— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 27, 2019
None so blind as he who refuses to see.
— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 27, 2019
Boeing has built an autonomous military aeroplane that flies in formation with a manned fighter jet to ward off electronic warfare attacks. Reports say the craft could be modified to carry and use its own weapons.
The electronic warfare drone was built for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) by the American aerospace conglomerate and is roughly the size of a traditional military fast jet, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"Its primary purpose would be to conduct electronic warfare and reconnaissance missions, particularly in environments where it is considered risky to send manned aircraft," reported the Aussie state broadcaster.Baby steps towards the End Days.
RIVERSIDE — A probationer who led Riverside police officers on a dangerous, high-speed pursuit in a luxury electric sports car was arrested after the plug-in car’s batteries died Sunday night, Feb. 17. The pursuit, which wound its way from Riverside’s Eastside neighborhood into Orange County, ended in a felony stop on the 91 Freeway.The owner had an app on his phone that let him track the car's location in real time. He relayed this info to the Police, who kept the thief on the run until the car's battery died. Of course, the bad guy looks pretty much like what you'd expect:
Unless you buy it after an IED explosion, or going out like Quint in Jaws, death mainly hurts the friends and family.
No one ever woke up during a Code Blue and said "Ow!". They were over it, and generally speaking, long gone and well past caring at that point.
And if they've had their threescore-and-ten, or more, it isn't really necessary to "compartmentalize" their death; someday, it's going to be everybody's time.
The hard ones are the way-too-early ones, especially kids and infants. No one pulls the plug on those for an hour or more, because kids.This is a long and thoughtful post, inspired by a post at OldNFO's place. I'd be interested in the opinions of Tacitus, a retired ER doc who is a sometimes commenter here.
Trump is defunding the left and lowering its statusThe EPA will no longer take science advice from “scientists” who receive stupendous amounts of money for climate doom.During the Obama years, the EPA packed the CASAC panel. Twenty-four of its 26 members are now agency grantees, with some listed as principal investigators on EPA research grants worth more than $220 million
Environmentalists, predictably, sued, alleging this policy would change the “science” advice away from environmentalism – as obviously it would.
In 2016, the World Bank announced it would spend 28% of investments on climate-related projects by 2020, which is roughly three hundred to four hundred million dollars of American taxpayer money per year. All Climate related projects, as near to all of them as make no difference, are scams that enrich political activists, and again, Trump cut this out.A horde of journalists have lost their jobs, and their status.
I'm not sure that I entirely buy this argument, but if Trump does to this what he's doing to regulation (eliminating several for each new one) then in the next 2 (or 6) years there could very possibly be more unemployed Leftists.Trump is now taking aim at “Disparate impact” If he succeeds with “disparate impact”, there are going to be mass layoffs of bitter angry aging cat ladies with vast unpaid college debt and credit card debt from Human Resources, radically curtailing the status, wealth, and power of the left.
Both craggy rock outcrops are the petrified remains of a long-past volcanic eruption. The lava cracked as it cooled and hardened, like mud in a dry lakebed, and those cracks reached well down into the deposit, so the cooled lava ended up in a cluster of vertical pillars. (The Giant's Causeway in Ireland is another well-known example of that process.)That geological coincidence made the work of quarrying much easier than in Egypt. There, at around the same time, workers were chiseling blocks out of solid bedrock. In Wales, the quarry workers just had to wedge a column apart from its neighbors at the joints (it's difficult not to imagine peeling a really big piece of string cheese, honestly).Pearson and his colleagues found some evidence of how they did it, thanks in part to the almost-universal human tendency to drop things and forget to pick them up again. The ancient quarry-workers left behind mudstone wedges and stone hammers, which they would have driven into the cracks between the pillars to carefully pry them apart. The wedges were precision tools for delicate work; mudstone is considerably softer than the rhyolite and dolerite columns, and Pearson says that made a difference."An engineering colleague has suggested that hammering in a hard wedge could have created stress fractures, causing the thin pillars to crack," he said in a statement to the press. "Using a soft wedge means that, if anything were to break, it would be the wedge and not the pillar."
