This weekend is Memorial Day, the traditional BBQ kickoff to summer. But on these shores, it's the day to remember the fallen from past - and current - wars. The day was originally called Decoration Day, the date was at the very beginning of summer so that wild flowers would be available everywhere for families to decorate the graves of their fallen loved ones.
Many had no graves to decorate, as their loved one had an anonymous foreign grave for their final rest. Today the Texas Air National Guard (and others) bring the fallen home on "Angel Flights". This weekend, remember them. Both the quick and the dead.
Animal rescues in Minnesota are welcoming dozens of beagles into their care this week from a biomedical research breeding facility in Wisconsin.
Late last month, Big Dog Ranch Rescue and The Center for a Humane Economy announced they bought the beagles for an undisclosed sum from Ridglan Farms near Madison.
The purchase followed a settlement with Wisconsin state regulators where Ridglan agreed to give up its breeder’s license in exchange for avoiding criminal charges.
"Researchers" - we all know what that means, don't we Dr. Fauci? Odd isn't it that cruelty to animals often precedes cruelty to humans ...
And this part is infuriating:
But [Special ProsecutorGruenke did find that Ridglan allowed non-veterinarians to perform eye operations on some animals without general anesthesia in violation of Wisconsin’s animal mistreatment law.
Wolfgang would definitely want to bite that SOB.
Interestingly, this is the first post tagged Blinded By Science where actual blinding by scientists was involved.
A man named Tyler Brown opened fire on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Mass., this week, turning an ordinary Monday afternoon into a rolling ambush near Harvard and MIT.
Middlesex DA Marian Ryan said Brown, a 46-year-old Boston man (notice no doctor was needed to identify Brown as a man), fired roughly 50 to 60 rounds from a rifle at vehicles on the roadway.
A Mass Statie and Our Hero (legally carrying, natch) shot the dirty perp. So well done! And I hear you ask, what's the tie in to gun control. This:
Brown didn't appear from thin air; his criminal record included a 2020 shootout with Boston police, and he had pleaded guilty to charges tied to armed assault with intent to murder. He was reportedly out on probation when the Cambridge shooting unfolded.
OK, so Massachusetts is run by dumbasses. Dude was out on parole for armed assault with intent to murder, and he shot up a bunch of stuff, including a Massachusetts State Police cruiser.
But here's the punch line:
[The perpetrator] survived with non-life-threatening injuries and faces serious charges, including armed assault with intent to murder. [Emphasis mine - Borepatch]
This time he'll be sorry!
Some Masshole judge will release him in 4 or 5 years. But more gun control is just the thing. Oooooooh kaaaaaay.
It's quite a mystery why all the retarded Massachusetts liberals think they're so much smarter than we are. The evidence is against them.
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).”
The IPCC is the same "U.N. Climate Panel" getting headlines today. The IPCC Assessment Reports are the "State of the Science" reports they release every five years. They are considered the Gold Standard for establishment science, and they've been very quietly burying exactly this point for a long, long time.
The only thing they've given up is keeping these scenarios for the screaming headlines.
The only thing interesting here is why they are doing this now? I think it's the mad dash to AI, with AI datacenters springing up everywhere. Each of these has a ravenous power appetite, and the (very wealthy) folks behind AI have told the IPCC to tone down the climate alarmism.
Money talks, so the mainstream climate science establishment walks.
You’ve probably heard of the PayPal Mafia. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 its founders took the money, scattered, and built the next generation of digital monopolies.
Peter Thiel founded Palantir and seeded Facebook. Reid Hoffman set up LinkedIn. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen started YouTube. Max Levchin founded Affirm.
Elon Musk—who had merged X.com into PayPal two years earlier—went a different direction. He took his payout and leased a small warehouse in the El Segundo area of LA.
He bolted a sign on the front that read “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.”
We all know where that's gone.
Most people still think SpaceX is “just” a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk “way” of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.
After meeting dozens of SpaceX graduates in warehouses across LA, I’m convinced:
The SpaceX Mafia will create more wealth than the PayPal Mafia—possibly more than all of Silicon Valley combined.
If you can track only one alumni group in business today, this is the one. SpaceX is the new Harvard.
A hedge fund buddy of mine told me: “I’d pay real money for a database of ex-SpaceX employees.”
