Taylot Swift wins Entertainer of the Year at the CMAs

Kanye West could not be reached for comment.

The purpose of politics is power

So what happens when something becomes politicized? We see the first inklings of this with the surprise expressed by feminist groups that Obamacare doesn't cover abortions:

"We cannot and will not support a health care bill that strips millions of women of their existing access to abortion," NOW President Terry O'Neill said in a statement. "NOW calls on the Senate to pass a health care bill that respects women's constitutionally protected right to abortion and calls on President Obama to refuse to sign any health care bill that restricts women's access to affordable, quality reproductive health care."

For years, they've supported a government policy of the sun rising in the east. Now they're dismayed that the sun rises in the east. Whatever.

So what happens when you inject another politicized topic - with its satellite political activist groups - into the mix? Something like this:

American researchers have estimated that the US health care sector is responsible for "nearly a tenth" of the nation's carbon emissions. This is almost triple the amount emitted by aviation and around four times that emitted by the IT industry, suggesting that green groups should shift the focus of their advocacy.

Journal of the AMA, Vol. 302, No. 18, Nov 11 2009.

What healthcare will get cut by the ruling class - and for whom - to appease the environmental lobby?

Man-made airborne carbon dioxide not increasing

So we're pumping all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is going to change the climate, right? Not so much:

Several recent studies have highlighted the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. This is an important claim, because so far only about 40% of those emissions have stayed in the atmosphere, which has prevented additional climate change. This study re-examines the available atmospheric CO₂ and emissions data including their uncertainties. It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero. The analysis further shows that the statistical model of a constant airborne fraction agrees best with the available data if emissions from land use change are scaled down to 82% or less of their original estimates. Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found.

Pay no attention to those Deniers at Geophysical Research Letters, they're clearly funded by Big Oil or something.

Hat tip: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Word

Remember

Today is the 11th day of the 11th month, the 91st anniversary of the day the guns fell silent in the War To End All Wars.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Any veterans in the Boston Metrowest area who would like a beer, courtesy all of the bushel baskets of cash Borepatch gets from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, email me at borepatch at gmail dot com.

It's been quite a while since I watched any PBS TV, but tonight on POV they are running The Way We Get By, about the greeters who meet the returning troop flights in Bangor, Maine. For years, they've been on call 24x7, meeting Our Boys (and Girls) at all hours of the day or night. 900,000 troops, getting a hero's welcome in a small airport in a small city. It's an amazing story.

The Way We Get By - Trailer from The Way We Get By on Vimeo.

Show information here.

Hat tip: Dad. Happy Veteran's Day, Dad!

UR SECURITY IS ZERO%

That is, if your name is Police Constable Plod of the Durham (UK) police force:

Police in Durham have been forced to take their website offline after it was defaced in apparent protest against the conflict in Pakistan.

The attacker, calling himself "L33T HACKER Ali.Mani" left a message on the site, saying:

UR SECURITY SUCKS UK POLICE THIS IS MY REVENGE AGAINST U

Um, Ali? I know it's really not my place, but I think it's spelled

UR SECURITY SUCKS UK POLICE THIS IS MY REVENGE AGAINST JOO

Just to keep that Jihadi je ne sais quois.

The hacked site is mirrored at Zone H. Pretty run-of-the-mill "hacktivism", really more typical of 2002. As of the time of this writing, the site is still down.

Macintosh security update

Mac users will want to go here, for a righteous helpin' of security fixes.

Bootnote: I think that this is the shortest security post I've ever made. Even with the bootnote.

The Line

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

- Cicero

I used to be a leftist, proudly "progressive." No more. I no longer have the stomach to sleep with evil, even evil in the name of the greater good. In all of the retrospectives about the fall of the Berlin Wall this score of years ago, something is missing. Recognition of tyranny is there (mostly). Recognition of how (mostly) the once unfree populations have embraced freedom is there, too (mostly).

