3D printed guns scare progressives, so of course they want to ban them

Because the future is frightening.

First, a BBC news video to show you what the fuss is all about:

The Telegraph describes it thus:

Instructions for making The Liberator, a plastic handgun that could escape detection by conventional airport security, were today made freely available to download from the internet by anti-government activists in the US.

It was created by a group in Texas that aims to make “WikiWeapons” that can be reproduced with a home computer and a $1,000 (£644) 3D printer that uses heated plastics instead of ink.

“It’s a demonstration that technology will allow access to things that governments would otherwise say that you shouldn’t have access to,” Cody Wilson, the leader of Defense Distributed, told The Daily Telegraph.

Emphasis added. And that scares statists like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who’s first, knee-jerk reaction is to ban it:

The Liberator may look like a toy, but “this gun can fire regular bullets,” Schumer said, calling for legislation outlawing the technology’s weapons potential.

The bill was drafted by Rep. Steve Israel (D-L.I.).

“Security checkpoints, background checks and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print their own plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,” Israel said in a statement.

To Schumer, the ramifications of make-your-own untraceable and undetectable weapons are “stomach-churning.”

“Now anyone, a terrorist, someone who is mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon, can essentially open a gun factory in their garage,” Schumer said. “It must be stopped.”

Apparently Chuck (and Rep. Israel) have never heard of improvised firearms, before, such as the Sten gun, meant to be made in home workshops. And Loyalist militias in Northern Ireland practically made a hobby out of homemade submachine guns. (So did the I.R.A., from what I’m told.)

But it’s not what the terrorist or criminal might do with the weapon that truly scares progressives, though I doubt even Schumer realizes this. Look again at the bolded quote above — Wilson nails it. What truly scares the progressive statist is the loss of control.  The ideal, for Schumer and those like him, is the administrative state run by bureaucratic experts who decide what’s best for everyone. Life is too complicated for the “average Joe,” so we need ever more legislation and regulation to keep everyone safe and prosperous in line. That includes access to firearms, which have advanced beyond anything the writers of that dear, but now obsolete Constitution could imagine.

What frightens them is that it makes their precious regulations powerless. Like I wrote before on this issue:

But now think about the effect on gun control: this (3D priting) is the discontinuous innovation. Statists and gun-banners and those standing on the graves of children can scream as loud as they want for ever more laws controlling firearms, maybe even get them, but, as long as you can download the plans and have access to a printer… All those laws are useless. They’re the modern buggy-whips.

An idea once conceived cannot be un-thought, and technology once discovered cannot be undiscovered. Even the secret of making an atomic bomb is out there, in spite of all our efforts to keep it classified;  only the difficulty of obtaining the materials and constructing it have slowed its spread.

But combine 3D printers (which are only going to get smaller, cheaper, and more portable) with easy information distribution — hello, torrent sites! – and, well, Schumer and his wise, progressive control-freak buddies can write all the laws and regulations they want; it just won’t do any good. People will ignore them.

And that’s what scares the pants off progressives.

PS: I can see one potentially big benefit to the advent of 3D firearms: by showing how useless gun-control regulations are, it might actually spur us to deal with the real problem behind mass shootings, such as at Aurora and Newtown — mental illness and the lousy state of mental health care in the US.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

The Boston Bombers’ finances and their bombs

Via Money Jihad, here’s what’s publicly known of their resources:

• U.S. News reports that “The larger Tsarnaev family ended up living on public assistance in Cambridge, Mass,” which in context of the article was probably around 2010.
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev received a $2,500 scholarship from the city of Cambridge in May 2011 to pursue higher education.
• Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unemployed, but his wife, Katherine Russell, was working long hours as a home health care aide.  During their last conversation, Tamerlan told his uncle that he fixes cars, but he did not say whether he was earning wages.
• Patimat Suleimanova, the Tsarnaev brothers’ aunt, said that “the brothers had stumbled upon money problems” in 2012, and that their father Anzor Tsarnaev “would send money from here when he could.”
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev withdrew $800 from Bank of America an ATM card stolen from the Tsarnaev’s carjacking victim on the night of April 18.