The article then goes on to list four companies founded by SpaceX alums - the "SpaceX Mafia" who are already solving really hard (and expensive) problems. Only two are space companies.
The horse on the left is Golden Tempo, a 23-1 long shot who won the Kentucky Derby. The jockey is Jose Ortiz who won the Kentucky Oaks race yesterday - only the ninth jockey to win both in the same year.
The horse on the right is Renegade, at 4-1. The jockey is Irad Ortiz, Jr., Jose's brother. Irad has won the Belmont Stakes twice.
As long as
we are limited to chemical rockets where 90% of the weight is fuel and
rocket with only 10% payload we will never be able to make use of the
solar systems resources efficiently. The problem is there is no viable
alternative...not even a theoretical one. It's an enormous hurdle to
becoming a space faring species.
I have two comments.
Efficiency factors into the price. Starship may get the cost of payload to orbit down to $50/pound. That's what King Crab costs. It's hard to call this "inefficient" when it is reducing cost by three orders of magnitude.
Agreed with danielbarger and others that this does not get us to Interstellar travel. The DC-3 didn't get us to the moon, either, but it was a damn fine start.
I'd like to see where things are 30 years from now. For sure we won't still be on Starship but we will be a lot further ahead than we are now. And guaranteed people will no longer be optimizing for mass.
Consider the two critical metrics: Dollars per tonne ($/T) and tonnes per year (T/year). Any effective space transport cargo logistics system must aggressively optimize both these metrics simultaneously. Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Constellation 2.0 as described above [NASA's SLS-to-the-moon program - Borepatch] would be more like $4b/T and 2 T/year.
Not only is this architecture obviously worse than Starship, it’s also significantly worse than Apollo or any existing lunar delivery system. For example, the Blue Moon lander could be flown on Falcon Heavy, delivering perhaps 10 T to the surface for <$200m. Indeed, the Constellation architecture is worse than the current state-of-the-art by roughly the same factor that Starship promises to be better. That is, it takes the key metrics of $/T and T/year and runs as far as possible in the wrong direction. It is also a programmatic dead end, since none of the individual components can be upgraded in a meaningful way without restarting development of the entire system from scratch. It’s an expensive, interlocking failure.
I'd say that Starship is an enormous efficiency improvement.
The Silicon Graybeard (among others) links to a really interesting video from SpaceX about Starship:
Something that needs to be shared is a video from SpaceX, called Starship - Test Like You Fly and while it's nearly a half hour long, it's absolutely worth watching.
That's near-term Starship past and (implied) future. But watching it made me think about a 2021 post from Casey Handmer - Starship Is Still Not Understood. In it, he remarks on just how far Starship had come in the previous couple of years:
While I am 100% certain that the Starship design will continue to evolve in noticeable ways, the progress in two years cannot be understated. Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.
The odds of Starship actually working in the near future are much higher today than they were two years ago. Across the industry, decisions are being made on a time horizon in which Starship operation is relevant, and yet it is not being correctly accounted for.
He then goes on to lay it all out:
Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.
Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.
The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant.
Jerry Pournelle used to say that the only space metric that counted was cost per ton delivered to orbit. I don't see this as a Berlin Airlift; it's a Liberty Ship. Mass Produced in huge numbers and able to shuttle large amounts of generic cargo to and from space. Handmer emphasizes this point:
Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.
Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing.
The implications are huge, and probably require a change in the institutions themselves (e.g. JPL and NASA):
NASA centers and their contractors build exquisitely complex and expensive robots to launch on conventional rockets and explore the universe. To take JPL as an example, divide the total budget by the mass of spacecraft shipped to the cape and it works out to about $1,000,000/kg. I’m not certain how much mass NASA launches to space per year but, even including ISS, it cannot be much more than about 50 T. This works out to between $100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo and >$1,000,000/kg for deep space exploration.
Enter Starship. Annual capacity to LEO climbs from its current average of 500 T for the whole of our civilization to perhaps 500 T per week. Eventually, it could exceed 1,000,000 T/year. At the same time, launch costs drop as low as $50/kg, roughly 100x lower than the present. For the same budget in launch, supply will have increased by roughly 100x. How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?
...
This is where the risk to the space industry originates. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit.
