since both of the people who contributed to the name are racists as well if you want to get right down to facts…and Washington was even an actual traitor as opposed to the not actually traitors that the Confederates who seceded from the union can be argued to be.

You probably read on the news about the book that John Bolton wants to publish…and how the administration took him to court to prevent publication since he had not completed his required review by the Intelligence community and received written approval to publish his book.

See…it is supposed to work like this. If you have a clearance when you get debriefed you sign a statement agreeing not to divulge classified information to anybody else…and it notes the felony nature of this act and specifies the penalty. What the rules say is that if a person from the Intelligence community wants to write a book…he has to submit it *before anybody else sees it* to an office in the Intelligence community and receive written approval to publish…this usually entails several back and forth negotiations on the contents to verify that no classified info is in the document…but it is supposed to happen entirely between the author and the reviewer. Mr. Bolton…well he gave his book to both his publisher and his lawyer before doing any of this…and that is 100% illegal as (a) they don’t have a clearance, (b) they don’t have need to know even if they did have a clearance, (c) they don’t have proper classified material storage facilities, and (d) just because Mr. Bolton says there is no classified material in the document doesn’t make it true…he is not the person in which that determination resides. Now Mr. Bolton claims that he received oral approval…but the rules say it must be in writing and he’s not been able to produce either the letter or a reviewer who will admit he told Mr. Bolton it was OK orally.

So…Mr. Bolton is legally liable for a felony and in my opinion should not have been allowed to publish…but the judge decided that the cat was out of the bag as 10s of thousands of copies had already been distributed to booksellers that he the judge would just ignore the law and allow him to publish the book. He will still be liable to prosecution for violation of his agreement, providing classified material to unauthorized people, and for civil forfeiture of the entire proceeds from the book. 

But hey…he’s got an ax to grind against the President so his friends in the WAMM are perfectly ok with that.

Hmmm…oh yeah, SCOTUS. Chief Justice Roberts has set himself up for a no win situation later on. As you probably know…SCOTUS this week sent the whole DACA process back to the administration to try again because their changing of the rules was “arbitrary and capricious” since the administration tried to end DACA via regulation instead of Executive Order…which would have been upheld. One of the reasons that it was arbitrary was that the admin didn’t follow the requirement to have draft rules and get public comment before imposing them…but then again the Obama admin didn’t bother with those niceties when they set up the rules to allow DACA…but since he issued an Executive Order to do it it was perfectly legal.

Now I feel for the DACA folks…that’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals…and it essentially prevents deportation of illegal immigrants who were brought here by their parents when they were toddlers. These folks don’t know any life outside of the USA…and have little attachment to Mexico or Guatemala or wherever they came from south of the border…but the fact remains that  they are still illegal immigrants. Congress had refused for years to do anything about their not-of-their-making situation…so President Obama did what he thought was right.  Now President Trump wants to do what he thinks is right…and is being pilloried by the WAMM for it. Me…I don’t think kicking them out is the right answer…but then just giving them a free pass to citizenship isn’t the right answer…our Congress critters need to solve this problem but they’re too busy blaming the other side for everything to actually do their job.

It is the other SCOTUS decision that will put Justice Roberts in a bind in a couple of years. The case was about whether LBGTQ people could be discriminated against on the basis of their LBGTQness or whether that would be sex discrimination which is already illegal. The majority opinion said that it did and essentially equated LBGTQness with gender and hence discrimination was illegal.

There are two problems with this decision. First…it seems awfully close to the court performing a legislative function in making that determination and that really isn’t their job…interpreting the law is their job. Second…and this is what will cause the problem later…they’ve set themselves up for a case where they will have to determine whether Freedom of Religion or Right to Privacy takes precedence. I’m quite sure that there are only two genders…science tells us so and that there is no such thing as being able to change your gender. I don’t care a whit who you want to have sex with…if you like men that’s fine and if you like women that’s fine too no matter what your gender is. I also don’t care a whit if you want to dress up as a man in women’s clothes or vice versa…that just makes you a transvestite…or if you want to get your willy chopped off, get breast implants, grow your hear long and wear heels and makeup…just don’t tell me that doing all that makes you a woman or makes you a man if you go the other way. Frankly what clothes you wear and who you boink should remain in your personal purview.

However…religious organizations will still fire individuals who don’t meet the strictures of their faith…and inevitably that means that some LBGTQ person will get fired because LBGTQness is against the tenets of their faith. This means that the fired person will sue and eventually the case will get back to SCOTUS to decide which of those constitutionally guaranteed rights is paramount.

I can kinda see why Justice Roberts really wanted it to come out this way…after all his primary consideration after the law is the legacy of his Court…and if they had ruled for the right to discriminate against those people…or for the right of the administration to end DACA (which they actually said was absolutely within their rights but that they just didn’t do it the right way)…either of those outcomes would have been pounced on by the WAMM as proof that the court was just a bunch of Republican stooges…heck, they’ve already said that before but in an election year Justice Roberts just didn’t want that. But I can’t help but wonder if he really thought through the entire sequence of ‘what will happen now’ in his zeal not to make a politically unpopular decision in an election year.