Read the rest at Money Jihad.

This isn’t unbelievable to me: none of their bomb components were all that expensive (that I know of). It’s possible they were living off occasional work, the wife’s income, public assistance, and handouts from relatives, even for Tamerlan’s flight to Russia.

But one thing nagging at me are the bombs themselves. Here’s an explanation of how they work. They’re by no means expensive, so I’m willing to accept that the Tsarnaevs obtained the parts with their own resources, but… First-time bomb-builders making electronic triggers and doing everything right, including safely transporting them? Seems a stretch. It’s almost a given that they practiced making these and tested the devices somewhere.

But where? Was it on private land, concealed from prying eyes? If so, who gave them access? If not, how did no one notice?

It seems to me that, although the surviving brother has asserted they worked alone, they almost had to have help building and testing the devices, themselves.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

This is why California can’t have nice things: taxing email

“Shakedown”

Not yet, but a Berkeley (natch) city councilor thinks it’s a grand idea:

Gordon Wozniak, a Berkeley city councilman, proposed taxing email messages during a recent city council meeting in an effort to reduce the spread of “spam,” or unwanted emails.

Wozniak also said an email tax could raise money to keep the U.S. Postal Service functioning.

“There should be something like a bit tax … [it] could be a cent per gigabit and they would make, probably, billions of dollars a year,” he said.

First question for Mr. Wozniak: are you taxing the senders or the recipients? If the former, how do you plan to get Nigerian scammers and Chinese porn spammers to comply? If the latter, then how…. Wait, I know: “It’s for the good of the community.”

Can you imagine how fast businesses would leave California if email messages (or data transfer) were to be taxed? Hint: hard to believe, but even faster than they are, now. And what about people who rely on email for their small or micro-businesses, or their hobbies? The Internet has been a fabulous engine for wealth creation, so naturally progressive Luddites want to kill it through taxation.

And what is it with the leftist obsession with preserving dying institutions? The Postal Service is collapsing, in large part due to the efficiency and convenience of email. It can’t compete, so let it go and let other, better services take its place. Just like their obsession with railroads, “progressives” boldly look to the past, when the future is staring them in the face. And because the future frightens them, their reaction is to tax it to prevent it.

Meanwhile, a suggestion to Councilman Wozniak: If spam email so annoys you, stop whining and get a service or software with a good spam filter.

And keep your grasping paws off my wallet.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Journalistic integrity at CBS? Not when it comes to competitors…

Or their innovative technology:

Recently, I found myself thrust in the middle of a kerfuffle when CBS ordered its subsidiary CNET to remove a product from consideration for a “Best of CES” award at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. I can never recall any major media company, much less a top-tier First Amendment protector like CBS, publicly mandating an editorial decision based on business interests. The bizarre aggressiveness of CBS executives against the Hopper Sling disturbed me as it not only tainted the CES awards, but it hurt one of the world’s classiest media companies.

The controversy started when Dish introduced the Hopper, a product that allows Dish subscribers to skip through TV commercials under certain conditions. CBS and other networks sued Dish to stop the sale of the Hopper, despite a landmark 1984 Supreme Court decision that innovative products like the Hopper cannot be blocked by copyright owners if the product has many uses. Broadcasters never even challenged the legality of the TiVo personal video recorder back in 1999, which allows easy commercial fast-forwarding.

While the CBS legal challenge to the Hopper case chugs along, Dish used the 2013 International CES, to introduce the Hopper Sling, which allows Dish subscribers to stream one channel over the Internet while another is playing on the home TV. As owners of CES, we had an agreement with CNET to cover the show and recognize the best products. The CNET editorial team identified the Hopper Sling as one of the most innovative products of the show, but CBS brass ordered the CNET editors to remove it from CNET’s website.

