How is it that when the left got a Federal judge in a liberal area like California to rule that a Trump executive order couldn’t be enforced, the injunction was effective nationwide, but when a judge rules against a Biden vaccine mandate, that injunction is only effective for the circuit where the judge is located?
Military
Howitzer Deployment
The Biden administration deployed 30 self propelled howitzers to the Ukraine, near the border with Belarus and Russia. The report is that the move also includes several dozen tanks, armored vehicles, and several thousand NATO troops. Sounds to me like an Armored Brigade, which would have 80 M1 tanks, and a few batteries of self propelled artillery.
A similar deployment was made into Poland 4 years ago. Funny how there are mentions of this from several European news sites, but none from the US. Does that mean it is a false report, or is the US media simply ignoring news in Europe?
Criminals
Counter Productive
Thanks to a record increase in homicides that began with last summer’s rioting peaceful protests, the US has seen the highest increase in homicide rates in modern history. Cities like Portland, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Philadelphia have seen record numbers of homicides.
The rate of homicides is up by 30% from 2019 levels as the US homicide rate increased from about six per 100,000 in 2019 to 7.8 per 100,000 in 2020. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report recorded 21,570 murders total in 2020, compared with 16,425 murders in 2019.
Rifles and shotguns combined accounted for the same number of homicides as did fists and feet:
Even with all of that, the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was 42% lower than the suicide rate (13.5 deaths per 100,000 people) and 71% below the mortality rate for drug overdose (27.1 deaths per 100,000 people, as of the third quarter of 2020).
All of this is actually causing a backlash to the BLM/Antifa narrative. In a Pew Center survey conducted in September, 47% of U.S. adults said they favored an increase in funding for police in their area, up from 31% in June of 2020. Support for reducing local police funding declined from 25% to 15%.
Remember that one of the things an insurgency must do, according to the CIA insurgency manual, is destroy the people’s trust in the government. This causes the people to cry out for protection from anyone who promises to provide it. Then the communists step in and fix everything.
Military
Congress abdicated its responsibility
The Pentagon says that the National Guard has to take the jab, even though their state governor may be refusing. Why can they do this? Well, here is the theory:
The National Guard is usually controlled by the state , but the president has the power to federalize the guards at any time, which would require the guards to receive the vaccine. Because President Joe Biden has not federalized the guards in Oklahoma, the state mandate stands.
That isn’t how it works. The President can’t call the militia- only Congress can. Article I, Section 8, clause 15:
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
The President can’t call forth the militia of a state. So how did they get around that? Thank our courts, who decided that, when a person enlists in the state National Guard, he or she is also enlisting in the National Guard of the United States. Congress has thus delegated to the President its authority to call forth the militia, and the courts rubber stamped it.
Military
Failing Empire
The Commandant of the Marine Corps has announced a new plan where some Marine Corps recruits won’t have to attend boot camp. He claims that some positions don’t require Marines to, well, be Marines. So much for “every Marine is a rifleman.”
The rapid rise in importance of the cyber domain, for instance, has challenged us to find creative ways to quickly build critical skills at mid-career and senior levels. Unless we find a means to quickly infuse expertise into the force – at the right ranks – I am concerned that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, among other fields where the speed of technological change is exponential, will force us into a reactive posture.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger
When he says it, he claims that cyber warfare is the reason. When I hear it, I think this means each unit will have an assigned “gender studies specialist” or some other political officer assigned to it.
He also wrote that Marines no longer on active duty who now have “critical career experience” should be able to return to service at a higher rank.
“I can envision a Marine who left active duty as a captain or corporal rejoining our ranks as a lieutenant colonel or gunnery sergeant, respectively, after spending 5-7 years working in a cyber or IT field where the service currently lacks capacity,” Berger wrote. “With the right education and experience, that same corporal might also be eligible to return as a mid-grade or senior officer.”
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger
So a person can sign up for 3 years, leave as an E-4, then 5 to 7 years later return as an E7? What about those who stayed? Are they gonna be stuck without promotion because the ones returning are taking up billets? For those who don’t know, a person who enters the service as a brand new O-1 (Second Lieutenant) officer takes a minimum of ten years to be promoted to O-5 (Major).
Sorry, but this destroys the entire idea of the Marines. I say this as one of your Navy brothers: Anyone who serves from this day forward won’t have my respect.
On the other hand, it isn’t like the US Navy is doing much better. Navy ships are becoming rust buckets that are filled with unqualified personnel, which is why they can’t seem to stop colliding with everything that gets near them.
This is the same thing I noted when we talked about this fat ass from Meal Team 6:
Our military is a shell of its former power. If we engage in combat with any near peer adversary, we are going to get our asses kicked.
