.454 Casull and other Idiocy

I will start off saying I am not good with pistols. I don't have strong enough wrists for serious recoil, and the flinch I get makes my aim terrible. This is unfortunate, but I make up for it by being really good with carbines and other long-guns. I prefer flight to fight.

There is a popular myth in the media, usually fed by ignorance and a creepy sort of gun-fetish, over the .454 Casull. This is a round based on the .45 Long Colt, loaded like a Magnum in a strengthened firearm. Unfortunately, the round is... finicky. I have seen them fired at ranges. You can't avoid the noise. They are much louder than a full power .44 Magnum, itself horribly loud. They also have a lot of muzzle flash, which makes then nearly useless for self defense. If the muzzle flash is bright, at night this will blind you meaning you only get one shot against an attacker. Unlike the video, created by Japanese gun fetishists because Japanese people aren't allowed to have guns, at all, the Casull case will not work in an automatic handgun. Strictly revolvers. Revolvers are generally a bad idea for night time self defense anyway, since they flash in the gap between the cylinder, which holds the cartridges, and the barrel. This is usually measured in thousandths, however the pressure of the load of hot gasses is often 25,000 pounds per square inch, and oddly enough, this corrodes steel as it goes screaming past with a brilliant flare of burning powder, like a flashbulb. Revolvers have many flaws. When you know the facts, you find people using them to either be true experts willing to live with the costs, or massively ignorant of them. In the real world, a pistol has interchangeable parts you can swap yourself. In the real world, a revolver must be given to a gunsmith, to manually and carefully correct defects which is genuinely expensive, time consuming, and never ending. If you use it, it will be damaged. Thousands of dollars of effort and labor costs, for each revolver. And you can just swap those parts in an automatic pistol. Automatics are, oddly enough, cheaper and more reliable.

What makes the Casull finicky? Well, the powder load has to be VERY precise. Too much, it explodes the gun like a grenade, blowing apart your hand and possibly killing the person next to you. That would make you murderer, btw. Firearms rules are: you are legally responsible for the bullet. No kidding. Same with kabooms, what they call a firearms malfunction that explodes it. Such events are rare, but not impossible. Anybody who says nice things about Soviet weapons should be aware that their ammunition is of the lowest quality, with powder variations averaging one grain, which is a lot. This contributes to their inaccuracy. Liking Soviet guns marks you as IGNORANT.

Too little powder in the case, the bullet doesn't move and the case overpressures, once again exploding. The margin of error? 0.33 grain. That's it. This is a very small amount. In most calibers, you can vary a load plus or minus 5 grains, which slows it down or speeds it up until overpressure blows out the primer and stretches the case, obvious danger signs to an expert loader like me. I spent hundreds of hours perfecting my craft. I liked making ammo more than shooting it. I eventually figured out that I just like precision assembly work. This helped me stay in a job 3 years longer than I should have, but we all make mistakes. If only I'd become an auto mechanic. Sigh.

The gist of this is, the .454 Casull is a finicky prima donna round. The others like it, such as the .44 Magnum can be loaded nearly as hot, without exploding, or down drastically until it reaches .44 Special, which only has 1/3 the energy, around that of a .45 Long Colt black powder. Knowing you can fine tune the velocity, and thus recoil, of a .44 magnum makes it a far better round for an inexperienced handgun shooter. And even that is debatable considering that a .357 is even more tunable, as you can put standard .38 special through a .357 without a problem, or .38 +P (high pressure), or .357 magnum, or .357 +P (higher pressure magnum) in the same revolver. The recoil of .38 special is not bad. It won't give you a flinch so you can aim it pretty well. This is a modern version of the .35 (same diameter) used by most gunfighters in the Old West. Yahoos used a .45 Colt peacemaker (.45 Long Colt). Few got good with them because the recoil was bad. The heavy weight over the barrel in a .45 ACP pistol helps tame the recoil of the 230 grain "ball" round in the famous 1911 Automatic designed by Mormon John Moses Browning. Browning eventually corrected the flaws of this pistol in his later Hi-Power 9mm, including magazine capacity, range, and removing the linkage pin that kept breaking and remains a problem today. The Hi-Power is the most popular handgun on Earth, btw. It and its copies are insufficient for killing bears, but perfectly adequate for Cougars, wolves, wild/feral dogs, rabid raccoons, 2-legged predators, and will do so out to about 70 yards. At 50 yards, you need to aim about 13 feet over the head of a target using a 1911, since EVERY bullet drops under the effect of gravity after leaving the barrel. This is another truth the ignorant ignore.

Ignorant people also like AR-15s. They are the US army's rifle. They aren't very nice. No military weapon is very nice. All of them are cheap, low bidder, crap. I have handled many and been seriously unimpressed. Always choose a bolt action hunting rifle over a military gun if you want to hit stuff with one or two shots. The military one just throws more rounds downrange and tries to hit by chance. This is unacceptable for private citizens when every bullet is your personal legal responsibility. Especially the ones you miss with. They keep going. Even the ones you hit with keep going. Many people don't understand that. A clear shot is awfully hard to insure. And a safe backstop is rare. Hollywood is doing nobody favors. And video games should insist on friendly fire being the default. It is less fun, but would certainly teach better control and proper respect for firearms. It might make people a lot more responsible.

 

Hollywood, for another example, loves the Desert Eagle handgun, built by some insane mechanical engineer in Israel. It weighs 4 pounds. It has the gas system from an M-16, shrunk down, fitted to a cartridge with a rebated rim, a known flaw in firearms that most mechanical engineers avoid, with a highly overpowered charge which still has less energy than a standard M-16 does, at the muzzle and at 100 yards. On paper its a ridiculous failure. The Israelis don't issue it, but individuals can carry their personal firearms in training so anything goes. Golda Mayer (former PM of Israel in 1948) carried a short barreled English Enfield tanker carbine rifle instead of a silly pistol. Used it to great effect too. In movies, we've been seeing the Desert Eagle since the original Robocop. And it appears in Snatch. But in the real world, the .50 Action Express is not a self defense round. It is a loud noise and probably a 2nd degree murder charge or civil suit for personal property damage because the one you missed.. it hit somewhere else.

 

Hollywood loves the Toyota Prius, which is capable of 50 mpg if driven carefully. Hollywood is steep, with hills and canyons. Hollywood people are not careful. Most of them with a Prius gets around 40 mpg, which most cheap compact cars can do, thanks to modern fuel efficiency and the lack of hauling around the 1100 pounds of lithium batteries the Prius has. The Prius is technically a very dirty car, ecologically. The strip mines where they get the lithium poison the environment, and then the lithium itself travels a total of 26,000 miles for processing before it gets into the batteries and put into the car. 26,000 miles before the car moves a single foot under its own power. How lame is that? I know people who drive them economically, and actually have the care and caution required, and good for them. But they aren't Hollywood people. They live around here. Completely different species of human, really. Hollywood is for grasping egomaniacs, people who need to look good on camera, all the time, to protect their Brand so they can be hired again.

