Goodbye to The Blacklist.

This is/was a show that started with a nice premise (Top criminal manages to bamboozle the FBI into do stuff for him) but let’s face it, the script quality the last three seasons has been less than good. The only reason I was watching it is because James Spader continues to do an amazing acting job as Red Reddington, the cultural concierge of crime with zero morals.

Last year, actress Megan Boone had to do her bit for Wokness after the Parkland shooting and swore her character (FBI agent Elizbeth Keen) would never be seen using an AR 15. Since I really don’t remember her using one in the series, I did not give a damn about her posturing as she was one of many Hollywood Dancing Monkeys doing the Official Gun Control PR thing at the time.

But on this week’s episode, the series decided to go full woke sharknado. The premise was that certain important men (you are not told all the details till halfway the show) are being kidnaped, kept for a couple of months and then suddenly released.   The victims do not cooperate with the authorities so there is a mystery behind it. Midway through the show you discover what’s the commonality among the victims: They are conservative pro-life males who were kidnaped and somehow, by doing surgery in some basement somewhere by apparently an IT guy and a pissed off mom, they were inserted with  fetuses that they would have to carry to full term because the laws of the State would prohibit them to have an abortion and that would teach them a lesson on interfering with women’s body rights.

First, my jaw broke a floor tile so hard it dropped. The human body is not a collection of Lego blocks you can remove and re-insert at you pleasure.  The amount of physiological and medical contradictions in the episode’s premise just made the show extra stupid. Second, what kind of idiot producer said, “You know what? Let’s do a Woke Pro-Choice show and shove it to the Male Supremacy.  because principles!” Dear dude or dudette or duddeX: I watch a show like yours to entertain me, not to be told by morons who failed Biology and Health classes and have the morality of Dr Mengele, what is politically and morally right. This last is ironic since the producers and writers had every character in the series abandon their moral compass and FBI oath before the end of the second season.

So dear The Blacklist producers, go FWoke Yourselves.

 

 

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Sunday Music

There are several version of this song, but I went with Foreigners because it happens in a recording studio and that gets me in the feels. Nominated for the List of Church Music.


PS: This was supposed to be for next Sunday with a Hat tip for Jay, but I clicked the wrong button. Enjoy anyway.

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Two socialists display their historical illiteracy/revisionist history

First, AOC:

Next, Bernie Sanders [mis]quoting/paraphrasing her:

 

So when AOC and Bernie say they want to be the party of FDR, what do they mean?

Do they want to inter the Japanese again?

Do they want to resist the desegregation of the military during a time of war?

Do they want to create federal housing programs that made segregation in the north possible through Redlining?

Do they want to send Jewish refugees from the Holocaust back to Germany to die in concentration camps?

Do they want to round up Jewish Holocaust survivors and ship them back Madagascar?

Maybe they just want to worsen the next economic downturn into another Great Depression with excessive economic meddling?

It amazes me just how little the Democrats know about how awful FDR was.  By every other Progressive standard, FDR should be canceled and banished to the dustbin of history for being a vile racist and bigot.

I guess they want to overlook/erase that because he got closer to making the US a socialist nation than any other person in American history.

 

 

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Scientific American writer can’t read a MIL-SPEC

I saw this at Scientific American:

Climate Change May Be Blowing Up Arms Depots
More intense heat waves can destabilize the components of munitions, particularly where explosives are not properly stored

Oh for fuck’s sake.

The author of this piece is Peter Schwartzstein.  According to his bio:

I’m a British-American journalist, consultant, and think-tanker based in Cairo, but am usually on the road elsewhere in the Middle East and North and East Africa.

I write about regional environment and geo-political issues, with a focus on trans-boundary water disputes, the conflict-climate nexus, food security and refugee movements. Though in an effort to cling to my last tatters of sanity, I also contribute occasional history and science stories to Smithsonian Magazine.

He is why I hate science writers.  Science writers are not scientists or engineers, they are journalists or English majors who write about technical topics.  But having little technical knowledge, they do a shit job writing about it.  Furthermore, coming from fields like journalism, which is heavily politically biased, they infuse their technical work with that bias.

Case in point, this article.

It was a little before 4 A.M., on an airless morning in June 2018, when the arms depot in Baharka, Iraqi Kurdistan, blew up. Brightening the dawn sky for kilometers around, the blast sent rockets, bullets and artillery rounds hurtling in every direction. Officials say no one was killed. But were it not for the early hour and reduced garrison, the death toll might well have been horrendous.

A year later, another arsenal exploded just to the southwest of Baharka, reportedly destroying millions of dollars’ worth of ammunition amassed during the fight against ISIS. Two similar blasts around Baghdad followed a few weeks after that, killing and wounding dozens of people between them. Before the end of this past summer, at least six munitions sites had gone up in flames in Iraq alone, according to Iraqi security sources.

While details of the blasts were scarce, investigators agreed that most incidents shared a common theme: hot weather. Each explosion came in the midst of a long, scorching Iraqi summer, when temperatures routinely topped 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). And they all struck just as powerful heat waves ramped up. Explosives experts say such intense heat can weaken munitions’ structural integrity, cause the thermal expansion of explosive chemicals and damage protective shields.

That can happen and this is a real concern for munitions.

