Clown World

Trump and the bullet

First we have:

'. . . FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on Wednesday that “there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel.”' - The Daily Wire

Why would you say something like that? I mean, does it make any difference? There was a man firing a gun at people at a public gathering. Why would you care whether it was shrapnel or a bullet? Oh, right, it's because they are clowns. Now it makes perfect sense. Muder truckers.

RAF RC-135W Rivet Joint

Then there is this from RT:

British spy planes ramped up their activity in the Black Sea in June 2021, just days before a Royal Navy frigate attempted to sail past Crimea in Russian territorial wars. According to the government in London, the HMS Defender was on a “freedom of navigation patrol” from Odessa to Batumi in Georgia.

The Russian navy had fired warning shots at the British frigate and dropped bombs from an airplane in its path. London initially denied that this happened, until Moscow released videos proving its case.

Four days after the incident, classified documents discovered at a bus stop in Kent showed that the Royal Navy deliberately sent the Defender into Russian waters to provoke a reaction. 

'Classified documents discovered at a bus stop'. Seems like I've heard that one before. It could have been that a harried civil servant inadvertently dropped a folder while waiting for a bus, but my suspicious mind says someone was tired of the bullshit and decided to leave that folder where they knew it would be discovered by a reporter.

Yes, London and Washington D. C. are two different cities in two different countries, but the USA barks and western Europe leaps to obey, so their governments are all part of the same circus.

Soviet Era Technology

MYSTERIOUS 50 Year Old Soviet Power Tool: Teardown and Review!
The Doubtful Technician

Just a couple of items I encountered today. Above we have an old Soviet power tool, below we have a Soviet micro computer, circa 1990.

UKNC

Talking to Osmany this morning and he's telling me that back around 1990 in Cuba, when he was ten years old, he was studying computer programming using these big, fat keyboards with a memory module that plugged into the upper right corner. This photo of the UKNC fits the bill. It was a PDP-11 clone. When I was in school ten years earlier, in Texas, we had a PDP-11 computer for certain classes. It was a mini-computer, which meant it was rack mounted.  The CPU was the size of a microwave oven.

There is a UKNC emulator available on GitHub.

Diamond Mines of Mercury

Mercury

The Silicon Graybeard has a post up about the possibility of a ten mile thick layer of diamond beneath the planet Mercury's crust. Suppose there was such a thing, and also suppose we could send a rocket there that could also return to Earth. The way SpaceX is going I expect we could build such a rocket within twenty years or so, assuming we really wanted to. What form would this layer of diamond take? Would it be a ten mile thick layer of gravel made of diamond gemstones? Or would it be like one solid layer like the shell around an egg? What could you do with a mile long piece of diamond? Might be time to go back and Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

Company - Musical Comedy - Keller Auditorium

Company | North American Tour Preview
BroadwaySF

A musical comedy? What we have is funny skits alternating with songs. We saw this a week ago. The skits were funny, sometimes hilarious. The words weren't always intelligible, but much of the comedy was physical: actions, poses, tone of voice, sudden stoppage of words, so you didn't actually have to hear what they were saying. The songs were, well, songs. They did nothing for me, but I'm funny that way. Some people are really into singing. Me, I prefer popular music, not this highfalutin' stuff.

The story is about a 35 year old single woman and the prospect of marriage, or not. The rest of the cast is five married couples, so we take a look at those marriages and none of them are perfect, they all have their own quirks. Kind of like real life.

Simpletons and Scoundrels

The whole Trump assassination attempt, has been, pardon the expression, beaten to death. But then I came across this piece by JMSmith. He brings history to bear on the subject, and I think his take is insightful. Voila:

Simpletons and Scoundrels

“A flighty and half-witted man is the very instrument generally preferred by cunning politicians when very hazardous work is to be done.” 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England  (1848)*

Macaulay makes this trenchant remark while discussing a deluded wretch named Granville, the doomed patsy in a failed plot to assassinate the English King William of Orange in 1692.  Macaulay tells us that Granville, a Frenchman, was “undoubtedly brave, and full of zeal for his country and his religion,” but that his main qualification as an assassin was that he was “flighty and half-witted.”  By “flighty” Macaulay means both impetuous (overhasty) and given to romantic illusions (i.e. “flights of fancy”).  I trust what he means by half-witted is plain enough.

A flighty and half-witted man is the preferred tool of cunning politicians when their scheme is very hazardous because “no shrewd calculator” will do the deed “for any bribe.”  What cunning politicians require is therefore a romantic simpleton who dreams of glory and cannot calculate the odds.

As Macaulay explains,

“It was plain to every man of common sense that, whether the design succeeded or failed, the reward of the assassins would probably be to be disowned by the Courts of Versailles and Saint Germains [the exiled court of  James II], and to be torn with redhot pincers, smeared with melted lead, and dismembered by four horses.  To vulgar natures the prospect of such martyrdom was not alluring.”

