Archive for the 'Politics' Category

In light of the murder of a security guard at a nuclear power plant allegedly by ISIS, I had a conversation with someone this weekend on that subject.  A brief synopsis of it follows.

Person A: So can ISIS do anything to a nuclear power plant?

Me: Do you really want to have this conversation?

Person A: Yes.

Me: Okay.  So be it.  No, ISIS can’t do anything.

Person A: But what about Chernobyl?

Me:  At Chernobyl, which is an RBMK-1000 design, it was neutronically a loosely couple reactor in order to allow refueling on line because it was producing weapons grade material.  It’s neutron moderator was graphite, not water.  The water was both the coolant and a neutron poison.  Thus, on lose of coolant, the neutron population rapidly increased.  That fateful night an electrical engineer was running a test on the reactor, and the reactor operators were operating under his procedure.  He put the plant in a condition in which safety systems and automatic reactor trips were bypassed, forced a plant transient, and voided the core of water.

When he did this, reactor power increased by a factor of 100 within one second.  Shortly after the accident a lot of multidimensional analysis work was performed to ascertain whether it was a nuclear explosion or a steam explosion.  The answer was pretty clear, it was a steam explosion.  Commercial nuclear reactors cannot explode like a bomb.  It’s impossible.  But it dispersed the coolant channels in such a manner that the core could no longer be cooled.  It melted.

This Russian design had what we call a positive void coefficient, leading to an overall positive power coefficient.  Reactor transients with increasing power further increase power.  In America, the code of federal regulations dictates that reactors be designed with overall negative power coefficients.  In Europe too, I believe.  The RBMK only exists in Russia and the Ukraine.

I’m sorry, I asked you if you really wanted to have this conversation.

Person A: So the plant is intrinsically safe, but can ISIS do anything with the security badge?

Me: No.  Entry into the plant requires biometric screening, like palm prints.  If someone tried to force their way into the plant, they would be shot within seconds (not to mention the fact that the turnstiles would never open).  The only real threat to safety and security would be an inside job, where engineers who had extensive knowledge of the safety analysis of the plant went into the plant to area terminal cabinets and opened sliding links, lifted leads, and so on, disabling safety systems.  In other words, malicious tampering.  Engineers are very non-fertile ground for that sort of thing, having worked their entire careers trying to baby the machine into working right to begin with.  No engineer wants to see his life’s work go away in ignominy.  Besides, engineers are boring people.

Person A: So why all the hype?

Me: Soccer moms will do anything, give over any amount of privacy, give up virtually anything, in order to maintain a level of safety and security.  ISIS and nuclear power plants is the latest incarnation of the whole ISIS thing generically.  The government gets a chance to say, “Hey, listen to us, we’ll protect you if you’ll only give us access to your iPhone, all of your records, bank accounts, medical data, tell us whether you have any guns in the home, let us listen to and record your phone calls and all of your text messages, and in short be your protector.  We’ll take care of you, we promise!  We won’t let the mean bad men make the big bad thingy go BOOM and hurt your precious little babies!  Let me have the keys to your life, sweetie!”

NYT:

Though Mr. Cruz has adjusted his public tone, calling for party harmony and appealing to “our better angels” in a moment of political discord, senior Republican officials say Mr. Cruz has made little effort to repair relationships, particularly in the Senate.

Senator John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican senator and Mr. Cruz’s fellow Texan, privately lobbied Mr. Cruz to attend a Senate Republican luncheon in the Capitol and soothe feelings, according to a Republican strategist briefed on the request. But after a CNN report in which some Republican senators suggested that Mr. Cruz apologize to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, whom Mr. Cruz called a liar on the Senate floor, Mr. Cruz’s campaign became irritated and backed off a peacemaking lunch.

Mr. Cruz and Mr. McConnell have still not spoken, according to an aide to Mr. McConnell.

“I’m not sure there’s anything to apologize for,” Jason Johnson, Mr. Cruz’s chief strategist, told reporters recently.