 

The moral of the story is, if Hollywood likes something, it is probably junk. Hollywood is all flashy ignorance. It is about marketing for quick cash. It is part of what is sad about Southern California, more boom-town inevitability. This is particularly sad because there is so much oil under LA that fracking will destroy the ground water, cause fires and cancer there first. It will empty because of this. And then, the hurricanes will come up from Baja and dump a lot of rain and cause a lot of flash floods and landslides and fill in the few reservoirs leaving them with less to drink, ironically. LA's future is rather sad. I hope that most of them go back to Florida and New York and the really interesting ones go to Detroit and St. Louis and get murdered by the local drug dealers while pretending to be making gritty realistic movies with .454 Casull handguns. Sigh. Idiots.

Of course, everybody in Detroit carries a gun for self defense because they have the highest rate of carjacking in the world, even higher than Cape Town, South Africa. And Hollywood is SO fussy about not being seen to allow self defense. Victims make better stories. Stories they can turn into movies, with marketing deals they can sell to pay for their next mansion, their next supercar, their next fantastic deal. Hollywood is all about increasing the misery for their own profit.

 

See why I think California needs a divorce from LA?

Parent of Slain Coed Urges Culinary Institute Ban On Vegetables

That mess with the crazy kid with Aspbergers freaking out and murdering six people down in Santa Barbara missed this possible headline.

 

After all, he stabbed three people with a kitchen knife, and

 

if we didn't eat vegetables,

nobody would need a kitchen knife.

 

So really, we should blame the vegetable farmers for his actions. And the agency that organizes the preparation and safe handling of vegetables is clearly to blame, there. That makes just as much sense as blaming the self-defense lobby for people who failed to defend themselves against the lunatic. He successfully stabbed three people before he picked up the gun.

 

The police knew he'd put out insane murder threat video blogs. Was he jailed for making threats? Nope. Did his Psychiatrist have him committed? Nope. Did his psychiatrist put him on the no-guns list, like his job requires him to with delusional rage monsters? Nope.

 

Or possibly BMW, since the car made it possible for him to commit drivebys. If he'd had to walk, he wouldn't have been able to hurt all those people.

 

LA doesn't make sense. Neither does SF. I consider this yet another reason to divide California into 3-6 states. I don't want my taxes funding that kind of state and local law enforcement incompetence. The kid gave off all the classic warning signs. So why wasn't he jailed, sedated and treated like the loony he clearly was?

 

So really, bizarre conclusions in the news are just as sensible as the ones we got, blaming the Self Defense Political Action Group Lobby for the massive errors of a psychiatrist in LA. I really hope they put that guy in jail and yank his license, with big fines, civil suits, and examination of his other patients to see if they're also risks for psychotic spree killer attacks. After all, if he missed this one, maybe he's missing others, and maybe he said the wrong thing in session, causing the break in the first place. You never know if you don't investigate.

 

Not all Liberals are viciously incompetent hypocrites... but most are.

Science posts on end of Interglacial (Holocene)

So I wrote up an article a couple days ago, but this is far better, with way more references to actual papers rather than my fuzzy recollections of my own research for the last 10 years. Please look at the data, and the links, and understand this is something all geologists know. You get to learn that glaciers COME BACK in simple undergrad geology. We suspect mechanisms exist that cause the switch to flip, and eventually flip back, but somehow takes 100K years of Ice and 18K (or less) of not. The suggestion, in the article, that planting rice in China emitted so much methane gas that it extended warming and drying a bit longer, that's pretty interesting. Considering the Himalayan hypothesis for starting the ice ages, I have to wonder if there's some geographic cause for these switches. The suggestion that the gulf stream is responsible, having its heat pump interrupted and thus allowing colder air to hit Europe, that might be true.

Instead of presuming the outcome is "warming" they ought to remember that disrupting weather via high or low pressures are already known to shift weather patterns, and there's extensive data on this in Europe. The El Nino and La Nina pacific oscillations are important as well, known to impact global weather. It isn't very sexy, however.

 

Its not as sexy and massaging bad models which completely missed the boat, and after 17 years with no warming, and a long cold winter in the Midwest that STILL has ice in Lake Superior, the most since we got weather satellites to see it, well, Warming just looks retarded. And nobody cares about "Change" since its linked to all we've got in our pockets after a certain useless politician wrecked our economy under the same claim. Meh.

 

Read the article. It is pretty interesting.

Tesla Credit Rating Downgraded Over Long Term Risks

I have to agree with the article's points. When your entire idea is to build really expensive cars in a down economy using rare Earth elements (Lithium etc) while competitors have access to the same technology but already have the supply chain infrastructure and experience? You're screwed. The point that Tesla could default in 2017... that's probably about right. And cars for $65K? That's not affordable. You can get a really nice F-type Jaguar race car for that.

Tesla S review by Car and Driver magazine.

I'm not sure that electric cars are the future. Electric trains, sure, but cars need special batteries and have limited range. If you can work with that range, fine, but for the distance, a very small engine car or scooter will also work, for far less money, and the tanks of gas you could buy with the difference is way more economical. Now that we know that there's a Saudi Arabia of Oil underneath California, and Two Saudi Arabias of oil under Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, fracking our own oil shales is a lot less disruptive than going to war for Bolivia's Lithium, or waiting actual years for the leach fields to drain out enough lithium from the only US Lithium mine, located in Nevada. Technology has to answer its demand quick or competition spoils it. Don't bother arguing. That's life.

 

When you consider that the 2.0L turbo in a Subaru WRX has the same seating, comforts, speed, and many times the range of the electric car in the tank for HALF the price? Duh. And Subaru also makes a really nice turbo diesel engine that they nearly released in the USA in 2010. You can buy it in the EU and its good. And it will run on biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil or algae or fracked from the shales. Whatever. Still, even paying to swap from the gasoline Subaru to the Turbo Diesel is cheaper than the Tesla. And you don't have to go to war for the Subaru.

This Subaru Forester Diesel would sell here. Half the cars on the road in the Sierras are Subarus. We get snow, you see. And barely half the roads are paved. Can the Tesla do this? Would you trust it enough to try? If you run out of juice in the boonies with a Tesla, you have to rent and haul a construction generator there, then run it for hours to charge it enough to get unstuck. Its not a matter of a friend dropping off a gallon of diesel or gasoline in a little red can. I agree with the article that the Tesla SUV is a flop. Gull wing doors for kids on the school run? Really? How are they reaching those? Does it open and shut with electric motors? What do those weigh? Sigh.