When Granville was betrayed by his accomplices, his punishment was simply to be hung, drawn and quartered, but the prediction that the French and Jacobite principals of the plot would disown their assassin was fulfilled in full.  The official position of Versailles and Saint Germains was that assassination was abhorrent and Granville had acted alone, perhaps under the influence of madness or some personal vendetta.

After his trial, and without hope of reprieve, Granville named one Barbesieux, an agent in the French War Office, as the architect and director of the plot.  Although Louis XIV officially abominated political assassination, he quietly protected Barbesieux.  Macaulay asks:

“If he really abhorred assassination as honest men abhor it, would not Barbesieux have been driven with ignominy from the royal presence, and flung into the Bastille?”

Macaulay’s question is, of course, rhetorical.

A failed assassination.  A flighty and half-witted patsy who met a grisly end.  Official shock and detestation.  The designer concealed and protected.

Some people are going to say this smells like Killary's handiwork and I'm not going to say they are wrong.

If the name Granville sounds familiar, it's because there have been a number of Granvilles in English history, but none that I found from this time period. JMSmith concurs, the only reference we have is in Macaulay's book.

Evanescence - Bring Me To Life

Evanescence - Bring Me To Life (Official HD Music Video)
Evanescence

Listening to the radio on the way home from brunch this morning and this tune comes on the radio, and my wife turns it way up. Surprised me, didn't think she would go for this. I think I remember hearing this tune a long time ago, possibly by another group, but I couldn't find any evidence of that, so here we are.

Inflation

Inflation

Saw this meme about inflation this morning. I know prices have been going up, but they've been going up since I got out of high school and Nixon took us off the gold standard (1971). It seems like they have been going up faster lately, which I blame on the government's profligate spending. I don't know how accurate this meme is but those items which have gone up 50% (for all intents and purposes 49.3% is indistinguishable from 50%) make it look really bad. But how bad is it, really?

So I took the nine numbers listed above and computed the average. It comes out to 31%. So what rate of inflation do you need to reach 31% in four years? 7%. That's only 2% more than the 5% that I use as my default value for inflation.

My general rule is that a business needs to be making 3 times as much as the rate of inflation. One third of that 21% profit goes to taxes, one third goes to compensate for inflation, and the remaining one third is what the investors (the owner or shareholders) can take home. At an inflation rate of 7%, a business needs to be returning 21%. So while profits that large companies are reporting may seem excessive, it is probably no more than they need to survive, and we all depend on those businesses to support our civilization.

Future Yachts

1902s Yacht Fair Lady

I'm reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars and round about Chapter 9 we are cruising the Black Sea in Griselda's personal yacht, North Star. This is back in the roaring 20's so there is a whole crew to operate the ship and cater to Griselda's whims.

Yacht from the Future

Reading about this excursion from the Black Sea to Scotland prompted this little thought experiment. Imagine a world where all our problems have been solved and we have robots to build anything we want. In a world like that everyone could have their own fully automated nuclear powered yacht, capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean or even sailing around the entire world.

You wouldn't be able to get to the middle of continents cuz there's no navigable Rivers, so you would need an aircraft, a helicopter with a 2500 Mi range. And it would have to be a big helicopter so you can have a comfortable cabin and not be riding in a noisy plexiglass box.

If everyone's got one of these yachts that's would be 8 billion yachts and the question is: if they were evenly distributed over the world's oceans how far apart would they be?

Oceans cover 139 million square miles, so if each of the 8 billion people on Earth had their own yacht, then, on average, each yacht would have 11 acres of water to itself. Evenly spaced they would be 700 feet apart. Trying to go anywhere would be like navigating a parking lot or a harbor, not exactly smooth sailing.

Thanks to Anonymous for pointing out the error in my math. Well, not the math, but my interpretation of the math. This was my original description:

 

. . . there would be like 12 yachts per acre or 3 yachts per quarter acre. I picked a quarter acre because that is the size of a good sized suburban lot. In other words, it would be right crowded and you probably wouldn't be able to go anywhere on account of being hemmed in so tightly.

Kaspersky

Seven years ago the Federal government banned the use Kaspersky anti-virus software in government computers.

Last month the government banned the sale of Kaspersky anti-virus software in the USA starting July 20.

This morning (July 19), CrowdStrike anti-virus software caused Windows computer systems world-wide to crash. ZeroHedge has the same story.

Color me very amused. I quit using Windows years ago.

P. S. RT has a story about CrowdStrike, former FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry and Russiagate. Huh, imagine that, you put corrupt slimeballs in charge and you get screwups like this.