Hey Lindsey, you can cram your endorsement up your ass.  As for Mitch McConnell, apologizing to him would be akin to pledging fealty to a demon.  I would lose all respect for Ted.  I would rather see McConnell tarred and feathered.  Or perhaps hanged.  But a good old fashioned tarring and feathering would drag it out longer.

WRSA has this up where it is implicitly suggested that Paul Ryan (weasel that he is), is actually going to make a move for candidacy.  It also appears to be suggested that this behavior is somehow controlled by the GOP machine.

Bhah!  The establishment controls little to nothing, Paul Ryan has as much chance at being the candidate as my dog, and the second example is a bunch of goobers in over their head trying to run things they shouldn’t.  Nothing more.

I’ve heard it until I’m sick and fed up.  The establishment.  They are to blame for Trump.  The establishment.  THE ESTABLISHMENT!  Screw the establishment!  They are responsible for all of the nation’s ills.  Except, not really.

The establishment is mostly filled with gargoyles, demons and pit vipers, except for a few like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Louie Gohmert (TX), Dave Brat and Jeff Duncan (who as I discussed before, all met in Ted’s office on a regular basis and strategized to kill the gang of eight bill, for which they all give him credit).  But the bad ones, and they are numerous, were put there by voters.

Let’s cover that point again.  Voters put the bastards in office.  Every Senator and member of the House (with the sole exception of which I am aware, Tim Scott) was voted into office, not appointed.  The voters have all the power.  The voters put the bastards in office.  Sure, the voters’ ranks is mostly filled ignoramuses, goobers, idiots who would rather spend time playing fantasy football, and couch potatoes who would rather watch mind-numbing nighttime sitcoms than learn anything about government, human nature, theology, philosophy or anything that requires heavy thought.

But that’s the point.  If voters are too stupid or disconnected to vote honorable men into office, then it’s to be expected that dishonorable men will behave dishonorably.  And by the way, I simply don’t buy Ann Barnhardt’s axiom that “The culture has degraded such that seeking and/or holding office, especially national-level office, is, in and of itself, proof that a given person is psychologically and morally unfit to hold public office.”  It has absolutely nothing to do with the culture, and everything to do with the state of man both redeemed and unredeemed.  There is nowhere in the Holy Writ that Ann can turn that explains that merely seeking leadership marks a man out as being more sinful than any other man (Ann should read more John Calvin on the state of mankind), and she can’t demonstrate that there is.  Screaming it louder and louder doesn’t make it so, and Ann just made that up because she’s so pissed off, like she always is.

As for the GOPe, “the establishment,” they are easily dealt with.  The voters are doing it now.  A single election cycle can throw them all out on their ears.  The establishment has no power not given to it by the idiot voters.  Finally, most of the chattering class is woefully ignorant of most of the things I’m telling you, so you’re now smarter than most of the pundits inside the beltway (you probably were anyway).

Except that they may be beginning to catch on (and I’ll cite with caveats and stipulations).  Enter Jonah Goldberg.

Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican party as we know it. Not nominating Trump will wreck the Republican party as we know it. The sooner everyone recognizes this fact, the better.

[ … ]

Trump’s response to this floor-fight talk was to vomit up the usual word salad. “All I can say is this, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Trump told ABC’s This Week. “But I will say this, you’re going to have a lot of very unhappy people [if I’m denied the nomination]. And I think, frankly, for the Republicans to disenfranchise all those people because if that happens, they’re not voting and the Republicans lose.”

Even through the syntactical fog, Trump’s point is clear: If he can’t reach 1,237, he should get the nomination anyway. Because he is Trump. If that doesn’t happen, his supporters will stay home, defect from the party, riot, or all three.

And he’s right. Not about deserving the nomination even if he doesn’t have the delegates. That’s typical Trumpian whining. But he’s right that if he’s denied the nomination, many — not all, but many — of his supporters will bolt from the convention and the party. Left out of Trump’s unsubtle threat: Many anti-Trump Republicans will desert the convention and the party if he’s not denied the nomination.