 

I'm glad I didn't go work for them. My interview there three years ago left me wondering if they were nuts. "We just need to know if  you are comfortable lifting 20 pounds and twisting every 45 seconds for 10 hours a day. We've lost prior operators due to back injury, but we don't have any plans to fix this problem because its expensive." Yeah, that's what the interviewer said. After that, I wasn't shy asking about Peak Lithium and how that's supposed to work when the goal is electric cars for everybody. Yeah, no followup interviews after that.

 

Diesel subarus make sense. You can even build them out of recycled steel and retrofit the engines and tanks onto existing gasoline subarus. Would make a great contract business for car mechanics someday. Far cheaper option than buying a $65K electric car with 100 miles of range and guaranteed to be carrying somebody rich enough to buy one. Total kidnapping opportunity there. In a world with 26%-48% unemployment rates, and no futures, kidnapping rings make sense. Sensible rich people don't advertise their wealth.

See? The rich will be buying Subarus too. So who's the market for Teslas? Rich Liberals? How long will that work? Collective guilt only works on certain religious groups. The rest of us don't care and change the channel. So yeah, Tesla is an interesting experiment with a receding horizons problem and a shrinking market. So long as they're using Lithium batteries, it has no real future.

The Next Ice Age

So there's a plausible hypothesis about how the last ice age began.

 

Essentially, when India crashed into Asia, the rising Himalayas (still rising) disrupted the monsoon weather that previously swooped north to rain all over central Asia were blocked and forced to higher elevation, causing rains to become snows. As the mountains are particularly tall, they got glaciers, which flowed down both sides, including the Tibetan Plateau which ended up with ice sheet. Ice sheet reflects light, making it even colder there and more fell until Glaciers were rolling down off the plateau and mountains in all directions. Overall cold also affected mountains on other continents and you get glaciers in other parts of asia, Europe, North and South America, starting in the high and cold places but eventually making their own weather. All that ice came from somewhere so sea levels fell 80 meters. That's nearly 300 feet. The North Sea is 300 feet deep. It was dry during the ice age, thanks to a huge glacier at the north from Scotland to Norway and no English Channel. That came later. You could walk from Yorkshire to Norway, and people did. Oil crews still find stone age artifacts on the sea bottom there.

Similarly, we know that the north American ice sheet was centered in Canada and flowed down to the South and East as well as north. This sheet was two miles thick and generated its own weather. There is known evidence of glaciers reaching into Texas and the Florida Panhandle, at their greatest extent. It is hypothesized that free (non-frozen) water on the Arctic Ocean allowed for wet summer storms to snow in the northern Rockies where it is typically an dry cold desert. Accumulating snow would eventually turn into a glacier, which then flows down. A big enough glacier eventually changes the surface temperatures.

And this is where things get amusing. You have to have WARMING to get the arctic ocean to melt enough to put water into the cold DRY artic winds, which gets snow on those Rocky Mountains in Northern Canada which are cold and bone dry, for now. And since we've already gotten prior ice ages over the last 3 million years, the last of which only ended (officially) 10,000 years ago, we are about due for the next one to start. And sea levels rose 80 meters. That is about 300 feet. This also means that in the next ice age, sea levels will SINK 80 meters, eventually. Venice won't be flooded anymore. All those nice docks in Miami will be high and dry. The north Sea will shrink. Hudson Bay will lose a lot of its size. Ice is also denser than land, than rock, so the weight of the glaciers advancing will start pressing down again, and continents work by equilibrium. We may see some earthquakes as they bend the underlying basement rock. Also, it could set off volcanoes as the stresses will shift over certain magma chambers. Nevada has a number of technically active volcanoes though they are commonly thought to be dormant by non-Geologists. Belize will turn into a swamp. All those coastal cities will find they have to rebuild their docks down on the new mudflats. And even that is kinda risky, since earthquakes tend to lift coastlines. Continental rock is lighter, less dense, than sea floor rock. In the prior ice age, the Pleistocene, some of those bigger shelves had a huge impact on global climate, namely by shutting off the Arctic current through the Bering Strait because it wasn't a straight anymore. The land bridge was hundreds of miles across. With no cold water input into the North Pacific, there was no regulating sea surface temps in the Western USA, California for example, so we got Hurricanes all the way to Oregon, not just petering out before reaching San Diego like now. That also meant no fog. However, rainfall levels were 125 inches a year. That's 3-10x what we have now, and the hurricanes also spawned off huge thunderstorms into the Southwest, which provided water to the forests of juniper and topped up the perched aquifers all over the desert, filled the shallow lakes, fed the streams and rivers meandering through Nevada, which was an important stopover point for migrating birds and mammoths, mastodons, and those camels you currently find in Asia and the Sahara. Both species are from the Americas, as camellids evolved in South America and spread across the land bridge to the rest of the world. Same with sheep. The land bridge was really important.

 

It is also important to remember that while glaciers are forming, and meltwaters sometimes flow down the far side into deserts, revitalizing them (Owens River Valley), they also change local and regional climate by their presence. Liquid arctic ocean water makes glaciers in the Rockies. Fallen sea levels ends some currents, and changes the origin of rain waters and timing. Hurricanes are summer events. Hurricanes flowing up the California coastline and dumping 125 inches of rain? That's a big change from today, but it was like that for 3 million years before people. During the ice age that was a typical weather pattern. When the ice age comes back, it will return. Real science rarely gets certainty, but the patterns for ice ages and retreats is well established, heavily studied by reputable scientists without political agenda, and documented extensively for the last few centuries. And its fascinating stuff. The study of ice ages is called Glaciology. It is NOT the same thing as Climate Religion, which gets all the press and money. Glaciologists have seen a lot of retreats, where a glacier slows its movement and melts a lot, but this is not that unusual. In the Little Ice Age, from 1150-1850, glaciers advanced a meter a day until one knocked over a church in Switzerland. The whole thing is well documented by the local priest who tried everything to save their chapel. Monks in the Medieval Warm Period have diaries and budget ledgers detailing the fish catch of Cod from Iceland in 800 AD, listing them by barrel of salt cod on the docks. This went on for centuries, this logging. Fish are extremely sensitive to water temperatures, so the catch corresponds to how many were there, so the variation in numbers tells you what the sea water temps were on the Icelandic Shoals. Documentation of the Medieval Warm Period trumps wailing by True Believers of the Humans Cause Global Warming religion. As it is unlawful to fund religions with federal and state taxpayer dollars, getting it declared a religious cult would defund it, removing the money from the equation and thus ending the scam.

