I have cancer, blast it all.
It's prostate cancer. While that's what took Dad, usually this is the one you want to get because it's slow growing. Except for mine. Hey Borepatch - Nice Gleason score!
It seems that it's nothing but the finest, most aggressive prostate cancer for Mom Borepatch's little blogger.
And there's no waiting around for things to get scheduled and approved. Holy cow, things got lined up toute suite. I guess that's good, but it's not a great sign.
Huh:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Department of Transportation on Monday revoked all existing permits for automated license plate readers installed by local law enforcement in state highway rights-of-way and said it will stop approving any new installations, citing an “exponential increase” in deployments, reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and “surveillance schemes.”
The Engineering and Operations Memorandum, signed by Will Watts, P.E., FDOT’s chief operating officer and assistant secretary, directs local agencies to remove the devices within 30 days. If they do not, the department said it will take them down. FDOT reserved the right to immediately remove any unit that poses a safety hazard.
From my perspective, the biggest immediate problem with the Flock system is that it has a very weak authentication and audit system. This likely makes abuse of the system hard to find. And given the widespread abuse that has been reported, that makes you wonder just how much abuse is happening.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Flock. I mean, after all - if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, amirite?
Well done, FLDOT.
It's rare that we see an honest-to-goodness saint these days. It's even rarer to see one in the entertainment industry. Dolly Parton was one.
Her father never learned to read, growing up in Depression era eastern Tennessee, but she always said that he was really intelligent and always wondered what he could have done if he had had access to books. So she started her Imagination Library 31 years ago.
The charity has given away a third of a billion children's books. I don't think that I've seen anyone in my lifetime (celebrity or not) that has had this big a positive influence world wide.
As I said, a saint.
Her enormous success as an entertainer allowed her to do this. Here is a quick recap of just how enormous that success was. Note that the numbers are low because I took them from a 16 year old post, so she was even bigger than this:
Yet she said that the greatest honor she's received is a bronze statue
on the Courthouse lawn in her hometown. She was more properly called Dr.
Dolly Parton - she received an honorary degree for her decades of work
to increase literacy. Eastern Tennessee had a real problem with that
when she was born in 1946.
Through it all, she's kept her sense of humor. Famous (or infamous) for
her showy outfits and huge wigs (among - ahem - other things), she has
been known to say "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." When Dolly was originally on the UK TV's Graham Norton Show, Graham was wearing quite a loud suit, for which he apologized. Without batting an eye, Dolly said Don't you worry yourself, my aunt had a sofa just like it. It was instant chemistry, and Norton and Parton became great friends, to the point where he recorded a duet of Islands In The Stream with her at her theme park, Dollywood.
Unusually for an entertainment celebrity, she was married to her husband, Carl Dean, for almost 60 years until his death. When asked if she was going to remarry, she demurred, saying I don’t think I’ll ever be married but once. I think Carl’s waiting for me on the other side, and if I turned up at the pearly gates with somebody else, he wouldn’t like that! He’d be saying, ‘Who’s that little [bleep]? You leave him outside the gates and if the Lord wants him in here, you get on in here with me!
Needless to say, The Queen Of The World and I are huge Dolly Parton fans. There's a real sense of loss in her passing, that we shall not see her like again. But our loss is Heaven's gain. Like I said, a saint.
So long, Dolly. Thanks for making the World a better place.
The Queen Of The World and I are saddened by the passing of Dolly Parton. But neither of us are unsure of whether she has been reunited with her husband of 60 years on the far side of the Pearly Gates. While she was not in this version of the song, I'd be astonished if she would not have been able to sing this from memory.
Scott Rank hosts the "History Unplugged" podcast. He excels at highlighting interesting books. We've seen him here before, talking about "The Rifle" where a veteran gets World War II veterans to autograph his M1 Garand, about the tank duel in front of Cologne Cathedral, and about an interesting conservative blog and podcast.
He has a fascinating episode up about how analysis of ancient DNA is entirely rewriting our understanding of "Deep History" - things older than around 10,000 years:
Humanity’s story from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC (from the end of the ice age to the beginning of civilizations) follows this pattern: primitive hunter-gatherers slowly progressed to farmers, then to village-builders, then to city-dwellers and kings. With enough food surplus to free up everyone from having to farm, religion, medicine, and art developed. But a revolution in archaeological science has completely rewritten the human past. Tools like ancient DNA sequencing, isotope analysis, LiDAR scanning, ground-penetrating radar, and high-precision radiocarbon dating are completely rewriting what we know about the ancient past. For example, the Natufians of the Levant, living between roughly 14,500 and 11,500 years ago, built permanent stone villages, stored food, buried their dead with elaborate grave goods, and developed complex social hierarchies — all before farming a single crop.