[ … ]

Trump represents just the most pronounced of a spiderweb of ideological and demographic fault lines that are increasingly difficult to paper over. As Joel Kotkin put it in a column for the Orange County Register, the Republican party now “consists of interest groups that so broadly dislike each other that they share little common ground.”

For whatever reason, Trump’s supporters have concluded that (a) they don’t care about issues of life and will vote for candidates who support abortion, and (b) they don’t care about having a single payer socialist health care system for the rest of their lives and the lives of the children’s children.

I’ve told you before and I’ll say it again.  This election cycle is the last chance … the … last … chance … you have to turn back a single payer health care system.  If Trump dumps Obamacare and substitutes his own version of a single payer system (which is no different except that it opens state lines), it will never be reversed in American history without bloody revolution.  It will take weapons to turn it back.  Maybe that’s what you want.

And yet there are those Ted Cruz voters, who have said that they will bolt the party if Trump is nominated.  I’ve outlined my four non-negotiables, and Trump misses on two of them, and is weak on a third (he misses on pro-life, misses on a single payer health care system, and he’s weak on gun rights).  I won’t vote for Trump, so I’m in the category I mentioned above.  On election night, I’ll sit back and laugh, but I won’t whore my vote out to the least bad candidate.

But that’s the point of this whole thing, yes?  The fault of the GOP debacle lies not with the GOPe, not with Trump, and not with Cruz.  The responsibility for the debacle lies in fault lines developed years ago, irreconcilable differences, voters who have fundamentally different world views on very important matters.

The GOP is not finished if Trump is the candidate (future tense).  The GOP is not finished if Cruz is the candidate (future tense).  The GOP is not finished because of the GOPe.  The GOP is finished – past tense – because of fault lines in the voters.  It is irreversible, having to do with things theological and philosophical and things related to incorrigible values and world and life view.

Prepare yourself now for the fallout.

David Codrea:

With the Ohio primary tomorrow, it’s evident Gun Owners of America Chairman Tim Macy has not kept a pledge made by Director Emeritus Larry Pratt last year on national radio about factoring a candidate’s position on immigration in the group’s political ratings.

Groan.  Sigh.  I think it was Jesus who said let your yes be yes, and your no be no.

Eric Holder:

The Senate leadership’s plan to blockade President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court is the “height of arrogance,” former Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says — lashing out at GOP lawmakers for repeatedly refusing to “meet the president halfway.”

Is it the kind of arrogance it takes to discretely send weapons to the Mexican cartels in order to build a case for more regulation of legally made and sold American firearms?  Oh yea.  One is legal, the other illegal.

It’s a sad day for Breitbart.

Kirsten Powers: How long will Obama ignore Christian genocide?  Dumb question.  Forever.

25% of French teenagers are Muslims.  That means France is finished.  It’s a dead man walking.  For the record, I don’t agree with the author’s understanding of Descarte and French identity.  For this I would turn to Carl Becker, “Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers,” but I simply don’t have time for that tonight.

Donald Trump on random numbers.  Yea, I know something about random number generator algorithms as part of my Monte Carlo analysis training.  1237 is no random number in this context.  It’s just one more than 1236, which is exactly half of 2472.  Am I going to fast for you?

Trump said he has “instructed his people” to look into paying the legal fees of a 78-year-old man charged with assault after he sucker-punched a protester at a North Carolina rally. “He loves his country” and may have gotten “carried away,” said Trump, who argued the supporter was provoked by the protester.”

This is as full of crap as everything else Trump says.  The MSM was aghast at what he said.  On the other hand, I looked deeper and saw that it’s a misdirect meant for affect.  It’s all bluster.  If he had wanted to pay for the man’s legal expenses, all he had to do was contact the man, set up an account, and tell the man to hire any counsel he wished at Trump’s expense.  Instead, he said he has “instructed his people to look into paying the legal fees.”  This is double speak for it may never happen, or he wants to intimate that it might happen, or that there is something more complicated than merely opening an account.  There isn’t, and Trump just wanted the affect at the rally.