I suspect that Jared Isaacson understands this. The Space industry five years from now will be very, very different that any projections we can make today. Starship's future - while brightly described in SpaceX's outstanding video - is much more interesting than almost anyone suspects.
When correlated systematic errors and the realistic treatment of infilling problems are properly accounted for, the global mean temperature curve before 1950–1970 (and partly even today) cannot physically be determined with an accuracy better than ±0.5–1 °C. Consequently, a claimed trend of +1.3 °C since 1850 is **not significantly distinguishable** from a zero trend. This is not “skeptical exaggeration”; it is simply what error theory and metrology **mandate**
So you can't show any warming that is statically valid. Always trust content from Borepatch!
I'll just wait quietly over here for my long-delayed Nobel Prize ...
3. There is still no patch from Microsoft (i.e. a true Day Zero exploit)
4. A successful exploit results in exceptionally bad things happening (access to the SAM database, get password hashes, and Administrator privileges).
5. The exploit code has been posted to Github. This is Biblically bad - fire and brimstone, etc.
The only good news (and it is legitimately good news) is that this does not look like it can be exploited remotely. Corporate IT departments will be pulling their hair out about their users gaining Admin access to their corporate laptop, but users at home shouldn't panic (you are already admin).
Microsoft has not covered themselves in glory here - heck Forbes has an article on this. That's not good PR. In my experience, Microsoft was pretty good at disclosure, but that was a long time ago.
Also, the researcher did not cover himself with glory either. There are something like a billion vulnerable systems out there and he uploaded the warez to Github? Not cool.
I am surprised at my reaction to the Artemis II mission. I mean, it's a huge bucket of money to throw at well connected aerospace contractors - and one that imperils the astronauts because it's so expensive that they couldn't really test the heat shield.
And yet suddenly it's 1968 and the teachers are rolling televisions into the classroom so we can watch the spaceships return to Earth.
Sure, it's crazy expensive, but we just sent men people around the damn Moon.
And we did it without that ridiculous Metric System ...
For a moment, America is the Old America that can do things.
When it was released in 1959, Beh Hur became the second highest grossing film in history (behind Gone With The Wind) - saving MGM from bankruptcy. It won an astonishing 11 Academy Awards, including best musical scoring by composer Miklós Rózsa.
It's good music for Easter. I hope that you (like we) are enjoying it with family.
The Queen Of The World's son is visiting for Easter, along with his best buddy Mario from Basic Training. The weather was perfect, and so we met up with one of his High School buddies who happened to be here:
Anna Maria Island, off Sarasota Bay. The High School buddy brought a drone and took this photo. Yeah, I'm down there somewhere.
Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor. Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.
But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago. And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40.
Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.
The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the only nuclear powered carrier outside the U.S. Navy, is en route to the Mid-East as part of the French response to recent events in the region. As it is sailing into harm's way, security would understandably be high. The exact location of the ship would be classified.
Strava is a fitness app athletes use to record their activities running or cycling. It's very popular and can be used to allow athletes on training equipment paired with the app to compete with one another or share their individual results with friends or interested fans. Results can be published in near realtime.
The French officer that was getting in a 7 kilometer run on the deck of the ship is was a Strava user. The GPS coordinates of his run pinpointed the location of the flagship in real time. The location was confirmed with publicly available satellite photos.
A French armed forces spokesman said the reported incident did "not comply with the
current instructions" and appropriate measures would be taken.
Holy Week calls for the Big Guns of classical music. Hector Berlioz was one of these, and his Messe Solennelle is one of the great works of religious music. Astonishingly, Berlioz was only twenty years old when he wrote this, and then destroyed the music for Messe Solennelle (except for the Resurrexit portion).
In the Eyes of a Ranger, the unsuspecting Stranger, had better know the truth of wrong from night Cause the rule of law and order starts at the Texas border, with the lone Star of the Ranger shining bright.
For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you; Any wrong you do, he's gonna see. When you're in Texas look behind you; for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.
In the Heart of a Ranger he'll never know the danger; from desperate men with nothing left to lose, the Ranger keeps on coming; so there ain't no sense in running, cause he's bound and sure to make you pay your dues.
For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you; Any wrong you do, he's gonna see. When you're in Texas look behind you; for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.