We’re going to look at other recent discoveries that have changed what we know about the Ice Age and Neolithic periods, and we’re joined by is Patrick Wyman, author of Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. We cover the Copper Age megacity beneath modern Spain that was abandoned so completely it wasn’t rediscovered until the 1990s. We talk about Ukraine’s Trypillia culture, which built cities of tens of thousands of people, with no kings, no temples, and no walls. We look at the Neolithic mass graves of central Europe that shattered the myth of the peaceful early farmer, a single Polish burial site where DNA, isotopes, and radiocarbon dating together revealed a family massacre tied to the very moment steppe migrants were pushing into the region.
Highly recommended.
Admiral Collingwood was Nelson's second in command at Trafalgar, and led the second division of ships of the line on HMS Royal Sovereign. Because this was the Age of Sail and because the wind was so light, HMS Sovereign was under fire for an hour as it approached the French/Spanish battle line. But the day ended as Collingwood had predicted to his officers earlier. Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.
As we are today.
The news is that the Union Jack flag flown from the Royal Sovereign was purchased at auction last year by a foreign buyer and was set to leave the country. As one of only three surviving flags from the battle, historic preservation laws were invoked by the UK Ministry of Culture and the export was suspended to allow local UK organizations to match the purchase price.
Well, that has been done, and the flag will be displayed at the Discovery Museum at Newcastle-on-Tyne, Collingwood's home town*.
Bravo Zulu to the donors for preserving part of Britain's Royal Navy heritage.
* And not just Collingwood - many of Royal Sovereign's crew came from Newcastle as well.
You should backup your data. You should have multiple backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data saved to different types of backup media. Ideally, you should have multiple rolling or rotating backups of your data saved to different types of backup media including off-site backups.
Evidently, a PBS station didn’t follow any of these rules. Instead they handed their data to a third-party, said “Here, we’ll pay you to store it for us,” and now they’re screwed because the company went defunct.
Le sigh. Lawrence brings the hammer down on their IT organization:
Nor can this PBS station plead poverty: “2022 their gross income was [about] $13.5 million expenses 12.8 million. Their net was 3/4 of a million. So the net that is what they got to keep after paying all the employee salaries, after paying the directors 700,000 bucks.” Yeah, they could afford a local backup solution.
And quite frankly, so can you. ASM826 and I wrote at length about this a decade ago.
They keep saying this every year, and I keep saying what I say every year. First, what they say:
July was “a wild weather month,” setting a record as the warmest month ever for the contiguous United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.
Temperatures last month averaged 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit as above-average warmth blanketed the U.S., and several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records since NOAA started keeping track in 1895.
Last month was 0.1 to 0.2 degrees warmer than July 1936 and July 2012, according to the agency. July also broke the record for the average low temperature, at 64.2 degrees, surpassing July 2022 by 0.7 degrees.
Notice how slippery this report is: several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records. So what about the State high temperature records for those locations? And this is where I say what I've been saying for like a decade or more:
You want to see a real heat wave? Look at July 1936. Eleven States set high temperature records that stand to this day. That Wikipedia page is a little shifty on this, trying to hide the decline in record temperatures. You'll see an asterisk next to South Dakota, which the Wiki page says means Also on earlier date or dates in that state. So what was that earlier date for South Dakota? July 1936.Everyone is shifty on climate data. So what gives? It's the old expression from Statistics: if you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything. Here's how they torture the data:
Oh, and three more States set high temperature records the next month, August 1936. That makes 14 out of the 50 States suffered record high temperatures in the summer of 1936. That's almost 30% of the States.
The reported warming trend appears to be driven mainly by rising nighttime low temperatures. Because climate “averages” combine daytime highs and nighttime lows, warmer nights can make the overall average look higher even when daytime high temperatures do not show the same increase.
...
NOAA adjusts older weather-station records to account for non-climate changes, such as stations moving, equipment changing, or observers recording temperatures at different times of day. Its Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm (PHA) compares a station with nearby stations to identify and correct apparent breaks in the record.