In a stunning failure to understand the current political climate, dope John Kasich goes all in for amnesty.

Here’s the text of a brief telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Kanye West.  I still think Trump should ask him to be his running mate.

Part III

Part II

Part I

News from S.C.:

Sen. Floyd Nicholson, D-Greenwood, expressed a more general view of concealed-carry practices.

“Carrying weapons? I’m totally opposed. It’s just my personal opinion. I don’t own a gun. I am not a hunter, and I have nothing against those individuals who hunt. But just carrying a weapon around? I think we’re going back to the Wild Wild West,” said Nicholson. A portion of his district borders the Savannah River, and stretches across parts McCormick, Greenwood, Saluda, and Abbeville counties.

“Give everybody a holster and a gun and let them go, like they’re doing in Texas? I’m just opposed to this.”

We’ve already seen another of the jerk-offs in S.C., a communist by the name of Larry Martin.  It sounds like South Carolina voters have their work cut out for them.  They should stock up on tar and feathers.

I had always wondered about a more detailed listing of why the Senate hates Ted Cruz.  NPR tries.

Probably the most awkward question you can ask Republican senators these days is why they’re still giving Ted Cruz the cold shoulder when it comes to endorsements.

“Well, I think you know the answer to that,” said Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

“I’m going to let you … speculate about that,” offered Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” said Dean Heller of Nevada, without elaborating further.

No, it’s not obvious, jerk off.  I don’t want to speculate – I want you to be man enough to explain in words why you hate the man.

During Cruz’s very first year in the Senate, he and a group of House Republicans helped force a 16-day government shutdown. At the time, in 2013, he crowed about it. But his Senate Republican colleagues were fuming. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said Cruz had led them on with a promise to defund Obamacare.

“You know, we’ve been asking from the beginning: What’s the end game? How does this end? How do you achieve what you’re purporting to achieve on defunding Obamacare? And I never got an answer to that,” Ayotte told reporters when the government was reopening that October.

And then there was the time Cruz flirted with the idea of defunding the president’s executive action on immigration. He fumbled a procedural maneuver on the Senate floor, which forced his colleagues to come to work on a Saturday. Not the kind of smooth move that will earn one’s way into senators’ hearts.

So let me get this straight.  Cruz is only one man and cannot force a government shutdown forever, but he managed to do it for a while, and you expect that to be some sort of problem for me?  I would have loved it if he had been able to burn down Washington, D.C., and tar and feather you bunch of traitors, but as I said, he’s only one man.  And now we get to the sophomoric.  He forced you to work on a Saturday!?!  A Saturday!?!  Poor babies.  Did you not get to go to your house on the lake that weekend, you sorry collection of bottom-feeding twits?

And then, of course, there was the time Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar.

Oh, I see.  You only want liars in the Senate, Ted didn’t oblige and he called out the lies.  God almighty.  What a cannibalistic gaggle of gargoyles.  I hate them more every day, and I didn’t think that was possible.

This is a twisted tale, and you will want to stay tuned until the very end.  But in order to set this up, you first need to read this stunningly good article posted at National Review.  It is written by Lisa Smiley, entitled True Pro-Life Convictions Are Non-Negotiable.  We’ve covered this before, my readers and I.  Trump is a believer in abortion and Eugenics viz. Margaret Sanger.  But put aside my pedestrian writing for a moment.  Read all of Lisa’s piece.

Lisa is not just a Proverbs 31 woman.  She is a warrior, a stalwart of the faith, and a thousand times more of a man than any of the male Trump supporters to come in and throw comments around like monkeys jumping around in cages and throwing their feces.  The commenters (those who are detractors) are screeching gargoyles, worthy of your most sincere disapprobation and disgust.