For those who haven't been following along at home, let me give some background. The UN IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the body who produces Assessment Reports on the state of the climate every five years. This collects what is considered the best consensus science. The last Assessment Report is Assessment Report 5, or AR5. The section that Curry quoted is Working Group 2 (WGII) which (being to lazy to look up) is the report for government policymakers, providing guidance to those considering new laws.Some people (including one of the Members) took issue with the following statement in my testimony:“Based upon our current assessment of the science, the threat does not seem to be an existential one on the time scale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation.”I referred to AR5 WGII:“Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 (WGII, Table 12.4) has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence. The only tipping point that the IPCC considers likely in the 21stcentury is disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice (which is fairly reversible, since sea ice freezes every winter).”In hindsight, I should have hit this a bit harder.
Here’s Tokyo, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23 GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.Exactly. Just check the numbers, roughly. They talk about some metropolitan area around Tokyo so lots of people are involved. 27 million sounds fine. And each of them needs almost a kilowatt of power at each moment – most of it is not "personal energy consumption", however. 3 days is 72 hours, 72 times 23 is 1656. We need 1656 gigawatthours. Solar doesn't work, the weather is bad. The wind turbines should better be stopped and protected because the cyclone could break them. OK, you need a prepared charged battery with 1656 gigawatthours for those nice three days (or some really long and good cables from another part of the world with generous inhabitants who are willing to share a half of their energy).
One kilowatthour of Tesla-like battery used to cost $1,000 but the price went below $200 in a recent year or two and the Tesla CEO dreams about $100. Great. Let's use $200 per kilowatthour. 1656 gigawatthours is 1656 million kilowatthours which would cost 1656 million times 200 which is some $330 billion for those batteries whose only purpose is to satisfy some brainwashed morons' view that renewable energy should rule the world (and they probably reject nuclear energy as well because Greenpeace told them to do so). And it's just one Tokyo metropolitan area, some 1/300 of the world population.But he's not done with the math. He discusses how many lithium batteries you would need to provide everyone in the world with the same 3 day's electric storage that we're talking about for Tokyo, and how this would take ten times more than the world's entire lithium reserves. Then he switches to a discussion of how you create the steel needed for all the wind turbines - most of the power for making steel comes from direct coal burning at the steel furnace. If you don't use coal, where does that power come from? He closes with a key point:
The production of steel and cement and the operation of airplanes requires a lot of concentrated and reliable energy that is delivered in real time. If there exists no viable alternative physical scheme where the concentrated energy comes from, then no financial schemes or Ponzi schemes can successfully replace the bulk of the existing system with an equally viable but would-be "cleaner" alternative.Let me elaborate on this point. The perceived legitimacy of government and social institutions (such as environmentalism) has been collapsing over the last 20-30 years. That trajectory has a very clear landing point:
Image par la Wik |
So it turns out that two people died and five cops were shot in a no-knock raid of an alleged dealer’s house where no significant narcotics were found on information provided by, well, possibly no one. Something obviously stinks here.There's no word that describes this other than "appalling". Prosecutions should result.
Tom Cruise is filming Top Gun 2 on the mighty USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), a US Nimitz class super carrier. The crew has been ordered to not look at Tom Cruise or to talk to the arrogant Scientology OT. Tom Cruise will make a fortune from Top Gun 2 pretending to be a US Navy officer and yet he shows no respect to for the men and women who serve aboard the Theodore Roosevelt.
Tom Cruise has the same arrogant behavior going on in Scientology: No one is allowed to look at him or talk to him unless he grants permission.
Scuttlebutt from the crew of the “TR” has made its way onto social media — and special thanks to my colleague Intergalactic Walrus for making today’s article possible due to his timely commenting at the Underground Bunker.
Famed actor Tom Cruise recently said that his job is comparable to being deployed to Afghanistan, according to court documents obtained by TMZ.I know people at NAS Lemoore, and will ask what they hear - filming will be there later this month.
Yet another example came to light on Monday when a driver in North Brunswick, New Jersey wrecked his Tesla on a highway while the vehicle was in Autopilot mode. According to a report published by News 12 New Jersey, the driver said that the vehicle "got confused due to the lane markings" at a point where the driver could have stayed on the highway or taken an exit. The driver claims that Autopilot split the difference and went down "the middle", between the exit and staying on the highway.Insty is skeptical, but I'm not. This is exactly the kind of situation that you should suspect the software could handle badly: confusing input from signs or lane markers leading to a failure to navigate the car on a safe route. It's not a software bug, it's a gap in the algorithm used to control the car.