You probably won’t see this on the evening news…in
Uniontown PA…a black guy by the name of Daylan McLee rescued a cop from a burning patrol car after an accident in front of the apartment. He’s a guy with dreads and visible tattoos on his body and has had some run ins with the cops in the past…some of them his fault and some maybe not so much…but he said that he won’t let the actions of a few allow him to blame all police…so he did the right thing and saved the cop’s life as the cruiser burned. He has several ongoing lawsuits against those who he says have wronged him in the past…and his lawyer naturally claims it is all based on racism…but here’s a guy who did the right thing anyway.

Good on’ya Daylan…

One final example of race baiting clickbait headlines before we move on for today.

This
article…would take you to an article with the headline “Video shows Florida officer immediately draw gun on woman, aim at her for over 4 minutes” and if you read it a bit you’ll see that the woman in the article…they make sure to specify that she’s a black woman and a white cop…well she says “I feel like something needs to happen to the Tampa PD officer who held that gun on me for four minutes. The Tampa PD, they are bullies, and the way they treat people is bad.”. 

But read a little further and you’ll see that she ‘borrowed’ the car from a friend…and that it was a rental car…and that it had been reported stolen by Hertz so the officer performed a felony stop of the vehicle. Noting that there were 2 people in the vehicle and that he was a single cop…he stood behind his car door and 100% in accordance with policy drew his weapon to cover the occupants, directed them to make their hands visible and to remain in the car, and called for backup. Some 4 minutes later, backup arrived, he put his weapon away and the women occupants were taken into custody. After investigation…it was determined that the occupants did not steal the car and they were released and the car impounded…when they could have been booked and taken to jail on auto theft charges…but the cops did the right thing, exonerated the women, and released them.

Me…I think they need better friends…what did they expect when they were driving a stolen car? The Tampa police chief has reviewed both the body cam video and the women’s dash cam video and determined that nothing improper was done…and according to the police the women were happy with the explanation they were given for both the stop and the detaining when they were released.

But now…she wants to have some butthurt and blame the police for doing their job…and “something needs to happen to him”. I agree…he should be given a commendation for following procedure, doing his job, protecting himself and the citizens, and doing things the right way.

And finally…you’ve probably seen the case of the guy in Atlanta who was passed out drunk in the Wendy’s drive in and was eventually…after a fight with the police during which he took one of their tasers and fled…and while fleeing turned around and fired the taser at the cops before he was “murdered by being shot in the back by the police” according to the WAMM. So this fellow had several strikes against him…DUI, resisting arrest, fleeing, stealing a law enforcement weapon, and firing that weapon at the pursuing police.

Now I’m not saying the cops should or should not have shot the man…but I think that getting a conviction on the 11 counts including felony murder is going to be a long shot…in fact I think the DA deliberately overcharged him trying to scare him and his lawyer into pleading guilty to a lesser charge but that’s just me. However…remember what I told you a few posts back about the #1 goal a cop has when he goes to work today.

That goal is to be alive at the end of his tour to go home to his family.

Now consider the photo below…you’re the cop chasing this guy in the dark, you know he’s in possession of one of your weapons, and he is a fleeing felon.

Now if you’re that cop…your adrenaline is pumping, you know this fellow has a weapon…and he’s pointing/firing it at you…are you justified in fearing for your life of the life of others in which case shooting him is justified…or are you not justified? Remember…you’ve got a split second to make a decision.

Me…you can’t tell what that weapon is…and while he told you he had no weapon and you patted him down you weren’t arresting him at the time of the pat down so maybe you missed the gun in his pocket.

It’s a lot grayer of a situation than the WAMM would have you believe.

One image this time…a nice reflection shot of our pond on a calm day. I need to nag Neil…nag, nag, nag…to take Connie out early some morning and see if we can get some socially distant photos for here…there’s a little hiking nature area just a mile or so south.

Ok…on to interesting things found on the net.

Looks like the tiger printer is getting low on ink…or maybe it’s just a normal tiger, golden tiger, white tiger, and albino tiger in the same portrait.

Retirement unemployment.

This seems appropriate given the current wokeness outbreak.

Truth hurts sometimes.

And finally…this pretty much describes the weather this month so far in Fort Myers…and it will be like this through September or early October at least.

Cyas.

Not much going on…we got our UPS for the TV and internet stuff in and installed and the second one for the file server is on the way…and we also got our grill cover. Neil finished the garage cleanup…got everything sorted and stored and we can now keep Li’l Red inside instead of outside.

Now this week…we’ve gotta get rid of Aunt Jemima syrup and pancakes, Uncle Ben’s Rice, the chef on the Cream of Wheat box and even Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Where will it end.

Now I know that Aunt Jemima has used a black woman in their marketing for over a century…but now it’s bad. Only…maybe let’s consider a couple of facts about that.

Did you know that Aunt Jemima was a real person? Yup…a former slave named Nancy Green moved to Chicago after the war and started a food company making…you guessed it…pancakes. She became pretty successful at her company…in fact she was so successful that the General Mills company bought her out and used her image in their marketing…she went on to become in addition to the company spokesperson a storyteller, cook, and activist as well as the first of numerous black women who headed the marketing. She died in 1923 as one of America’s first black millionaires…and remember in 1923 a million bucks was a whole lot more than it is now. 

