Question of the Week
What is the stupidest thing you’ve heard somebody say in the last two weeks?
What is the stupidest thing you’ve heard somebody say in the last two weeks?
When I make a statement, I know that I am correct. The proper temperature for the bed of my 3D printer for PLA is 55°C. As far as I know, this is correct.
If someone were to question that statement, I would consider that I am wrong. Being wrong is part of being human.
Assuming that I am wrong, I will go verify the statement. And what I would find is that there are more pieces that go into that statement, for example, the build plate I’m using.
Having an open, learning mind allows me to self-correct when I am wrong. I actually do this so fast, in real time, that people don’t even notice that I had something wrong. Somebody says I’m wrong because of a particular reason. I evaluate and change my position, taking in the new information.
People remember the outcome, where I’m usually correct; they don’t remember the incorrect starting point. It is a process to get to the correct answer.
I’ve done this here. I’ve made a statement; one of you has corrected me or added more information. I verify, then move forward with the new information.
Unfortunately, we are surrounded by people that are incapable of doing this.
These people cannot conceive that they might be wrong. They argue by expert.
My second wife used argument by expert constantly in our interactions. Since she wasn’t able to support her opinions, she turned to an expert and would tell me I was wrong because this expert was saying what she was saying.
This would require me to locate experts who she would accept, which she never did.
The problem with this style of argument is that you are not looking at the subject. You are not investigating the subject. Instead, you are vetting a third party. You have lost the point of the discussion.
I don’t need an expert to tell me that dropping hot glass into cold water is a good way to end up with shards of glass.
The need for people that are so stupid they require an “expert” to tell them what they should think drives me bonkers.
An example. NH has no income tax. Most of the tax revenue comes from property taxes. You are taxed a certain amount per $1000 of value your property has.
For one area of the state, the tax rate is $34.37/$1000. With an average home/property assessed at $215,000, giving an annual tax of $7389.55.
Now consider a small farm with 40 acres at $5,000/acre. That puts the value at $200,000. The assessed value at around $120,000 with an annual tax of $4124.40.
Now NH wants to protect farmers from heavy taxes so they have an option for your land to be put into “current use.” This covers undeveloped land (hunting, fishing areas) and farmland. If your land is in current use, you only pay taxes on 10% of your assessed value. So the farmer won’t be paying $4124; instead, he’ll be paying $412.40. A significant savings.
This is all well documented in the state’s laws. There are people who do nothing but defend current use cases. The gist is that if you have at least 10 acres in current use, you get this tax break.
A person I knew worked for a town. The town was having a shortfall. They were attempting to raise revenue by getting more land pulled out of current use. This person was concerned about their land, 125 acres, 123 of which were in current use. They asked the town lawyer about their concerns about putting up a small 10×20 hunting cabin in the woods.
The city lawyer told her that the hunting cabin would cause all 123 acres to come out of current use.
Even when I showed her the statutes, even when she was presented with the literature from the current use defenders, she took the word of her “expert” over what the plain text of the law said.
Nothing I said would convince her that she was wrong. She didn’t need to consider that she was wrong because it wasn’t her opinion; it was her “experts” opinion.
She was stupid.
On the other hand, she wanted to post the land as no hunting. That would have taken the acres out of current use.
Because she never learned to read the law for herself, nor did she hire a lawyer to advise her, she didn’t know that posting the land could have taken it out of current use.
The left is full of stupid people. People that can’t think, but they can certainly regurgitate what they have been told.
COVID-19 is so deadly that healthy children must be vaccinated against COVID-19. And you should wear your mask when in your car alone or out on a surfboard or in a boat in the middle of a lake.
They could never apply logic to their position because they never evaluated how they got there.
The other day I heard from a teacher friend that they had observed ICE removing a student from the middle school. Except it turned out that she hadn’t observed it. Two of her fellow teachers had observed it.
I was concerned. Was this the mythical unicorn ICE action? ICE agents storming schools to grab kids, throw them into handcuffs, and drag them out?
Well, no. It turns out that the kid was an illegal alien. His parents have removal orders against them. They had been picked up while the kid was in school.
ICE came to the school, told the admin that they needed to pick up the kid. The admin walked the agents to the classroom; the ICE agents and the kid walked out together. No muss, no fuss.
They were making sure the kid didn’t come home to an empty home.
