Author Archives: eehines

Credulous Editors

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are in a tizzy over the Senate Judiciary Committee having voted out to the Senate floor the nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having done so after the Progressive-Democratic Party’s committee members staged another of their toddler temper tantrums and stormed out of the committee meeting because they couldn’t get their way. Especially, though. the editors are upset because the Republican majority on the committee chose to ignore a so-called whistleblower’s beef about Bove.

At a March 14 meeting, discussing the possibility that a judge could block those removals [illegal alien deportations], “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.” That’s according to a “whistleblower” letter by a former government lawyer.

And

The Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority dismissed this evidence as “completely devoid of context.” That sounds like an argument by plausible deniability. The whistleblower made specific claims, and isn’t his account context?

That also sounds like an argument for facts and specifics rather than anonymous claims. It’s telling that the editors chose one interpretation while completely ignoring another, much less identifying that other and explaining their logic in choosing the one interpretation over the other. And, no, the person’s account isn’t context; it is itself shorn of context: for instance, to whom was his letter written, what are the relationships between the letter writer and the letter’s recipient with Bove?

And this: the editors never even identify the whistleblower, whose name as the protected person that all whistleblowers are, should be a matter of public record. There’s also a reason that the editors put their characterization of whistleblower inside those euphemism quotes. Maybe that’s because the person isn’t actually a whistleblower, but a leaker with an axe to grind. What proof—what evidence, even—do the editors have that the person exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues before he chose to leak? Too, if the whistleblower isn’t actually one, but a leaker, why do the editors not worry about that leak context?

The Biggest Losers

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Progressive-Democratic Party New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a real threat to businesses domiciled in the city.

One of Mamdani’s most controversial proposals is a plan to launch government-run grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods.

Especially this, from 2021 when he was a city councilman:

…there are also other issues that we firmly believe in…the end goal of seizing the means of production….

Businesses would leave “in droves” if Mamdani gets elected, according to some. That’s the problem, though. Only those with mobile businesses—enterprises that can produce or sell their products anywhere, although factories of any size would be deucedly expensive to move. Businesses that can’t just pick up and go, though—the mom and pops, chain franchises that require hands-on direct customer-facing operations can’t. These include restaurants, fast food stores, gasoline stations, grocery stores, bodegas, food trucks, skating rinks, the list is endless: these businesses are trapped. And within a short time—one mayoral cycle, likely—they’ll be the ones left to pick up the city-imposed costs of operating in NYC.

And those small operations will be forced to compete against city government-run grocery stores, restaurants, gasoline stations, and on and on, businesses that have no worries about costs—especially with the city picking up, or waiving, the costs of rent and property taxes—because they’ll have the bottomless pocketbooks of the city’s coffers.

Yes, yes, Mamdani is only talking about government-run grocery stores. Who truly believes he’ll stop there? He’s already offering additions [from the first link]:

…eliminating subway fares, free municipal housing and childcare….

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