Where a Redneck Jew, a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
What we have confirmed so far is 11 dead, 6 wounded, shooter is a former city employee who used a .45 caliber handgun with extended magazines.
No names released at the time of this writing (10:08 PM)
UPDATE: If Heavy.com has the shooter right, this story will disappear by Tuesday night next week.
From National Propaganda Public Radio:
Gov. Jay Inslee Says Washington State Is A ‘Template For Success’ For The U.S.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has not been shy about framing his candidacy to become the 2020 Democratic nominee for president around global climate change.
In his policy proposal he says that defeating climate change is the “defining challenge of our time,” and that it is incumbent upon the next president of the United States to make that challenge a priority.
Inslee also pointed to his state as a model for how economic growth and progressive policies like fighting climate change do not need to be at odds with one another.
Remember that Seattle is not just the largest city in the state of Washington, it is the largest city in the Pacific North West, and 60% of Washington’s residents live in the Seattle metropolitan statistical area.
So, ummm… with that in mind… I’m going to leave this right here.
Speaking of TDS causing blinding obtuseness…
Before today, I was vaguely aware of the webcomic, Life of Bria. It is one of those comics celebrated in Social Justice circles, where the protagonist is some sort of oppressed victim (in this case a trans-woman) and EVERY other character outside of the protagonist’s circle of friends is an oppressive monster.
I mostly ignored it until I saw this trending online, in which the author starts begging for money.
I cannot even fathom what goes through LGBTQ conservative's minds…
Website: https://t.co/iRA8yjbyRW
See things in advance: https://t.co/4O53uFiCK2 pic.twitter.com/81rDymfbXL
— Bria (@LifeofBria) May 27, 2019
One question: does anybody know where these anti-gay and anti-trans concentration camps are? We have a railroad track near our house and I’ve never seen cattle cars full of fabulously put together men taken anywhere.
I swear, there is a subset of the Left that are just pure political masochists.
They want nothing more than to feel the sweet, sweet joy of noble self-pity that comes from being oppressed.
Not really oppressed. Not actually being starved to emaciation while being worked to death doing hard labor.
No, that’s real suffering. These people just want the perception of oppression to make them into favored victims.
If you want to know why everything in politics seems like such shit, this is why.
How can you have a conversation in good faith with someone who actually believes the first American President to come into office supporting gay marriage is going to set up anti-Gay concentration camps.
You can’t.
But damn it feels good to be a victim.
I have been watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and it is, as my retired Marine Corps co-workers would say, out-fucking-standing.
I’ve been waiting for the finale to write about it, but then something happened that made me accelerate my plans.
Before I go into that, I want to heap more praise on the show.
I have read a lot about the Chernobyl incident and the miniseries as about as historically accurate as they could make it and not be a boring documentary.
There are some minor changes, such as condensing a team of about 20 physicists to one character played by a fantastic Emily Watson.
The sets, the costumes, the cinematography, everything about the show expertly captures the grinding poverty and misery of the mid 1980’s Soviet Union as it was sliding into collapse.
It also captures the casual disregard for human life that the Soviet Union had for its people and the oppressive cruelty of the Soviet police state.
For example (a little physics here too):
Chernobyl was an RBMK type reactor. Those are water cooled, graphite moderated. RBMK reactors use non-enriched Uranium as fuel, and regular water as coolant, which makes them cheaper to operate, which is one reason they were so popular in the Soviet Union.
In a RBMK nuclear reactor, neutrons kicked off by U-235 strike other U-235 atoms and cause those to fissile (break apart) kicking off more neutron which hits more U-235 driving a chain reaction.
In a nuclear weapon, more than 90% of the uranium is U-235, so the statistical likelihood of neutron capture goes up and the fissile chain reaction goes into run-away and an explosion happens.
In an RBMK reactor, only 0.72% of the uranium is U-235, so neutron capture for a chain reaction is unlikely.
Natural neutron emission by Uranium is fast neutrons, these have very high energy, but because of the wave/particle nature of subatomic particles, they have a short wavelength and small capture area. A chain reaction can be generated by moderating the neutrons, slowing them down to thermal neutrons, increasing their wavelength, which increases their capture area increasing the statistical likelihood of capture and a chain reaction.
An RBMK reactor uses graphite to slow down the neutrons and drive the chain reaction.
The other part of a nuclear reactor are control rods, these absorb neutrons, taking them out of the chain reaction. Drop neutron absorbers into a nuclear reactor and the reaction slows down, drop in enough and the chain reaction stops.
In an emergency, a reactor is supposed to drop in all the control rods killing the chain reaction and shutting down the reactor.