Biden Camp Throwing Their Weight Around, Again

I've been getting some pushback from people I know about RT, well screw that. I like RT, I think they publish some very good stuff. They also publish a lot of stuff about the Ukraine war, but I don't read any of that because I expect that, like 99% of the stuff published about active conflicts, it's all bullshit.

You may have heard that Elon Musk wants to prosecute somebody, I dunno, major media outlets? The Federal government? over censorship of anything to the right of center. And since whoever is in charge in Washington D. C. has been calling the shots in Europe, we get this fun little bit:

WATCH full Zakharova interview before ‘far right’ magazine ban

The German outlet Compact was quashed in its home country days after publishing a conversation with the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman

RT has published the full 80-minute video of an interview that Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova gave to the German magazine Compact.

This week, the German government banned the publication and began a police investigation into its associates, after accusing it of fueling “far-right extremism.” Zakharova claims that the crackdown could have been a response to the interview.

Compact correspondent Hansjorg Mueller asked the spokeswoman which “red lines” Berlin might cross in Ukraine to trigger direct retaliation by Russia. He also wondered if Moscow could withdraw from the Two Plus Four Agreement – the multilateral treaty that allowed the reunification of Germany in 1990.

The German government did not mention either Russia or the Zakharova interview in its announcement of the crackdown on Compact. Instead, it accused the outlet of undermining the constitutional order in the country with its content.

Some German media linked the move with the surging popularity of the anti-migration, nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Mueller served in the German parliament in 2017-2021 as a member of the AfD faction.

You can watch the interview by following the link. The two people (Maria and the reporter) are speaking some foreign gibberish, but there are subtitles. If the subtitles are crawling by too fast (or too slow) you can adjust the playback speed. I didn't watch it, I don't have the patience. I like my news in short, succinct paragraphs.

While we are on the subject of 'whoever is in charge in Washington D. C.', Sarah A. Hoyt has a fine idea for a novel.

P. S. 'Dirty Commies' is the best label I could think of for this post. Just to be clear I am not referring to the Russians, but the Biden administration.

Preference Cascade

Borepatch put up a post titled:

The preference cascade has begun

I hope he's right. He explains the term, but I'm wondering because I think I've heard this term before, so I go looking and I found this excellent post on Blog & Mablog:

The Coming Preference Cascade

It was so great I had to leave a compliment and as a bonus I got this wonderful response: 

Thank you for submitting a letter to Blog & Mablog. Years from now, after you have been nominated to become the next Secretary of State, the fact that you used to read this blog, and even were so far gone in your depravity that you wrote this letter to us, will no doubt be brought up at the congressional hearings. Such being the case, we commend you for your courage. At the same time, while admiring your bravery, we have to warn you that because of the volume of letters we receive, we are not able to promise to publish every one. Thank you for understanding.

The Blog & Mablog post has four parts. The third part is titled Saul & David and is about some passages in the Bible. I am not sure what the relevance is, other than the aura of authority is linked to the spirit of the Lord. Shoot, that might be true.

I don't know how far the cascade has progressed. My local area (Washington County) is like a little bubble of joy and happiness, things couldn't be any better. I have to avoid talking with people about politics, most of the people I know are true blue Biden supporters. Intel and Nvidia both have a big presence here and they have made fortunes for a bunch of people. You can tell from the proliferation of wineries and Christmas tree farms. You can't just have a big estate in Oregon, you have to be using it for 'agricultural purposes' and Christmas tree farms and wineries fit the bill. The far east side of Portland is another matter.

Walking the Dog

Dog Water?

I have upped my walking to 30 minutes. It's been a year since I got my new artificial hip joint installed and while I could walk comfortably since shortly after the operation, walking for a few minutes would cause the joint to start aching. After a while I was able to walk around the block (ten minutes), but this summer I have started tackling longer distances, like three or four miles. Great achievement, but it left me so wiped out I would need a couple of days to recover. Sad, very sad, as the great and benevolent Donald likes to say. But now I've been doing 30 minute walks every morning and all is well.

I go early in the morning, before breakfast and before I've taken a shower because if I wait till those two chores are done, life takes over and a walk takes the back burner which means it doesn't happen. While I am out, I will usually see about a dozen people, some are working (roofers and landscapers mostly), some are just out walking and about half of these are walking their dogs.

Today I noticed this little puddle adjacent to a paved walking path. Been by here every day for a week and today was the first time I noticed it. It looks like someone deliberately made this hole for drinking water for dogs, but it has a definite brown tinge from the adjacent asphalt paving. Doesn't seem like a good idea, but if it was really bad I suspect dog's wouldn't drink out of it.