Remember, they adjust the measured ("raw") temperatures, but they don't adjust the record temperatures (because that would be way too shifty). So (as I've been posting for years), how much of the 20th Century's warming is from adjustments? It's 80%:
An interesting question is how much of the 20th Century's warming came from adjustments, rather than from raw data? A picture is worth a thousand words:And what Science®-denying Tea-Bagging place did I get that? From the Fed.Gov's weathermen, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).What you're looking at is the annual adjustment made to the raw temperature, for each year in the 20th Century. You'll notice that almost no adjustments are made to years up to 1960, and then a very interesting shape appears in the graph.
A hockey Stick.
So the data are fiddled to the point that over 80% of the reported warming cannot be found in the data as recorded. Its in the adjustments to the data after the fact.
And so we're left with three observations:
Hey, Bustah!
Two items of note here. First up, Baltic shipwreck champagne was destined for Tsar Alexander II:
Meticulous research into the bottles of champagne found in a shipwreck discovered in the Baltic sea south of the Swedish island of Öland in July 2024, has uncovered that they were destined for the table of Tsar Alexander II.
The well-preserved remains of the 19th century ship were found 190 feet deep by technical divers from the Baltictech Association. The ship stayed upright when it sank to the seabed, and the cold waters of the Baltic were ideal storage conditions for dozens of glass wine bottles and stoneware Selters mineral water bottles....
The team reached out to Louis Roederer to find out more about the bottles, perform chemical analyses of the liquid inside the bottle and advise them on recovering a few samples. As luck would have it, one of Roederer’s champagne experts, Peter Liem, is also an experienced technical diver, so he was able to go down to the wreck and point specific bottles to recover. One was tested in Sweden, and several sent to Louis Roederer ChampagMeticulous research into the bottles of champagne found in a shipwreck discovered in the Baltic sea south of the Swedish island of Öland in July 2024, has uncovered that they were destined for the table of Tsar Alexander II.
The well-preserved remains of the 19th century ship were found 190 feet deep by technical divers from the Baltictech Association. The ship stayed upright when it sank to the seabed, and the cold waters of the Baltic were ideal storage conditions for dozens of glass wine bottles and stoneware Selters mineral water bottles....
The team reached out to Louis Roederer to find out more about the bottles, perform chemical analyses of the liquid inside the bottle and advise them on recovering a few samples. As luck would have it, one of Roederer’s champagne experts, Peter Liem, is also an experienced technical diver, so he was able to go down to the wreck and point specific bottles to recover. One was tested in Sweden, and several sent to Louis Roederer Champagne House in Reims for analysis.
The champagne contains 110 grams of sugar per liter and 12% alcohol and it is not just still drinkable, according to Peter Liem, it is “glorious:”ne House in Reims for analysis.
The champagne contains 110 grams of sugar per liter and 12% alcohol and it is not just still drinkable, according to Peter Liem, it is “glorious:”
Actually, the floor of the Baltic Sea is likely to be an ideal storage environment to age Champagne. The temperature is just above freezing and doesn't change over the course of a year (or century).
Next up: Name of 8th c. Maya astronomer deciphered
A text of Maya glyphs painted on a Classic period (250–900 A.D.) building at the ancient site of Xultun, Guatemala, has been discovered to record an astronomical formula that concludes with the name of its author: “so says Sak Tahn Waax” (meaning White-Chested Fox). He is the first mathematician and astronomer in the Americas known by name.
The glyphs were in a hidden (lost?) room inside a pyramid. You have to wonder how much more hidden history is waiting discovery.
It put yellow sticky notes with username and password on corporate laptops:
The company decided to take some old laptops and give them out to new users. To make life easy for the recipients, they put sticky notes – everyone’s favorite credential-sharing tool – on the laptops with the name of each employee and their initial login credentials on it.Angels and Ministers of Grace defend us. And remember - this was the IT Department that did this.
Let’s just stop for a moment to remark on how bad it is to put usernames and passwords on a piece of paper where the wrong person could see them. Even the IT department should not know your password, should someone in IT themselves turn rogue. So, even if the laptop stayed on a shelf in a closet that only the support staff had access to, having that sticky note would be bad.
However, our situation is even worse because the laptops in question were stored in a conference room while the facilities team finished readying the office for the move. During that time, anyone who had access to the conference room could go in and get multiple user account credentials.
And that's exactly what happened ...
Sigh.
This is why we can't have nice (security) things on the Internet.
Now I'm a simple guy, one who believes that the Bill of Rights means what it says, and applies even to whack environmentalists who don't like cops. And so this seems like something that the Courts should swat down:
The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a
The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.