What's missing is any description of the depth of evil that was our enemy. Col. Jeff Cooper saw it, and wrote of it in To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth:

Starting at its western edge, The Line is composed of several strata. First comes the actual linear boundary, surveyed and marked to the centimeter. There is no fence here. Free people can walk right up to it - but they do not step across it. Death looms. Some ten paces beyond the marked boundary, to the eastward, is the outside fence. It is a single barrier some ten feet high, electrified and sown with directional mines set to fire along its inside surface. Beyond the outside fence is a band of dead ground some 100 meters in width, cleared of life and planted at random with pressure-release anti-personnel fragmentation mines. When the snow melts in winter thaws these go off erratically in the sunshine - "Lenin's serenade."

At the inner edge of the dead ground are the dogs - German shepherds chained to an overhead trolley that allows them to run parallel to the inner fence but not back into it (electrocution) nor forward away from it (explosion). ...

At intervals watchtowers loom fifty feet into the air, manned and equipped with enhanced-vision devices, cameras, weapons, and release controls for packs of killer dogs which can be set free at command behind the inner fence. ...

Behind the inner fence lies a belt of Zombie-land five kilometers deep. No one moves here except those whose duties demand it. The fields produce. Roads and roofs are mended. There is an occasional dilapidated vehicle in motion. At first glance it seems a viable countryside. On closer inspection, however, it is death-in-life. There are perhaps two lighted windows where there should be scores. Such villages in which there are lights are inside electric fences. The sickening effect grows as the sun sets. ...

With exquisite cruelty the very existence of The Line is concealed from those it contains. The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves. Bad slaves sometimes do cross it, but because they do not know what they face they usually die.

My staff sergeant guide on this occasion told me of a case he witnessed. A young woman, apparently driven to desperation, dared to cross the eastern 5 km line and lead her small child west towards liberty. As she approached the inner fence, the orcs in the watchtower loosed the dogs.

"I stood there with a rifle in my hands, but I was not allowed to shoot." He said, "I hear those screams every day. The mother's were louder than the child's. They were long and very high. They drowned out the growling of the dogs.

"For a while."

The worker's paradise was not above selling its slaves to the west:

Between 1964 and 1989, 33,755 political prisoners were ransomed. A further 2,087 prisoners were released to the West under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to leave East Germany to rejoin their families. In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion DM – nearly $2.3 billion at 1990 prices – in goods and hard currency.^[117] Those ransomed were valued on a sliding scale, ranging from around 1,875 DM for a worker to around 11,250 DM for a doctor. The justification, according to East Germany, was that this was compensation for the money invested by the state in the prisoner's training. For a while, payments were made in kind using goods that were in short supply in East Germany, such as oranges, bananas, coffee and medical drugs. The average prisoner was worth around 4,000 DM worth of goods.^[118] The scheme was highly controversial in the West. Freikauf was denounced by many as human trafficking but was defended by others as an "act of pure humanitarianism";^[119] the West German government budgeted money for Freikauf under the euphemistic heading of "support of special aid measures of an all-German character.

I'm thankfully not the only one to notice this strange amnesia, and judge. And to find today's leftist intellectuals to be wanting:

The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.

The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989.

...

I find it obscene that [New Zealand] National Radio broadcasters Geoff Robinson and Lloyd Scott this morning recalled the Berlin Wall, its twenty-eight years of bloodshed and the 1200 slaughtered East Germans, with wistful nostalgia. They even appeared to excuse the East German secret police, the Stasi, as people just doing their jobs.

Not just judged to be morally void, but intellectually as well:

In 1922 Ludwig Von Mises explained that socialism would eat itself and the people whom it enslaved – that it couldn’t plan, it couldn’t produce, that it couldn’t calculate -- that it was and always would be both morally depraved and economically unsustainable. Sixty-seven years later he was proven emphatically correct when the illusion that was socialist Eastern Europe collapsed, and the symbol of its totalitarian state was torn down.

The barest minimum qualification for an intellectual is to examine and test your first premises. To reject them, if they do not model the world effectively. Philosophers all the way back to Plato would hold today's left in contempt, with their hope that some how, this time it will be different.


Here's a different way of saying the same thing:


Such a strange forgetfulness by the Moral Titans of the left: chattel slavery, Schießbefehl ("Order to fire" - shoot to kill), thousands of dead, the souls of millions crushed. For their own good, of course. The People must be protected from the people.