When a Ranger's on your Trail, he won't know how to fail, and you can't buy him off at any price; so if you decide to ramble, and with your life you'd gamble, know where you are before you roll the dice.
For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you; Any wrong you do, he's gonna see. When you're in Texas look behind you; for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.
If you see him coming' round the outskirts of town, never take that Ranger for a ride. For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you; Any wrong you do, he's gonna see. When you're in Texas look behind you; for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.
Yes, that's sung by Chuck himself.
But this is the song that I associate the most with him. R.I.P.
This is not surprising, but it is pretty interesting, especially the guy in Dubai where Google Maps puts him in the middle of the straight. The discussion about why the Iranians probably have not mined the straight is also pretty interesting.
As background, I've posted several times on the Herculaneum scrolls, herehere and here. That last link in particular is a fairly pain-free Youtube video about what the Big Deal is.
And a Big Deal it certainly is. In short: when Mt. Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Pompeii in 79 AD, it also buried it's more prosperous neighbor Herculaneum. One of the (very) rich Romans who lived in Herculaneum was likely the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and had one of the biggest libraries in the Empire. The extreme heat of the lava flow carbonized the scrolls (books). Researchers have been using CAT scans to image the carbonized rolls and have been applying AI to "unroll" the scrolls virtually and distinguish between carbon-based ink and just plain old scroll carbon. They are starting to read scrolls that have been lost for 2000 years.
Like I said, this is a Big Damn Deal.
If this interests you, there is a must read essay on what's been happening over the previous 18 months, the progress that's being made, and the challenges that are still present. This part is really, really interesting:
So the central question has shifted from whether text could be recovered at all to whether it could be done routinely. At the current pace, processing the full Herculaneum library would take several years. The Vesuvius Challenge Master Plan, published in July 2025, outlines a series of steps intended to compress that timeline. These include improved surface extraction, deeper automation, and tools designed to reduce manual intervention at every stage.
According to Schilling, the problem is not that current methods fail outright, but that they require too much human steering.
“It’s not as fast or effective or cheap as it should be,” he told me. “Right now, we have solutions that work but that require human input.” What researchers want instead is a “global optimal solution” — a system that can isolate papyrus surfaces, unwrap them, and detect ink reliably across many scrolls without constant correction.
We're not there yet, but people are starting to figure out how to get there. And it looks like there are a bunch of scrolls that were entirely lost over time that we will be able to read:
These scrolls are believed to contain Greek prose that largely vanished elsewhere, including philosophical works from the Epicurean tradition that were rarely recopied because they conflicted with Christian doctrine.
Top o' the morning to you, and happy St. Patrick's Day (almost). This is my
traditional Paddy's Day post, mostly because I love the music here.
What is the "Classical Music" of Ireland? It's not (Italian) Opera, or (German) symphonies, or even an (English) homage to
Ralph Vaughan Williams (who studied under an Irish music professor)
"countryside music" in the concert hall. Instead, we find something ancient.
We
find something that easily might not have been. Turlough O'Carolan
(1670 – 25 March 1738) was the son of a blacksmith. His father took a
job for the MacDermot Roe family; Mrs. MacDermot Roe gave the young lad
some basic schooling and saw in him a talent for poetry; when a few
years later the 18 year old Turlough went blind after a bout of
smallpox, she had him apprenticed to a harpist. He soon was travelling
the land, composing and singing.
This
tradition was already ancient by the early 1700s. it was undeniably
Celtic, dating back through the Middle Ages, through the Dark Ages,
through Roman times to a barbarous Gaul. There bards travelled the
lands playing for their supper on the harp.
This
was O'Carolan's stock in trade. He rapidly became the most famous
singer in the Emerald Isle. It is said that weddings and funerals were
delayed until he was in the vicinity. One of his most famous
compositions - if you have spent any time at all listening to Irish
music, you know this tune - was considered too "new fangled" by the
other harpists of his day. Fortunately, he didn't listen to their
criticisms.
He
married very late, at 50, and had many children. But his first love
was Brigid, daughter of the Schoolmaster at a school for the blind. He
always seemed to have carried a torch for her.
So
why is this post in the normal slot reserved for Classical Music?
Listen to this composition of his, and you see the bridge from the
archaic Celts to Baroque harpsichord.
And
keep in mind how this brilliance might never have blazed, had Mrs.