The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.
passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports.
This is thought to be the first known case in the United States where federal prosecutors have charged someone for the alleged destruction of data using a “duress” password built into a phone’s software.
According to The Guardian, which covered the story earlier this week following the court’s first hearing on Monday, Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick is fighting the charges. Tunick’s attorneys said that it was unlawful for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to seize his phone as he arrived back in the U.S. last year and that any evidence — including the alleged wiping of his phone — should be thrown out.
The Einsteins at DoJ say that the Border Agents didn't need a warrant to search his phone because he "hadn't entered the US" - even though this all took place at Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.
It looks like they guy has some pretty high powered legal help - including the Electronic Frontier Foundation - so hopefully the right precedent will get established here: i.e. that the 4th and 5th Amendments mean what they say.
This is all about a software feature called a "Duress Passcode":
The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.
The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.
The Border Patrol dudes asked him for his passcode while holding him in durance vile for hours. Eventually he gave them the Duress Passcode.
IANAL, but just because he's an activist for anti-cop activities doesn't mean he doesn't have rights.
And yeah, the scare quotes in the post title are intentional.
Midwest Chick (you do read her every day, don't you? Thought so.) posts about how a Professor was smarter than most of his students, catching most of them using AI to cheat on an assignment:
A very clever professor in Mississippi decided to test and see if his students were cheating using AI. So he put some code in his exam instructions using white font that couldn’t be seen by the students, but could be seen by an AI if a copy/paste was used.
Click through for the details (which are hilarious) but even more so for the comments her readers left. My favorite was one from Carl Bussjaeger:
Oh, yes. I should probably mention DuckDuckGo’s AI. When called out on all of its hallucinations, it informed that if I don’t want it to make s–t up when asking strictly factual questions, I have to specifically TELL it not to make s–t up.
Sure you can trust AI. Just tell it not to make s**t up ...
Just to review.
Today's lesson will focus on the second rule and the problem I have with appendix carry. A holstered firearm in the front of your strong side leg is commonly referred to a "appendix carry". I have always thought it broke the four rules. The muzzle of your firearm, depending on if you are seated, crouched, or standing, will variously be pointed at things you do not want to destroy.
When another rule is broken, as in the case documented by the shooter below, that bullet is going to find your tender flesh in life altering ways.
Appendix carry. Just say no.
Tuna sends in another one:
Want to hear 2 short jokes and 1 long one? joke joke Joooooooooke
OldAFSarge is (like me) fighting blogger burnout. He's been posting for 16 years which is quite an accomplishment. Unlike me, he's put his hand (quite successfully) at military history fiction which takes a whole lot more effort than the Dad Jokes and stuff I put up here. Besides, OldAFSarge's co-blogger Tuna sends me half of the Dad Jokes anyway.
So I understand what he's going through.
But one thing he posted recently was a straight (non-fiction) account of the run up to the Battle of Waterloo, to set the scene for his fiction. This tickled my memory:
But every time [the French] ended the war, the British would dig deep and come up with more money to finance yet another coalition to fight Napoléon. They had the advantage of their island and the most powerful navy on the planet between them and the French.
As much as Napoléon wanted to be done with those pesky islanders, he couldn't get to them. The Royal Navy had smashed the combined French and Spanish fleets (huh, the Spanish, I thought the French were their enemies) at Trafalgar. Napoléon was a master of land combat, never did understand the sea. A big advantage the British had was that their navy was constantly at sea, blockading the French and cutting off their trade from the rest of the world. The French mostly sat in port, plotting to drive the Brits off but never getting quite there. Though, for the most part, French ships were better, it ain't the ship, it's the crew. And the Royal Navy had some excellent sailors.
People don't realize just how much better the Royal Navy was than anyone back in the day. And yes, it wasn't the ship, it was the crew and especially the leadership. Nelson's captains were justly famous for their independence and their aggression.
Heck, half a century earlier Admiral Byng had been shot, not for losing a battle, but rather for not winning it. Voltaire immortalized this miscarriage of justice in Candide, famously writing "in this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others." Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. The Royal Navy flag officers learned from that.
Nigel Calder wrote about just how amazing the Royal Navy's performance was in his fantastic book The English Channel. I cannot recommend this book more highly, and it's the book that I have re-read more than any other. In it, Calder (who was quite an accomplished yachtsman) sailed his ketch all the way up the English channel on the French side, crossed over the Dover Straight, and then sailed it back down the English side. Along the way he wrote about the geology, seascape, history, and current events (from 1986) all along the way. The book is a complete delight.
