Interesting Items 10/08

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

  1. Ford
  2. NAFTA
  3. Ribbon Gun
  4. Brothel
  5. Radiation
  6. Ryugu
  7. Plastic
  8. Goolag

  1. Ford. As it turns out, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was lying through her teeth in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee a week and a half ago.  It appears she didn’t even write her letter to Rep. Eschoo and on to Senator Feinstein.  That letter appears to have been written by a long-time friend, former FIB agent with Ford while visiting in Delaware, during the summer.  Evidence for this is the letter refers to her high school best friend (whom Ford threw under the bus claiming she had health issues) as a “he.”  The friend’s name is Leland Keyser, generally a man’s first name.  If Ford writes the letter, she doesn’t make that mistake.  Additionally, we have Ford in at least two lies.  First is that she is scared of flying.  She isn’t and travels by plane regularly from Hawaii to Delaware.  She is not unfamiliar with polygraphs, which she stated under oath.  A boyfriend said she is sufficiently an expert that she has been asked to help people prepare for polygraph tests.  Her friend, Monica McLean, a former FIB agent pressured Keyser to change her sworn testimony to the Committee.  This would be witness tampering.  Just to complete the festivities, McClean lawyered up over the weekend, a tell in the world of investigation, as when a lawyer lawyers up, this usually means the fecal matter is about to hit the rotating machinery.  Ford also lied about the second front door, supposedly installed due to the negative impact of the event on her tender psyche.  It turns out that there are some very strict zoning laws where she lives in California.  She was making some extra money hosting a therapist office in her home.  The second door was for that office.  Final story comes out of PowerLine where one of its readers graphed the changing dates Ford claimed she was attacked.  Three times 2012 – July 6, 2018, she described that date as mid- 80’s.  Her letter written July 30, 2018 significantly changed to early 1980’s.  Her handwritten statement to the polygraph tester got more specific as “high school summer early 80’s.”  Final timeline in front of the judiciary committee nailed it down to Summer ’82.  What happened July 2018?  She started working with Eschoo, Feinstein, their staffs, and their recommended lawyerette, Debra Katz.  This was a setup.  Apologies for not catching this earlier.  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/friend-of-christine-blasey-ford-reportedly-felt-pressure-to-revisit-statement-on-allegations

 

  1. NAFTA. Relatively unseen and intentionally not covered by the drive-by media was announcement last week of a NAFTA replacement.  The original treaty that allowed both Mexico and Canada to levy taxes, tariffs, rules, restrictions, and impediments to the free trade of American goods and services without corresponding US ability to do the same.  That has changed.  That has gone away completely.  Under the new agreement, all three countries will now operate under generally the same rules.  Finally.  Economically, I am a Friedmanite, which also makes me a free trader.  Over the years, I have generally supported the trade deals, but wondered why the bloody things needed to be hundreds to thousands of pages long.  Now we know why.  The drafters needed those pages to carve out good deals for themselves, well connected friends and supporters, and the rest of the country be damned.  This process came to its head with the attempted passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership late in O’Bama’s second term.  Trump killed it early on and started negotiating bi-lateral trade agreements.  The NAFTA replacement was mostly negotiated with Mexico with Justin Trudeau jumping in at the last minute, not wanting to get left out.  If what I have been reading about this agreement is accurate, this will be a great improvement over the original NAFTA.  President Trump is to be congratulated.  https://www.breitbart.com/economics/2018/10/02/dairy-farmer-trumps-usmca-trade-deal-will-have-huge-impact/

 

  1. Ribbon. I am a fan of military weaponry and entrepreneurship.  Generally, those worlds don’t cross paths a lot as entrepreneurs are unable to traverse the regulatory hurdles of creating new weapons systems.  But every now and then, you run across something interesting.  Latest example is a device called a Ribbon Gun as a possible competitor for the M-16 and its variants introduced in the 1960s.  The Ribbon Gun has a single block of drilled steel with four parallel holes that can be fired simultaneously.  Theoretical maximum firing rate is 250 rounds / second.  The ammunition is loaded in blocks and fired by electromagnetic actuators.  The prototype weighs in at 6.5 #, slightly less than the M-16.  This looks interesting and will be something to keep an eye out for.  https://gazette.com/military/army-might-have-found-its-new-rifle-in-colorado-springs/article_96cd214c-c290-11e8-9d41-27b5a0e767a4.html

 

  1. Brothel. As the War on Men by feminists continues, men are starting to look at alternatives to women for sexual contact.  One possible solution is sex with machines, not unlike what women have been doing for years.  A robot sex brothel was supposed to open in Houston last week.  The local government got itself involved, shocked, simply shocked that such a thing would be proposed.  The owners did not refer to the retail shop as a brothel.  Rather, they called it a showroom where customers could try out the merchandise.  The company opened its first location in Toronto a year ago charging a dollar amount for a half hour with a robot.  The robots are also for sale.  All the usual suspects got their panties all in a wad, making all the expected arguments against the new entrepreneurial business.  Their problem is that the technology is quickly getting to the point where this is an affordable and acceptable solution to the toxic mess feminists, #MeTooers, and other man-hating misandrists have managed to turn male – female sexual interactions into.  Like vaping, this is not a problem.  Rather it is a solution.  And a warning.  https://www.foxnews.com/tech/robot-sex-brothel-slated-to-open-is-not-wanted-houstons-mayor-says