 

Meanwhile, historically, melt periods between glaciations tends to last about 18-20 thousand years. The Great Warming was 19,500 years ago. So the ice should come back anytime now. Possibly in our lifetimes. A Russian study on Wrangell Island, north of the Bering Strait, suggests that the ice age can come on in merely 20 years rather than thousands like you'd think. This has led to some truly terrible movies that seemed to be powered by cocaine and ignorance. Most American scientists think that it might be more like 40 years for a full 10'C temp drop to occur. It is important to remember that just because global cooling has happened, it won't be all at once. It takes a long time, even with ideal conditions for snow, for that to accumulate into sufficient ice that its weight starts it flowing off the mountain tops and changing the climate around it as it goes. Thousands of years will pass while these glaciers advance, but once they reach a large enough size, a meter a day is 360 m per year, a kilometer every 3 years, and how many kilometers between that origin to the next glacier over? And the next? And all of it accumulates and moves. That's an implacable thing that we must adapt to, but the upside is we already did it once.

 

Our species is older than the ice ages, barely, though we didn't have modern minds until 133,000 years ago. We've been through this before. We can get through it again. And most of the tropics were still very tropical, and despite rushing rivers and flooded lakes, California would have been amusing away from the heavy weather on the coasts. Watching glaciers advance will be hilarious for webcam operated wheeled drones broadcasting to the internet. A lot easier to fix than the ones on Mars. Frequent rains in the Southwest means there's enough water to justify more homes and cities there, and tripling the flow into the Colorado fixes the treaty issues, meaning there's more water to share out. Baja should bloom. Same with the Sahara and the dry parts of Spain and Morocco. The Persian Gulf will empty and the Saudis and Iranians can have tank battles instead of throw missiles across the water. Removing this humidity from the Arabian Peninsula will have some profound effects on their climate and long term plans for desalination. When the water goes back to the Indian Ocean, what are they going to do? Build new plants? Run pipelines from Oman? Move away? Sea Levels will drop 80 meters, remember. It doesn't happen all at once, but it is relentless as the glaciers grow.

 

Ice age water levels are non-trivial, and their effects will be quite interesting. Florida Keys and Bahamas will lose a lot of islands and gain a lot of spits and peninsulas as the islands merge. The Gulf stream will have to change its course and may slow down in response. I haven't seen any studies on how falling sea levels will affect that, but I'm pretty curious. Spits and mud flats stink in ways that lagoons don't, so some of the popular resort properties will stop being popular and stop being resorts. That's life. It doesn't require religion, just time. If you are around long enough, you get to see this happen yourself. Just imagine the whining when they have to pave the Venice streets because the water levels have fallen so far you can't even dredge there without undermining foundations. Hilarious.

Suzuki DR 650 SE

I came out of the Library this afternoon, after shelving books for six hours, and spotted a really nicely maintained Suzuki DR 650 motorcycle parked in the lot. This being a rural county, some of the better used roads are not paved. North Bloomfield, for instance is paved a few miles up towards Yuba River, but eventually turns into gravel before crossing the river at Purdon and climbing up to North San Juan Ridge, a very long ridge of the Sierra Foothills which climbs from the lowlands at Bridgeport all the way to Bowman Lake, at the top of the Sierras. It is so rural there are obvious tree farms, planted in very precise rows easily visible in aerial photos on Google Earth, and side roads that drop off the ridge north to the Middle Fork of the Yuba River, towards Downieville, itself hardly a metropolis. Most people who live on the Ridge, an hour from Nevada City due to the slow curves of Hwy 49, are much too far from Sacramento to seriously commute anywhere for a job. Most of them work locally, growing dope. I am saying that plainly. The basic job, the occupation that pays the bills, on the North San Juan Ridge, is dope growing. Everybody knows this, around here.

 

So spotting this really nice looking DR650 motorcycle, very well maintained, probably down from a gravel road up on the ridge somewhere, for library books. I have slightly mixed feelings of admiration. This is someone who said "screw low fuel economy vehicles. I'm riding a bike." And rode it to the library to borrow books. You have to respect that. Whatever they do for a living.

 

This bike was spotless. There were no bent vanes in the oil cooler. The parts were carefully cleaned and lubricated. I have to admit this was looked after by a man who cares about his stuff, is proud of his bike and takes good care of it. Admirable. I hope he rides it in good health. I'd like one of those.

Shiver by Lucy Rose

Shiver by Lucy Rose is the opening credit track for the popular Japanese art-house anime series called Mushishi. Very few Japanese anime will use properly sung music with dedicated musicians. They mostly get some poppy Japanese voice actress they've already hired for the cast to do it, and few of them write good songs. Their singing is competent, not emotional or evocative. There are only a few cases where proper international music is used instead, this being one. Serial Experiments Lain also had a similar vibe, about 10 years ago.

This is by BoA, and the track is Duvet. Do not confuse this band with the new electronic one of the same initials. Serial Experiments Lain is a very freaky story about a computer hacker, about rave drugs in Japan, about technology out of control, of teen suicide, and the nature of consciousness. Pretty heavy material for an Anime, but the Crash was only 10 years old at that point. They still thought it might end. Of course, it didn't, and Japan retains the highest suicide rate of the industrialized world. Japanese Grandmothers hate children. They're killing them off by stifling the economy there. And the kids know it.

The Delgados had The Light Before We Land as the opener for the exceedingly depressing child-cyborg story "Gunslinger Girl". Their album Hate is about Divorce, which I sometimes find quite appropriate. Gunslinger Girl has some amazing imagery, but its also very tragic and is about the worst of human nature.

 

That is not to say that there aren't some great Japanese musicians that find their work in Anime. Suneohair got a lot of airplay in the art school tragedy anime Honey and Clover.

When the art school hero of the series realizes he's placed second in love, and second is the first of the losers, they play this song as he pedals a bicycle away helpless and heartbroken. Its gotten used in quite a few AMVs (Anime Music Videos). The title is Sora Mo Isogashii. It means "under a weeping sky."

 

Speaking of AMVs, they can sometimes be good.

 

 

 

88 Lines About 44 Women, classic punk rock song of the 1980's.



This AMV was done by Erin Weaver, wife of anime voice actor Brett Weaver, famous for Gai Daigoji of Nadesico fame. They live in Austin, TX.

So yeah, music drifting into Anime could get better, but you get flashes of brilliance.