I commented about this article that hell would freeze over before I ever vote for a man who supports abortion and eugenics.  Some particularly stolid comments still don’t understand that this has only partially to do with whether he has actually performed abortions.  First it has to do with policy as it concerns judicial appointments and support for candidates for the Senate and House.  Secondarily it has to do with moral judgment.  In any case, I pointed out that the GOP is on its own should the voters elect Trump as their candidate (and I do blame the voters as much as I do the establishment – no one is holding a gun to their heads and forcing them to vote for Trump).

More specifically, I said this.

Thank you. If bamboo splints are shoved under my fingernails, my toenails are pulled off, I undergo dental work like I was in “Marathon Man,” and I am beaten until dead, I will never, under any circumstances, for any reason, not if hell freezes over, vote for a man who supports abortion and believes in the eugenics of Margaret Sanger and the Nazis. If the voters are without scruples enough to make this awful man the GOP candidate, it is no longer my party. I’ll never return to the GOP. It will have lost me forever. Whether it wins or loses will be immaterial to me. it can all burn to the ground. In an analogy I once drew with the Texas A&M bonfire, it will be a wonderful thing to behold, beautiful and stunning. I’ll light the match, or pour gasoline on it. God bless the fire. I hope to see it.

Enter a commenter using the nom de guerre empirical101, who said this according to Disqus.

You are unhinged and full of BS if you believe what you just typed out, LOL.

Except not really.  Disqus remembers everything, even when you delete your comment, or most of it.  You see, it sends you the real text of the comment via email when it is posted, and when it was posted by empirical101, it went like this (I don’t intend to use sic for every spelling and grammar error since that would break the flow of the comment).  Remember folks as you read this, Herschel is the one who is unhinged.  I’m unhinged.

You are unhinged and full of BS if you believe what you just typed out, LOL.

If the we lose to Hillary, because you keep f ing around screwing around with the front runner, then i will help her take all you old farts Social Security by never get another inflation pay increase.

I will help legalize all the young illegal so they will vote in the marxist syste m to screw you.

I will help school Hillary’s people on how best to completely turn the U.S. military into a Soviet style police force. I served 20 years and did half of it in man power.
I know exactly were to go to stack the officer ranks with hard core marxist/communist filth.
It will take 8-10 years more and you turds will be total slaves.

Bring it,
I have been in war twice and still young enough to help them drag you to prison, i will convert and help them. Got nothing to lose at that point and got nothing to live for but revenge.
You want it turds, then you will get it.

This country will burn and i will laugh in your faces.

5:01 p.m., Thursday March 10 | Other comments by empirical101

There you have it friends.  A Trump supporter, threatening me with enslavement if I don’t support Trump.  Now, to be sure, I am not in the least worried about his threats.  He doesn’t know anything about me, whether I can still hump a 60 lb. backpack, shoot an AR-15 or 1911 or take care of myself.  Nor does he know anything about my beliefs, commitments or value system.

Furthermore, with the military increasingly imbibed of feminism with females in every MOS, transgender and homosexual coming out parties in the Pentagon, and the pathetic Ashton Carter at the helm, I am more amused than anything else at his threat to use the military against anything at all.  I hope he doesn’t mind if I chuckle a bit.  My former Marine son chuckled at this post when I read it to him.

But this does go to show his mental weakness and moral value system (or lack thereof), that he would immediately rush to thoughts of enslavement and collectivist force to ensure that his leader’s wishes were followed.

Can anyone say “Fascist?”

CNN:

Bold move for a politician? Perhaps.

But the decision reflects Cruz’s deepening alliance with the powerful gun lobby and his effort to cast himself as an unapologetic warrior for the Second Amendment.

A CNN review of speeches, interviews and court filings shows that Cruz has spent years forging ties with defenders of the Second Amendment — including a group to the right of the NRA. Some of those he’s allied himself with disdain all gun control, including gun-free zones at schools and other government buildings. Cruz has embraced those relationships as an aspect of his candidacy that sets himself apart from his rivals.