MacDermot Roe not seen the talent in a blind Irish boy and set him upon a
path trod by many equally unexpected geniuses, all the way back to St.
Patrick. It is truly said that we never know what our own path will be
until we set our foot down on it.
But
his was an ancient path and he inherited much from those who trod it
before him. His "Farewell to Music" is said to be more in the
traditional mold, and might have been appreciated at a feast held by
Vercingetorix before the battle of Alesia.
This
music is a bridge between modern and the ancient that disappears into
the mists of legend. Perhaps more importantly, it is a music that is
still alive today, after a run of perhaps two and a halfmillennia.
And
it is a music where you still hear the yearning of a young blind man
for his muse, Brigid. That is a vitality that should not be exiled to a
single day of celebration, even if it is for as illustrious a Saint as
Patrick. On this Feast Day of St. Patrick (almost), remember just how deep the roots of our
civilization run. (Originally posted March 16, 2014)
Country music is alive and well in the Emerald Isle. Glór Tíre is a long running and highly rated country music talent competition on Ireland's TG4 channel. The last season's winner was Paddy Treacy with this song. It's Irish (for sure) but it is indisputably country. I love this video - it looks like he and his mates had a blast filming it.
Nightnoise is one of the most famous Irish jazz ensembles, combining jazz with traditional Irish themes. As we come hard into St. Paddy's Day, this seems a fun kickoff that a bunch of you should like.
The knowing world watches and mocks as the mighty Royal Navy and Great Britain struggle to get ONE SINGLE SHIP underway 12 days after the war started and still the damned thing is unable to leave port ...
You can say exactly the same about all of the Britain's pantywaist partners in NATO. Not one single one of them has ponied up a ship or fighter squadron or bomb wing to send off to do something about the sudden and complete dramatic disruption to their oil and gas supplies. NOT ONE OF THE BASTARDS HAS STIRRED.
I have watched as people are concerned that poor Britain is struggling to get a ship underway but that really isn't the real problem. You see, any relevant and serious government would have seen the damage to their economic fortunes by the oil and gas embargo and sortied the entire fleet and sent every other fighter and bomber to the Middle East to squash the Iranians and as we have all noticed, not one of them lifted a finger.
Yup. If they don't care about oil from the Gulf being cut off, let them buy Permian Basin fracked oil. Otherwise, His Majesty's Government would tell Lloyd's to keep insuring tankers. But they don't.
The USA has let them act like children for so long that they no longer know how to act like adults. c.f. German Chancellor Mertz' comments yesterday that shutting down German nuclear power was a huge mistake, but it's too late to change the decision. Maybe you should try adulting sometime, Chancellor.
And the last word goes to HMS Defiant:
I think the first wave of European refugees is looking around now and beginning their research; where do they want to settle when they pick themselves up and their families and maybe even their businesses and move lock, stock, and barrel to the United States or Western hemisphere as they start fleeing the dire fate their elites have arranged for them all.
It used to be a real pain to install Linux. My first Linux distro was Slackware on a v0.99 kernel that came on 35 floppy disks (ask your parents, kids) way back in the early 1990s. Things have come a long, long way since that. You don't even need to muck around with dd and create a boot USB anymore. Super easy.
Sometime in the last two or three weeks the odometer here ticked over 20 Million page views. Seems kind of weird that I wasn't tracking that, but whatever. In three months we will celebrate the 18th blogiversary here.
Silicon Graybeard has an interesting theory about all the traffic lately.
His Majesty's fleet seems to be entirely unable to protect His Majesty's subjects abroad. There seems to be only a single ship (MHS Dragon) that can be sent to Cyprus for anti-missile defense, and it has taken more than a week to prepare to sail. And they still haven't left port.
The Royal Navy is no allied force worth considering. Perhaps HMS Defiant can comment on his place.
As they point out, the Royal Navy was ready to sail in three days when the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher told them to stand ready in the Falkland crisis. And then they had something like 100 ships. Now they can't get a single one.
As Donald Trump would say, sad!
Although I like what he says about the "1000 ship Navy" at about 11:40 into the video. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But after all, what today is the "special relationship" or even the transatlantic alliance? But it's really weird that we're getting more support from Germany than from Great Britain these days.