Talking to Jack about his dog Ruthy yesterday. It seems like Ruthy likes to eat cherry pits she finds on the ground. Jack's neighbor has a cherry tree that hangs over the fence, and there's a cherry tree at a nearby school where they go for walks. So what's the big deal? Dogs eat all kinds of garbage, that's how they get that wonderful dog breath. Well, seems cherry pits are full of cyanide. If you just swallow them whole it's not a big deal, but if you crunch them up it doesn't take more than a dozen to send you to your maker. The crunch is the key, but dogs like crunchy things, so, yeah, you wanna take precautions.

Wasn't there a tune called Walking the Dog? Yes, yes there was:

Rufus Thomas - Walking The Dog (1964)
Reelblack One

Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump

Mickey Mouse Club Intro (Color)
Dalton Barron
I was inundated this morning with people yammering about the shooting. It was all Trump, all the time, which led to the title, which led to the above tune. I'm surprised someone hasn't redone the tune with 

D-O-N, A-L-D  T-R-U-M-P replacing Mickey Mouse. I mean, they have the same number of letters. Disney would probably have a conniption fit.

So there was a lot of yammering but not much in the way of actual information. We do have this video. I got the link from daily timewaster.

The sniper was already watching the shooter. Why didn’t he shoot first! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/Ts72wqdG4t

— GentlemanJack (@xGentleManJack) July 14, 2024

We can hear 5 shots being fired in this video. After the first shot, the rooftop snipers don't seem to be aiming their weapons. Erik Prince posted this in a post on X:

Watching the newsreel one can hear how proximate the shooter is by the very short time lapse between the crack of arriving bullet (supersonic) to the boom of muzzle blast (sonic).  

I dunno about that, sounds like the action cycling on a semi-automatic rifle to me, and as those five shots came within four seconds, I think it very likely it was a semi-auto. 

Full Metal Jacket - Mickey Mouse song
BakotaNiN

This showed up while I was looking for the video at top. This one might be more appropriate.

Jargon

Heard a couple new-to-me expressions this weekend. We were talking about why a radiologist might be needed at 2AM, and we were thinking, well, trauma in the Emergency Room. But then dutiful daughter mentions:

Decompensation - In medicine, decompensation is the functional deterioration of a structure or system that had been previously working with the help of compensation.

I suspect in everyday conversation you would call it 'taking a turn for the worse'. And yeah, if someone decompensated in the middle of the night, you might very well need a radiologist.

The other one I heard from a friend at happy hour:

Index of Refraction and Coefficient of Extinction are the real and complex portions of light.

Okay, there's a lot crammed into that sentence. I've heard of Index of Refraction, it just tells you how much light is bent, but Coefficient of Extinction is new to me. Wikipedia gives us this:

Extinction coefficient refers to several different measures of the absorption of light in a medium:

• Attenuation coefficient, sometimes called "extinction coefficient" in meteorology or climatology
• Mass extinction coefficient, how strongly a substance absorbs light at a given wavelength, per mass density
• Molar extinction coefficient, how strongly a substance absorbs light at a given wavelength, per molar concentration
• Optical extinction coefficient, the imaginary part of the complex index of refraction

I think the last one, Optical, is what we want, though what you would use it for is beyond me.

45

M1911A1 .45 Automatic

This caught my eye, I mean it sounds like a really good deal. But this is an old ad, surely from the days before Nixon canceled the gold standard. In those days an ounce of gold was $35, so this gun cost almost two ounces of gold. Now-a-days, a 45 will set you back $1,000, which sounds like a chunk of change until you realize that gold is now $2400, which means this gun would cost less than half an ounce of gold. So in terms of our rapidly devaluing paper money, a 45 costs like 20 times as much as it did in the bad old days. However, in terms of real money, a 45 costs a quarter of what they used to cost.

 

Twang

Twang
Chuck Pergiel

Trying to pull the shed corner to the final position at the max pull of the cheap marine winch i bought years ago that didn't work for squat at least resulted in this cool sound. - Uniberp

Happy Hour

Lively discussion at happy hour last night. I made notes because I am looking for some science fiction to read and we're looking for concerts to attend this summer.

Science Fiction Books

• The Coincidence Makers - Yoav Blum 
• Jennifer Government - Max Berry

Science Fiction Authors

• Randolf Monroe - XKCD, NASA
• Daniel Suarez
• Blake Crouch
• Justin Cronin

Tunes

• Dermot Kennedy - Giants
• Bodine
• Rodrigo y Gabriella
• Ryan Sheridan
• Violent Femmes
• Which version of 'I Shot the Sheriff' is better? Bob Marley's version or Eric Clapton's?
• Icicle Works
• Yes
• Jethro Tull - Ian Anderson
• John Anderson 
• America - Warm Springs Oregon July 27th

SpaceX

SpaceX upper stage anomaly

How is it that we even have pictures like this? We are walking way out on the edge and there ain't no net.