[ … ]

Throughout the primary process, Cruz has touted his endorsement by the Gun Owners of America, a gun-rights group that boasts a “no compromise” stance on gun control.

In an election season that has defied all odds, the gun-rights debate has not followed a predictable path in the primaries. And while Cruz has worked to establish his Second Amendment bona fides, some establishment figures in the Republican Party see this alliance as one of the most serious problems he would face in broadening his appeal if he reaches the general election.

“This is a group that could be portrayed as extreme, and off in a ditch,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former 2016 presidential candidate who has tangled with Cruz in the Senate but now sees him as a preferable alternative to Trump. “Anybody they endorse will have to carry those bags.”

[ … ]

The group’s executive director, Larry Pratt, opposes all gun control and sees massacres like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School as evidence of the need for more, not fewer weapons in America.

Pratt has little tolerance for those who oppose his views, including the President and members of Congress. He said “it’s kind of a good thing” that politicians who favor gun control are in fear of being assassinated or deposed.

“That’s what the Second Amendment is,” Pratt said, “It’s a warning.”

There is much more at CNN.  It’s a very lengthy article, and good except for the assumption that Cruz has triangulated his position rather than holding it outright.  I wouldn’t expect much more than that from the MSM.  But read the rest of the article.  His position on gun rights goes way, way back, well before he ever even got into politics.

As for the awful little woman Lindsey Graham, his hand-wringing over the baggage associated with Larry Pratt is amusing and pitiful.  Larry is right.  The second amendment is a warning – a warning to people like Lindsey Graham to stop lording it over the people and do their bidding.  That’s why Graham is so uncomfortable with it.

As for what people thing about Pratt’s endorsement, my God.  What a bunch of little girls.  What happened to the men of America, who would stand on principle and say what they thought, back it up, and refuse to equivocate?  It appears we’ve lost most of them.  Cruz is one of the good guys, one who has never backed away from gun rights.

Don’t forget Who said it, Trump or Kanye?, or Who tweeted it, Trump or Kanye?  No indication yet whether Trump is going to select Kanye as his running mate.  I think it’s a match made in heaven.  Well, now there’s the Trump twitter bot.  I agree with one of the commenters here.  I don’t really think this is AI (artificial intelligence).  I don’t think it sounds intelligent at all, which is why it sounds so much like Trump.

Oh poppycock.  I don’t really think Trump is trying to make a photo look like Sieg Heil!  I think he is goading people to make (Biblically) unlawful oaths or vows.  Those folks don’t know everything about the candidate, and it’s foolish for them to swear to vote for a man who may later turn out to violate a tenet of their own conscience.

Trump wants to torture.  It will make us stronger, says he.  But then he won’t require any Soldier or Marine to do anything against the law (as if they would even be tempted to disobey the UCMJ and have their First Sergeant beat the hell out of them before they go to Leavenworth).  But he wants to change the law so that we can torture (what R. J. Rushdoony says about torture in The Institutes of Biblical Law comes to mind here).  So if you’re against torture, the good news for you is that Donald Trump is too.  On the other hand, if you’re for torture, the good news for you is that Donald Trump is too!

Trump is a Rorschach ink blot.  You get to project what you want.  He is your wildest imaginations, all of your hopes and dreams, the caretaker of your concerns, and in short, everything to everyone.  And he’s going to make America great again.  I can’t wait for the advertisement.  “Join the Army, drive bamboo splints under fingernails, watch the sobbing, hear the screams!  Kill women and children.”  It’ll be awesome.

Folks sure appear to be explaining their morals in this election cycle.  Ann Coulter apparently said, “I’d be happy to support Trump if he wanted to perform abortions in the White House.”  Well, there you go.

Uh Oh!!! Guess who’s a HUGE fan of immigration work visas?  That’s right, your favorite savior, Trump!  Please don’t tell me everyone knows he’s a fraud?  I just don’t think I could take not doing these little Fun With The Candidates pieces!

Fun With The Candidates, Part I

Fun With The Candidates, Part II