Whatever you do, don't mention the war. Gosh, the darn Krauts have no sense of humor ...
The Royal Navy is the fleet of Great Britain. You know Great Britain, right? It used to be where Britain is now. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
This is Jeremy Clarkson from 1998, four years before he rebooted the Top Gear show. They still had F-14s on the carrier. This is a very cool look back to Old America when it still was America.
The English language has evolved for basically as long as there has been English. A great book on this subject is Robin MacNeil (and company) in The Story Of English (highly recommended if you are a history nerd like me).
Well, via a link from someone I've forgotten (sorry! Midwest Chick? A Large Regular?) there is a fabulous demonstration of this where the writer starts in the present and where each paragraph goes backwards in time 100 years. I started getting lost around 1200 AD, and I've messed around casually with Old English before. I would catch the odd word before 1200 but the overall gist was a mystery.
And I love the URL for his site. LOL.
But at the end of his post he links for a Youtube video of a guy who speaks the different versions of English, starting in 400 AD and going forward 100 years at a time. I found this a lot harder than reading, only starting to pick up some comprehension around 1500 AD. But when he turns on transcriptions it's amazing how far back I recognize a lot of words.
Wild. I've embedded it here. Highly, highly recommended. And I guess I'm not the only one who's interested - 1.2 Million views in two months? Yowser.
The New Zealand navy was so proud and happy to have a lesbian from Britain come on board that they gave her a $100M survey and dive vessel,which she crashed and sank.
The $100 million HMNZS Manawanui, which was under the command of UK-born homosexual Yvonne Gray, crashed on the south side of Upolu on October 5, 2024, due to human error including failure to turn off autopilot, an inquiry found last year.
This is the official inquiry report which is leading to Commander Gray's Courts Martial. Obviously the entirety of His Majesty's New Zealand Navy is a bunch of dirty misogynists ...
In general, mid-term elections favor the party out of power. This is
true so often that it is almost considered a law of nature,
particularly during a President's second term. What you don't ever see
is anyone ask why do voters reject the party in power in the mid-terms? There's quite a simple answer.
Fatigue.
The
voters have had some time to get used to the Administration and starts
to tire of the typical amount of scandal, incompetence, and general
dum-assery that any administration accumulates.
That's not at all
what we see today. The main focus of the Trump 47 administration has
been border security, deporting criminal illegal aliens, economic
growth, and lower inflation. There are remarkable results for all of
these, despite the legacy media's frantic efforts to hide them.
Each of these are 80% issues - i.e. the issues all get 80% support in polls.
I would go so far as to say that the voter fatigue is on the other foot. It's the Democrats
who spent the last four years stumbling through a morass of
dumb-assery. And who are all on the 20% end of the issues that voters
care about.
And here comes DJT with the State of the Union Address. Here's the TL;DR version:
TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors.
The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.
Anyone who has ever ordered something from Amazon that looked like a good deal, only to discover that the photos weren't exactly depicting what you got - you know that the People's Republic of Chine (a.k.s. PRD, a.k.a. Red China a.k.a. West Taiwan) has a very different (dare we say "predatory") concept of truth in advertising than we do on these shores.
Me, I wouldn't buy one of these things on a dare. FYI, they are something like 60% of the market because they're cheap.
In the great digitization of all my family photos I came across this image.
The story is that the boy in the picture was mad one day and he tore, crumpled, and poked holes in the picture. It was saved anyway because there not many pictures and you could still see the image.
I worked on it in GIMP, because Photoshop costs too much for how often I would use it, and managed, despite my woeful lack of skills, to get it looking like this.
This is how I put it in the archive I created, alongside the original.
Recently, I read an article on using AI to repair damaged photos and thought of this image, so I gave it a try. The image I uploaded was this second image, the one I had labored over for a couple of hours. What I got back in about 90 seconds was this.
There's valid concerns about where all of this is going, and so much of the AI generated stuff on FB and YouTube is terrible, but this is amazing. I have a handful of pictures I scanned and saved because they seemed important to the family story in some way but are damaged, faded, or in need of color balancing. I'm hoping for more results like this.
Today, Governor Maura Healey announced the launch of the ChatGPT-powered Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant for the state’s workforce, with the goal of making government work better and faster for people.
I've recommended Mint Linux before, but this is a great overview of why users new to Linux should consider Mint.