For a top media company to impose editorial control so publicly for business reasons created a firestorm, resulting in stories in USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal and several tech blogs. CBS’ actions are puzzling, and troubling, on many levels.

One CNET reporter has already resigned over this, and there may be more on the way. While this is business and not politics, it should serve as a reminder to us all that the MSM is willing to bend or even alter the news to meet its goals. CBS’ “classy reputation” was already tarnished by Rathergate, and NBC News’ president has resigned “under controversy.” (1) And the major media reporting on so-called man-made climate change has been nothing short of disgraceful, agenda journalism at its worst.

Thanks to the space the Internet provides alternative voices, the “gatekeeper of what’s news” function of the MSM is dying, though they still need to be watched like a hawk. As Democratic pollster Pat Caddell recently said, the media has become an “enemy of democracy.” (2)

via Instapundit

Footnote:
(1) For a devastating and nauseating example of NBC’s (and other MSM) dishonesty, have a look through my blog-buddy’s Sister Toldjah’s Trayvon Martin archive, about the persecution of George Zimmerman. She moved mountains exposing their perfidy.
(2) With exceptions for certain individual reporters. But the overall MSM “culture” stinks with corruption.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

The fool’s errand of #Guncontrol – regulations can’t keep up with technology

One of the truisms of investing is that you have to watch out for the “discontinuous innovation” — the unexpected development or invention that renders your investing plan worthless. The classic example is the “buggy whip industry” after the development of automobiles.

Something similar can be said of the statist need to control everything via regulation: it’s a fool’s errand, because you can’t predict the discontinuous innovation that will render the regulations meaningless; you can’t regulate human ingenuity.

In this case, the mirage the statists are chasing is “gun control” and its ultimate goal, near or total prohibition. Yesterday saw President Obama stage a dog-and-pony show of a press conference to sign three vapid memos, while the New York legislature a day or so before  rammed through worse-than-meaningless legislation that trammeled the rights of law-abiding citizens while doing nothing to prevent another of the mass-shootings that supposedly inspired the law.  Included in the bill was a regulation limiting magazines to a seven-shot capacity, rather than ten, meaning that you’ll no longer be able to buy them in New York gun shops. (1)

No problem! With a 3D printer, you can just make them at home!

Five months ago, the group of homemade gun enthusiasts known as Defense Distributed set out to create a lethal firearm that could be downloaded and 3D-printed entirely from scratch, circumventing all gun control laws. But as new gun bills have been proposed in the wake of recent shootings, creating a bootleg weapon with digital pieces may soon be far easier: As simple as printing a spring-loaded plastic box.

Over the past weekend, Defense Distributed successfully 3D-printed and tested an ammunition magazine for an AR semi-automatic rifle, loading and firing 86 rounds from the 30-round clip.

That homemade chunk of curved plastic holds special significance: Between 1994 and 2004, so-called “high capacity magazines” capable of holding more than 10 bullets were banned from sale. And a new gun control bill proposed by California Senator Diane Feinstein would ban those larger ammo clips again. President Obama has also voiced support for the magazine restrictions.

But Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson says he hopes the group’s recent work demonstrates the futility of that proposed ban in the age of cheap 3D printing.

It doesn’t just demonstrate it: it cranks the truth up to 20 and blasts it from the rooftops. Here’s a video demonstration from last year of how the 3D printer works for making tools:

When I first saw this video, my thought, like the narrator’s, was for its application to space travel and eventual colonization of other worlds. Neat, right? The Star Trek replicator isn’t a pipe-dream.

But now think about the effect on gun control: this is the discontinuous innovation. Statists and gun-banners and those standing on the graves of children can scream as loud as they want for ever more laws controlling firearms, maybe even get them, but, as long as you can download the plans and have access to a printer… All those laws are useless. They’re the modern buggy-whips.

Sure, these units are big right now and the materials (I’d guess) cost a fair bit, but that’s no bar to mobsters and cartels. (2) And think about the advances in computer printers: from hulking, crude units that took up lots of floor space to small desktop lasers the output of which is almost indistinguishable from print shop quality. The same will happen with these 3D printers; at some point not too far off, you’ll be able to make your own 30-shot semi-automatic rifle from the comfort of your own home.

