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Aaaand Another Example

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Here I’ll switch up just a little bit and talk about stuff other than guns.  Here’s an interesting article about some REALLY heavy equipment: World’s Biggest Dump Truck Goes Electric. It’s about a new vehicle (known in the mining industry as a “Haul Truck”) with a payload of 500 metric tons. That’s 1,102,000lbs. Say it Dr. Evil style, “Over one millllllion pounds!”

But I take exception to this bit from the “World’s Biggest Dump Truck” story:

A massive vehicle that can haul loads weighing more than 500 metric tons—the equivalent of 350 VW Golfs—just hit the work site in Siberia, claiming the title of the world’s largest dump truck.

But it has another claim that makes it even more impressive: an electric drive motor. Electric-powered vehicles have been around to do heavy lifting in mines for years, but those trucks, known as trolley trucks, received their electricity from overhead power lines.

The Belarusian truck manufacturer BelAZ wanted the efficiency of the trolley trucks, but in a free-moving behemoth suitable for open pit mining.

Ah, no. Yes, in some mines overhead lines are used, but in every mine I do work at (all open-pit), the trucks are exclusively internally driven and they’re just called “haul trucks.” The biggest trucks I work around are the 360 short-ton (720,000lb) capacity Caterpillar 797, and 400 short-ton (800,000lb) capacity Liebherr T282, the first is a mechanical-drive truck with a huge diesel engine running the wheels through a 7-speed automatic transmission, but the second is a 3,700Hp diesel-electric. Big electric motors in haul trucks are not new. Not hardly.

But you don’t get how BIG these things are until you’re near one:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKpTVbQPX_E?rel=0]
Awhile back I got a headhunter call looking for someone willing to be a Liebherr field service technician for their haul trucks.  I’m a bit old for that and told them so.  Maybe twenty years ago, but they didn’t have the technology twenty years ago….

Layers of Editorial Oversight…

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Via reader (and heroic comment-recoverer) John Hardin comes another example of how accurate the media is when reporting on StuffTheyKnowNothingAbout™ – in this case, guns:

Layers of Editorial Oversight photo Airsoft_MampP.jpg
Well, THAT one is “primarily plastic” because it’s an Airsoft TOY.  My M&P9 has a completely steel slide and barrel, as does every other M&P model I’m aware of.

This is from a CNN story, The U.S. Army is seeking a new gun. Some excerpts:

The Beretta M9, used by the U.S. Army since 1985, is manufactured by a 500-year-old Italian company, which has a factory in Maryland. The Beretta was the “lethal weapon” in the 1987 box office hit action movie “Lethal Weapon.”

No, Sparky. Detective Martin Riggs was the “Lethal Weapon” in the action movie “Lethal Weapon.” He carried a Beretta, among other firearms.  (Mel Gibson also flinched uncontrollably when he fired it, ruining some of the suspension of disbelief, though he played crazy like it was an Oscar-worthy role.)

Here’s an interesting admission, however:

Polymer pistols have become increasingly popular as lightweight and ergonomic, particularly among women, a fast-growing demographic among gun users.

A growing demographic even though, we’re told, that there is declining gun ownership!  So once again we’re “informed” by the supposed Gatekeepers of Information, again exercising their role as the clergy in the Church of State.

Yawn.

Thanks, John.  I’m not blogging much, but it’s still nice to get pointers to interesting stuff.

UPDATE:  Fellow Tucson blogger David Hardy points out more errors.

Loss of Faith

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Back in March I wrote R·S·P·E·C·T for and the Rule of Law about the increasing and increasingly outrageous abuses of local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies upon the citizenry of this country. One image I posted in that piece was this:


What we’re witnessing in Ferguson, MO is the reaction of a population when they have completely lost faith in the Rule of Law. You may argue (and I may agree with you) as to whether this population chose the wrong “victim” as their breaking point, but the fact remains that – as a group – blacks feel that the legal system oppresses them and kills their male population with impunity. As was pointed out in comments to that earlier piece, the image above was an abbreviated version of this one:

photo becomethis.jpg
Apparently the end result is not a sniper in a ghillie suit, it’s this:

Ferguson photo 72C7809D-9BCA-4E65-A509-71E14DB8900D-140810-DC-Riots4A-640x413.jpg
Right now.

Rev. Donald Sensing wrote in the distant past of 2004,

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

Barack Obama stated in October of 2008,

…we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Now in November of 2014 that transformation seems to be nearing completion, and that transformation is a growing nationwide loss of respect for and faith in the Rule of Law.  Ferguson is a spasm of outrage, limited (now) to small areas.  But I’m reminded once again of this Quote of the Day from the now-defunct Woodpile Report:

Middle class America is no less violent than any other people. They seem passive because they’re results oriented. They rise not out of blood frenzy but to solve the otherwise insoluble. Their methods of choice are good will, cooperation, forbearance, negotiation and finally, appeasement, roughly in that order. Only when these fail to end the abuse do they revert to blowback. And they do so irretrievably. Once the course is set and the outcome defined, doubt is put aside. The middle class is known, condemned actually, for carrying out violence with the efficiency of an industrial project where bloody destruction at any scale is not only in play, it’s a metric. Remorse is left for the next generation, they’ll have the leisure for it. We’d like to believe this is merely dark speculation. History says it isn’t.

I wish I’d archived that entire piece before it disappeared.

As I’ve noted more than once, our austerity riots are going to be epic.

“Tough history coming” indeed.

Quote of the Day – Education Edition

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My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

– Danusha V. Goska, 10 Reasons I Am No Longer a Leftist

Read the whole thing.

I am reminded of this 2011 “Truth in Fiction” excerpt from the science fiction novel The Road to Damascus:

(The party) is composed of two tiers. The lower tier produces many outspoken members who make their demands known to the upper tier. The lower tier is derived from the inner-city population that serves as the base of the party. The lower tier’s members are generally educated in public school systems and if they aspire to advanced training, they are educated in facilities provided by the state. This wing constitutes the majority of (the party’s) membership, but contributes little or nothing to party theory or platform. It votes the party line and is rewarded with cash payments, subsidized housing, subsidized education, and occasional preferential employment in government positions. The lower tier provides only a handful of clearly token individuals allowed to serve in high offices.

The upper tier, which includes most of the party’s management, virtually all the appointed and elected government officials, and all of the party’s decision-makers, is drawn exclusively from suburban areas where wealth is a fundamental criterion for admittance as a resident. These party members are generally educated at private schools and attend private colleges. They are not affected by food-rationing schemes, income caps or taxation laws, as the legislation drafted and passed by members of their social group inevitably contains loopholes that effectively shelter their income and render them immune from unpleasant statues that restrict the lives of lower-tier party members and all nonparty citizens.

(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This….is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.