Her likeness was found in pretty much every household in the south and I assume up in Yankee land as well…because we all used her syrup even if we made our own pancake batter from scratch with Bisquick since it was (a) cheaper than her pancakes and (b) we had it anyway for making biscuits…although to be honest we made them from flour, Crisco, baking powder, baking soda, and milk as often as we made them from Bisquick and milk. Back in the day…actual maple syrup was pretty rare and pretty expensive outside of the arctic Nawth where it was produced so hers was what we used down in the no longer PC term Dixie.

And ya know…if the brand started today and General Mills used her likeness to honor a black woman who achieved quite a lot…it might even be considered a good thing.

But nope…she’s gotta go…along with pretty much every other black person used in any marketing campaign? I guess having a self made black female millionaire spoil the narrative.

When do we get rid of the Nike Air Jordan logo? Do bald white men feel slighted because of Mr. Clean? Do gas station attendants quake in their safe places because of “the man who wears the big, bright Texaco star?” Or how about white women…do they tremble in their aprons over Betty Crocker?

There was this long discussion over the matter on Neil’s photography forum in the non photographic section…the thread is entitled “Cat True Facts” but other than a link in the first post it’s all about the left running out of things to be offended over…and how if marketing folks refused to use blacks in their marketing campaigns that would be bad…and how that would be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Heck…even the. Land O’ Lakes logo is apparently being changed…they’ve ditched the Native American portion on their logo.

What’s next…Black Label whiskey? Dark rum? Red and white wine? Brown mustard? Egg whites?

Anyways enough on that.

I see in the news that the University of VA…known as UVA in the state…is changing the logo for their athletic department for the second time in 2 or 3 months. The university teams are known as the Cavaliers and the logo consists of a large upper case orange V with blue outline and two crossed cutlasses in blue below it. This has been their logo since at least when Neil was in high school. However…they changed the logo back in April or so so that there were sinuous edges on the handle portion of the cutlasses to honor the sinuous walls that are on the campus. These walls were designed by that well known slave owner Thomas Jefferson who just happened to be a big wig in VA politics…and they were designed in the sinuous manner for the simple reason that you need a lot fewer bricks that way. The wall is actually longer than a straight one would be but you can build thinner…and hence less costly…brick walls if they’re not straight. Now…where did Cavaliers come from? Good question…and the answer is that back in the 1600s there was a revolution in England over whether the king had sole and ultimate power or whether they would have the parliamentary form of government that they have now…and naturally there were two sides in this revolution. The Virginia Cavaliers was a pro royalist organization in the Virginia colony and most of the upper crust of the colony’s society was part of it…so when the university was founded later it seemed naturally to use Cavaliers for the mascot. Nothing in any of that seems racist to me…but apparently the WAMM has decided that the honoring the sinuous walls is racist because “the walls were only built to keep the hide the noise and view of the slaves outside the walls from folk inside the walls”. Seems pretty flimsy to me…but the university caved to the WAMM and has redone the logon…again…keeping straight lines on the edges of the cutlass handles. Whatever.

I see that Mr. Putin says that not only does Russia have “hypersonic” missiles that are “completely un-interceptible” but they also have hypersonic defense weapons.

Now I gotta tellya…”hypersonic missiles” is just a bunch of marketing BS. According to the definition…hypersonic means they go more than 5 times the speed of sound…and according to the hypersonic missile hysteria they are glide based vehicles that maneuver during flight to keep from being intercepted as well as flying at a “much lower altitude” . That sounds pretty good…until you realize that it’s all a bunch of hooey. The fact is that every ballistic missile is hypersonic…they travel at about 15 times the speed of sound pretty much from about 30 seconds after launch until they go boom at the target…so so much for hypersonic indicating a new capability. Moving on to flying at a much lower altitude…they’re still above about 98% of the atmosphere…up until the past year or so this was known as a depressed ballistic trajectory…and pretty much any ICBM or SLBM these days is capable of doing so albeit at a reduced range compared to a purely ballistic flight…but in either case they’re still essentially out in space…so so much for gliding. Finally…that new maneuverability…well warheads have been capable of maneuvering since about 1970…you might have heard that ballistic missiles since about that time have what is known as MIRVs or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles…which means that a single missile can make multiple targets go boom. Now there are some limitations for MIRVs…you can scatter the warheads over a much further distance parallel to the missile flight path than across the flight path…but since they were all dumped off of a ballistic missile they’ll all hit the same place…that’s just physics for ya…unless you maneuver the various warheads to the right/left/short/long of the ballistic point to hit various targets.

Now it is certainly possible that gone could make faster missiles that remain in the atmosphere…and they would provide shorter reaction times than slower missiles would…duh…but in order to really maneuver much they need to be in the atmosphere so as to give the control surfaces something to act against to do this maneuvering. Remaining in the atmosphere means more air friction…which means more heat…and there’s a reason that a ballistic missile gains most of it’s speed after it leaves the atmosphere behind…that reason is to protect it from the heat…just like the heat shield on a space capsule does or the tiles on the space shuttle did. The fastest aircraft known is the SR-71 blackbird…holding the speed record of 2,193 mph…and the limit on the speed is both power and heat load. As you go faster…the amount of power needed and hence fuel needed increases geometrically…every mile per hour increase gets harder as you go faster…and the drag against the air generates more heat. Materials science just hasn’t caught up and trying to achieve any airframe that will go faster than about 5 or 6 times the speed of sound while remaining in the atmosphere and not melting simply becomes a heat/fuel/power problem.

