Gun Related Deaths

Gun Related Deaths in the U.S.

I like this chart. It contrasts reality with what is commonly believed. It breaks down firearms deaths into four distinct categories. The narrow dark blue bars show the actual percentage of deaths while the wide, light blue bars show what is generally believed. 

Problem is that no one wants to hear about suicide, it's too depressing. You get too depressed, you might want to kill yourself, so we don't go down that road. Mass shootings, now that's something we can get excited about. Oh my gawd! That's just awful! What if that happened here? Somebody should do something! Never mind the actual numbers, it's the psychos that draw our attention.

Via View From The Porch

P.S. The original chart was an animated GIF. That struck me as silly. Maybe it works for some people, but I didn't like it, so I grabbed a screen shot and cropped it.

Making Movies

How Noiseless Props Are Made For Movies And TV Shows | Movies Insider
Insider
Today we have two different aspects of making movies. The above video about sound is just a technical curiosity.

The Alec Baldwin shooting prompted Roberta X to up a post up about people making movies involving guns. It's very good.

National Debt

National Debt

Given the how fast the government is spending money, the numbers shown above in Lesson #1 are cannot be exactly right, but they're close enough. Scaling them down to household level does a good job of putting them in perspective.

Go fast moped

Moped Dick at Bonneville World Finals 2019 - 50cc Two Stroke Landspeed Bike
2STROKE STUFFING

Our crazy 2-stroke guy went to Bonneville? Sure, I'll watch that, except there is a whole bunch of extraneous stuff that I don't care about, I just want to see this thing go, so I skipped ahead to where they make a couple of high speed runs, but they aren't on the salt flats, they're on some remote 2 lane asphalt road. It's totally worth it. The sound is glorious.

America Gone Mad

Argosy cover: America At Bay in a World Gone Mad

I wonder if we are victims of  statistics. Not that the numbers are pushing us to do things, but that we even have numbers. If we didn't have numbers about what was going across the country and we just looked at our own sorry / not sorry situation, we might not think whatever it was was such a big deal. Still, I keep skimming the blog-o-sphere. Most of it I disregard (yes, the government is lying, yes inflation is ramping up, yes, everyone's supply chains are constricted, yes, everyone is an idiot except me), but sometimes you just got to wade into the swamp and let the hot slimy water wash over your body.

Intro from Commentary: America Gone Mad by Conrad Black:

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

He goes on at some length. I might have got as far as Flummoxed by Biden.

Conrad Black (author of this piece) is someone to be reckoned with:

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Via  Knuckledraggin My Life Away

P.S. I much prefer boldface to quote marks. I want to say it's easier, but is it? Putting quote marks around a phrase (assuming after the fact) means typing a quote mark and then typing Ctrl-< (left arrow) as many times as there are words in the phrase you are trying to quote, and then typing another quote mark. Emboldening a phrase (geesh, that emboldening is a long word for such a short root) just requires Ctrl-Shift-< (left arrow) as many times . . . and then typing Ctrl-B. So you save one keystroke, but your movement requires pressing three keys, not just two, so I guess it's a wash. Unless you are using double quotes. Then you have to use the shift key, twice, so you lose.

Plus bold faced text is easier to identify when you are looking at a whole page. Look at whole page for a phrase and bold faced text will jump out at you.

I don't know that I have any hard and fast rules about using bold face type. Titles of articles from other places get it, as do company names and, shoot, pretty much anything nameable. People don't usually get it, I'm not sure why. So I've been formulating rules about this for a while because I think it makes it easier for the ready to comprehend what I'm talking about. But maybe it doesn't help at all. Maybe no one even notices. That's okay, in that case I am just doing it for me. Huh. Imagine that.

Marimba

Havana (Marimba Pop Cover) - by Camila Cabello
Marimba Pop

I had a tune pop into my head this afternoon, some kind of electro-pop thing, sounded kind of like a marimba, but more electroniky. Could not identify it, but hey, we got fancy computers now that can identify songs from sounds, don't we? Well, yes and no. Google has one that works on your phone, and there are others on the web. You need a microphone, obviously, but they don't work for shit. I tried a couple and they both delivered some kind of recent pop crap. Probably works great for their target market. I ain't there. Obviously.

Anyway, I looked for marimba music thinking it might turn up. It didn't, but I found this, which is pretty cool. And now I'm not sure I can even remember what I was looking for, so I'm good.

Coal Dozer

Bulldozer pushing coal

Coal has been in the news lately. China is looking at a shortage for their electrical power generating plants this winter. Zerohedge has a story about the current coal market in the USA. All this reminds me of a story from some years ago about an accident involving a bulldozer feeding coal to a power plant. I don't recall the particulars of the accident, but the situation was very telling.

There is a large pit, maybe a hundred yards across, full of coal. In the bottom of the pit is a hole that leads to conveyor. The conveyor carries the coal to the furnace where it is burned to generate heat to make steam to drive the turbines. There is also a bulldozer in this pit. The operator's job is to keep the conveyor fed, so all day long he is pushing coal into the center of the pit where it falls onto the conveyor. Somebody is doing this 24 hours day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. That's a bunch of coal, and that's only one power plant.

We burn about 1.5 tons of coal per person in the USA to generate electrical power. In 2008 it was more like 3 tons.

We've been hearing about how bad coal is for years, but now that we are looking at the price of natural gas, all of sudden coal is looking much better.