Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

How has it happened that after seventeen years militant Islam is still in the world?  And not the ridiculous remnants that occasionally hold a rally in an Illinois park, like the National Socialists with their Hitler fanboy cosplay.  Seventeen years of Global War On Terror and the goblins continue to issue forth from their hiding places, determined to spread, in their own destructive way, their own particular death-cult interpretation of  "Dar-al-Islam."   Seventeen years.  How can that be?  The mollycoddlers who can not countenance the actual rooting out of the evil have no right go wailing for someone — never themselves! — to go out in peril of death to distant places to perform fractional measures temporarily to safeguard their security at home.  

What follows below the break was originally posted 10 April 2013, under the title "Kill It With Fire."  


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"It can only be killed by fire while awake and by using the Rite of Exorcism if found in its grave during the day."
-- Vampire Universe: The Dark World of Supernatural Beings That Haunt Us, Hunt Us, and Hunger for Us, Jonathon Maberry. Kensington Publishing Corp: New York, 2006. p 16-17, from the Wikipedia article on Vampire folklore by region (South Slavic belief).

At the end of World War II, Hitler's body was burned, pulverized, and flushed into the sewers.  Nazi symbols were destroyed and banned.  Men like Eisenhower forced German citizens to face the atrocities they had actively or passively allowed.  "Never again," they said.

They can never all be found and exorcised while asleep.  The evil is always active while seeming dormant.  We are the ones who sleep.

But the evil continues.  Its undead hunger wakes.  

"I think that September 11 ought to be made a day of mourning everywhere in the West. After all, it will undoubtedly be a day of celebration all across the Dar-al-Islam. 

"We ought never to forget. Never, until the focus of this filthy plague is a hole in the ground, sowed with salt. Never, until Islam is one with the worship of Moloch and Baal. Never, until we can say, 'Mecca delenda est''."
    -- Gerard Vanderleun, What I Saw: Notes I made on September 11, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights, re-posted at American Digest 11 September, 2012.

There is that evil that can only be killed by fire.

 "I am Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the elfstone, Dunadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil's son of Gondor.  Here is the Sword that was Broken and is forged again!  Will you aid me or thwart me?  Choose swiftly."
    -- Aragorn, in Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Tolkien knew that isolationism did not work — regretted the fact, but admitted it; sometimes the Men of the West have to travel to the gates of Mordor because that is the right thing to do.

North Korean "President" Kim Jong Un threatens nuclear mayhem -- and [Obama's] U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel tells reporters on 10 April 2013 that Korea is "skating very close to a dangerous line."  Hagel does not appear to be preparing use of a big Pacific Theater flame thrower to Kill It With Fire.  His ilk seem to be off on another Carteresque episode of Why-do-they-hate-us and Is-this-Kim-crazy?  Um, guys?  When the man has the loaded gun pointed at you?  Then it really doesn't matter why he wants you dead or whether he is sane.  Kill It With Fire.

Every time.

Find it.  Kill it.  Burn it.  Pulverize it.  Flush it.  Again.

Remember Remember the Tenth of September

September 10, 2001. 

The day before the Towers fell. 

The day before I knew/cared what FDNY stood for.

The day before the Global War On Terror interrupted American serenity and prosperity.

What I remember is that, listening to the radio as I drove to work every morning, I would tune in the Tech Report which included geek tidbits like AMD's new (!) x86-64 CPUs, and ads for Dell desktops with 100MHz clock speeds and 256 GB hard drives. 

The Tech Report also included news about Tech stock prices.  Up and up and up they went.  I would tune in and think, "Wow, wouldn't it be great to be a millionaire with money to invest without a care; wouldn't it be be great to make a bundle on these tech stock things?!"

Wouldn't it be great?

The next day they weren't talking about computer geek stuff.

From the studio in New York City, the tech editor was talking about the World Trade Center.  Both towers were on fire -- somehow. 

I hadn't even had coffee yet.

An airplane hit the buildings?  Somehow? 

And then it happened.

On 11 September 2001, at 6:59AM Pacific Daylight Time: WTC2 (South Tower) collapsed.  Before another half hour, WTC1 (North Tower) collapsed.

That was a strange day at work.  All the planes grounded.  People trying to get news.  Talking about the falling man.  Engaging in conjecture.

But looking back, it's September 10th of 2001 that seems strange.

What is the diameter of a tree trunk?

There's a standard method for coming up with a single nominal measurement for the tapered and non-geometrical reality of a tree trunk.  First you go up 4-1/2 feet from ground level.  Then you measure the circumference of the trunk at that height.  Then you divide by pi .  What you end up with is an average diameter at an arbitrary height.  Not very meaningful in itself, but if you get that measurement and compare from year to year to year, or from tree to tree to tree, you might start to see a trend.  Careful, we might learn something. 