The military has been working on making both aircraft and weapons go faster ever since the Wright brothers…but physics and engineering is the same for everybody. The likelihood of either side getting a lasting advantage through this hypersonic weapon crap is pretty small…but it is used as the bugaboo to get more defense dollars on both sides.

Interesting things found on the net.

If you go to Vienna Austria…be careful not to fart in front of the police. Apparently a fella there was fined 500 Euros because he farted inside the paddy wagon after he was arrested at the riot and drove the cops out of the vehicle due to the aroma…so if you get arrested in there make sure ya don’t lift yer butt cheek and let ‘er rip but go the silent but deadly route.

Apparently…the International Space Station is getting a new Universal Waste Management System later this year…that’s NASA-speak for toilet…I have no idea how the gentler gender will use this thing as it looks pretty painful…maybe it works like that You Go Girl funnel thingy that is marketed for female hikers. 

I found this picture which compares the size of the tallest mountain on earth…well, it’s not actually not the tallest mountain as the volcano in Hawaii is taller from the ocean floor than it is, but I digress…anyway Mount Everest compared to the Olympus Mons which is a shield volcano on Mars and is actually both the widest and tallest mountain in then solar system. Because of the diameter, height, and diameter of the planet…if you could stand at the base you would not be able to see the summit of the volcano…and if you could stand at the summit you would not be able to see any of Mars except Olympus Mons. Mars is also home to the deepest canyon in the solar system…the Valles Marineris…it is over 2,500 miles long, 120 miles wide, and 23,000 feet deep so it pretty much dwarfs the Grand Canyon which actually only comes in 4th place for canyon size on the earth…there are canyons in Nepal, Australia, and Tibet that are larger than it is. 

This one is self explanatory.

As is this one.

Although I have to admit…I wonder how many of today’s so called atheists actually know that the word means…I’m guessing not many. Most of them have just rejected religion and hence the concept of a god with either an upper or lower case and I’m convinced that most “atheists” are just rebelling against what their parents are or believe in…but that is not what the word actually means.

What it actually has to do with is…just why do we exist and how did we get here.

Ranging back to Neil’s Religion class in the parochial McGill Institute in high school…his teacher was a catholic priest named Father Hay who he was somehow tangentially related to but can’t remember the details…anyway the first day in class the good Father asked us if we existed.

We all agreed that we did exist and after a bunch of logic trees led by Father it becomes pretty obvious that if we exist today…well actually it was that day back in the early ‘70s…then something must have always existed. Logic tells us that if there was ever a time when nothing at all existed…then nothing could exist now since there would have been nothing make existence come into being…in short you can’t get something from nothing. So…if something exists now then something had to always exist. After another series of logic trees one comes to the conclusion that whatever existed back into the infinite before has to be either material or not material…or saying it another way either material or spiritual.

Those that come down on the spiritual as the thing that always existed are known as theists since they believe in theism…which is the belief that a God or gods exist outside of the material realm. This being has been called many, many names over the years and while we are Roman Catholic I’m not going to force the belief in a single God on anybody since there’s no actual proof…that’s why it is called faith.

On the other side of the equation…the folks that believe the universe has always existed are a-theists meaning not theists which got shortened to atheist…and I’m willing to bet that few if any of today’s self professed atheists have actually thought this through.

On the other hand…there’s pretty reliable evidence that the universe is 13 billion or whatever years old and is still expanding. At some point in the indeterminate future…all the energy in the universe will have been expended, all stars will have died and gravity which is an immutable constant will start to slow the expansion of the universe…eventually causing it to stop and start to contract…and after an amount of time approximately equal to the time from the Big Bang until expansion stops the universe will collapse into itself in one giant ball…and at least according to the theory there might be another Big Bang starting the process of the universe all over again…in fact according to the theory there have been an unknown number of Big Bang/expansion/end of the universe cycles going backwards in time.

Anyway…just a thought brought on by that last image.

This one brings to mind the logic jar we used to have when Neil worked for ISD in the SecDef’s bureaucracy…if you tried to inject logic into any discussion or decision you got fined and the money went into the jar…about once a quarter we took the proceeds down to the pub on the first floor and drank them.

Even better than “You want me to stop this car?”

And here for ya…a bit of humour…note the British spelling…from our friends across the pond.

All of these were gleaned from actual advertisements in UK newspapers.

FREE YORKSHIRE TERRIER.
8 years old,
Hateful little bastard.
Bites!

FREE PUPPIES
1/2 Cocker Spaniel, 1/2 sneaky neighbor’s dog.

FREE PUPPIES.
Mother is a Kennel Club registered German Shepherd.
Father is a Super Dog, able to leap tall fences in a single bound.

COWS, CALVES: NEVER BRED.
Also 1 gay bull for sale….

JOINING NUDIST COLONY!
Must sell washer and dryer $100…

WEDDING DRESS FOR SALE .
Worn once by mistake.
Call Stephanie.

**** And the WINNER is…. ****

FOR SALE BY OWNER.
Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, 45 volumes.
Excellent condition, #200 or best offer. No longer needed, got married, wife knows everything.