I mean, look at this. The anime (Gasaraki) flings itself apart like a badly unbalanced flywheel, but its a heck of a teaser. I hope the OP director got a job doing music videos. It feels more dated now, but 15 years ago? This was cutting edge.

 

Biking The Truckee River Trail

Memorial Day weekend started early with the F1 Grand Prix of Monte Carlo. Great race, no red flags, few accidents, very fast. Finally saw an engine blow a seal and burn up all its oil. Two more of those. The cars are too quiet, and no faster than current Indycars. Dad thinks they ought to offer a simple 2.0L I4 turbo and a non-turbo 3.0L V6, no more batteries, no more KERS. Just stick to engines. Be simple. The races would be better and the cars would weigh 400 pounds less so they'd be faster. These KERS hybrids kinda suck the fun out of it. And we'd get our noise back.

 

We watched the start of the Indianapolis 500, set it to record, then drove up to Tahoe. They drive in circles really fast. It is boring. F1 isn't in circles. They have actual corners, left and right. They have to accelerate and brake. Not just zip to full speed and hold it there.

 

Btw, Google Earth: The signs all say "Squaw Valley". Not Olympic Valley. Squaw. Stop with the racist BS, Google. Reverse discrimination is discrimination. Reverse racism is racism. So giving people bad directions? Lame.

 

We parked at Squaw Valley right off Hwy 89 about 10 miles South of Truckee, unloaded the bicycles off the rack, filled my backpack with lunch, and were off.

 

We gently climbed the paved trail past many families on bikes of their own. Adorable little kids, mothers corralling them, slightly harried looking fathers with 4 small children around them. Big families, was surprising. I also passed many bikes towing 2-seater trailers with kids in the seats, mostly toddlers, some wearing little football helmets. Other people had those bicycle shaped upright trailers that pinch to the seat post. Still others had tiny kid bicycles with 12 inch wheels and tiny little girls perched, exhausted, on them. Passed them all on the way up river to Tahoe City. The river is very clear, and cold, because the coffer-dam at Tahoe City apparently is opened during the Mountain Air River Rafting Company hours of operation during the weekend. They have a contract, and they pay for the service. Lake Tahoe is slightly low, and I walked out onto the spit exposed by low water for some great photographs of the mountains on the South end of the Lake, still covered in snow.

 

Lake Tahoe is beautiful in the important cliché ways, and its a cliché because it is true. Same with the wealth up there, and how there are both bikers and billionaires, families and casinos. Tahoe City has no casinos, being on the California side. The Casinos are over at Incline Village to the East and the very Eastern edge of Southshore, across the lake from Tahoe City. Tahoe City is where the main outlet from the lake falls into the Truckee River and eventually gets to Truckee, then down the canyon to Reno, providing most of its water supply, before being treated and released into Pyramid Lake, which is green from sewage and the local Paiute-Shoshone Reservation. The Truckee River used to flow into Lake Lahontan and if I have my way, will again. It isn't like drowning Reno would be a crime against humanity. Most would say it was putting the dying city out of its misery. Especially since filling that enormous lake will take decade, even with a really good supply of water. The thing about flooding large areas, such as the Black Sea, is the water rises so slowly there is time to gather your stuff and your kids and your flocks of goats and chickens and walk uphill, slowly, and stay ahead of it. And this will be a legal and planned operation. With permits and lots of advanced notice.

 

Hwy 89 is the main vehicle route along the Truckee River. North of Squaw Valley the bike path is merely widened shoulders, about 9 feet per side, so bicycles can ride side by side and still leave plenty of room for passing vehicles. Accidents are rare. Hardcore cyclists park at a lot by the highway and ride the extra 10 miles. But the trail south, uphill to Tahoe City from Squaw Valley, is off the road and very popular because it is quieter, slow and intimate, following the river and embankments keep the kids from wandering into traffic. It is very safe. And not too steep. I like it. My Mom liked it. Dad remains a fan, at 73 years old. I'm very proud of him for keeping at his exercise and staying healthy. He will live a lot longer, and happier, by avoiding sedentary life. It is good for me too. Many of the locals with kids know about this trail and drive up for the day with their bikes.

The view South up the river, right at the edge of the Rafting company's pickup point behind me. Don't you want to visit?

 

Subtlety

I am not a subtle man, but I can appreciate it when I see it.

 

Japan's way of dealing with their housing bubble in 1989 has been a long series of placating denials and refusal to modify their broken financial system, because that would fix it, and fixing it means allowing competition for the currently failing monopolies. It means losing power, despite their power actually killing off their country. Japan has a long history (centuries) of self-genocide, and that practice continues today. What they are doing is not subtle, and if anybody cared about them, would be decried in the same way that we decry the dictator running North Korea (Best Korea!). But we don't. Japan is friendly and patient and very polite and we nuked them twice and feel slightly guilty about this. Or are told we should be. Nuking them saved 2 million American servicemen from dying, men who had families of their own after the war. You might exist because of that. You might not be here if we didn't nuke Japan. Twice. Be slightly conflicted over this, but only slightly. Japan, after all, butchered 2 million civilians in Nanking, civilians who had already surrendered. They didn't kill them because they had to, or in battle. The Japanese butchered them with swords because they WANTED TO. Always remember that, especially when Japan says it didn't happen despite the bragging and photographs of their OWN NEWSPAPERS of the time. It happened. And denying it today just keeps more nukes aimed at them from China, and reminds America why we need to keep our bases there. Japan can't be trusted with its own destiny, because it allows genocidal aggression and pretends its all just fine because everybody else is a subhuman and unworthy of life. That's the real Japan.

 

I worry that someday America will be just as evil and corrupt. So far, our tricky environment is good at killing such monsters. Western states allow for some outlandish ideas, but droughts, fire, and earthquakes mean you must be reliable to your neighbors in times of trouble or you find yourself a victim of common disasters or pointed rebuke. The east has all these, plus tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, and worse corruption. The East is like the West, in certain ways. And due to its corruption is very different in how it handles things. If civil war breaks out, it will happen there first.

 

Japan is a country which is what the future looks like. They've got the Shinkansen, the Bullet Train, which is 200 mph, electric, and carries passengers around the country very quickly. It is a first world transportation system. Meanwhile, farmers stoop over rice fields planting enough for their families because they can't afford a full sized combine or the land to do operations at full scale like California does. Japan imports California rice because small scale is backbreaking labor and doesn't pay enough to be a career. And the Youth! can't make it work. So there's no jobs in agriculture with a future in Japan. And when a nation starts importing its food, it is in trouble.