At some point, of course, some statist will think of tightly regulating 3D printers, themselves. Good luck with that. It didn’t work with the Soviet Union and photocopiers, and it won’t work now. You’ll just wind up with a samizdat gun industry.

And this is one reason I assert that most gun regulations, done in haste, based on emotion, and exploiting a tragedy, are useless self-delusions. The give the sound and fury of effective action while really doing nothing and, in the case of the violently mentally ill, ignoring the real problem.

They’re about as effective as using  a buggy whip on a Camaro.

via Jim Geraghty and WR Mead.

Footnote:
(1) But criminals will be able to get all they need, and larger, on the black market. Like I said: meaningless.
(2) Man, is this going to put a dent in the ATF’s foreign sales…

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

How the U.S. Could Take Out Syria’s Chemical Weapons

This is a job for SCIENCE!!!

Three words: “molten, metallic foam.”

We really do have all the best toys!

Religion of Misogyny: Saudi Arabia tracks wives’ movements, reports to husbands

Equality in slavery

But don’t you dare say Islam doesn’t respect women:

As of last week, Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.

Saudi women’s rights activist Manal al-Sherif, who last year urged women to defy a driving ban, said a man had contacted her to say he had received a text from the immigration authorities while at the airport with his wife.

“The authorities are using technology to monitor women,” said Saudi author and journalist Badriya al-Bishr, who criticised the “state of slavery under which women are held” in the kingdom.

“This is technology used to serve backwardness in order to keep women imprisoned,” she added.

Under laws influenced by the strict Wahabi interpretation of Islam, women are not allowed to leave Saudi Arabia without permission from their male guardian (a husband, father or brother), who must give consent by signing what is known as the “yellow sheet” at the airport or border.

The article mentions the mockery this new rule has received from women and some men, but it’s supported by the Wahabi religious establishment, which is a lynchpin of the monarchy, so that makes it the law.

What’s next? A fatwa mandating electric shock collars for disobedient wives?

RELATED: More on the wonderful state of women under Sharia.

via The Jawa Report

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

#Curiosity Fantastic photo from Mars landing

Last night, America returned to Mars with the successful landing of the rover “Curiosity” in the Gale Crater region of the Red Planet. While there’s been no sighting of lost cities, canals, or Thuvia (yet), we do have this amazing image:

(Click the image for a larger version)

That is Curiosity about six minutes into its seven-minute descent to the Martian surface. The larger upper portion is the parachute, while the lander itself is the lower dot. The photo was shot by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, from more than 200 miles away. There’s video of the related news conference here.

After all that’s gone wrong the last few years, it’s a nice reminder of the amazing things we’re capable of. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a snapshot of one American space vehicle taken by another American spaceship — around an alien world 350,000,000 hundreds of millions of miles away.

How cool is that?

Seriously, I want an art print of this.

EDIT: In my excitement, I was sloppy with the information: Curiosity’s route covered 350 million miles. Mars is closer than that in a straight line. I blame geeky excitement, and thanks to Mike in the ST comments.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

An about face by China on solar power

Reblogged from Watts Up With That?:

From John Droz's newsletter with a hat-tip to Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. for bringing it to my attention and via the "I can hear Joe Romm's head exploding" department and Electric Light and Power comes this story:

CHINA TO DROP SOLAR ENERGY TO FOCUS ON NUCLEAR POWER
Asia Pulse

China will accelerate the use of new-energy sources such as nuclear energy and put an end to blind expansion in industries such as solar energy and wind power in 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says in a government report published on March 5.

Read more… 123 more words

Al Gore and Thomas Friedman shriek in rage.

Obama’s going to regret dissing *THE* Rutherford B. Hayes

Because the mockery is going viral:

 

Background here. And see the rest at Quickmeme.

via Moe Lane

Dear Sanctimonious Greens: your beloved electric cars harm Gaea!!