And finally…from the Greatest Living Scottish Thinker Billy Connolly…he is actually a comedian comes this.

“If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, How come they can’t have a headache and sex at the same time?”

Cyas.

According to the what you read in the media, protesters, and pretty much every Facebook or Twitter feed…you would believe that every law enforcement officer out there goes to work thinking to himself “hey, I hope I can shoot a person of color today or beat a protester with my baton and then spray innocent peaceful protesters with tear gas.”

What are these people thinking? Most cops more likely go to work every day thinking 3 things. First…I hope I live to see my wife and family after work today. Second…I hope my partner and fellow officers do the same thing. And third…especially in these times…I hope I don’t have to arrest a person of color today because if he/she resists arrest I might have to use force and I know that somebody with a camera will video it, selectively edit the video to remove his/her conduct which resulted in my using force, post it on the internet, and I’ll get criminally charged for doing my job…and my department will more likely than not refuse to back me up even though I was following orders and policies.

Despite what you read…cops shoot very few people. Last year in Chicago…there were 550something homicides…and exactly 3 of them involved the police shooting somebody. I’ll get to the rest of them in a minute.

So…BLM. Now I understand what it says…and I sympathize with Mr. Floyd up in Minneapolis who was killed…and I understand the protests. However…the cops involved have already been convicted in the media…protesters are demanding first degree murder charges, and one has been charged with second degree murder. Now I went and looked up the Minnesota statute on murder…and here is what it says consists of second degree murder.

• Killing a human intentionally but without premeditation
• Killing a human while participating in a drive by shooting
• Causing someone’s death without intention while in the commission of a felony other than criminal sexual conduct or a drive by shooting (those would be first degree)
• Causing a death unintentionally while attempting to or intentionally inflicting great physical harm when the accused is restrained by a protective order and the victim is under the protection of that protective order.

It looks pretty clear to me that of those 4 specifications…only the commission of a felony one has any relevance to the Floyd case at all…and even that is questionable and proving it beyond a reasonable doubt is questionable…but for the fact that the media has already convicted him and the chances of getting an unbiased jury of his peers is essentially zero.

Looking only at the facts of this case…Mr. Floyd was a convicted felon who was under the influence of both drugs and alcohol. He passed a counterfeit $20 bill in a local store and the police were called. Given that the bill has been described by witnesses as having running ink and looking like Monopoly money…it is unlikely that Mr. Floyd was unaware it was counterfeit. He was detained by police, handcuffed, and taken across to the squad car and placed in the back. Apparently he was beating/kicking the windows and the police opened the door to try and calm him down…at which point he got out and was struggling with the police who took him to the ground and additionally restrained him using approved and authorized techniques…and while those may have been techniques that should not be allowed is a debatable question the fact is that they were approved and authorized. At some point…Mr. Floyd died although he was not pronounced dead until over an hour later at the hospital. The autopsy showed no evidence of traumatic asphyxiation and found the cause of death to be cardiac and drug/alcohol related. Given all of that…I think that meeting the beyond a reasonable doubt criteria for some underlying felony would in a fair jury trial be pretty tough…which means that second degree murder is out as well. Frankly I think that the state Attorney General has overcharged hoping to get him to plead to a lesser charge so that the AG can declare victory…but we’ll see.

OK…another thought on BLM. After the whole movement started…people in the middle and right politically started additional hashtags…All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter…meaning everybody and police respectively. Until yesterday…I thought those hashtags were completely correct…but according to the Vox-splaining and Guardian-splaining (those are both very close cousins of man-splaining…google it if you don’t know the term) anybody that says that is racist and is viewing things from “white privilege”.

Gee…I never knew I was racist…I’m really glad somebody ‘splained it to me.

Bull crap…I am not racist and just because somebody has a deluded opinion that I am doesn’t make it true. 

There are obviously some bad cops…but I do not agree that they’re all racist murderers…the vast majority of them just want to do their job and go home at the end of their tour tonight. There are also some bad protesters, and some bad activists…but again not the vast majority. 

Oh yeah…those 550something homicides in Chicago…the vast majority of them were young black males who were killed by other young black males. FBI statistics bear out the facts that victims are for the most part killed by criminals of the same race and that murders are committed by blacks at a higher rate than by whites. The reasons for the higher rate are nuanced and subject to a lot of interpretation…but facts are facts.

But back to BLM…mebbe somebody can ‘splain this one to me.

If Blacks Lives Matter…why is it that only some matter and some don’t?

• Mr. David Dorn…a black retired St Louis MO police captain was at his friend’s pawn shop during the riots and was attempting to protect his store and stock…well he was shot in the head by a young black looter over a used television set.
• Homeland Security Officer Patrick Underwood…again, another black man…was murdered by rioters in Oakland CA
• In Chicago…93 people were  murdered between 1/1 and 3/31 this year…the vast majority of them were young black males murdered by other young black males

If Black Lives Truly Matter…where are the protests over these deaths? Where are the protests over the 18 murders in a single day in Chicago…a city record…which again were mainly black men murdered by other black men?

Could it be that those young black men who were murdered don’t fit the agenda of the “police are murdering racists” crowd?