 

This has lead to an overwhelming depression in the population, which exerts itself in various popular media. One form is the sadly cute harem anime, where a boring guy with no particular good qualities is surrounded by desperately cute teen girls who want to date him, marry, and have his babies. And they squabble over this not very interesting guy. Naturally, this is a completely unrealistic genre and its popularity stems from Dating Simulation Games. The young men who buy them don't get dates with real women, who want a whole lot more than anyone can afford in an economy where only a small population actually have jobs. With no job, you have no future, no right to marry and have children. The Japanese population is crashing. The most intelligent women either suicide or leave the country. The more helpless women suicide or settle for a life of misery alone, which is arguably worse. The more reckless but pretty seem to become sluts and try to land a married man and have his kid and some child support settlement money to live on. I can't imagine a son of a slut would end up very happy with life and likely end up with dating sims rather than a marriage. The basis of Japanese families has collapsed with their economic collapse. Similar things seem to be happening in America too. I worry this is where things will go, though it seems that instead of dating games, we have more unwed mothers, who thanks to the economics of paternity suits, need two children from separate fathers for full income and three children for a retirement income. Keep in mind, these women have three children, from three separate men, specifically for money. It doesn't make men feel very good about single moms, and single mom's always deny this is what they are doing, that they are different and it was All His Fault, not themselves. Men end up living alone, getting obsessive hobbies, and setting aside money for DNA paternity tests and countersuits for fraud if they bother to date at all. Those cases are nearly always denied because Judges are ALWAYS on her side. This has had a very chilling effect on American men and seems to lead to violence against women, particularly murder suicides. We don't often hear that the children killed weren't his, but were claimed as such. The Coroner doesn't bother with the paternity tests, much less publicize the proof that she was a cheat and a criminal. No justice.

 

Another direction the Japanese go with this is cult religions. The Sarin gas attack in Tokyo was by a suicide cult called Aum Shinri Kyo. They're dead or in jail. Suicide cults also slip into media. And being a Buddhist country for the most part, accepting your fate is an expected part of the culture. So you get media about the end of the world and how nice it is. And that leads to a very odd but beautiful manga (adult comic book) called Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou aka Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip. The name is nothing special, but the content is really interesting.

 

It is a story about Japan sinking into the Pacific, of the human race dying out after some wars, and the wild nanotechnology and plant life growing over the artifacts of man as everything largely goes back to nature. The story takes place over about 40 years. And the heroine is an Android who doesn't age, merely observes peacefully, which is a very odd way to tell a story. There is no effort to reverse the changes. No brave story of people starting families to repopulate and rebuilt. None of that will work and has been discarded before the story even starts. Things have gotten so far that even the violent people themselves are dead so you don't even need a firearm for self defense anymore, though in the first chapter it is clear that you DID recently before. Things have just gone so far that the section of society which could object is gone. The meek have inherited the Earth, and its being overgrown with vines, grass, and trees. Even the roads are vanishing because there's no vehicles moving, the oil is mostly gone, and there's no reason to go anywhere because the economy is in the small gatherings of people that still exist, for just a bit longer. How can you even argue with that?

 

Here in America, the most popular cult is Global Warming Is Caused By People and We All Need To Die to stop it. I was a child when the local Jonestown kids left for Guyana and died a few months later, poisoned by the cult because it had run out of money and that was their escape to Paradise. I knew two of those kids. They were just like me, only their parents were nuts, broke after giving all their money to Jim Jones, a vacuum cleaner salesman who discovered religion paid better and was a tax writeoff. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a cult, just like Jonestown, and will end in fire for the faithful zealots. If we are lucky they will kill themselves without trying to kill the rest of us. I can only hope. Few seem interested in sane solutions to the perceived problem. All their solutions either can't work or involve taking money from other people by force and putting it into their own pockets. And that's your obvious sign of a scam. Carbon trading has already been exposed as a money laundering operation, but the Zealots just say "NAH NAH NAH NAH I CAN'T HEAR YOU". Die in a fire. Can you hear that?

 

Someday when there's no money or fuel for road maintenance, gasoline is either unavailable or painfully expensive, and the US dollar has collapsed so we're all broke, the roads we love will have herds of deer and black bears and coyotes and wolves wandering around in daylight. If we are lucky, we'll ride trains past the pretty wildlife. If we are unlucky, we'll be on foot, and possibly lunch. Buy a motorcycle and you can probably outrun the bears and wolves and coyotes. And try not to hit any deer. Hitting one with a motorcycle is worse than hitting one with a car. This happened to a friend of mine. Recovery took a very long time. If the falling over bugs you a lot, think about a 4 WD ATV. Better fuel economy and maneuverability than a Jeep, with a 400cc engine, and easier to get un-stuck. You still need to ride it on roads, but it has more grip and is less likely to flip over if you ride carefully. Japan isn't worried about transportation because they've already got trams and buses and few people have jobs so getting there and back is less about convenient timing and more about necessity. When their economy drops another step, it will probably turn up in their anime, and we'll see how they handle it, and if the way they go will work for us.

 

So I'm watching the Future, sort of, in Japan. And I'm wondering how America will deal with things. We're just as doomed.

Top Gear: America

Some few years ago, they tried to make Top Gear in America. It didn't work. They hosted it in Detroit, which is the center of car construction but is flat and has boring roads. Car CULTURE is in California, as anyone can tell you. This is where the Drive Through Restaurant was invented, where MacDonalds and Carls Jr both originated. It is a LONG drive from Detroit to California, so the show rarely came to the prettiest roads in the nation, which sort of kills the value of the thing. And the host was said to be mean, rather than funny, and it died after a year of failing to copy UK Top Gear, failing to get audience, and failing to make money. This is a pity.

I think if you wanted to make that show work, you would need to site it in California, not Detroit. We have the better roads with the nice photogenic scenery. The only people who want to see pictures of Detroit are post apocalyptic movie makers. Jay Leno has a fun car review show in LA, but it's not very Top Gear-ish. He buys the cars he reviews. Top Gear reviews cars that are awful too, and say so.

As Jeremy Clarkson likes to point out, America is the opposite of Britain. We drive on the correct side of the road, like most of the world (except Japan and Australia and New Zealand). Our foreign workers speak Spanish rather than Hindi. Few of us buy caravans (trailers) and those who do pull over to let traffic by. In California we only get about 2 months of rain a year, and in England, they only get about two months of dry. So copying the same events of Top Gear? Not quite right. The clever thing is to copy them in the opposite way.

In a theoretical American Top Gear, you'd review motorcycles on Highway 49, Scooters in San Francisco or Newport Beach, Convertibles in Feather River Canyon or Yosemite, pull trailers up the North Coast and camp near the sea without lighting anything on fire. You'd review tow vehicles and trailer types including a Teardrop trailer, ultralight trailer, and full sized airstream fifth wheel trailer, including the ease and difficulty of pulling and the comfort in cooking and sleeping.