Alec Baldwin

Judge throws out Alec Baldwin manslaughter case

Why am I hearing about this from RT? Oh, if might be because I won't pay for subscriptions to known liars like the Washington Post and The New York Times.

I thought this was a bullshit case from day one which was what, two years ago? It's taken this long for the courts to figure out it was bullshit? It did draw a lot of attention and now I wonder if that wasn't the plan all along. Everyone knew the case was bullshit, but if you are playing with firearms you need to be careful. By dragging this out across the headlines for however many months they did, they may have impressed all the Hollywood prop guys that you can't be messing around. So maybe all this bullshit did some good.

Ukrainian Language

RT has the story: Ukrainian children still speaking Russian – regulator

Here's an excerpt:

Since gaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine has largely been a bilingual nation, with most citizens able to speak or understand both Russian and Ukrainian, particularly in the eastern half of the country. After the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev, however, Ukraine’s new authorities abolished Russian as an official regional language and have adopted policies aimed at suppressing and outlawing it, arguing that it represents a threat to national unity and security. 

In 2019, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law requiring Ukrainian to be used exclusively in nearly all aspects of public life, including education, entertainment, politics, business and the service industry, obliging all Ukrainian citizens to know the language. It also requires that 90% of TV and film content produced in the country be made in Ukrainian. From July 17, the use of the Russian language in Ukrainian media will be virtually outlawed, Kremen has said.

This forced Ukrainization was one of the reasons why Russian-speaking residents living in the east of the country rejected the post-coup authorities in Kiev in 2014. Many of these regions, namely the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, have since joined Russia after overwhelmingly voting to do so in public referendums in 2022.

There is something wrong with Ukraine, well, there are many things wrong with Ukraine, many of which are caused by the dunderheads in Washington D. C., but this kind of thing makes me think there is some fundamental problem that made all the chaos possible.

There was a bunch of noise in the USA a few years back with people complaining about immigrants not speaking English. That seems to have died out. Was there a court ruling? I don't remember, but Spanish crops up now and again, it helps when you are dealing with working people as opposed to my fellow retirees (useless twerps, the lot of them). My Spanish is limited. When people ask if I speak Spanish I like to trot out my favorite phrase: 'Una mas cerveza fria por favor'. Yes, beer is feminine. I had to check.

Police

Tam points out this story:

Cops: The Young versus The Old

over on Active Response Training. Good story.

Aerojet

Abandoned Planet: Aerojet Everglades
Abandoned Planet

I remember reading something about this place a while back. This video doesn't have much, but it does give us a bit of the story. The part about the Apollo Program ($257 billion) costing more than the Manhattan Project ($2 billion) was a surprise. The price of gold during the Manhattan Project and at the beginning of the Apollo Program was $35 an ounce. By the end of the Apollo Program the price of gold had tripled, so the $257 billion amount is slightly inflated, but we can pretty safely say the Apollo Program cost roughly one hundred times as much as the Manhattan Project. All the stories about life on the home front during WW2 are all about rationing and shortages of everything. By contrast America was living the high life during the Apollo Program. Funny how a little injection of government spending  during WW2 jump started the economy to the point that we could shoot the moon and not even notice.

Abandoned Aerojet Dade Rocket Facility

We're way down at the tip of Florida.

Explaining the Obvious

From Europe’s Far-Right Revival: Unpacking the Surge by Zubair Mumtaz

July 9, 2024

The far-right is gaining increasing power across Europe, with several countries now having right-politico parties in government or as major political forces including France and the Netherland are the latest. This trend is driven by a few key factors such as worsening economic conditions and decreasing living standards of the working and middle classes, worsened by neoliberal policies and the Eurozone crisis, which have led to frustration with mainstream parties. Far-right populists have effectively capitalized on this discontent, positioning themselves as advocates for the “common people” against the political establishment.

Concerns regarding immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority nations, have provided a fertile environment for far-right parties to advance nativist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic agendas. They blame immigrants and minorities as a threat to national identity and security, proposing simplistic solutions and fueling anxieties.

However, the failure of centre-left and left-wing parties to adequately address the economic and social worries of their traditional working-class support base has created a void that far-right populists have filled. The left’s perceived alignment with pro-EU, pro-immigration policies has alienated numerous voters, prompting them to search for alternatives.

Moreover, as mainstream centre-right parties increasingly embrace far-right language and policies, particularly on topics like immigration, it has contributed to the normalization of extremist perspectives. This blending of the lines between the far-right and centre-right makes populist parties seem more acceptable to a wider electorate.

Furthermore, growing dissatisfaction with the perceived absence of accountability and responsiveness of EU institutions to the needs of all member states has fueled Euroscepticism. Far-right parties exploit this sentiment, positioning themselves as protectors of national sovereignty against an overbearing, undemocratic EU bureaucracy.