What happened to the outrage over the death of Mr. Arbery down in New Brunswick GA a few weeks back…it was all you read about in the news and Benjamin Crump was all over it…but it just disappeared after the incident in Minneapolis.

And now we have this movement afoot to “abolish the police”…in fact 8 of the 12 Minneapolis City Commissioners which is a veto proof majority…have pledged to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department and instead send nurses and social workers. I wonder if those commissioners talked to the grandmother down in the hood or the single mom trying to raise her kids to be honest citizens to see if they really wanted to have the drug pushers on the corner, the whores standing on the street, and the drive by shootings and gang fights…I bet they didn’t.

I’m sorry for Mr. Floyd…I really am. However…I’m also sorry for the hundreds of businesses…primarily minority owned…that were looted and destroyed in the riots. I’m also not implying that all of the protesters are rioters or looters…in fact most of them were likely not. However…the police have a hard time figuring out who is the rioter and who is the non violent protester when rocks, bullets, and Molotov cocktails start flying out of the crowd at them. 

One more thing…late breaking news. As you might be aware from the news…Mr. Flynn who pled guilty to lying to the FBI when he was actually determined by the Justice Department to have been entrapped and the DoJ was unable to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Well…a couple months back when all that came out…he applied to withdraw his guilty plea and the DoJ decided to dismiss the charges. This went to the judge…who decided that he and he alone would punish Mr. Flynn for his wrongdoing. Since he wanted to appear “impartial”…he enlisted another retired judge to evaluate the submission and determine whether Mr. Flynn should be charged with perjury and found guilty of criminal contempt of court by the trial judge so he can be sent to prison. Unfortunately…the “impartial’ retired judge he selected had written an op-ed before he was appointed saying that Mr. Flynn was a traitor (he’s not…both of these judges need to go and read up on the definition of treason) and should be sent to prison. The DoJ appealed to a higher court to attempt to force the trial judge to dismiss the case as requested by the DoJ…this is done routinely just as defendants frequently and routinely plead guilty to a lesser crime that they might not have actually committed so as to get a lesser sentence or as part of a plea deal. The higher court gave the trial judge until today to respond back to the higher court and just about 1400 today the impartial judge who already branded Mr. Flynn a traitor…well, amazingly enough he announced that Mr. Flynn was guilty of perjury. No trial, not jury…just this retired and obviously biased judge saying he’s guilty. I wonder what the higher court will say now…and what the trial judge will say.

OK…enough of that. Let’s get on to something more interesting.

As you know…the spring is pretty much the dry season down here in FL then about mid to late May it turns into the rainy season…and while it doesn’t rain every day it rains a lot of days late in the afternoon with some thundershowers…you can go from cloudless blue sky to pouring rain to cloudless blue sky again in an hour. As a result of the dry season…ponds and such get pretty low in water and then they fill back up when it starts raining…and I gotta tell ya the one out back has filled up at least 3 feet from what I can see. Here’s some before and after photos.

This one was taken back in early May…notice the reeds and grass at the close end of the pond across the narrow end and how far the trees just to the left of center are from the water line.

This one was taken Monday…the grass and reeds that were out oof the water in the first shot are now completely flooded and the waterline has moved probably 20 feet back down the long axis of the pond. The trees across the way are now just 4 or 5 feet from the edge of the water.

Here’s a shot taken facing across the pond from just about where the bank goes out of sight on the right side…90 degrees from the shot above.

You can’t see it in the shot above…but just about in the center running vertically there is a concrete structure that forms part of the drainage system…in the shot below you can see it with Lagatha on top. This shot was taken in April sometime…and by the time it started raining the concrete ledge there just in front of Lagatha was 18 inches out of the water. The same concrete is in the shot above…slightly left of center running from 7 o’clock to 1 o’clock and is under the surface about 2 feet from what Neil can tell.

I’ll sure be glad when we get out of the current weather pattern…the afternoon rains happen a lot here but the past 10 days or so we’ve gotten an awful lot from Tropical Storm Cristobal that made landfall over by New Orleans which is 500+ miles west of here. It sort of sat offshore of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico a couple of days after it made it’s way over from the Pacific side and with the size and counter clockwise rotation it sent a lot of moisture our way.

We got our new pellet grill yesterday…so today we assembled and tested it and also hung some pegboard in the garage…Neil thinks that in another 3 days of a couple hours work early before it gets too hot he will have the garage squared away and we’ll be able to put the car in. 

The Elks Lodge is opening back up today…they’ve deep cleaned and arranged the tables for social distancing so we’ll plan on going down for tacos tomorrow afternoon. 

And since it hurricane season…Neil tested our portable generator, we’ve got some bottled water for emergency supplies, and will get somer more batteries for our emergency lights…our stove is electric but we’ve got the propane gas stove and grill and the new pellet grill out on the lanai so we can cook and keep the beer cool if we need to. All of our power lines here are underground in the neighborhood and the local power company does a good job at keeping the transmission lines clear…the neighborhood did not lose power in either Hermine, Michael, or Irma so we’re really not all that worried. The pond would have to come up another 8 or 10 feet to get to our lanai and we live in a concrete block home so we’re really pretty safe here. All of the flooding and damage from Irma…which was the worst of the bunch to his this area recently…was south of us and mostly on the other side of the river.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

Our friend Bill sent us this…and while we’re not RVers any longer…you have to ask yourself “What could go wrong with this 50 amp power hookup?”