Your goddess will be angry with you…

According to a recent study by researchers at UT-Knoxville, electric cars have a greater pollution impact than comparable (and evil, EVIL, EVIL!!) gasoline-powered vehicles:

“An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,” [Chris] Cherry said. “Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions.”

Particulate matter includes acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soil or dust particles. It is also generated through the combustion of fossil fuels.

For electric vehicles, combustion emissions occur where electricity is generated rather than where the vehicle is used. In China, 85 percent of electricity production is from fossil fuels, about 90 percent of that is from coal. The authors discovered that the power generated in China to operate electric vehicles emit fine particles at a much higher rate than gasoline vehicles. However, because the emissions related to the electric vehicles often come from power plants located away from population centers, people breathe in the emissions a lower rate than they do emissions from conventional vehicles.

Still, the rate isn’t low enough to level the playing field between the vehicles. In terms of air pollution impacts, electric cars are more harmful to public health per kilometer traveled in China than conventional vehicles.

(Emphasis added)

The key is that the electricity needed to charge the batteries of those virtuous electric vehicles has to be first generated somewhere; in China, the vast majority comes from plants using fossil fuels. The effect is simply to transfer the generation of pollutants from where the vehicle is used to where its power is created.

Bear in mind, this study was conducted in China, which relies overwhelmingly on coal. While the US generates far less of its electricity from coal, it’s still significant — about 46%. (See Table 1.1) And China’s pollution controls are notoriously weak, so coal-fired plants in the US probably generate far fewer pollutants than their Chinese counterparts. Still, coal is a dirty fuel source, one of the great demons in the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and air pollution does not respect national boundaries.

Preening Greens charging their Volts and Leafs and Priuses and oh-so Smart ED cars should perhaps remember that their virtue comes at the cost of (environmental) sin.

RELATED: It’s similar to that other fetish object of the Green cult — wind power. The wind is so unreliable a source that, to make sure the power grid stays up, backup coal, gas, and even nuclear plants have to be kept running on standby for those times when the wind stops or blows too fast. Kind of defeats the purpose, no? Unless that purpose is just to make oneself feel good, or profit from government subsidy… or both.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

When geek dreams become real life

Come on, this is Dungeons and Dragons brought to life, thanks to the mad scientists of DARPA: a Wand of Fire Suppression!

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known to its friends as DARPA, has announced their latest innovation: Instant fire suppression. The goal of the research project, which was part of a joint venture with Harvard University, was to find a better way to put out fires. Instead of conventional tactics, DARPA wanted a high-tech tool that would attack the very physical make up of fire using acoustics and electromagnetism.

You might be asking, “But DARPA, we already have perfectly good means of extinguishing fires, don’t we?” Sure, but each method has some pretty major drawbacks. Chemical suppressants, which interrupts the combustion process, are only effective against some types of fires, often result in collateral damage through their use, and are usually toxic. Water and CO2 suppression work well enough by smothering fires, but they still require a physical delivery system — the logistics of which can be hampered by the tight spaces one might encounter onboard a ship, for instance.

Through their research, DARPA wanted to use the physics of fire against itself. In their own words, they sought, “a novel flame-suppression system based on destabilization of flame plasma with electromagnetic fields and acoustics techniques.” Their research paid off in the form of a handheld “wand” device which snuffs out flames.

Click through for video. The big problem is scalability (perhaps power requirements or the size of the fire), but I imagine that can be fixed with enough research. Regardless, this is beyond way-cool. It’s science fiction brought to life, technology as magic.

Now, if they’d only start working on creating a hot Elf chick in a chainmail bikini…

The Chevy Volt is a technological marvel!

For 1896, that is:

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

…and…

As the New York Times reported September 5, “For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”

So, in return for trampling the rights of bondholders and investing $50 billion taxpayer dollars (1) in order to protect the UAW, President Obama (2)  has shown us the “automotive future” — a car that would have impressed… President Grover Cleveland.