Still no unicorns.
These people do not know how to think for themselves. They are too stupid to hold an opinion, so they borrow other people’s opinions.
They think they know the law because they had a one-hour seminar taught by radical activists.
A deportation enforcement officer will have between 100 and 200 HOURS of training in the law, focusing on immigration law. ICE agents are required to be college graduates. Their training is provided by actual experts in the law, and they are tested to confirm their knowledge.
You can’t fix stupid.
Mobs are an organism. They act like a living creature. They might be made of people, but they react in known and predictable ways.
Mobs move in the path of least resistance towards their goal. If one person chooses a different path, others in the mob will follow, not a lot. But more people will follow those, and pretty soon there is a significant part of the mob moving in that new direction.
This is why breaking contact with the mob can be difficult. You need to fade out of the mob, not attract attention that causes parts to follow.
When there is a junction, the mob will flow down multiple paths from that junction unless guided. This is how multiple blocks can become involved with the mob: they move in the same general direction, but they fill all available space.
Mobs avoid hard points. They will flow around those hard points, but hard points cause a pain-like response, and the mob recoils from contact.
Riots are a type of mob behavior. My mentor told the story of how he and his Johns Hopkins buddies rushed to the rowhouse of one of the buddy’s moms. There they set up in the front window with long guns.
As the story was recounted to me, every rowhouse on that block suffered serious damage except for three. The rowhouse they were in and the two rowhouses directly across the street from them.
The mob avoided that hardpoint. It wasn’t worth the pain, and the organism retreated.
Mobs are dangerous. People get caught up in them and don’t know how to extract themselves. People that would never dream of being violent or vandalizing property will do it without even a thought. They follow anybody who acts like a leader.
During student protests that turned into riots at my University in the 60s, before I got there, there was no vandalism until one person threw a brick through the plate glass window of an upscale store. The student newspaper ran a picture of the man throwing that brick through the window to go with the story of the police vowing to track down the student who did it.
Oh, the man throwing the brick? He was dressed as a police officer.
The REST of the windows, those were broken by students who followed suit. Once one act of violence happened, the rest of the mob followed suit.
During the January 6th march to the Capitol, instigators changed the protest into a mob. That mob did not turn into a riot; they just did things that, as individuals, they would not normally do.
The reason that it didn’t turn into a riot was because there was no drive among the people to be violent.
We compare that to the BLM riots.
In Kenosha, we saw protests turn to mobs turn to riots. One of the interesting things that was caught on camera was people in all-black clothing, carrying umbrellas, throwing those first bricks. Starting the process of turning the mob into a riot.
The people in the streets were already angry. The media had been stirring up hate and anger for days and weeks. It took very little to drive the protests into mobs and the mobs into riots.
But there are things that mobs don’t do. They don’t have Command and Control structures. They don’t have security details. They don’t have assigned tasks for different units. They don’t have units.
One of the interesting, but not surprising, features of the “mobs” in MN is just how well organized they are.
All of which leads me to believe that they are not organic. There are parts that are useful fools/tools. But there are other parts that are most definitely acting to destabilize societal norms in the area. To foment a revolution.
We have some good delivery drivers, but my goodness, some are horrible.
I’ve had a half dozen packages delivered to my “porch or front door”. With pictures of boxes, or packages in a white garbage bag sitting in a pile of snow under my mailbox. 2 feet from where the melt puddle forms.
On Saturday they promised a delivery. They then told me they couldn’t deliver because of severe weather.
The cause? They didn’t want to go up the driveway.
Sunday they delivered up the same driveway with no changes.
I’m sad to say that USPS does a better job of package delivery. Amazon drivers will flat-out lie.
That’s nto to say we don’t have some good ones, Saturday and Sunday drivers are bad, in general.
When I purchased my first 3D printer, it came as a kit. One of the “spider” style.
By this I mean it had three towers with arms that supported a hot-end platform. By moving the base of the arms up and down the towers, the platform would move in 3 space.
It was the fastest type of printer available.
Unfortunately, it was not a good choice. The instructions were not good, and in particular, they got the size of one of the drive wheels wrong.
The printer was designed around 3mm filament at a time when most hotends had moved to 1.75mm. I paid to have a 3D printer dude tune my printer to make it work. It didn’t, but he did upgrade it to 1.75mm filament.