But I didn't want to talk about trees.

Let's talk about guns!  Specifically, ammunition.  One of the meaningful metrics for the manufacture of ammunition is pressure.  Because nobody wants to KBOOM their gun.  Yet we want consistency within certain parameters from one ammo manufacturer to another, and from one lot to the next.  There came into being the Sporting Arms Ammunition Manufacturers Institute (SAAMI), where smart guys write up the "SAAMI Specs" for every recognized ammo type, from rim diameters to chamber dimensions to maximum pressures. 

It takes a lot of pressure for the machine we call a gun to throw the ball we call a bullet at desired velocities, often well beyond the speed of sound.  You can't measure pressures like that with a hydraulic bourdon-tube pressure gauge.  So one question is, how do you even measure these very high pressures? 

In the olden days, they came up with an indirect measurement.  They created a contraption known as a crusher gun, with a piston that communicated with a hole drilled through to barrel; the piston pushed on an arbitrarily standard artifact:  a hollow, enclosed tube of lead or copper of a known length.  The firing of the cartridge would send the piston pushing into the calibrated tube, crushing it.  Measuring that tube's length after firing gave you a relative datum known as Lead Units of Pressure (LUP) or Copper Units of Pressure (CUP).  As you can imagine, this kind of pressure testing of ammunition was expensive and slow. 

During the 20th century, the development of electronic strain gauges for severe environments led to using electronic means to measure ammo pressure.  SAAMI was right there on the leading edge of that technology, and created standards for type and placement of the strain gauges for each cartridge type. These electronic instruments produce data in the form of change in electrical resistance over time, often with a considerable amount of "noise" -- but with tweaking and filtering, the Institute was satisfied with a method, enough to start calling this indirect measurement a reading of Pounds per Square Inch. 

This is great!  Now for each type of loading you can look up recommended maximum pressures per SAAMI spec PSI.  What could be simpler?  What more could you want?

I dunno.  Something.  For some people, anyway.

Enter the Commission Internationale Permanente pour l'Epreuve des Armes à Feu Portatives (CIP) -- Euro jerks for whom SAAMI was just not good enough.  CIP decided to take a giant step back to slow and expensive ammunition testing that uses a special (!) strain gauge that actually sits inside (!) the brass cartridge case, requiring: drilling the case, inserting that case into the chamber and lining it up with the strain gauge hole, inserting the strain gauge, securing the whole shootin' match, and then touching off the round to get the data.  (Did I mention that they are drilling! into a live! cartidge?!)

But that's not what I really wanted to talk about. 

What I really wanted to ponder is the ongoing insistence that military ammo somehow has a higher maximum pressure specification than civilian ammo.  "Oh, don't shoot 5.56×45 NATO ammo in a .223 Remington gun!!!11!  5.56 is 62,366 PSI and .223 is only rated for 55,000 PSI man!"

That kind of talk makes me feel tired.

Yes, the CIP's drilled through EPVAT measurement is 430 megaPascals (62,366 PSI).  But look what you're doing there:  you're measuring the tree trunk at a different height. 

Minor variations in chamber specs notwithstanding, .223 Rem = 5.56×45 if you use the same measurement methods.  Period.  The U.S. Military SCATP method just is the SAAMI method and the rounds under both names yield a pressure of 380 megaPascals Maximum, or 55,000 PSI. 

Please don't confuse yourself.  You're just measuring the tree trunk closer to the ground. 

On the subject of Amazon.com

The online retail distribution giant seems to be changing from Amazon in the sense of "earth's biggest river" (whence the "earth's biggest bookstore" of yore), into Amazon in the sense of heavily armored warrior bitch of myth.  As in Beware! Stay Back! Psycho Chick Ahead! Abandon Hope of Customer Service All Ye Who Enter Here!

Yes I still have Prime.  But then I still have a car and a California driver's license, and that's a pain in the backside, too.

Maximum Randomness Meets Its Match

Years ago when Ernő Rubik's Cube was a hot gift idea, the brother-in-law introduced me to the mathematical concept of maximum randomness.  Apparently there is a position of the colored pieces of Rubik's Cube from which ANY move takes you closer, not farther away from, the solution: the maximum order of a single color on each face of the cube.

Maximum chaos, or maximum randomness.

Like the sign in the hands of the panhandler says: "Anything would help."

An interesting math concept.  When brother-in-law handed me his mixed-up Rubik's Cube and announced that, for once, anything I did would help, I of course had to take it on faith.  He's a bright guy and takes his mathematics quite seriously, after all.