Oh, why the heck not? His economic policies are right out of the 1930s; why not go back another 40 years?

Forward… into the past!

via JustOneMinute and QandO

Footnotes:
(1) Of which you can assume a significant portion was borrowed from China.
(2) Oh, and you’ll be happy to know the administration ordered the purchase of 110 of the marvels of Green tech.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

And so it ends not with a bang, but a whimper

Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of America’s greatest triumph in space exploration, the first manned landing on the Moon. Here’s a video commemorating that moment:

(via GinTheGin)

And late last night, 42 years after Neil Armstrong first stepped on another world and 49 years after John Glenn became the first American to enter orbital space (1), our manned space program came to an end with the landing of the shuttle Atlantis.

In the dark, as if to spare us the embarrassment:

(via The Jawa Report)

And, yes, I know there are plenty of reasons why a private space exploration program is a good idea; I even agree with many of the arguments. But I don’t want to hear them just now.

I’m not in the mood.

Footnotes:
(1) Of course, Alan Shepard went first in Freedom 7, but that was a suborbital flight. Impressive and heroic, but not quite slipping the “surly bonds of Earth.”

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

The wind-power farce

Maybe “scam” would be a better word for something that is pushed as a “green solution” to anthropogenic global warming (1) , yet doesn’t do what it promises to do, but what it does do is done at tremendous public cost, all while making the alleged problem worse. In the UK, wind farms have become the government’s centerpiece for fighting climate change (2). Christopher Booker, writing about this policy in the Telegraph, explains why wind power is a chimera worthy of Don Quixote tilting at windmills:

Centrica and other energy companies last week told [the Department of Energy and Climate Change] that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.

We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on “spinning reserve”, 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. This is that their power continually fluctuates anywhere between full capacity to zero (where it often stood last winter, when national electricity demand was at a peak). So unless back-up power is instantly available to match any shortfall, the lights will go out.

Two things make this even more absurd. One, as the energy companies pointed out to DECC, is that it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose. The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on “spinning reserve” chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency – thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.

And before we laugh and point at the Brits for their folly, keep in mind that these are the very same “solutions” that the Obama administration, its eco-statist allies, and the corporations that would benefit from the required government subsidies all want to impose on us. We even have a whole government agency devoted to pimping wind power, while the administration has shown repeatedly its hostility toward developing our vast coal and oil supplies.

Rather than laugh, we should look to Britain for a warning.

Footnotes:

(1) A problem, remember, that does not exist.

(2) Attempting to control the world’s thermostat. Someone should introduce these idiots to King Canute.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

The grenade in your lamp

Hey, you know those twisty compact fluorescent bulbs we’re being “encouraged” to buy because incandescents are so evil? You know, the light bulbs that are going to save the planet, because they’re (begin pious look) sustainable (sigh wistfully, end pious look)?

They can explode and burn your house down:

A compact fluorescent light (CFL) on the ceiling burst and started a fire in a home in Hornell, N.Y. December 23, 2010.  “Those are the lights everybody’s been telling us to use,” said Joe Gerych, Steuben County Fire Inspector.  “It blew up like a bomb. It spattered all over.”  Fire Chief Mike Robbins said the blaze destroyed the room where the fire started and everything in it, and the rest of the house suffered smoke and water damage.  The Arkport Village Fire Department as well as the North Hornell Fire Department required about 15 minutes to put out the fire.

“Bulb explodes without warning,” reported NBCactionnews.com, May 21, 2010.
“Tom and Nancy Heim were watching TV recently, when Tom decided to turn on the floor lamp next to his recliner chair.  ‘I heard this loud pop…I saw what I thought was smoke, coming out of the top of the floor lamp,’ says Tom.  Nancy suddenly found glass in her lap.  She says, ‘I did not see it. I just heard it, and I noticed I had glass on me.’”