Most munitions are designed to withstand severe heat but only in the relatively short term.  If exposed to extreme temperatures and humidity for long enough, a munition can become unstable and may even more or less strip itself apart.  The wood in antipersonnel stake mines rots; rubber and plastic in plastic mines can shatter in the unrelenting sun. Without regular monitoring, heated explosive materials within munitions can force their way through seals and filler plugs, a shell casing’s weakest points. Nitroglycerin becomes so sensitive when it absorbs moisture that even a slight shake can set it off.

Also true.

“The physical effect of abnormally high temperatures is that a high level of stress occurs between components because of the different expansion rates of the individual materials,” says John Montgomery, chief technical adviser for explosive ordnance disposal at the Halo Trust, a land-mine-clearance nonprofit organization.

This can happen.

Higher temperatures also raise the risk of handling errors by fatigued armorers. From chaotic conflict zones to the best-equipped NATO-standard storage facilities, soldiers say summer is when explosive accidents peak because of a combination of foggy decision-making and more sensitive munitions, both caused by extreme heat. “In the military, everything is more difficult when it’s summer,” says an Iraqi artillery officer who gives his name as Ali. “And now summer never ends.”

This is a logistics and training issue.  Use more people on shorter duty rotations to combat fatigue.

But for all those improvements to happen, there is going to have to be a sea change in attitudes, arms experts say. Many militaries do not make stored munitions much of a priority, and they—and environmentalists—are not thrilled at the prospect of having to go through the expensive and sometimes polluting process of destroying and refreshing their stockpiles more frequently. “It can be difficult to get any government to focus on ammunition unless something bad happens, because it’s just not a sexy topic,” says Robin Mossinkoff, head of the support section at the Forum for Security Co-operation at the intergovernmental Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. “But if you can afford to spend $300 million on new weapons, you can afford to do this.

Nothing he said is technically wrong.  My problem is that it is biased by a Brit-Yankee based in Cairo who has clearly gone native.

There is a fantastic article published in Middle East Quarterly 20 years ago that is just as accurate and relevant as ever.  I was first introduced to it in ROTC and it should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the Middle East.

Why Arabs Lose Wars
by Norvell B. De Atkine

I’m not going to go into the whole thing, but there are two parts that are necessary to understand.

Information as power:
In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature.

And

Indifference to Safety:
In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training safety.

So a large portion of what Schwartzstein is blaming on climate change is actually the result of the terrible culture of Arab armies.  They don’t know how to build proper munitions storage facilities, they don’t handle the munitions safely, and they wouldn’t care about the safety of the depot workers or surrounding civilians if they did.

Notice how the explosions he cites are in Iraq.

But it is his last paragraph that is most annoying.

As the materials scientists for a military contractor, I have personally done environmental testing on munitions.  I’ve frozen it, baked, blasted it with UV radiation, it and sprayed it will all sorts of corrosive or caustic chemicals.

I can’t tell you what our munitions can handle, but I can tell you that MIL-SPEC requires a minimum of 140 degF and -40 degF stability for both long term and cyclic exposure.  That testing is governed by both MIL-SPEC and ASTM standards and that testing facilities are ISO certified.

Global warming isn’t going to cause US military munitions to accidentally go off any time soon.

I don’t know if all NATO countries use exactly the same standards and tests that we do, but I have a feeling they are very close.

So if a bunch of Arab armies and terrorist cells using old Soviet surplus weapons, or Iranian or Egyptian knockoffs, blow themselves to hell with improper storage and handling of munitions that weren’t properly made and tested to begin with… I have no fucks to give about that.

Just make sure our soldiers stay clear of those depots and enjoy the fireworks.

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I am out of Twitter Gulag, Tovarsich.

Finally got the announcement of parole from Twitter. In a sense it was funny that I got sacked for saying former Bolivian president Evo Morales needed a time out in front of a firing squad and 2 days later he renounced escaped the country afraid he was going to get his ass shot.

And thank you to each and every one who helped publishing the posts while incarcerated.

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There are many travel bags under $2,750.

Authorities say security officers found a loaded handgun in a flight attendant’s carry-on bag at a Florida airport.

The Orlando Sentinel reports that 28-year-old Joseph Brozyna was arrested Thursday and charged with carrying a concealed firearm and carrying a firearm in a prohibited place.

Police say the Frontier Airlines flight attendant was passing through security at Orlando International Airport when Transportation Security Administration agents found the .40 caliber pistol. An arrested report says Brozyna acknowledged that the gun was his. He told police he recently went on a road trip with his gun in the bag and forgot to remove it.

Officials say Brozyna’s concealed carry permit had been suspended.

Frontier Airlines says Brozyna has been suspended.

Brozyna is free on $2,750 bail. Jail records don’t list an attorney.

Flight Attendant Had Gun in Carry-On Bag at Florida Airport: Police

Let’s go over the key sentence once more:

He told police he recently went on a road trip with his gun in the bag and forgot to remove it.

Now, I am not gonna harp on having a senior moment and forgetting to check a bag for something or another. It has happened to all and those of you saying “Me? Never!” Karma is waiting around the corner.

What I like to offer for those who travel a lot is the idea of segregated Carry On bag for Air Travel that you will make sure never come close to anything firearms. You have your other bag that use for road rips or even a trip to the range (not a good idea anyway),  but this one will never come close to a gun or a box of ammunition ever.  I would even go as far as slapping a Gun Free Zone sticker somewhere inside it as reminder that no guns are allowed in this bag. See? Finally a use for those stupid signs.

You will check it anyway before a trip, but the chances of you overlooking something and coming to meet TSA with something felonious will drop dramatically.

Anyway, that is just an idea.

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