So strange that the left cannot take this moment to reflect on actual evil, and to condemn it without mistakes were made and for a noble cause excuses, without clinging to that most slippery word "but". They believe - and I generally concur - that they are good people, motivated to do good. But they flinch. They are behind their own mental Iron Curtain, trapped by an unexamined world view. Behind their own, intellectually-imposed Line.

The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves.

Tear it down.



He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

UPDATE 11 November 2009 10:33: Welcome visitors from Random Acts of Patriotism. Thanks for the link (and the kind words, ASM826)! While you're here, you might be interested in my thoughts on Ft. Hood.

Battlefield Preparation and Ft. Hood

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

- Sun Tsu

Battlefield Preparation occurs before the first shot is fired. The obvious (and uninteresting) goal is to degrade the enemy's assets - to destroy tanks, anti-aircraft sites, and command and control links. These will be (hopefully) sorely missed when you launch your forces into the fray.

The less obvious (and more interesting) goal of battlefield preparation is to paralyze the enemy. Sometimes you can do this without firing a shot, like when Paton's First US Army Group at Dover immobilized critically needed German reinforcements that might have turned the tide in Normandy.

This paralysis opens up tactical opportunities that would not be otherwise available. Battles are often won in what are essentially small unit actions - Napoleon's dictum that there is a single point on the battlefield where the moment of decision will occur ultimately translates down the TOE to a single column, or battalion. A successfully executed strategy is a massive force multiplier on the tactical level.

So what happened at Ft. Hood? Actually, all you have to read to know the answer is this (via Instapundit):

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

According to the officials, the Army was informed of Hasan's contact, but it is unclear what, if anything, the Army did in response.

The Army knew that this guy was a terrorist in the making; after all, they're not idiots. They had been immobilized by al Qaeda's battlefield preparation. Ft. Hood was a tactical target of opportunity, made by an expendable, tactical asset in the War of Terror (their side), enabled by a wildly successful execution of their strategy. Everything else was mere body count.

The only conclusion that we can reach is that al Qaeda has achieved a stunning strategic victory, using the West's Political Correctness to freeze our response. In retrospect, this perhaps shouldn't be a surprise, because we've seen this before:

During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened to be recounting the pre-September 11th events concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone's first question was "Why?--Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case? (I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen, who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort.)

And before anyone blames the current administration, this is a good time to reflect that the PC induced organizational paralysis certainly dates through the Bush and Clinton administrations. And it's not just the military. Eight years into the War on Terror, we see that Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr was right. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: the more things change, the more it's the same old thing.

There's a saying in business, when you're doing competitive analysis. Don't look for your enemy's weakness - if he's dangerous, he'll fix that. Look for the weakness in his strength. He doesn't want to fix that.

Our strength, as western societies, is openness and tolerance. al Qaeda has found the weakness in that strength. We don't want to see what bumps up against that tolerance; actually, we're afraid to see. Afraid to be criticized as not tolerant we close our eyes, and that opens up tactical opportunities like Ft. Hood. When you combine that proactive paralysis with regulations that makes reacting difficult or impossible, you prove another dictum:

Enough layers of management ensure that disaster is not left to chance.

Our entire society consists of soft targets of opportunity. There's no other way to look at the Ft. Hood battle (for that is what it was) as anything that cannot be replicated across the land, from sea to shining sea. Politically Correct induced paralysis combined with we don't encourage self-help induced paralysis means that loosely affiliated terrorist cells - or individual actor "micro cells" - will be find a wealth of tactical targets of opportunity.

Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?

- Sun Tsu

UPDATE 9 November 2009 21:02: Paralysis in pictures.

UPDATE 10 November 2009 09:34: Bumped. Having slept on this, it seems more significant than my usual blather. I don't want it to get lost in the flurry of today's blather.

UPDATE 12 November 2009 10:26: Welcome visitors from New Jovian Thunderbolt. If you're interested in this post, you might also like this one.

Quote of the Day

The Czar of Muscovy reflects on the fall of the Berlin Wall:

Anyway, if you do not already understand how massively important and monumental a day that was and why, the Czar can pretty much guess for whom you voted last time around.

Heh. Extra crazy ESP powers, right there.