The car then drove off the road and collided with several objects before coming to a stop. The driver claims that he tried to regain control of the vehicle but that "it would not let him".
Looking at short trends in the global surface temperature data, the analysis shows that global temperature has not increased under Republican presidents, only Democrats.LOL.
Image de la Wik |
An Illinois couple said a hacker spoke to their baby through one of their Nest security cameras and then later hurled obscenities at them, CBS station WBBM-TV reports. Arjun Sud told the station he was outside his 7-month-old son's room Sunday outside Chicago and he heard someone talking. "I was shocked to hear a deep, manly voice talking," Sud said. "My blood ran cold." Sud told WBBM-TV he thought the voice was coming over the baby monitor by accident. But it returned when he and his wife were downstairs. The voice was coming from another of the many Nest cameras throughout the couple's Lake Barrington house. "Asking me, you know, why I'm looking at him -- because he saw obviously that I was looking back -- and continuing to taunt me," Sud said. Later that night, Arjun Sud noticed the Nest thermostat they have upstairs had been raised to 90 degrees. He suspected the hacker was behind that too. Nest's parent company, Google, said in a statement that Nest's system was not breached. Google said the recent incidents stem from customers "using compromised passwords exposed through breaches on other websites."Let me, err, Google Translate that last bit: Google said that if you use one of these damned things you'd better be a security expert or J. Random Hacker will set your house temperature to whatever he wants and teach your baby interesting vocabulary.
— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) February 9, 2019
The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it.
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In Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela.
If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club.
This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two.$500 per family for a single day's electricity. There's your Green New Deal. The only question is why Australians are not rioting in the streets and burning their politicians in effigy. Maybe the reason is that we see voters going for this madness here, too: Georgetown Texas household electricity bills rise by $1200/year due to "100% renewable" power.
A woman in a hot air balloon realizes she is lost. She lowers her altitude and spots a man fishing from a boat below. She shouts to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man consults his portable GPS and replies, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.
She rolls her eyes and says, "You must be a Republican!"
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," answers the balloonist, "everything you tell me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you're not much help to me."
The man smiles and responds, "You must be a Democrat."
"I am, replies the balloonist. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "You don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but, somehow, now it's my fault."Via the Queen Of The World.
Welcome to the colliding of your two little musical worlds, where that classic country connoisseur and twang hound in you meets the hard-driving metalhead who punched a hole in your bedroom wall in 7th grade while listening to Master of Puppets. This is what occurred when Metallica showed up in Nashville Thursday night (1-26) for their first show in Music City in 10 years, and were graced by the presence of other than country music legend Loretta Lynn who was there to soak it all in.
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About halfway through the show, frontman James Hetfield took a break, and guitarist Kirk Hammett and bass player Rob Trujillo took the opportunity to play a stripped down version of Loretta’s 1971 hit, “You’re Lookin’ at Country.”That's so awesome that it's in danger of collapsing into a black hole of awesome - not least that Loretta went to their concert. The video quality is pretty bad here but it's a cool moment.
Growing up in rural Northeast Alabama in the foothills of the Appalachians, I was privileged to catch the tale end of what was an era marked by ruggedness and self-sufficiency. I grew up around men that were willing to fix what was broken and take the time to do it right. My father was a Vietnam veteran and the product of growing up farming the hills of these same mountains where I was raised. He always carried a small pocket knife much like the one pictured. He had an affinity for Case knives, but would carry the occasional “Old timer” or “Buck” or even “Schrade”. One thing was for sure, that he had one with him, wherever he was. You could also be pretty sure that his pocket knife would be so sharp that if you were to stare at it too long your eyeballs would bleed. Now that's pretty sharp.... The pocket knife was an important part of his life. Whether it was to slice a freshly picked apple, or to cut some twine, (coincidentally twine can patch most any broken farm implement until you can get home) he was always prepared. At Christmas time, my father always had his knife waiting to help open those pesky gifts that needed cutting open as only a father can do best.I too got my first pocketknife from Dad, back around 1970. I have a new Benchmade one that the Queen Of The World got for me that I keep clipped in my pocket. It feels weird if it's not there.