Tomorrow we'll talk about how a seasoned IT guy has moved from Windows to Linux. Spoiler alert: it's less technical work to make Linux work right than it is to make Windows work.
I've posted this each President's Day for quite some time but have found no reason to adjust the rankings.
It's
not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's
is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but
we're taking it today. But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let
me offer up Borepatch's bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.
Top Five:
#5: Calvin Coolidge
Nothing To Reportis a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.
#4. Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson
is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised
extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial
for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase). He repealed Adam's noxious
Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.
#3. Grover Cleveland.
He
didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the
payoffs so common then and now. He was so famously incorruptable that he continually vetoed pork spending
(including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that
he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.
This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so
high), on vetoing a farm relief bill:"Federal
aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the
part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national
character."I highly recommend his biography Man Of Iron.
#2. Ronald Reagan
He
at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first
President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above). He
would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet
fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash. It
also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and
Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which
was (and hopefully still remains) sane.
#1. George Washington
Could have been King. Wasn't. Q.E.D.
Bottom Five:
#5. John Adams.
There's
no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a
blatant violation of the First Amendment. It's a sad statement that the
first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.
#4. Woodrow Wilson.
Not
only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a
Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque
Sedition Act of 1918. He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into
war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, re-instituted segregation
in the Civil Service, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to
foreign policy. The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W.
Bush) says all you need to know about them.
#3 Lyndon Johnson.
An
able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any
real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more
Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White
House, and that says a lot.
#2. Franklin Roosevelt.
America's
Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices,
packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of
takers who would sell their votes for a trifle. He also rounded up a
bunch of Americans and sent them to Concentration Camps. But they were nice Concentration Camps - well, we're told that by his admirers. At least Mussolini met an honorable end.
#1. Abraham Lincoln.
There's
no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the
States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to. Lincoln saw
to it that 5% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded
preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the
Republic's history. Along the way, he suspendedHabeas Corpus,
instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political
opponents as he saw fit. Needless to say, Progressives adore him.
So happy President's Day. Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad. Yet.
OldNFO has an important post about how Microsoft is moving very aggressively to a 100% online subscription licensing model. This is important enough that I won't excerpt any of this; instead, you should go read the whole thing. It's not too long, but if you care about the security of your home network (especially the whole who has access to my data and can I even know thing), go read. I'll wait.
What this means is that you don't own any Microsoft software. Sure, you may think that because you paid them money (most often when you bought your computer - some of that purchase price went to Microsoft in the form of a license fee for Windows). But you actually don't own "your" copy of software. At all.
Rather, you have the right to run the software on your computer. That may not seem like a big difference, but it is. The license agreement (you know, the one you didn't read before you clicked "I Agree") allows Microsoft to change the terms of the agreement at any time, at their pleasure.
Microsoft has just done this in a big, big way. Key new stuff in Windows 11 is:
AI integrated with your operating system
Online presence is critical for lots of Windows now (e.g. AI)
Windows will nag you until you put all your data online (OneDrive) whether you want to or not.
The proper technical term for that first bullet point is that your Windows operating system is essentially now an "AI Agent" which if you are a regular reader you know is very, very bad security juju.
Combine this enormous security hole with the requirement to essentially be online 100% of the time (bad security) and the liklihood that OneDrive will slurp all your data to some Internet black hole in a Microsoft data center, Windows is simply unsecurable.
Yes, I know that is inflammatory, but there is simply no way that you can get assurance that your security is sane. I say that as someone who has spent decades inn Internet Security (and particularly in security assurance). Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't think that I could get decent assurance that things aren't going "bump in the Net". For most of the readers here, it's not even worth trying.
So what do you do, assuming that you are not a tech nerd like me?
Interestingly, Microsoft has just flipped the technical script on this. It used to be that it was easier to stay on Windows than to move to alternatives like Linux. Now that's out the window, at least if you want to protect your data from that OneDrive vacuum cleaner and whatever the AI agent will do to you.
This is really slick. The Linux equivalent of the Windows Start Menu lets you try all the apps (I use the Office apps which are every bit equivalent to Word and Excel, etc, and will save files in Microsoft format like .DOCX).
Take a few weeks poking around, you will likely see that it's not a big learning curve.