"Maximum chaos" has bounced around in my mind [I know: "Is he talking about the concept or the usual background noise in his brain now?" And how could I tell?] since the early 1980s.  But I'm not sure I ever really believed in the idea until last week.

I have met maximum randomness in the real world!  It's not pretty.

Opening a new box of blue nitrile gloves from my usual supplier, I beheld not 100 blue nitrile powdered gloves, size medium, lying flat and docile in a stack like Kleenex; I beheld a box packed with the shriveled carcasses of withered blue cocoons, a mass grave of blue nitrile prunes preserved clutching each other in their final agony, an expended and dessicated worm-orgy of rubber gloves packed, pressed, sealed at the factory in Thailand so I could save my delicate digits from the ravages of the industrial workplace.

The picture is a handful of gloves.  Six? Eight? Hard to tell.

How do you even put these on your hand?  There's no opening.

Somebody once said, "You must find the way."  Maybe it was Lao Tzu.  Maybe it was somebody who merely looked like Lao Tzu (which come to think of it is probably most of everybody, ever, on on the planet).

At this point maximum randomness is your friend.  Reach out and pinch a little piece of blue glove anywhere.  It doesn't matter where.  with your other hand pull the wad of wrinkly glove away from the pinch.  There.  You have introduced ORDER to the system.  You will now be able to see the glove shape, to find the opening, and to introduce your hand to the inner sanctum of industrial safety.

Why did I write this?  I figured, "Anything would help!"

Bücherverbrennung 10 May 1933

It might start with burning books, but it ends with piles of corpses.  It starts with "purification" of thought and speech, and ends up with secret police enforcing the will of the State.  It starts with the self-appointed cultural elite having the "correct" ideas, and becomes a death cult. 

On this day 85 years ago, 10 May 1933, the Deutsche Studentenschaft student group staged a massive book burning at the Opera Plaza in Berlin. 

[photo credit Liz Sheld's PJ Media Morning Briefing]

German Wikipedia pompously explains:

"On May 10, 1933, in National Socialist Germany, book burnings took place as part of an action against the non-German spirit of the German student body. Tens of thousands of books by Jewish, Marxist and pacifist writers were publicly confiscated and burned in 22 university towns, beginning with the Berlin Opera Square. In June 1933, and in the months thereafter, numerous other actions followed. The staging and the cult ritual, the systematics of performance have given this auto-da-fé the rank of uniqueness in the continuity of the historical series from antiquity to the most recent present." [thanks, google translate!]

Side note. The German wiki authors seem to be hedging their bets, striving to place the late National Socialist unpleasantness in a wider historical context. "Continuity of the historical series." See! Even St. Paul condoned burning the books of the pagan sorcerers! Yeah, Acts 19. Hmpf. The big difference, though? The Mages of Ephesus voluntarily converted and brought their own books for destruction.

One thing burning is good for: totalitarians. Kill the beast, cut off its head, burn it, grind the ash and flush it down the sewers.

As Gerard says,

The vampire by sunlight or stake.
The wolfman by silver in bone.
The demon by bell, book, and pentagram.
The fascist by fire alone.

Okay so now I'm conflicted

My default reaction to all things Starbucks is negative. Starbucks is not really a place I would choose to spend time or (not very often anyway) money.  Plus, the coffee is not that great.

So when Starbucks upper echelon decided to close stores one afternoon in May to conduct training on racial "issues" etc., my reaction was negative.  For one thing, a manager who throws an employee under the bus is not a good manager; as a military officer who throws his unit in the way of blame or danger is not a good officer. A Starbucks executive who throws a Starbucks manager under the BLM bus is not a good executive.  For another thing, Law/Order. 

But now the Starbucks training decision is being criticized because the anti-bias training session agenda is planned to include information from the (Jewish) Anti Defamation League. Black Lives Matter and the Women's March people are screaming this morning because, in fine,  JOOOOOS!  The cited article quotes Linda Sarsour calling the ADL "an anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian organization that peddles Islamophobia."

That's my conflict point. 

See, I'm all in favor of being against antisemitism ("I hate Illinois Nazis!"),  so Crowndot must risk being classified as a anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian organization that peddles Islamophobia, and commend Starbucks for including the ADL even if the idea of anti-bias training is repellent to me. 

As I get older and older, life in the starkly divided United States actually seems to become easier in this:  if the enemy of my friend is my enemy -- the enemy is more and more likely to declare his position these days in no uncertain terms. 

But in this conflicted instance, the friend (ADL) of my (usually) enemy (Starbucks) is actually my friend.  Rules were not made to be broken, but rules are often contraindicated.