There were three types of filament at the time, PLA, PA, and ABS.
PLA is a starch-based plastic; it has a relatively low melting point but is cheap. It is the standard for most prints.
ABS is the standard plastic you find almost everywhere.
PA is Nylon.
I purchased some ABS and Nylon but never had what I would consider a successful print.
Fast forward to today, and the types of filaments have exploded.
Besides the three listed above, they now have PETG, TPU, PC, ASA, PLA+, PA6, PA12. And many of these are available with CF (carbon fiber) or GF (glass fiber) added.
PETG is stronger than PLA and has a higher melting point. It is commonly used. I use it anywhere I might need something that will withstand a little heat.
TPU is a printable rubber. You can print custom gaskets with it. It is also used for non-slip feet.
PC is polycarbonate; it prints clear and is heat resistant and strong. ASA is a stronger than ABS material.
All of these do a job well. And I’m going a bit bonkers trying to make sure I hit the correct price/performance mark.
The good news, for me, is that I’m starting to come out of the print for the printer and starting to print tools and organizational things for me.

In May of 1963, there were mass protests in Birmingham, AL. Blacks were protesting racist laws, passed by Democrats, and enforced by Democrats.
The laws were bad. The leaders were bad. The cops and other enforcers were bad.
That isn’t to say there wasn’t more than a bit of propaganda going around.

A motel manager was told to get the blacks out of the motel pool. His orders were ignored. The police were being ignored.
The law was bad. The people enforcing it were bad. The hotel manager? We don’t know, but he was painted as bad.
The gallon of acid he poured into that pool would not have done a damn thing to anybody in the pool. Unless it was poured on somebody, it was so diluted b the time it entered the pool that it did not and could not cause harm.
He used fear and ignorance to drive the blacks from his pool, because he was ordered to do so.
Not every person in the South was racist. Not every person was bad. Enough of them were to paint an entire section of our country as evil racists.
64 years later, conservatives are still being painted as racist using these images of Democrats enforcing Democrat-passed laws.
The problem with dealing with people in the spur of the moment is that “bad” or “evil” is not visible in the moment. It takes time.
I still remember the first time I saw the George Floyd video. I was enraged. I was glad I didn’t have to choose between watching a cop kill a black man or shooting the cop and spending the rest of my life in jail.
It turned out that every single thing told to me by that video was a lie. And my country burned.
The evil that is the modern (and historic) Democrat came to the forefront. They held “protests” that turned into riot after riot after riot.
They attacked federal buildings for weeks on end. They took over parts of cities and refused to allow people free travel through their city.
And they lied to us. The entire memo of “mostly peaceful” comes from a reporter telling us that the “protest” was mostly peaceful while the rioters set fires in the background.
When Kyle showed up to defend a commercial property, because the Minneapolis police wouldn’t or couldn’t, he ended up being chased by a convicted felon. When that felon attempted to take Kyle’s rifle from him, Kyle shot him, and made a good communist out of him.
A little later, another man became known as Lefty. He was carrying concealed. He attempted a sneak attack on Kyle, when Kyle pointed his rifle at Lefty, Lefty stopped, then continued his attack, quickly losing the use of his right arm.
Lefty was not legally carrying, by the laws of Minnesota. His permit to carry had expired.
He absolutely had the right to carry. The Second Amendment protects the right of every person to armed self-defense, and more. The law that made it illegal for Lefty to carry was unconstitutional. It might not have been found such, yet, but it is.
I will stand up to anyone to clearly, loudly state that Lefty had the right to carry.
He did not have the right to misuse his gun. When his gun came out of its holster to threaten Kyle, he was no longer on Second Amendment protected grounds.
You have the right to carry. You have the right to defend yourself. You don’t have the right to use your gun for criminal acts.
We need to be aware that rights are not situational. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to protest. Your right to carry doesn’t end when you go to a restaurant that serves beer. Your right to carry doesn’t end because somebody else is scared.
The Fifth Amendment does NOTend when a person is accused. That would make it worthless.
Your rights are not situational.
I’ve been told I live in a MAGA bubble. If I wasn’t brainwashed by FauxNews and actually cared about others, I would no longer be a Maggot.
The reality is that I can’t escape their noise and opinions. It is everywhere.