Even worse, these are surface stations (South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Antarctica). Almost all of the southern hemisphere south of 45° is ocean. How many readings are in the climate database from ship reports?This is the foundation of the whole Global Warming narrative. Then a huge layer of statistical manipulation is layered over it to attempt to hide the data quality and quantity issues. Kriging, interpolation, homogenizing, “the reference station method” of making up a number based on a temperature up to 1200 km away. None of this can fix the real problems with the underlying data. They can only burry it under a layer of bafflegab.How bad is it?These are the months of data, that is not a missing data flag, for each wmo number in the Antarctic region (country starting with a 7). Note that the very first one has 10 years of data, that’s all. 120 months. THE longest is 1356 or about 113 years, then the next is 1212 months, or 101 years. Long for a human lifetime, nearly nothing in geological time scales and climate cycles. Most of the rest are around one human lifetime or less.
So, basically #GovNortham is retreating to the classic "These aren't my pants" defense so familiar to street cops.https://t.co/PuaU9T3MMB— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 2, 2019
Democrat Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia just stated, “I believe that I am not either of the people in that photo.” This was 24 hours after apologizing for appearing in the picture and after making the most horrible statement on “super” late term abortion. Unforgivable!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2019
Game Theory is a field of mathematics originally developed to try to mathematically derive optimum solutions for card games in the 18th century. It has developed into a major field of analysis used in computer science and even the design of crypto systems. Any of you who saw the film "A Beautiful Mind" have at least a passing familiarity with the subject.
You probably even know the most famous example of Game Theory: The Prisoner's Dilemma. Two prisoners are (separately) offered a deal - rat out the other guy or keep silent. If they rat and the other guy doesn't, they go free and he gets a long sentence. If neither of them rat, they both get short sentences. If they both rat, they both get long sentences. And most importantly to the prisoner, if he doesn't rat but the other guy does, he gets a long sentence while the other guy walks.
It's a one-time deal, which makes the math simpler. Real world situations are not so simple, and a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma has incorporated this. Tit For Tat is a sequential set of prisoner's dilemma events where the strategy is to play what your opponent played in the previous round. If your opponent was cooperative, you will be cooperative; if he screwed you, you will screw him back.
What's interesting about Tit For Tat is that mathematical proofs have shown that it leads to the outcome with maximum combined utility. If your opponent always screws you, you're no worse off playing Tit For Tat, but if your opponent is always cooperative or also plays Tit For Tat then both of you derive the maximum benefit.
Image von der Wik |
Bradley was a part of Nashville’s recording scene for more than seven decades. A member of Nashville’s famed “A-team” group of studio musicians, Bradley played on many of Nashville’s greatest hits. His staggering list of credits includes Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces,” “Crazy,” She’s Got You” and “Sweet Dreams,” along with Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Elvis Presley’s “Devil in Disguise,” Roy Orbison’s “Crying” and “Only the Lonely,” Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away,” Alan Jackson’s “Here in The Real World,” Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans,” Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” John Anderson’s “Swingin’,” Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man,” Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’,” the Everly Brothers’ “Ebony Eyes” — and so many more that a complete discography would turn this piece from an obituary into a book.Add in Hank Williams, Burrell Ives, Perry Como, Boan Baez, Buddy Holly, and Connie Francis. I don't know that this makes him the most important studio musician in history but I don't know that it doesn't.
The bottom line is that these watches (including but not limited to brands Gator, Tinitell, and Xplora) have NO security in their database and allow ANYONE to access ANY USER'S DATA without having to log in. This is a year after a Norwegian government report on this, and NOTHING HAS BEEN IMPROVED. This is perhaps the worst example of a saying I frequently roll out: security wasn't an afterthought, it wasn't thought of at all.the Norwegian Consumers Council published the excellent ‘WatchOut’ research that demonstrated trivial access to kids GPS locations through vulnerable tracker watches, including the Gator.It received plenty of press coverage and resulted in several kids tracker watches taking swift action to secure their systems.A year on, we decided to have a look at the Gator watch again to see how their security had improved as a result of their actions.TL; DR
Guess what: a train wreck. Anyone could access the entire database, including real time child location, name, parents details etc. Not just Gator watches either – the same back end covered multiple brands and tens of thousands of watches