If she hasn’t…she will soon.

A little risqué…but what a great word.

Ya’ll young’uns probably won’t get these two.

Google “The Man in Black” if you don’t get them.

This one caused quite a stir on Neil’s Ugly Hedgehog Photography forum…apparently some of the high and mighty there (a) didn’t see the humor in the double entendre and (b) have no life.

Of course…those same grumpy old people also have a problem with the comments in the Boudoir Photography section on the forum…you have to specifically click the box to get that forum but it concentrates on bedroom and erotic photos…but not porn…just necked (or mostly so) people. A lot of the shots are quite nice but they are primarily female models and there’s this one older guy that typically comments “Nice t***s” for the really attractive one…and every time he does the PC police get all riled up about it…even though he’s admitted he keeps doing it because they keep griping about it.

There was also this long thread about the Post Office…one of the forum categories is General Chit Chat which is for non photo related stuff…unfortunately it all too often descends into political arguments…this one poor fella started a thread about why the USPS could not tell him where his package was even though the tracking info said it was in his local station for delivery…and then the resident Trump hater started in with the President’s “completely misguided attempt to destroy the post office by privatizing it and appointing a postmaster general with no post office experience”. Several of us tried to tell him that the USPS was screwed up long before the current administration, that the USPS Board of Governors actually appoints the Postmaster General and not the President, that the Board had been allowed to reduce from it’s legally specified 11 members down to a single member because the previous administration appointed no governors in 8 years in the White House, and that maybe it was time to let a business man instead of a postal veteran try and fix the problems. We also tried to tell him that the primary reason they were in trouble was that when the USPS was turned into a government owned agency and not a cabinet department they lost government funding but not government control…the USPS is not allowed to charge what it actually costs to deliver a letter, they are required to fully fund their pension obligations annually despite no private/public company being required to do that…they should be required but they are actually not…with union work rules, pay rates, and pension plans largely left over from the Cabinet Department days…is where the problem lies. I gotta tell ya…there’s a lot of things wrong at the USPS…just ask Neil’s brother or Jen’s mother and stepfather…but few of them come back to rest at the feet of the current administration.

Ok…something other than political stupidity in the news today…but there is just a slight political tie in.

You’ve probably seen news reports about the President blaming the FBI for lying about him…while that may or may not be true…there is truth behind a statement that the FBI lies when it behooves their interest.

To wit…today’s stupidity is about privacy…or the lack of privacy…in your electronic devices.

As you probably recall from the terrorist incident out in San Bernardino…the couple that killed their co-workers had a couple of iPhones which the FBI was unable to crack…their words…and they demanded that Apple provide them access to the phone contents.

Brief technical aside here…Apple does not have access to the data that is stored solely on an iPhone…by the design of their hardware and software that information is private to the device owner and is fully encrypted and protected against just trying random passwords until you guess the right one. They do have access to some data that was uploaded to the iPhone associated iCloud account. While it is likely technically possible that Apple could…if provided the physical phone that was seized by law enforcement…crack the encryption on the phone it would require developing a special version of the iOS software that the phone runs be developed to include the back door that would be used to gain access to the phone.

Now there’s been a long standing battle between Apple and phone makers on one hand and the government on the other hand about encryption…essentially the government has stated numerous times in court that critical evidence from iPhones was unavailable to the government and demands that Apple and other phone makers be forced by law to include a back door into their operating systems for “law enforcement use when authorized by a warrant”. Apple and other phone maker’s stance is that the 4th amendment protects you from unlawful search and seizure, that numerous court decisions have made it perfectly to plead the 5th and not divulge information that is in your head, that smart phones are an extension of the “information in your head” and are thereby constitutionally protected against disclosure without your consent. Apple has further stated that a back door to law enforcement essentially provides an open security hole for law enforcement usage…but that that security vulnerability would be quickly figured out by hackers and utilized for nefarious deeds. Indeed…much like the pro/con gun debate…if Apple were to develop a way to open phones but require that they be submitted to Apple and only the resulting information gained be provided back to law enforcement…well that would be good enough for the first case but the FBI would quickly demand that the FBI be able to extract the information themselves, and then the state police and then the NYC police and eventually constable Billy-Bob down at the county sheriff office would have the ability…and it would quickly find it’s way into criminal hands.

The trouble is…Apple is 100% correct…a vulnerability for law enforcement is a vulnerability accessible to everyone…you can either have encryption or you can not have encryption but much like pregnancy there isn’t any such thing as a little bit.

So anyway…FBI lies. Back during the San Bernardino incident…the FBI stated in court several times that it was “impossible”…again, their words from their legal filings…to access the iPhones of the terrorists unless Apple was forced to create the back door the FBI wanted. Unfortunately…this statement is a lie…and it was a lie when the FBI made it.

All computers hardware and software have vulnerabilities…that’s just a fact of life. While we would like them to be perfect…it jus’ ain’t so. At the same time that the FBI was making their “impossible” claim in court…they were negotiating with an Israeli security company to open the phone for them…and sometime after the FBI lost their court case they paid something close to $1 million bucks to said security company to crack the phone for them.