Ally and I noticed a while ago that every cop show on TV talks about “legally registered guns.” Every single one of them. NCIS was horrible about this. Law and Order had the excuse that it was taking place in NYC where all “legal” guns are supposed to be registered.
Though an egregious one popped up recently. The detectives of L&O were investigating a “sniper.” They tracked the gun back to the FFL that sold the gun.
They then accused the FFL of attempting to hide the identity of the purchaser because the signature on the 4473 was illegible. They made a big deal about it.
Every 4473 that I’ve ever filled out requires me to fill out the form with my printed information and the FFL then copies my government ID information (DL) onto the form. If the left didn’t lie they wouldn’t have anything to say.
What is a trope or common “everybody knows” that you see in movies or shows that is pure left-wing talking points?
I don’t like losing. I hate losing. I don’t want to lose.
In war, if you are not cheating, you’re not playing to win.
The Democrats and the Leftists of my Nation have declared war on me and mine decades ago. They hid it. They disguised it. They cheated.
They knew they were at war, and they were willing to do anything to win.
We saw this in gay marriage. They fought battle after battle, losing every time. They put forth a referendum in California, of all places. And the people of California soundly defeated the drive for gay marriage. The people of California amended their state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.
The left then found an activist judge to rule that the amended constitution was unconstitutional under the state constitution. What BS.
This led to a Supreme Court decision. And suddenly, gay marriage is the law of the land, against the wishes of the people.
And now I’m told I must accept it forever and ever, amen.
The left took over education, from K-12 to higher education. They won.
They attacked the truth through their constant lies on TV and later “main stream media”. They won.
At every step, they won.
And my side let them. Because we were too polite. Because we took the high road. Because “it was the right thing to do.”
After Sandy Hook, I got in a discussion on Facebook with a liberal. She wanted assault weapons banned. She cared for the little children.
I went on the attack. I threw every argument that had ever been tossed at me, at us. I told her that she hated children because she didn’t want people to defend them. That she wasn’t willing to sacrifice for the children.
For three days I hammered on her. I wasn’t giving an inch until her niece, a good friend, asked me to stop. It turned out that this liberal anti-gun was a teacher who had dedicated her life to children. She couldn’t understand why she was being accused of such heinous thoughts and deeds by a stranger.
I took the high road and stopped. No longer.
We, The People, attempted to stand up to the thieves who stole 2020. The result was that people were thrown in prison, denied their rights, lied about, socially destroyed, and financially destroyed.
To this day, the left lies about what happened. None of the people responsible for that travesty of justice have been punished.
I want them punished!
I don’t want my enemies armed. Not with knowledge, not with training, and certainly not with firearms.
They have exposed themselves to the world as animals. Unwilling to be active members of our societal contract. I want them to suffer.
I also believe in the right to free speech. I believe in the right to armed self-defense. I believe in the rights acknowledged and protected by our constitution.
And it is hard, really hard, to let those evil worms exercise their rights. I want to escalate their sound attacks to an extreme.
I’m reminded of the guy who mounted an aircraft carrier landing light, or something like that, in the back of his pickup truck. When somebody refused to dim their lights, he would light that thing off. Instant blinding of the person who was looking in that general direction.
That’s what I want in the sound world. They’re using a 50W Megaphone, I want to hit them with a 500W megaphone. I’d use a 5000W megaphone, but I’m not sure if I could carry that, even on a vehicle.
I’m of the opinion that ICE should be treating those insurrectionists blocking traffic as speed bumps, and I want it to be legal for you and me to treat them as speed bumps.
They have lost my empathy. They might live next to me, but they are not my neighbors. Neighbors have agreed to a social contract. These monsters have not.
They have no morals. They deserve no mercy from me.
They need to be at the strong receiving end of FO.
The right to self-defense is what keeps us from having mass graves.
I wasn’t actually planning on saying more after my comment on the snow post, but since I’m already here I guess I might as well. I’ll try to get my point across better this time, it should at least be less personally confrontational. You say that “THEY are worried, frightened, terrified, panicked” and that is your first and possibly most serious mistake. Never, ever, give the slightest bit of credence or respect to the crocodile tears of professional crybullies. They are not feeling these things (if they were scared in the least, then they would not spending every day harassing and threatening anyone who they think is ICE or a Trump supporter), they are making deliberate, malicious efforts at manipulation and emotional blackmail. Liberals always do this, it is literally the only move they have other than gaslighting, and when that fails, outright violence. I do not support their claim to civil rights because I know, with absolute certainly, that they will take those rights from me and everyone else who does not kneel to lick their jackboots the very first moment they can. I know this because every last one of them tells me this, gleefully, every single day.