On February 23, 2011, TV NewsChannel 5 in Tennessee covered “a newly-released investigators’ report that blames a February 12 fatal fire in Gallatin on one of those CFL bulbs.”  Ben Rose, an attorney for the rehabilitative facility in which Douglas Johnson, 45, perished, said, “This result is consistent with our own private investigation. …We have heard reports of similar fires being initiated by CFLs across the country.”

Read the whole thing, and remember to ask your congressman and state legislator, who are probably so proud of how “green” they are, why they are trying kill you.

via Watt’s Up With That, which has more about why these things can go boom.

RELATED: Snopes on the mercury hazard of CFLs.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

Dear Arab League: drop dead

Indulging his taste for laughable moral equivalence, the Secretary General of the Arab League and possible future president of Egypt, Amr Moussa, called for a no-fly zone over Gaza to protect Gazans (read: “Hamas”) from Israel:

Arab League Chief Amr Mussa said Sunday that the organization would ask the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza, which Israel has pounded with air strikes in response to rocket fire.Condemning what it called Israel’s “brutal” aggression in Gaza, a gathering of the Arab League’s permanent delegates chaired by Oman called on the UN to convene its Security Council.

The meeting would “consider the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip on an urgent basis to stop its siege and impose a no-fly rule on the Israeli military to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip,” the Arab League said in a statement

Because, of course, what Israel does to protect its own people is just like what Qaddafi is doing to his own people in Libya. And yet, I can sympathize with Amr; if there’s no no-fly zone over Gaza, those evil Israeli bullies might retaliate for Hamas firing an anti-tank rocket at a bus load of schoolchildren:

The condition of the 16-year-old critically injured in the anti-tank missile attack on a school bus in the Negev on Thursday remains unchanged, Dr. Itzhak Lazar of Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center told Army Radio Friday morning.The boy suffered severe head trauma and received artificial respiration while unconscious when an anti-tank missile fired from the Gaza Strip struck a school bus in the Negev on Thursday.

The missile, which was fired by Hamas, hit the bus moments after most of the children got off, while it was driving near Kibbutz Saad, about 2.5 km. from Gaza. Only two people were on the bus when it was hit – the driver, who was lightly injured, and the boy, who was en route to visit his grandmother. The bus driver is a friend of the family.

Immediately after the attack, Palestinians fired more than 45 mortar shells and Katyusha and Kassam rockets into Israel.

Whose “brutal aggression” are we talking about, Mr. Secretary General?

Hamas should consider itself lucky that, unlike Hamas, Israel is civilized and won’t give the Gaza Strip the carpet-bombing it so richly deserves.

RELATED: One of the Katyushas fired into Israel was intercepted by the IDF’s new “Iron Dome” tactical missile defense system, showing that missile defense can work even on a short-range, tactical level. McKittrick at Closing Velocity has more on this important development.

No, I wasn’t kidnapped

Sorry for the lack of posting over the weekend, folks. The video card on the Public Secrets Super Computer decided Saturday afternoon was a good time to die. (And that’s the second ATI Radeon card that’s failed in two years. I detect a pattern…)

So, posting will be spotty until at least tomorrow, when I hope to have the new (non-ATI) card installed.

Grumble…  Mutter…

Dear Nay-Sayers: missile defense works

At least well-enough in tests that it is worth pursuing for field deployment. The Closing Velocity blog keeps track of developments in missile defense and has posted a couple of interesting items in the last few days. The first involves the successful interception of an incoming missile during its reentry phase, meaning it’s closing on its target — such as an American city:

Lockheed Martin has conducted the second successful test of an advanced version of the combat-proven Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile system.

The upgraded missile – the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) – successfully intercepted a threat representative tactical ballistic missile target in the MSE battlespace at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico Wednesday.

(…)

The PAC-3 MSE missile features a larger, more powerful rocket motor for increased thrust, along with larger fins and other structural modifications for more agility. The modifications extend the missile’s reach by up to 50 percent, according to Lockheed.