Fast forward to this week. You may remember back in December 19 a Saudi pilot who was training at Pensacola Naval Air Station went on a terrorist rampage shooting people on the base and was killed. On investigation…the FBI recovered several iPhones belonging to the shooter…and again issued a subpoena to Apple who provided every bit of information that Apple had…but as in the San Bernardino case they declined to put a back door into the iPhone software to allow access. On the day the iPhones were recovered…they were identified and the FBI already knew of methods to get into them…and likely had already purchased the GrayKey device used to crack them. Nonetheless…the FBI again…and again with the support of the US Attorney General…demanded that Apple be forced via legislation to provide a back door “for legitimate law enforcement use”. Again…another straw man…the FBI and DoJ knew that Apple had provided the information they had and that the FBI could crack the phone without Apple’s help…but in the “never let a good crisis go to waste” mentality most politicians have they will try and try again to get encryption essentially banned.

So this week…the FBI announced that they had definitively linked the shooter in Pensacola with muslim terrorist organizations…and again stated that Apple provided “no help”…again their words even though Apple provided all the information in Apple’s possession and offered technical help but would not built the back door the FBI was demanding despite the FBI’s ownership of one of the GrayKey devices.

What actually protects the iPhone encryption is that by design it prevents anyone not knowing the password from just trying passwords until they guess right…it does this by lengthening the time between attempts for each failed password and irrevocably wiping the encryption key after 10 failed attempts…and without the encryption key you’re just not going to crack the encryption as the key is long enough to make the brute force technique (the only one that will work if you don’t know the key) take thousands of centuries to find the correct password. All good criminals and terrorists know this…because Apple (and Google who writes the Android software used by essentially all other smart phones whose names don’t start with a lower case i)…tells folks they should set it that way. I don’t know if auto erasure is selected by default on installation but it should be in my opinion.

So…with this GrayKey device…it essentially bypasses the 10 bad attempts and it gets erased limitation in the software. I have no idea how it does this…the company that makes it is very secretive about their technology and they only sell to law enforcement agencies but these things have ways of making their way into unauthorized hands.

What the GrayKey doesn’t do is crack the phone…it simply allows the cops to keep trying passwords until they guess right. If one uses the default 4 digit number passcode…it apparently takes from December until May to try passwords and get into the phone…all of Neil’s devices have much longer passcodes and he’s tried but so far failed to convince Connie that she should make hers longer as well.

So…again this week the FBI lied when they stated that Apple had provided “no help”…they provided plenty of help but just didn’t provide the FBI a probably unconstitutional tool.

Think about your smart phone…it’s got your bank account data on it if you log into there passwords, maybe scantily clad pictures of your wife/significant other and all sorts of other stuff the government has no right to. If that stuff were in your head…they can’t force it out of you and Apple’s position (along with most other tech companies) is that your smart phone or device is an extension of your head and you’re entitled to privacy. In any event…even if you aren’t a criminal you have a right to your private information. Yeah…the government can get a subpoena for it…but they have to go through proper channels in order to do so…do we really believe that they would always go through those channels? Me…I think that they would do what they thought was right…and assuming a case where a terrorist had planted a bomb that would go off in 2 hours they would do whatever it took to get information to save lives and worry about the rightness or court admissibility of that information later. While in the bomb in 2 hours case I might be convinced that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few and agree with that assessment…where does one draw the line? We’ve got a strong feeling about the Constitution ‘round these parts…and I’m certainly not willing to substitute the wants or justification of a single law enforcement person over the thoughts of the founding fathers.

Apple and tech companies are rightly opposed to putting in these sorts of back doors…because they will get discovered by bad people just like the many other hardware and software vulnerabilities that inadvertently exist are discovered…there is entire industry out there of people who search for these vulnerabilities…some of whom do the right thing and responsibly notify Apple or whoever so they can get patched and others who sell them to the highest bidder for real money…for instance a zero day root vulnerability of iOS, Android, macOS, or Windows can fetch the discovered upwards of a million bucks from these people…who then turn around and sell them to law enforcement as well as criminals or countries who want to use them for their own purposes. A great example…you probably heard about the Stuxnet virus that was used to disable the centrifuges the Iranians were using to enrich their uranium to weapons grade stuff back in the 2017-2018 time frame. That virus was almost assuredly written by some 3 letter named agency or a contractor who they paid to write it…and was introduced into the centrifuges through a previously unknown vulnerability and the centrifuges quit working…I suspect they simply had their speed increased until they destroyed themselves but have no real idea exactly what the outcome was.

In summary…in both of the high profile cases the FBI and DoJ tried to use the “terrorist” threat to weaken encryption…and they’re still trying today…they would be very happy if Congress were to essentially outlaw encryption by requiring the vendors to put in a government mandated back door. And in the long run…that simply won’t work because the bad guys will find ways around it. The simplest thing for them to do…and likely what any halfway professional terrorist would do if this back door was mandated…would just be to use offline encryption and then only put the encrypted stuff into the phone. Sure…it would make their communications a little more difficult…but encryption is just math and trying to outlaw it would be like passing a law to prevent the sun from coming up in the east…jus’ ain’t gonna work.

So mebbe the President ain’t all wrong when he says the FBI doesn’t always tell the truth…

On to interesting stuff found on the net.

This is getting serious.

The power of the human brain.

Cyas.