The author goes on for a bit. Who is he?

Zubair Mumtaz is a Conflict / Security Analyst and an M.Phil. Scholar in Peace & Conflict Studies at National Defence University. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.

The are at least three National Defence Universities:

• Washington D. C., U. S. A.
• Islamabad, Pakistan
• Taoyuan City, Taiwan

I'm pretty sure Zubair is from the one in Washington D. C.

The Draft

Seems that Ukraine has lowered the age for drafting men into the military has been lowered from 27 to 25. When we were fighting in Vietnam the draft age was 18. I haven't heard anyone explain this discrepancy, and I have no explanation myself. I just find it very odd.

Blast from a Parallel Dimension Past

Synthsaga SciFi: Middle 20th century American Typhoon motorcycles ,parallel dimension
Synthsaga

Cute.

Mosques

Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran, Iran

Technically, this building is not a mosque, but it is an old Islamic building. RT has a story about the recent election in Iran. It opens with this:

Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran is not just a religious site for Shiite Muslims, but also one of Iran’s most renowned political venues. Before the 1979 revolution, prominent Iranian intellectual and revolutionary Ali Shariati delivered his fiery speeches against Shah Pahlavi here. On Friday, starting at 8am, this beautiful building with its turquoise dome hosted the largest and oldest polling station in the country.

Remember the Shah? 

During World War II, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran forced the abdication of Pahlavi's father, Reza Shah, whom he succeeded. During Pahlavi's reign, the British-owned oil industry was nationalized by the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had support from Iran's national parliament to do so. However, Mosaddegh was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, which was carried out by the Iranian military under the aegis of the United Kingdom and the United States. Subsequently, the Iranian government centralized power under Pahlavi and brought foreign oil companies back into the country's industry through the Consortium Agreement of 1954. 

The election isn't going to make much difference, the Ayatollah and his cronies are still in charge. Wikipedia has a page about the building.

Streetview Ad

I got the picture at the top from Google Streetview. Pan 90 degrees to the left and you get this message in Persian plastered over the view. Translated* it reads:

1402

Website design and launch shop

Praise for curbing inflation and production growth

Advertisement of your brand and products on the Google map. Registration of your business on the Google map

09126063498

Vahid is stable

Digital publication ID: 13742

Shamad code: 1-1-870037-65-100

Maneh Culture Development Center in Naft Ber Game

www.241.ir

I wonder if they have hacked Google Maps or are they doing this with the connivence of Google? Surprisingly, the website URL works.

al-Nuri Mosque, Mosul, Iraq

Over in Mosul, Iraq, Aljazeera has a different story:

Iraq: 5 big ISIL bombs found hidden in Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque

Five large bombs were discovered hidden in the walls of the historic al-Nuri Mosque in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, a remnant of the armed group ISIL’s (ISIS’s) rule over the region.

The mosque – famous for its 12th-century leaning minaret – was destroyed by ISIL in 2017 and has been a focal point of the UN cultural agency UNESCO’s restoration efforts since 2020.

The UN agency said five large-scale explosive devices, designed for significant destruction, were found inside the southern wall of the Prayer Hall on Tuesday.

“These explosive devices were concealed within a specially rebuilt section of the wall,” a UNESCO statement said on Saturday.

Streetview takes you inside the mosque

* Translate means taking a screen shot, feeding it to Google Lens, picking up the text and feeding it to Google Translate, stuff that was science fiction 20 years ago.

Dar es Salaam

Dar es Salaam

Just a cool picture. 

Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Mombasa

Dar es Salaam is on the coast of Tanzania, about 200 miles south of Mombasa, Kenya. Zanzibar is about 30 miles away.

Slice of Pie

Slice of Pie Graph

Poking around on YouTube this morning and I noticed a video about taking progressively larger slices of pie and the question was which slice would be the largest? You start by taking a slice that is one percent of the whole pie, and then you take two percent of the remaining pie, and then three percent of what's left all the way up to one hundred. I couldn't come up with an equation that I could graph on Desmos, so off to the spreadsheet I go. Only had to make three little equations and then copy and paste to fill the rest of the sheet.

The size of the slice (the yellow line) goes up until you get to 10%. That's when you get the largest piece of pie. After that each slice gets progressively smaller. By the time you have reached the 35th slice, all that's left is 1/1000th of the whole pie.

Never did watch the video. Went back and looked for it but could not find it. Funny how I was able to get the whole problem from a one line blurb, but it took me a paragraph to explain it.