In an RBMK reactor, there are two dangerous design flaws. The reactors use water to both cool the fuel and act as a neutron absorber. If the reactor gets too hot, the water will boil forming bubbles. Steam is a poor neutron absorber compared to water, so the reaction rate increases. This is called having a positive void coefficient.
The control rods also have graphite tips. If the control rods are all the way out and dropped into the core, the first thing that the core sees is a neutron moderator (graphite) and not a neutron absorber (boron carbide) increasing the rate of reaction.
In Chernobyl, they were running a test and had the control rods all the way out and the cooling water at a low flow rate. As the water boiled to steam, it stopped absorbing neutrons and the reaction rate increased. The operators tried to shut down the reactor by inserting the control rods, but this dropped more graphite into the reactor. The combination of boiling coolant and additional graphite caused the reactor to go critical and cause a steam explosion and criticality energy release.
(Physics lesson over)
In the fourth episode, you find out that the Soviet Union knew about this potentiality because of previous reactor tests.
Rather than issue a warning to the other RBMK reactors to make sure this would never happen, the KGB classified this as a state secret to keep the world from knowing about the flaw in the Soviet nuclear energy program. So when the operators at Chernobyl ran their tests without this information, they blew up the reactor.
You also witness how the KGB and Soviet Government spent a lot of effort trying to hide their mistakes and how many lives that cost.
In the first episode, it opens seconds after the reactor explodes. The chief operator of the plant keeps saying that an RBMK reactor cannot explode. The personal dosimiters that the operators are wearing are all pegged at the max reading of 3.6 Roentgen.
Roentgen is a measure of the electrical charge generated by the ionization of air by ionizing radiation and is a good approximation for radiation exposure.
As the operators keep pulling out more dosimeters that go to a higher scale, those keep pegging out.
The chief operator keeps saying “those are broken it’s only 3.6 Roentgen.”
Later the military shows up measures over 15,000 Roentgen.
A good engineer would say “all of our meters are a max, so it must be higher than that.”
Steadfast adherence to the lowest measured number because that is the one that if reported will cause the least amount of embarrassment to the state is exactly the sort of thing that George Orwell wrote about in 1984 and has become known as “2 + 2 = 5.”
That is how the Soviet Union acted.
When Soviet physicists were trying to investigate the cause and solve the problem, the KGB spied on them, arrested them, and censored and restricted the materials they needed.
The Soviet Union even tried to cover up the explosion and didn’t evacuate people until radioactive Iodine started to rain down on Sweden and they couldn’t hide it anymore.
As you watch the show, you really get an understanding of the pervasiveness of the repressive police state that was the Soviet Union.
So…
In view of all that, enter the famed horror writer, Stephen King.
King suffered from a terrible case of Bush Derangement Syndrome back in the 2000’s, and now suffers from a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has become terminal to parts of his brain responsible for rational thought.
What the actual fuck is he talking about?
Everything about the Chernobyl was representative of all the failures of totalitarian Communism, and King can’t help making it about Trump.
This would be bad enough, but then the writer and producer of Chernobyl had to give King’s idiot assertion a boost.
This is the guy who has done a truly amazing job capturing the horrors of the Soviet Union during its slow collapse in the 1980’s (the subject of my thesis for my minors in military history in college, something I know a bit about) and implies that really the show is about Trump.
I don’t know what to make of this. I have three choices:
A little down the conversation, this happens:
The answer is Number 3. This guy has been made fucking retarded by TDS.
Chernobyl is a seething indictment of Socialist Statism that puts the power of the state bureaucracy over everything else, including the lives of the people.
I don’t know if that is an indictment of the Democrats unless the Democrats are pushing for Soviet Communism.
There is an enormously powerful scene in the 4th episode in which the army is evacuating people from the radiation zone.
They come across this 80-year-old woman on a farm, milking a cow. She refuses to evacuate. She talks about how she lost her family bit by bit during the Socialist Revolution, the Holodomor, World War Two, and now she is the only one left but she never left the farm and never will.
The soldier dumps out her bucket of milk. When she picks it back up and starts milking the cow again, he shoots the cow.
That is the Soviet Union. It did nothing but kill and make suffer and oppress. It left that women with nothing but a hut and a cow, then it killed her cow and dragged her out of her hut.
Craig Mazin’s idiocy continued to shine when confronted by Dan Bongino.
I want to make this point perfectly clear. There was virtually no love of Stalin and no love of Lenin by anybody who actually knew Lenin. The love Lenin was a carefully crafted cult of personality.
What there was, was fear. A ubiquitous and omnipresent fear.
Stalin and Lenin populated the ranks of the state police and parts of the military with people personally loyal to them. That loyalty wasn’t based on love or principle, but of mutual benefit.