Indian Environment Minister to IPCC: Get lost

Seems India isn't willing to keep their population in poverty for Mother Gaia:

I'm not at all sure what to make of this report just out in the Guardian. Apparently, the Indian Environment Ministry has just issued a report (here in PDF) saying that they see no signal of a climate effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the retreat of Indian glaciers:

Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, released the controversial report in Delhi, saying it would "challenge the conventional wisdom" about melting ice in the mountains. . .

Today Ramesh denied any such risk existed: "There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers." The minister added although some glaciers are receding they were doing so at a rate that was not "historically alarming".

The report is noteworthy because it contradicts the 2007 report of the IPCC:

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN agency which evaluates the risk from global warming, warned the glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could "disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner".

I guess it's easier to take big economics risks when you work in the Faculty Lounge (or western governments). Places struggling to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty seem to want stronger evidence.

Imagine that.

Blogroll Update

Following a Sitemeter trackback, I find that Carteach0 has a new (to me) blog, The Gregarious Loner. For the three people who haven't already run across his posts, he has some serious marksmanship blog-fu. He's been kind enough to add me to his blogroll. Welcome to the Borepatch blogroll, Carteach0 (your hit counter's fixin' to spin ...)!

If anyone has me on their blogroll, but I haven't reciprocated, please shoot me an email at borepatch at gmail dot com, or just leave a comment.

Security Smorgasbord, Vol 1, No. 6

It's Patch Tuesday, so Windows users need to make sure that Windows Update has pulled down the latest round of security goodness from Microsoft. Three critical remote code execution vulnerabilities are among the 15 fixes to be patched. Take Internet Explorer (doesn't work with Firefox, sorry) here.

----------------------------

The iPhone has been Rickrolled:

There's a worm on the lose that targets iPhones where the owner has jail broken them, and then forgot to change the default SSH password:

The trouble is that the most common jailbreaking software installs SSH using a default password. As a result, users who jailbroke their iPhone but never changed the default password are vulnerable to being "Rickrolled" by this worm, or worse.

If you haven't jail broken your iPhone (or if you have but changed the SSH password), then you can sit back and smirk.

-----------------------------

CBS News' 60 Minutes has takes a short break from forging documents, and produced a good overview of Cyberwar, and the threat to our power grid:



A couple of things to point out:

1. I'm skeptical that the Brazilian blackout was caused by intrusion, rather than by accident. While the threat to the power grid is IMO real, I don't think this is an example of it.

2. You probably still need state actors to pull off a major blackout, because it's not enough to take out a station or two. You need to punch enough holes in the grid that it comes apart, which means a lot of careful planning and execution - probably more than anyone other than a government can do. The Russians and Chinese are particularly active.

3. It's a target rich environment - more so than 60 Minutes lets on. But it's good to see people taking this very seriously.

4. You might think that I am an idiot. I can neither confirm nor deny anything.

Well done, 60 Minutes.

Sure looks like a duck ...

... to me, at least.

Well played, Bob. So very, very well played.

Watching the sausage being made

Sextus Empericus is watching the Healthcare Sausage Factory, so that you don't have to. He's found some interesting stuff, as you can imagine:

Under the Senate Finance Committee's health care reform bill (S. 1769), it may be possible for an employer of low-wage workers to set things up so that both it and its workers avoid any penalty for the lack of insurance. Under the bill, an employer pays a penalty for each employee that receives a subsidy for buying health insurance in the individual market. An employee is ineligible for this subsidy if the employer offers "affordable" health insurance. Households are penalized if they are not covered by health insurance, but these penalties are waived for those who lack access to "affordable" health insurance. Here, "affordable" has two different definitions, which creates a loophole.

You mean the Solons in Washington haven't given us a bill worthy of Philosopher Kings? Color me shocked.

Mockery, vol II

Hollywood lives (and dies) on a willing suspension of disbelief by their audience. The audience has to buy in to the basic premise of the film, or it will be a long 90 minutes. And high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Box looks to me like it will have this problem. The premise is idiotic: someone cares enough about your sick kid to offer you a pile of dough sufficient to cure him, but only if someone else dies.



