Monthly Archives: July 2025

Snowflake Insult

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A pressman, CBS News Capitol Hill Correspondent Scott MacFarlane, is crying that he has PTSD as a result of the crowd’s real-time reaction to the attempted murder of then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America. And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck [Todd on The Chuck Todd Cast podcast]. This was—I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.
They were coming for us. If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us!

This is disgusting and despicable even for a member of the journalism guild. No one was coming for MacFarlane or any other member of the press present during that rally and shooting. Any diagnosis of PTSD for a journalist in that environment is almost tautologically erroneous.

Worse, MacFarlane’s crying and PTSD diagnosis are insults to our soldiers who have been injured, traumatized, and suffer from actual PTSD. They’re insults to all of our firemen, policemen, and EMTs who have been injured or traumatized in the course of their life-threatening duties or, in the particular case of EMTs, the horrific abuses they’ve seen and treated in the course of their duties.

MacFarlane is a Snowflake Poster Boy for why journalist guildsmen and -women are viewed with such utter distrust and contempt by us average Americans.

A Promising Technology

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An alternative to GPS-positioning and navigation—which is increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing—is nearing operational capability, having already begun real world testing. Instead of receiving signals from satellites, this system is as self-contained as inertial navigation systems, but without the dependency on gyroscopes, which drift over relatively short periods of time. Instead, the system uses the varying degrees of magnetization ubiquitous in the earth’s crust. And it doesn’t even send out signals to measure that magnetization—I did say it was self-contained.

Inside SandboxAQ’s device, essentially a small black box, a laser fires a photon at an electron, forcing it to absorb that photon. When the laser turns off, that electron goes back to its ground state, and releases the photon. As the photon is released, it gives off a unique signature based on the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at that particular location.
Every square meter of the world has a unique magnetic signature based on the specific way charged iron particles in the Earth’s molten core magnetize the minerals in its crust. SandboxAQ’s device tracks that signature, feeds it into an AI algorithm that runs on a single GPU, compares the signature to existing magnetic signature maps, and returns an exact location.

Exact location: the system currently is capable of matching, every time, the FAA’s commercial navigation requirement of specifying location to within 2 nautical miles. The system can get within a quarter of a nautical mile about two-thirds of the time.

The system already seems capable, in the defense arena, of sensing submarines and tunnels. For targeting over enemy territory, though, greater precision will be required. The question here, in my peabrain, isn’t whether such pinpoint accuracy can be achieved (there’s no doubt that it can), but how we will get magnetic crust mapping inside, say, Russia or the People’s Republic of China.

I suspect satellites can get those maps.

My Latest Peter Hunt Novel

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Misbehaver, my latest Peter Hunt novel has been released as a Kindle eBook. This one concerns an off-the-books favor a police detective lieutenant has asked Hunt and his pseudo-niece Trang Thi Thao to carry out. A cop has been assaulted by a local gang, and the lieutenant thinks there may be a mole. Then Hunt’s lady, a defense lawyer, hires the two of them formally to get her client cleared of crimes he claims he didn’t commit. If they don’t, it’ll be the third conviction for the client, and he’ll get hard time in a Texas prison.

I hope you like it.

Eric Hines

Sometimes…

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A letter-writer, a founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, wrote in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday’s Letters section decrying the proposed funding reductions for the CDC and NIH.

Americans’ distrust of science isn’t merely leading to lower vaccination rates for such preventable diseases as measles; it’s also fueling shortsighted proposals to scale back public-health programs that save lives and taxpayer dollars[.]

It’s not so much that as it is that government bureaucrats who happen to have medical (or other science) degrees can’t be trusted. These worthies—Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are only the most famous examples—have shown themselves more interested in political ideology than actual science.

The letter-writer added this:

Proposed appropriations aside, $11 billion in cuts in early 2025 to already cash-strapped state and local health departments are leading to layoffs and cancelled data-infrastructure upgrades that hamper their ability to keep their communities safe.

This has nothing to do with funding cuts in “proposed appropriations.” If States are losing personnel and equipment upgrades, that’s entirely due to the spending decisions of those States—their governing politicians clearly consider other matters more important than the medical weal of the citizens they pretend to represent.

The letter-writer closed with a quote from former CDC Director Thomas Frieden, as though the remark is somehow dispositive:

You don’t improve things by destroying them, you improve them by improving them.

That’s often, even usually, true. However, sometimes the only way to improve the product a failed institution is supposed to produce is to remove the failed institution and replace it completely.

Uncertainty?

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A Wall Street Journal article centered on one American company’s claimed uncertainty regarding adjusting its supply chain to no longer be in the People’s Republic of China cited this:

American Outdoor Brands spent months coming up with a plan to minimize the pain of tariffs. Now it is stuck waiting to see where to go.
Most of American Outdoor Brands’ products, which range from fishing tools to hunting gear and pizza ovens, come from China. Executives were prepared to reposition the company’s supply chain ahead of July 9, when the so-called reciprocal tariffs were set to take effect, betting that it could move quickly to reduce any pain points once the new levies kicked in.
But President Trump’s decision last week to extend the deadline for trade deal negotiations to August 1 has prolonged the uncertainty for many companies. That means American Outdoor Brands’ supply-chain reshuffling plan remains on ice.

Why? Where’s the uncertainty? These companies—not just American Outdoor Brands—still know they need to move their supply chains out of the PRC. At worst, they just have more time in which to do so.

American Outdoor Brands’ CFO Andy Fulmer:

We’re very comfortable that we’ve done all the upfront work on where we’d go by product category. We’re just kind of waiting for those firm rates to come out.

Stop dithering, then, and execute. The likely range of tariffs already is well-known, and they’re unlikely to be raised in the face of intransigence; they’ll just go into effect on the deadline, or be delayed again.

In the meantime, there are a myriad other places from which to source intermediate components and—in American Outdoor Brands’ and others similarly situated—final products. Bangladesh, comes to mind, as does Jordan. And manufacturing-experienced Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Japan, Philippines. It would be easy enough in those latter cases to contractually require components not come from the PRC directly or indirectly.

Even move the supply chains to…the United States.