You'd also have an event with car camping, which UK top gear apparently is unaware of, which works with both sedans and hatchbacks. There's these folding shelters, called tents, which you erect on the ground and then go inside on soft mats and fluffy bags for sleeping. And then it folds back up and fits easily in the trunk. One gets the idea Top Gear doesn't care for the Coast much. California Coast is fantastic. It has great views, twisty roads, is a wonderful place for dating and driving, and usually has many fun restaurants and campgrounds and plenty of motels. The first motel ever was on the California coast, in San Luis Obispo. It is kind of run-down now, being old, and gets mentioned several times in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Faith lives there. In any case, the California Coast is often what people see in Car Commercials in the USA, so it would be utterly fitting to be used in a Top Gear program, which you just can't do in a day's drive from Detroit. This is a big part of why that show failed, I think.

I would have the presenters bring their wives or girlfriends along to show comfort of things like Convertibles, riding pillion on a motorcycle. I would suggest more ethnically diverse but still upper middle class hosts, people who like cars and aren't scared of bikes. And maybe a Huell Howser-type host who can easily talk to locals about their place and why it is special or interesting.

I would suggest track day reviews of both cars and tracks. And reviews of roads, so drivers can find good places to go with their sports cars, or what alternate routes to take if they're crowded.

A wine tasting car review, and a Lake Tahoe picnic review. And a Ski Trip review. These are things people actually do in California. Very normal stuff.

It would be amusing to see a race between a scooter and a Tesla S, where the Tesla can go freeway speeds, then needs to stop and recharge all night and the scooter keeps going at 29 mph. And going. And going. Don't cheat, give the Tesla lots of places to stop and recharge, and show the driver visiting many Dennys, and complain of gaining 8 pounds during the trip while the car was charging again. Assuming Tesla builds enough charging stations for this to work. They can stop and walk around old towns, being tourists because the car needs a recharge.

Show off some of the odder vehicles, like the VW 1L, and compare to a Caterham and baby Ninja 300 in a fuel economy race. Have a race between scooter, electric car, and Pacific Starlight Passenger train from LA to Chico or possibly Dunsmuir. Or even Portland. Maybe have the person on the train bring a bicycle to hop off and ride a few miles to a particular inn.

Go to car shows, races, special events like the Rubicon Trail and Monterey Auto Show, and find the balance between gushing humor and honest appraisal. Review the bikes and the convertibles and race Subarus. Get women's appraisal of cars for their comforts and excitement. Top Gear largely ignores women passengers. In the real world, men rarely get to buy cars entirely for themselves.

Only review cars (and motorcycles) that are available in the USA. Don't be afraid to chastise car companies that release yet another bad selling model and ignore new kinds of cars selling well in the EU which have market in the USA, such as turbo diesels. Point out that Fiat and Audi get fewer reviews in the USA because they are expensive and parts are far away while Japanese cars are close. Use the show as a way to present all the vacations in California you can drive to, and how much fun that is. If you built the show to work this way, I think it would succeed.

Domestically Manufactured Scooters

It is a great frustration to me that my country does not manufacture scooters.

 

Janus Cycles of Goshen Indiana makes a sort of moped with an interesting 50 cc two stroke motor, but the end price is rather high. It's really nice looking, don't get me wrong. It's just too expensive and slow to be a useful transportation machine. Its a fancy toy, like a Harley. That's a pity because, like a Harley, it is rolling art. But I'm looking for transportation solutions that aren't ugly. The only motorcycles America builds are Harleys which loud and expensive toys for rich guys, Indian which is also for Rich Guys, and Confederate which is, you guessed it, for rich guys.

 

A few years ago, a new manufacturer of less expensive motorcycles started up, called Cleveland Cycle Works. They used Chinese engines and parts and assembled them in Cleveland and sell them for a reasonable price so you can own a motorcycle which can do highway, but not freeway, speeds. This is a good start. They are 250cc machines, and they've starting building their own engines. They sell for about $4400, which is the same price as a Japanese starter motorcycle.

 

This is not to say that Japan couldn't be competing better in the USA. If Honda sold its EFI Wave 125 with vintage fairings, that would be more useful than their other bikes with small engines that won't climb hills. They also have a 110 cc EFI SuperCub, which boosts the power and has a nice vintage look. Neither underbone scooter is fast enough for freeways, but they'd work fine on the highways and streets of California. California and the West in general lacks many connecting roads between cities thanks to narrow passes and distance so any bike sold here needs to be able to sprint on and off freeways to reach the next frontage road.

 

Honda is currently selling several versions of their 500cc bike, but not a single one with Vintage looks, and their Rebel 250 EFI is still a cruiser, a market segment entirely dominated by Harley in America. For all their faults, Harley Davidson motorcycles climb hills great with their torque-heavy Vee-twin engines. This is why so many roam up and down Hwy 49 and 395 and 70. Those are great roads for those bikes, and being expensive, few criminals have the necessary cash to spend on them so bikers tend to be cosplayer-Pirates more often than outlaws. And when you see leather clad bikers in the same mental space as 20-something girls in blue hair and sailor Fukus, you find yourself smiling a lot more often.

 

So scooters come in two different styles. Modern Chinese and Vintage. Modern Chinese scooters are all about cheap function. They have lights that look like they work, like on a car, but are hit and miss from what I've read. Their styling looks dated within months and their resale value is scrap, zero.

Compare the above to a Labretta or Stella which reference movies and have a bulletproof design because original ones are still out there, still being used after 60 years.

And

And

As you can see, a Vintage scooter looks good and holds its value. Modern scooters get throw away. All time ugliest is the Honda Elite from the 1980s. Ugh.

Worse, most of these are still around. It is a mutt. Nobody loves them for their looks. They sell dirt cheap because people recoil in horror at seeing them. They are like 80's haircuts. Wrong in all sorts of ways. But since they are Hondas, the engines just go and go.

 

So what features are appropriate for a scooter made in America?