They have spent years telling me I deserve to suffer and die because I don’t want to wear a face diaper or subject myself or my family to dangerous and unproven fake vaccines. They have spent years telling me I deserve to suffer and die because I don’t think children should be sexually mutilated and abused. Hell, they’ve spent years telling me I deserve to suffer and die because I want to be able to own the very same guns they themselves are now rushing out to buy.
I do not offer them the protections of the Social Contract because they have repeatedly broken it in the most grotesque and reprehensible of ways, and have spent years telling me to my face that they are going to take every one of those rights away from me and mine the moment they have the power to do so.
If you allow declared enemies of civilization to treat the Social Contract as a game of “we can punch you all we want and you can’t hit back” you will be beaten to death.
— I don’t know what to write about. comment by TCK
I disagree with everything you said. I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Rights exist. We are all born with them. Every person in the world.
We are lucky to live in the United States, where many of those rights are protected by our constitution.
Those are not our Second Amendment rights. Those are our Second Amendment protected rights.
The same is true of all of our rights. Some are explicitly protected through the Bill of Rights, others are implicitly protected through the body of the Constitution and other Amendments.
TCK is wrong. Civil rights do apply to everyone.
My morals are not situational. Ally’s morals are not situational.
TCK’s seem to be situational. Rights for him but not for them.
When Dickwad was accused of sexually molesting the daughters of my best friend, I waited until I had seen enough evidence to know it was true.
When the detective asked me what I thought should happen to him, my answer was simple: After he is found guilty and sentenced, I want him placed in genpop.
Dickwad still had rights. He had a right to a jury of his peers. He had a right to face his accusers. He had the right to not incriminate himself. He had a right not to be tortured.
When he was convicted of the crimes he was accused of, he was sentenced, and his rights were removed from him.
He lost the right to vote, he lost the right to keep and bear arms, and he lost the right to move freely. And I fully expect he will lose his right to life will be removed from him before he gets out of prison.
Now I’m going to put on my administrative hat.
TCK: Feel free to leave. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
If you do stay, drop the insults. Ally put on her administrator hat and gave you the rule.
She told you that “Go fuck yourself.” is unacceptable. I echo that. “Go fuck yourself.” is unacceptable.
Her reply was thoughtful and did not attack you. She expressed her opinion clearly without attacking you.
Your reply again resorted to insults. You can’t point to a single thing in her original article or her reply that even remotely sounds like she’s being an “asshole.” You are wrong. Take a step back and read her article again and her comments without taking it personally.
Civil rights apply to everyone. You might not like it, but they do.
Do you even know what gaslighting means? Ally’s perspective is incredibly valuable to me, and I hope to the blog in general. Because she isn’t a “far-right conservative”. She’s barely right of what center used to be. Her perspective brings how the left perceives things.
She isn’t telling you this is a reality; it is how the left perceives things.
Are their fears irrational? Absolutely. If the Trump administration was disappearing people, like they claim, they wouldn’t know it was happening. If they were out of control, they would be rounding up those insurrectionists and throwing them in the oubliette, never to be seen again. That’s not happening. This means their fears are irrational.
“[Y]ears brutalizing the innocent” doesn’t seem to match with my memory. Those people up in MN didn’t brutalize the innocent. Maybe the Joe Biden puppet masters did, but not those people.
You might think “they” are guilty, you haven’t even presented enough evidence for me to consider them guilty. Regardless, people don’t lose their rights because they say nasty, evil, horrible things. They have to commit an actual crime.
If they haven’t committed a crime but what they did should be a crime, then we need to work to make it a crime.
We don’t get to say, “They committed a moral crime” anymore than they get to say it to us.
The reason they are called “civil rights” has nothing to do with social contracts. They are called that because they are “civil” cases, not criminal cases.
Criminal cases can only be initiated by the state. Civil cases can be initiated by anybody. A boundary dispute between to neighbors is a civil case.
A case about a violation of your Second Amendment protected rights is a civil case.