 

  1. Radiation. The Trump EPA continues to make positive changes in the regulatory approach to the world.  A recent example is reconsideration of their guidance on exposure to ionizing radiation.  For nearly half a century, that guidance has been that any exposure is a cancer risk which is demonstrably false.  This is the Linear Threshold Model for population level radiation exposure.  The proposed new rule will require regulators to consider various threshold models across the exposure range.  What most people don’t know (or remember) is that we live in a radioactive world.  And life on this planet has evolved to thrive in that world.  Radiation detectors have improved to the point where the decay of individual atoms can be measured and reported.  Problem is that it takes trillions of trillions of these decay events over a short period of time to present a cancer problem.  Indeed, there is a reasonable, well known and measured effect called hormesis that indicates exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation will lead to positive health outcomes.  The problem with the EPA’s past approach is that we are at the point with exposure to low levels of radiation that the crushing cost of compliance completely outweighs any measurable improvement in health outcomes.  With this change, the EPA is going to start considering both sides of the equation.  As expected, activists are not impressed.  Or supportive.  https://www.denverpost.com/2018/10/02/trump-epa-loosening-radiation-limits/

 

  1. Ryugu. The Japanese Hayabusa2 put a pair of tiny landers down on the asteroid Ryugu Sept 21.  These landers were very short lived and moved by hopping.  Gravity on the asteroid is so low that any other form of propulsion would be too heavy.  Individual hops last 15 minutes and cover some 50’.  These landers are tiny, measuring 7 x 3”.  They also carry cameras which returned photos of the incredibly rough surface of the asteroid.  The main spacecraft carries another two landers, one of which should touch down on the surface sometime this week.  The mission also includes a sample return which should deliver dust from Ryugu to Australia sometime in 2020.  http://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/hayabusa2/

 

  1. Plastic. One of the most recent cause celebre’s used by the greens is the notion that plastic pollution is killing life in the oceans.  This has been used as an excuse to ban plastic bags and plastic soda straws.  The problem with plastic is that it does tend to persist somewhat longer than paper or metal products.  The good news is that despite the claims of greens and well-orchestrated Goolag search results, it does not persist forever.  For example, all plastics degrade in sunlight.  Plastics floating in the oceans are broken down by exposure to sunlight and the motion of the water into smaller and smaller pieces.  At the same time, microbes of all types grow in the surface of the plastics, opening cracks, eating the plastics, and contributing to the breakdown of plastics in the ocean.  Eventually the small floating pieces erode and disappear completely.  Plastics are usually made of petroleum byproducts, as such when they degrade, they tend to degrade into shorter chain hydrocarbons like methane and ethylene (CH4 & C2H4).  This degradation gives the hysterical greens yet another talking point, accusing plastics of contributing to greenhouse gasses from the oceans (methane is a greenhouse gas).  The thing is that both methane and ethylene are quite common in the natural world and life has evolved to use both.  Life emits and uses these very same greenhouse gasses all the time as part of the operation of a natural living system.  None of this is to say that it is acceptable to indiscriminately dump this sort of trash in rivers and oceans as your waste disposal technique.  Trash belongs in the trash where it can be degraded in a controlled fashion.  An alternative approach is to start designing plastics to degrade quicker in the wild.  The drawback with this is a decrease in shelf life for items packaged in these sorts of plastics, not a game stopper, rather yet another consideration.  So far, economics of the quickly decomposing plastics do not favor it widespread use.  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/19/magical-plastic/

 

  1. Goolag. One of my favorite tech authors and futurists is George Gilder.  He did a recent three-part interview with WND on his new book, Life After Google.  He believes that the Goolag dream of “… a supermind in the sky that knows everything” will be supplanted by a distributed architecture with information distributed the way human minds are distributed.  Gilder goes on to note that the capabilities of the human mind are distributed among peoples worldwide, and an economy that distributes power like human minds distribute intelligence will work best.  This will unleash capitalism as it unleashes the free, open, unfettered marketplace.  He believes that blockchain technology will help solve the privacy problem via what he calls a cryptocosm, a new security architecture that will “… allow(s) you to keep your own personal details to yourself and transact anonymously across the network.”  This will break down what he calls the walled gardens of the internet in China, Iran, Goolag, FakeBook, etc.  If Gilder is right, and he has been right for the 50 years I have been following him, the fragmenting of centralization being pushed by Big Data is inevitable and will happen sooner rather than later.  It needs no new technologies.  This should be a fun ride.  https://www.wnd.com/2018/08/tech-icon-envisions-prosperous-new-world-after-google/

More later –

– AG

 

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