High Five Wire Puzzle

Without magnets and glue, how can they be combined?
UINVEA

I've seen bunches of puzzle videos, but this is the first one that really grabbed me. Grabbed me so much I went looking for it. Constantin makes it, and Knobelbox is the only place where I found it, and they are out of stock. There is a four wire version as well.

The Imperial, Part 2

Stonework above the entrance to the old Imperial Hotel - 1894

I was at Java Man Coffee in downtown Portland last Thursday, sitting there, drinking my coffee and I notice this old stone archway across the street. I'm looking at this thing and I am wondering what I am seeing? Is that just rough cut stone, or random swirly stuff? I think it's carvings of plants. Awfully darn intricate. Makes me wonder if it wasn't originally painted.

On a previous visit to this place we were around the corner and I never saw this entrance.

Italian Harrier

Italian Two Seat Harrier Trainer

Operating out of an Air Force Base near Milan, Italy.

Wikipedia knows the difference between the various types of Harriers.

The Double (Chinese) - Netflix

The Double - Official Teaser Trailer | Wu Jinyan/Wang Xingyue | YOUKU
YOUKU English-Get APP now

We've got a couple of women who have been victimized by powerful scumbags operating within the Emperor's circle, so everything is political and every word is analyzed for hidden meanings and potential traps. One of the women dies and the other decides to take her place. Since the dead woman has been gone from the capital for ten years and she left when she was a kid, no one really knows what she looks like, so with excellent coaching from her maid, the double is able to pass herself off as the absent woman. Our girl was supposedly murdered by her husband who was being threatened with the lives of the rest of his family. We've got a real snake's nest here, but our girl has had her eyes opened and she is pretty sharp, so you know revenge is coming.

The acting is a little crude, but I suppose when your audience is peasants you want to make things obvious, and that they do. Of course, since we are in the very uppermost level of society, there are fabulous clothes and ridiculous rules governing behavior down to how you say good morning. Very much like an English drawing room, but in Mandarin.

HE-1 WWII Navy Ambulance Plane

HE-1 WWII Navy Ambulance Plane

WAAAM has a page about this airplane, though it doen's contain much information.

Gangs of Galicia - Netflix

Gangs of Galicia - Official Trailer [English] | Netflix
MVSRS

More Spanish drug smuggling, this time in the town of Cambados in Galicia which is in northwest Spain. Sexual attraction gets people all crossed up. When a woman lawyer's father is assassinated she starts looking into his past and discovers that he was in the witness protection program for her entire life. She also discovers that he had another family in Cambados that he abandoned. Not being able to leave this alone she goes to Galicia and starts poking around and soon finds herself doing lawyer stuff for the Padins, the local drug smugglers.

Then we have the jackass of a cop who is willing to bend the rules as long as he can bring the Padin family to justice. The Padins are not nice people, but at least you know where you stand with them. This cop threatens people and lies to them in order to get what he wants. He is the villain in this show.

Cambados, Galicia, Spain
Northwestern Spain

The drug smugglers use a combination of fishing boats and go-fast boats to ferry bundles of cocaine from freighters sitting far off shore to the beach where they hustle the bundles into waiting vans. The fishing boats are pretty safe, I mean they are out there putt-putting around on the ocean which is what fishing boats do so they are not going to attract much attention. They bring the bales from the far offshore freighters to closer in shore where the bundles are transferred to the go-fast boats.  The go-fast boats are the weak link. There are not many of them so if they get spotted by the cops, the cops are going to be after them, and the cops have some really big go-fast boats of their own. Kind of scary actually.

Mussel farms in the Vigo estuary. Rias Baixas, Galicia, Spain

There are several scenes where we see the go-fast boats racing around these floating platforms. No explanation in the show. Seems they are mussel farms.

Happy Birthday to Me

Faucet Aerator Thread Gauge

Wednesday July 3 went to Cafe Nell for lunch. Had an order of huevos rancheros, my favorite dish there. It's kind of a foo-foo place, but I've gotten old and slow so I enjoy it. Stopped at older son's compartment and his kitchen faucet had gotten kind of wonky, so we walked half a mile over to Ace Hardware where they had a rack of about hundred different aerators. They also had a thread sizing gauge very similar to the one shown above. I swear every one of those threads was something demented. One was like 55/64" by 27 threads per inch. The Amazon blurb reads: "Identify thread pitch & diameter for 20 of the most common aerator sizes from 1/4-18 to 15/16-27". I think ours ended up being something like 15/16" by 23. It took a while to sort through the selection but we eventually found one. $10. I cracked wise that back in the day they probably cost 15 cents, and it turns out I was about right:

Curent Price of Gold	$2,300.00
Price in 1970	$35.00
Ratio	65.71
Price of Aerator	$10.00
Equivalent 1970 price	$0.15

So I had a nice meal, went for a walk, explored the arcane world of kitchen faucet threads, fixed something and got to complain about the gummint. All in all a pretty nice day.