If the name “Patriot” looks familiar to you, that’s because the PAC-3 is a descendant of the Patriot missile defense system that became famous during Gulf War I with, as I recall, mixed results. Twenty years down the road, the improvements seem to be remarkable.

It might also be familiar because, as McKittrick points out, the PAC-3 was the missile-defense system to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic — that is, until Obama pulled the rug out from under them to appease Moscow.

Then again, our president is quite honest about his attitudes regarding ballistic-missile defense:

As with his archaic beliefs regarding arms-control with the Russians, President Obama’s mind seems to be stuck in the early 80s.

The other development is the successful testing of the Arrow-2 counter-missile, a joint Israel-US project, off the coast of California, in a simulation of an Iranian attack on Israel:

Last night, off the coast of California, the joint US-Israeli missile defense system Arrow 2 achieved a remarkable intercept of a simulated Iranian ballistic missile:

• The Arrow interceptor was launched at around 10:30 pm Pacific Standard Time from a US Navy base along the California coast and intercepted a missile fired from a nearby navy vessel. Defense officials said that the enemy missile impersonated a “future threat that Israel could one day face in the region.” Defense officials lauded the successful launching as another indication of Israel’s defense capabilities in the face of Iran’s continued quest for a nuclear weapon. They said that the Arrow system could protect Israel from all of the missiles in Iran’s arsenal.

And here’s some entertaining video of the intercept. You may “ooh” and “ah” at will:

I don’t know about you, but I find this pretty darned exciting. Sure, these were simulations under relatively controlled conditions, but that is still shooting one bullet out of the air with another bullet, as McKittrick put it. Given the success shown so far and the danger posed by unstable tyrants in Pyongyang and Tehran (And where else that we haven’t heard of?), isn’t an anti-missile shield for America and her allies worth pursuing? I’ll grant it wouldn’t be enough to hold off a massive attack by the Russians or the Chinese, but that’s not the likely danger, these days. The threat of a small salvo or individual rocket from a rogue nation or even a capable terrorist organization is much more credible and still potentially devastating, and that is exactly what these systems are designed to handle.

It’s a shame we have a president who can’t see the world for what it is, rather than what it was when he was in college.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)

When science fiction becomes real: unleash the robot cheetahs!

Some of the neatest stuff comes out of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) — like this Internet thingy we’re playing with. Much of their work –that they tell us about– involves robotics, “intelligent” machines that can be sent into dangerous areas both to spare human soldiers the risk and to extend their capabilities. Wired has story on the progress toward developing, get this, a robot cheetah:

Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough. That’ll change soon. BigDog’s makers are working on a new quadruped that moves faster than any human and is agile enough to “chase and evade.”

Boston Dynamics, maker of the Army’s BigDog robotic mule, announced today that Darpa has awarded it a contract to build a much faster and more fearsome animal-like robot, Cheetah.

As the name implies, Cheetah is designed to be a four-legged robot with a flexible spine and articulated head (and potentially a tail) that runs faster than the fastest human. In addition to raw speed, Cheetah’s makers promise that it will have the agility to make tight turns so that it can “zigzag to chase and evade” and be able to stop on a dime.

Cheetah builds off work on the company’s previous four legged animal bot, BigDog.  It was built as a kind of unmanned pack mule, designed to carry equipment for troops on the battlefield. The robotic donkey could carry 300 lbs. over 13 miles on flat ground, take a swift kick and keep on moving. It’s creepy, lifelike movement can be seen on a number of videos online, climbing over hills and snow and hiking alongside soldiers, using GPS coordinates as its waypoints.

They talk about non-military applications, of course*, but, come on. Who didn’t smile at the prospect of unleashing robotic cheetahs that can run faster than a human on the Taliban?

LINKS: An earlier post on our coming Space Marine force. I’m also quite interested in powered exoskeletons, which are a precursor to full-blown powered armor. As I like to say, “We have all the best toys!”

*To keep the progressives happy, y’know. They’re sensitive like that.

(Crossposted at Sister Toldjah)