What's most idiotic is that someone would think twice about pushing the button - at least, I wouldn't. So where's the dramatic tension? I dunno - maybe this is a comedy? It's certainly a rich target for mockery:

The Button - watch more funny videos

Swine Flu: The Trailer

In Lego.



Insanely high production values, with a touch of zombies.

Michelson-Morley, and the death - and birth - of scientific theories

The science is settled. OK, what about Science Magazine?

A new study in the journal Science has just shown that all of the climate modeling results of the past are erroneous. The IPCC's modeling cronies have just been told that the figures used for greenhouse gas forcings are incorrect, meaning none of the model results from prior IPCC reports can be considered valid. What has caused climate scientists' assumptions to go awry? Short lived aerosol particles in the atmosphere changing how greenhouse gases react in previously unsuspected ways.

One of the most annoying arguments presented in the whole Climate Change debate is about "Peer-Reviewed" articles, and how nothing else really counts. This particular article is in Science, which is the Harvard of peer-reviewed scientific journals; mercifully, we won't have to listen to the mouth-breathing "My scientist is red hot; your scientist ain't didly-squat" silliness, as the scientific community gets around to what it does best: testing scientific hypotheses.

Sometimes a hypothesis is confirmed, and leads to a huge advance in our understanding of the universe. Einstein's theory of relativity was confirmed in 1919 when the light from a star was observed to be deflected by the sun's gravity.

Sometimes, an experiment shows that a particular theory is wrong, and this negative result leads to a breakthrough advance in knowledge. The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 was one of these.

Their experiment was designed to help understand an anomaly that was pretty vexing to scientists at the time: while light was understood to consists of waves - the radio spectrum is divided into wavelengths - recent advances had shown outer space to be a vacuum. Waves need some sort of material to propagate through - you can't have ocean waves without an ocean, right?

The solution that was proposed was the "Luminiferous Aether", a substance with properties that would allow the propagation of light waves at the very high speed that light was known to travel, while still acting as a vacuum regarding physical matter. Measuring this "rigid vacuum" (as it was described) was - as you can imagine - pretty tricky. Michelson and Morley devised a very clever test that used the motion of the earth through the universe. They reasoned that (a) the earth is moving at around 100,000 km/s in its orbit around the sun, and (b) the sun is moving even faster around the galactic center. This rapid motion across the ether should result in an "Ether Wind" that they could measure. Since the science about ether's properties was well established, the experiment had precise expectations for results.

They used a clever set of mirrors - some of which rotated - and beam splitters to cause a ray of sunlight to be divided into two beams, one continuing straight and the other deflected by 90 degrees. One beam would be following the direction of the Ether Wind; the other would be at right angles to it. After traveling a long enough distance, the beams would be reunited, and the amount by which they interfered with each other (because one had taken longer to travel the same distance, due to the Ether Wind) would be measured. From this, the presence of the Ether and the strength of the Ether Wind could be calculated.

Their results? Nothing. It was "the most famous failed experiment of all time." Of course, it wasn't the experiment that failed - it's been confirmed many times over the years, including by your humble blogger. It was the theory of the luminiferous aether that failed, spectacularly. That failure led to Einstein and Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics, and the Nuclear Age.

So what does this have to do with the current debate about Climate Change? First, it should be a reminder to scientists to keep a sense of humility. Better scientists than you have failed; they weren't the first, and won't be the last. Second, remember that repeating and validating hypotheses is what science does best. There was a quite robust theory of the luminifirous aether, it just couldn't be confirmed.

The scientist proposes, and nature disposes.

There is currently quite a robust theory of how atmospheric Carbon Dioxide "forces" higher temperatures through a rarely-seen-in-nature positive feedback mechanism. OK, nice theory. The problem is that it seems that it doesn't work, at least not the way that was thought. And before you attack the authors as right wing shills of the Oil companies, remember that they work for NASA and this article was published in Science.

Rather than being settled, the scientific debate is robust, and interesting, and changing rapidly. The atmosphere is more fiendishly complicated than we had thought? No big surprise here, except for a politician with an agenda.

Turbocharged ObamaCare

The reason it's being towed? The EPA says it doesn't meet minimum mileage standards.