Anthracite - Netflix

Anthracite - 2024 - Netflix Series Trailer 1 - English Subtitles
Phoenix Media Distribution

Crazy, overly-complicated serial killer murder mystery. Ida (Noémie Schmidt) is the shining star, as in a bright spot. Full of energy and enthusiasm, she seems to be too good to be true, and she is. She's dying of leukemia, chemotherapy has been ineffective, so she says fuck it, she's going to do what she wants. What she wants is to find her father who disappeared in one of these little villages tucked away in the French Alps. Her father was investigating a series of disappearances that have happened over the last 30 years. Okay, that's spooky number one. Then we find there was a cult operating in this area that staged a mass suicide 30 years ago. That's spooky #2. Are these two connected? You betcha, but that's not all. We also have a secretive biological research center up in the mountains that is investigating a microbe that was discovered in the anthracite coal mine that is inside the mountain. That's spooky #3. There are 100 miles of tunnels in this coal mine, and in many cases the last place a missing person was seen was not too far from an entrance to this maze of tunnels. Spooky #4.

There was a real suicidal cult, Order of the Solar Temple, operating in this area back in the 1990's. They managed to kill like 75 people. In the show, the leader of the cult is locked up in a psychiatric hospital, doped to the gills. The head nurse might be his most devoted follower. Turns out most, if not all of the characters in this show are related to each other, though they only find that out as the show progresses.

The scenery is spectacular, not surprising given the location.

Anthracite Filming Locations

They showed a map of the coal mine tunnels, but they only flashed it on the screen for a moment and I haven't been able to locate it. There are a couple of hetero-sex scenes, and a couple of fags. Is that because this is Netflix, or is it because that's what the real world is like?

Nonstandard Numbers

I'm Livid

4th of July

Lambert’s Auto, Rochester

Via The Feral Irishman

Gin

The Gin Craze
J. Draper

18th century would be the 1700's. Things like this make me wonder about people.

Electricity

VEVOR Hot Water Dispenser

A month or three ago we started decompressing the basement and expanding back into the main floor of the house. We had a remodeling project going on last year and while that was going on we were living in the basement. Usually I have place to myself, but we were both living in there for the duration of the remodeling project. Plus we had all the furniture. It was a little congested. My workbench suffered the most. Anyway, things are getting back to normal and I thought I would move the coffee maker and the hot pot onto a table in the big room. That worked okay until somebody tried to print something using the laser printer that was plugged into the same outlet and a breaker tripped. Laser printers draw 15 amps! Who knew? Certainly not me. Actually it was a bad arrangement overall. The coffee maker and the hot pot each draw about 15 amps. The coffee maker and the laser printer probably only draw that much for a few seconds, so you could probably get away with running both of them on the same circuit as the odds would be low that they would both want big power at the same time. You might even get away with it until you have completely forgotten about this whole power arbitrage thing. So, to keep the peace among my minions I moved the coffee maker back into the work room and the hot pot into the kitchen. The coffee maker displaced the battery chargers, so they got sent out to the big room.

There are still some problems with the current arrangement. The laser printer is still on the same circuit as the air fryer oven, but we seldom use it. I guess there was a time when we were using it regularly, but it's been months since it's been turned on. The hot pot died and has been replaced by an always hot pot. I suspect it is on the same circuit as the microwave but no problems. So far.

Then the new hot pot died. No, wait, it's working. No it's not, it quit again. What gives? The outlet is bogus. Maybe the prongs on the new plug are thinner, or something with fat prongs was in here before. In any case it's not a solid connection. So I replaced the outlet, 77 cents from Home Depot, and all is well. Except, while I was trying to sort out how many circuits I had, I discovered that the outlet under the sink is busted - no power at all. So now, since I'm getting all electricicated, I am going investigate. 

Did ROMEX Cable Change Again? (NM-B Update)
Backyard Maine

I found the problem in the switch box. Presumably the outlet under the sink is for the disposal that was never installed because we only use the basement for drinking beer, nothing serious like actual food. The switch is for the never-installed disposal. What I found in the switch box was three Romex cables. One would be power and one would go to the outlet box. The third? Well, hell, every electrical box in the world seems to have two or three extra Romex cables that often have nothing to do with whatever the box is for. But the wires in this one aren't connected to anything, they are just taped over.

Check the hot lead and it's got 15 volts. Check taped leads, and whoa! This one is hot! Talked to Jack at lunch today and he suspects that the 15 volts was induced by running next to a live wire. 15 volts, but no oomph behind it. So I decided to just tape it off and leave it. 

Electricians earn their money. Stuffing those wires back into the box takes some oomph, and trying to contort myself so I could reinstall the outlet under the sink was a struggle.