Criminals
Protest
This explains why the Capitol police wanted to open a bureau in Florida. Pelosi is about to move here.
Antigun
Gun control
New Federal law being proposed. Let me explain:
The problem: There’s no requirement for a background check on ammunition sales. So you can be someone who just stole a gun, illegally got your gun from some kind of trafficking, or were in possession of it and you are intending a crime. You can walk into any store and buy the bullets and nobody is going to check. If we extend background checks to ammunition, we immediately save lives
Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg
Fred Guttenberg is pushing for the proposed law, named Jaime’s law after the man’s daughter. Jaime was killed in the Parkland shooting in South Florida. Here is the thing: this law wouldn’t have done a single thing to prevent the shooting that killed his daughter. The killer in that particular case obtained his gun legally because authorities couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs.
If the law passes, it won’t fix a single one of the hypotheticals in the above quote. If a person steals a gun, buys one on the black market, or is intending to commit a crime, there is no way that such scenarios would result in failing a background check.
No, the real purpose of this law is to inconvenience shooters. It requires that ammunition can only be bought from licensed dealers. It also appears to require a permit to purchase ammunition at anywhere other than a shooting range where the ammunition will be fired on the premises. The law also states that there is no limit to the fee that can be charged for the background check.
Keep buying ammo, it may be needed very soon.
Gaming the Courts
Rittenhouse
I have watched nearly every minute of the Rittenhouse trial. With my understanding of the law, I think that this was a legitimate case of self defense. With that being said, I don’t think that the law today (especially in politically charged cases like this one) is being practiced in anything close to the manner in which it is intended.
If Rittenhouse is convicted of those killings, we can be sure that self defense in particular, and the justice system in general, are no longer operating in this nation. The best thing to do from that point forward is to run if you are ever involved in a use of force incident. The Ritttenhouse defense fund is in the millions of dollars. If that isn’t sufficient to win a case that is this clear cut, there is no hope for those of us who only have concealed carry insurance.
I guess we will see.
Gaming the Courts
Enhance
There was a huge battle that was waged in the courtroom for the Rittenhouse trial over the admission of an “enhanced” screen shot from a drone video. The prosecution used a still frame of Rittenhouse that the police spent 20 hours “enhancing” to get a grainy image that they claim shows Rittenhouse pointing his weapon at a party that was not involved in the shootings that took place a short time later.
The disagreement centers around what is meant by enhancement. Those on one side claim that this is no different than zooming in on a picture from your cell phone. The other side (the defense) claims that the software adds information to the picture. They are both correct, but the prosecution is being misleading about it.
The expert that the prosecutors seated to testify on this matter was a clueless moron that doesn’t know anything beyond “I push the button and this is the result I get.”
PIXELS
Let’s start with a discussion of what a pixel is. I’m going to do this in simple terms, so forgive me if I oversimplify. Light is actually made up of different wavelengths, each one symbolizing a color. The colors that we see are made up of a combination of those colors. There are three “primary colors” which, when combined, make up every color that we see. Those three primary colors are: Red, green, and blue. (RGB)
When a digital picture is taken, the light that passes through the lens and strikes a computer chip. That chip is made up of a number of tiny light sensors, each one converting the light into a digital signal. Each of those tiny sensors is known as a “pixel.” (Not, as the judge called them, “pickles”) That signal is represented by a number from 0 to 255 for each color. For example, a red pixel would be symbolized by 255,0,0.
Since there are 256 values for each of the three colors, that gives us 256^3 possible combinations, or 16.7 million possible color combinations. This results in each pixel taking up 24 bits of storage. This is important later.
When shooting a video, all the camera does is capture a series of pictures. The number of pictures that it takes per second is called the frame rate. Like the old flip cartoons, a display shows them back to you and your brain interprets that series of pictures as if it were smooth motion, filling in what it thinks is the missing information.
Here is a great example of video:
RESOLUTION
Resolution is simply the number of pixels in a given image. The more the number of pixels, the higher the sharpness of the display and the more that it can be “zoomed” or expanded without losing definition or detail. Different cameras and displays have different numbers of pixels, depending on the model of the device and the format that it is using.
For example, an HD display that has a resolution of 720p contains 1280 pixels wide by 720 pixels high. This adds up to 921,600 pixels, or what is rounded up to 1 Megapixel. Similarly, 1080p contains 1920 by 1080 pixels, which works out to 2,073,600 pixels, or 2 Megapixels. This means that we have fit more than twice the number of pixels into the same image size, all other things being equal, so the picture would be sharper. This also would allow us to double the size of the display without increasing the size of the pixel, which would cause us to have a loss of sharpness.