Stalin and Lenin empowered thugs and brutes. Taking people who in a normal society would be criminals and outcasts, and made them comfortable government officials in exchange for them using their love of inflicting pain and suffering on the people opposed to Stalin and Lenin.
Tyrants have always had brute squads composed of sociopaths given free rein to pray upon the political undesirables.
The KGB spied on everyone. Silence was the name of the game in the Soviet Union. People were afraid to speak in their own homes. Everyone knew that at any time they could be dragged away and shot for even so much as criticizing some aspect of the state to a spouse.
So where are the MAGA brutes? Where are the secret police spying on Americans? Where is the ubiquitous and omnipresent fear of criticizing Trump? How many people have been dragged away in the middle of the night and shot, with other afraid to even mention their name, less they be shot too?
Objectively speaking, there is nothing in the United States under Trump that parallels the conditions people lived in under the Soviet Union.
None.
And yet, here is a world famous American author and a Hollywood producer saying it does.
He seems to revel to trying to point out how every criticism of the oppressive Soviet bureaucracy by conservatives is nothing but hypocracy by and it’s really Trump that’s evil.
Here is the link to the video.
Clearly, he believes that Trump is in all things evil, and all things evil are in Trump.
I fail to fathom this level of obtuseness.
This is ridiculous fucking bullshit that is an insult to the tens of millions that died under Soviet oppression and those that risked everything to escape it.
If you can write a show that so incredibly captures living under Soviet Communism and think that it is a reflection on Trump, there is no help for you. Parts of your brain have atrophied and died.
It’s sad. Still, I highly recommend Chernobyl.
Original text translated using Edge browser extension… pretty decent job too
Caracas.-the service stations in Falcón, Lara, Monagas, Tachira, Trujillo and Bolívar were taken by officers of the National Guard as part of Government measures to restrict the supply of gasoline whose scarcity is has accentuated in most regions of the country.
In Falcon, headquarters of the Paraguana refining Center, the largest in the country and the second largest in the world with a capacity to process 940 thousand litres of petrol, the GN platoons took control of the suppliers for the purpose of enforcing the measure of re striccion 30 litres per vehicle and 50 litres to units of the public transport of passengers or cargo with foodstuffs.
Militarizadas gasolineras en varias regiones del país
Falcón, Lara, Monagas, Tachira, Trujillo and Bolívar are states in Venezuela. As the story says, Falcon is where the refinery is located, but you may not know that Falcon is next to Zulia state which is where most of the dying oil production is located and the states of Tachira, Trujillo and Lara are now restricted via the Military on the sale of gasoline.
I sort of understand Tachira. It is the gateway to Colombia and the heavily subsidized Venezuelan gasoline makes it too tempting not to smuggle. Gas in Colombia will cost you around $2.75/gallon while the Venezuela government sets the price at just under $0.04/gallon.
How about Lara and Trujillo? They are not close to the border so there is no issue with smuggling outside the country. The problem is that it seems they were being used to “smuggle” inside the country. If you are blinking your eyes hard, allow me to explain what I mean: Venezuelan energy sources, namely fuels and electricity, are being diverted for Caracas and its immediate surroundings know as Zona Capital. Zona Capital encompasses the Distrito Capital (Like D.C.) and the most crowded areas of two other states adjacent to the city. Not only Caracas and the Zona Capital concentrates all government powers but also it is the biggest voting block in the country. That means keeping the population happy by not having power outages and no lines to buy heavily subsidized gasoline which results in the rest of the country enduring up to 14 mandatory electrical blackouts and gas rationing.
Unfortunately that means the Venezuelans living in other states have to suffer restrictions and if there were to be enterprising souls who own vehicles with expanded gas tanks to buy in one state where gas is plenty and take it to other places, they would make some capitalistic cash from people that are dry or do not have 12 hours to wait in line for gas. Now that has been shut down and strict quota are imposed making sure you can’t buy more than what the government says you can a day.
The Assemblyman from Trujillo comes and complains to the President about his people suddenly living in the 19th Century and Maduro can tell him to go pound sand because the state does not enter in the electoral equation, their vote means less than the paper the ballot was printed on. In fact, the Assemblyman means also squat because it does not matter if he got elected, his state means nothing, so does he and he better follow what Maduro tells him to do or he gets sent to prison by order of the Supreme Court, the same court he voted for letting the President stack with his people.
Now, this is not new in Venezuela, but it has never been abused to the point we are seeing today. When the Electoral College was explained to me, my face must have been a sight to see and I still remember what I said : “This shit is genius! How come it is not used everywhere in the world?” The answer came back fast on something I already knew: People in power do not like to relinquish such power.
Venezuela is the perfect example of not only the true consequences of Socialism but the Tyranny of Democracy: Venezuelans voted for their ongoing transformation into the Somalia of the Caribbean.