1. Vintage looks. Metal, not plastic bodywork. Metal lasts and can be fixed. Plastic warps in the sun and falls off. Metal is heavier, but you'll still have it in 60 years. These plastic Vespas will fall apart in a decade. And they're really ugly underneath.
2. Working lights so you can see around corners after dark.
3. Engine on the frame, not the suspension member like Vespa.
4. 3-4 inches of vertical wheel travel, not 1-2 inches like a Vespa.
5. Flat bottom floorboards for groceries, with a folding hook.
6. Automatic transmission, because girls don't understand a clutch. 
7. Front disc brake. Replacement brake pads available everywhere.
8. 110-150cc four stroke engines, CARB legal and catalytic converter, able to pull a hill and reach 40 mph.
9. 12-16 inch wheels to roll through potholes without spilling the rider.
10. Adjustable rear suspension so a passenger riding pillion still has suspension. Average rider weight is probably 180, can be detuned to 130 for coeds.
11. Add about 10 inches to bike length to accommodate engine, etc over standard tiny Vespas, will help with stability too.
12. Offer 300 cc engine upgrade and EFI for highway riders and mountain riders, since The West is big spaces.
13. Offer oil cooler standard, and consider water cooled engines too.
14. Use standard industrial Kevlar belts for the CVT rollers since they last and are cheap.
15. Use transfer pivot for actual exposed drive chain or belt to rear wheel as greatly reduces weight and improved handling.
16. Mechanical steering lock, motion sensor alarm, and text message alert via free IT setup. Will require cellphone signal for that one, but will cut down on thefts if E911 GPS chip tasked with sending location of Scooter.
17. RFI key fob, rotating codes like Honda uses on cars uncovers steering lock, requires physical key to unlock frame, brakes unlock when key in ignition so can be rolled unpowered for ground floor apartment dwellers, or roll out of garage.
18. Backup kick starter.

 

And people already know about Enduros so don't bother competing with those. They have their place too. These scooters are for getting to work and college as the oil runs out and gets much more expensive. When the roads go away, people will switch to long suspension Enduros or move into town where a scooter still works. The trouble with starting a scooter company to build a model that actually suits American roads is the other makers could easily cut their prices by half and still make a huge profit and get most of your customers. I wonder if pretending to start a company would be enough to trick other makers into price cuts? Its not like normal people in today's economy can afford to buy a Tesla S when they're $65K. A scooter is $5K for the fancy one, but so is a used car, with a roof and 4 wheels that won't tip over and can't be thrown in the back of a pickup truck by a couple strong men and stolen in moments. Cars are currently nearly as cheap and a lot less trouble. But someday the cost of gasoline will make you suck your teeth noisily, and a scooter gets 100 mpg. What car gets that? In a world where the only jobs a college graduate can get are part time and minimum wage, all the money they get needs to go towards fuel and housing, not gasoline. And that's where our world is heading.

Global Warming Is A Scam

1. Climate always changes. Claiming this change is caused by people when climate has been changing longer than we've existed as a species is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof, and not with public funds.
2. Global warming happened 19,500 years ago when climate changed from Ice Age to Interglacial melt. The Current actual scientific hypothesis (by Geologists) is this was caused by the Milancovic Cycle, which is the orbital dynamics of the earth and sun and angle of the poles in our orbit. Nothing humans do can affect the Orbit. Humans were not burning coal or fossil fuels back then, either, as we were still stone age, without even Agriculture.
3. Global cooling was the scare of the 1970's, started by the VERY SAME PEOPLE claiming the earth is warming. They got funded for both studies and invited to the best cocktail parties.
4. Researchers get funding if they put "global warming" in their research. This gives them pay to live on. If they don't, they have to work flipping burgers like everyone else. If your research doesn't support "warming" you don't get paid. Academic fraud is financially motivated.
5. Data on "warming" is being tweaked to support "warming" and when it doesn't, those reviewing it either cut funding to that researcher or cut the data because it is "inconvenient" and listed as "outlier" data, as anomalous. Significant amounts of "outlier" data has been cut and ignored from "the model" because it shows the current strident panic is irrational and not supported.
6. Heat Island effects from parking lots and air conditioners near formerly rural weather stations have raised the temperatures detected. This means that readings at compromised sites are higher for the obvious reason. Readings at currently rural sites are largely the same as they have always been.
7. Cult-like insistence that all people who reject claims of human-caused warming are Deniers (of the True Faith). Providing proof that the claims are not merely biased but actual fraud result in further religious demands. The Warming Cult is the Spanish Inquisition. Denying their (false) claims is Heresy. History repeats.
8. The 97% of scientists claim is academic fraud. 12 people are claimed to have read the ABSTRACTS of 26,000 papers in a few weeks time, but did not actually read the contents of the papers. Reading that many abstracts is not actually physically possible without cheating (ie word search the abstract and datamine the searches, not actually read them. This is FRAUD). Abstracts are what the research documented by the paper is testing, not the results of the test, nor the method of testing which are in the paper itself. Many of these abstracts merely included the phrase "climate change" but had nothing to do with climate research and gathered no data. Some did so specifically to publish.
9. Most of the scientists cited as supporting the original IPCC sued the IPCC for libel, using their names without permission and ruining their reputations.
10. No geologists are cited in the Report as geologists typically study both the rocks and structure they occupy, but the environment those rocks were produced in and modified by. Geologists are both in competition with Climate "researchers" and have a long timescale which destroys the claim that humans cause climate change. And they can and do drop these detailed facts into conversation, like "the Jurassic era was substantially warmer than today and life thrived in that Period" which is not the sort of thing that Nihilist fundraisers want to hear when collecting the life savings of Warming cultists at cocktail parties. Facts interfere with the Scam. And the Scammers in the Cult of Warming don't want operations interrupted. It is about the Money.
11. This winter has been colder that RECENT memory, but not colder than my youth. In the 1970's and 80's it was pretty common for blizzards in the Midwest and East. Just because youth don't remember them doesn't mean these were common and normal weather events. They seem strange because people are Stupid.
12. Weather radar is a lot better now, and cellphone cameras mean they are well documented, compared to the old days of word of mouth news and needing a fancy video camera and good luck to get shots of the tornadoes. More people with more cameras in more places; of course you see more storms.
13. Western droughts are common and cyclic. They are usually followed by fires and floods. We are getting fires now. We expect floods this Fall.
14. The Baby Boomers are starting to die of old age and suffering ailments. They are a huge population which has behaved childishly their entire lives, as shown by history and current behavior. This whining generation, spoiled, is now turning to typical Zealous Nihilism to support Death Cults, to assuage their lingering regrets just like any aging population. Anthropogenic Warming, which requires the Youth to die in Mud Huts and suffer in Stone Age conditions on the off-chance that it might reverse global trends, makes them feel better about their own mistakes. Baby Boomers were a Selfish Generation and will die as such, still pushing their own mistakes onto following generations.

And really, that's the deal. It's about MONEY. It's about Greed. It is about dying Baby Boomers who want to hurt their kids just a bit more. It has nothing to do with science or reality or actual proper observations. Global Warming as portrayed by the Media is just a Religious Cult.