Compression
You can’t have more information than you started with, so whatever the camera doesn’t capture just isn’t there. So the resolution of the image is limited by the resolution of the camera. That isn’t the only thing that limits your picture. Another is the particular protocol that is being used to encode the picture. A picture that is stored as raw data takes up a large amount of memory space. As discussed before, a 1080p picture in its raw form has 2 million pixels, with each one using up 24 bits of space. This means that each picture takes up 5.4 Megabytes (there are 8 bits to a byte). This is very large, and raw pictures would quickly eat up your memory. The answer to this is compression.
Many of the pixels in an image are identical, or very much alike. Electronic devices take advantage of this by compressing the data. They remove the identical parts with a notation that basically says “this large area here is all one color.” How this is done is particular to each compression method, for example: jpeg, gif, etc.
Video is compressed in much the same way, using something called a codec. When frames are close to each other, the codec essentially will say “this frame is very similar to the previous frame, with the following exceptions” then proceeds to describe the differences. Each codec handles this in a different way. Some are more accurate in describing differences than others, and each codec has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some are used because they require less processing power, others may be chosen because they are more memory intensive, and still others are chosen because they tend to look the best. The point is that each codec handles the frames in a different way.
The Display Device
The last and final thing that affects an image is the device being used to display the image. The device, which can be a monitor, a printer, or even a projector, will have its own resolution, its own capabilities for frame rate, and its pixels will be of a certain size. A 4K television has 4096 by 2160 pixels. If that TV is 48 inches wide, then each pixel will be 48 inches divided by 4096, or slightly less than 0.0117 inches in diameter. If you get very close to your television, you can probably see the individual pixels on your screen.
Changing resolution
So what happens when we want to zoom in on one particular area of a picture? Remember that the limiting factor to resolution is the lowest resolution in the entire process: the camera, the compression method, and the display device. This is why they don’t film studio quality movies on low price point and shoot cameras.
Unfortunately, people watch too much television. On TV cop shows, some cop says “enhance” and the computer technician pushes a button, then the computer picks out a reflection on an eyeball in a photograph and is able to get a license plate number from a car that was passing by. That just isn’t how this works. Here is a woman from a frame of a video:
We want to see a what that person looks like. So we take a look and see that there is an area of interest, and we want to zoom in on that. Let’s say that the area of interest was one tenth of the height of the original, making that area we are interested in 512 by 288 pixels. So lets make that larger.
Now I am trying to make a picture that is 512 pixels wide by 288 high fit onto my 4k television, which is a display that is 4096 by 2160 pixels. There are only two ways to do that: You can make the pixels themselves larger, to get an image that looks like this:
That doesn’t help. We have a larger picture, but we have lost a lot of detail. The other way is to leave the pixels the same size, but have more of them. That means adding pixels. This process is referred to as upsampling. Many photo software packages will do this automatically, and each one has its own method for deciding what the added pixels will look like.
Some software packages will do averaging. Averaging is where you want to add a pixel between two existing ones. Lets say that one pixel is a bright red (200,0,0) and the adjacent one is a duller red (100,0,0). The added pixel will wind up being in between the two(150,0,0).
So what does this mean to the Rittenhouse case?
Even though I paid attention, no one mentioned the drone or the camera, so I don’t know the resolution of the camera that was on the drone that provided the so called “unicorn” video in the Rittenhouse case. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that the drone was a DJI Mavic 3, a popular consumer drone that costs in the neighborhood of $2,000. That drone has a camera that shoots in 5k resolution, which is 5120 by 2880 pixels, or 14.7 Megapixels.
When that software expands the selected part of the picture to show what Rittenhouse was doing, there will be pixels that are added. What was added? What remained the same? Normally, the person seeking to admit that photo into evidence has the burden of proving that the enhanced picture is an accurate depiction of what actually happened. They do this by having an expert present who can attest to how and to what extent that photo was changed.
In this case, the cop who did the photo enhancement was using software, but had no idea how that software worked, nor did he have any idea how the enhanced picture differed from the original. All he knew was that he pushed a button, and *poof* the picture was enhanced to show something.
That is why this is an issue. The judge, and apparently every leftist who is a CSI fan doesn’t understand that.
Gaming the Courts
Dancing through a minefield
For decades, we have heard that the states should be able to ignore Federal law with regards to Supremacy when it came to marijuana and sanctuary cities. Now the left is ready to acknowledge Federal supremacy again with this lawsuit over vaccine mandates.
I wonder how the courts are going to resolve this minefield with marijuana and sanctuary cities on one side, and vaccine mandates and gun laws on the other side.