He starts off in Brittany at the far Atlantic end of the French coast. The great French port of Brest was there, but Calder points out that in the age of sail the port was a trap for the French fleet because the prevailing wind was from the west. Because of the difficulty of a sailing ship sailing against the wind, the Royal Navy was able to blockade the French for years. Calder describes just how amazing a feat of seamanship this was:
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars spanned eighteen years, with only two short breaks. During most of that time there were British warships off Brest. To begin with they were only frigates, but later the British fleet remained at sea off Ushant winter and summer, in a patient demonstration of seamanship. When the wind blew hard from the west, the British ships beat their way out into the Atlantic, or even ran for shelter in Tor Bay on the English coast, confident that the French could not leave harbour against the wind. But whenever the weather was suitable for a breakout, the blockading fleet closed to within sight of the French shore.
...
In 1805 the conquest of England was Napoleon's first priority. The main responsibility lay with the fleet at Brest, and its commander Honoré-Joseph-Antonin Ganteaume. The duty of preventing the adventure belonged to William Cornwallis, who was in charge of the Channel Fleet blockading Brest. Cornwallis was known as Blue Billy because of his determination to remain at sea. If a gale forced his ships to run for shelter and replenishment in Tor Bay, the fleet was no sooner anchored than the flagship Hibernia would run up the blue signal flag denoting an imminent departure.
The preparations for the invasion were grandiose. Shipyards from The Netherlands to western France built nearly 2000 barges to carry 100,000 troops, complete with their guns and horses. The naval plan required all the fleets, from Brest, Rochefort in Biscay, Ferrol in Spain, and Toulon in the Mediterranean, to break out and rendezvous in the West Indies. The idea was to draw the British fleets to the wrong side of the Atlantic and to mass the French and Spanish ships for a dash back to the undefended English Channel.
...
On July 22 an inconclusive battle took place in fog off northern Spain, between a British force under Robert Calder [no relation to the author Calder - Borepatch] and Villeneuve's stronger fleet. Calder was court-martialed for capturing only two ships. Villeneuve received exhortations from Napoléon to free the fleet from Brest and sweep all before him.If you give us control for three days, nay, even for twenty four hours, your task will be done: all is ready, Europe awaits breathless on this great event.Villeneuve chose instead to retreat to southern Spain, and the Brest fleet stayed put. During these alarms, the British blockading force was reduced to fifteen ships of the line as compared with twenty five in Brest. Ganteaume thought he could shoot his way out but he was forbidden to sail because a major naval battle was not what Napoleon had in mind. While the British sacked Calder for failing to wipe out a superior force, the French would not let Ganteaume take his chance with a weaker one. Different attitudes to sea power, evolved in hundreds of years of warfare in the English Channel, decided the outcome.
...
A week later the truth dawned on Napoleon that Villeneuve was timid and Ganteaume was never going to get out. The Emperor ordered the Grand Army to march from the English Channel to the Danube where British diplomats had stirred up trouble for him. The small craft of the invasion fleet were docked and the crews disbanded. The attack on England had been called off. The blockading fleet's task lacked the drama of a major sea battle like Camperdown where the British had crushed the Dutch eight years earlier, but it decided the final contest at sea between the British and the French. The American naval historian Alfred Mahan [yes, that Alfred Mahan of "fleet in being" fame - Borepatch] wrote:Never in the history of blockades has there been excelled, if even equaled, the close locking of Brest by Admiral Cornwallis, both winter and summer, between the outbreak of war and the battle of Trafalgar. It excited not only the admiration but the wonder of contemporaries.
If you like OldAFSarge's military history fiction, you will like Calder's book. It's part tourist guide, part history, part sailing log. Like I said, I've re-read this book more than any other I own. Highly, highly recommended.
Jacob e3mails to point out an interesting article discussing the various AP rounds that the Department of War uses. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you'll find this interesting.
The one thing that the article doesn't discuss is the type of "Armor Piercing" ammunition that normal citizens can get. There's a brief discussion of this on this Reddit thread. (Yeah, yeah, I know - Reddit. But the info seems reasonable)
He also has an interesting post up comparing .300 Blackout with 5.56 NATO.
After a secret trip across the English Channel, the Bayeux Tapestry is back on English soil for the first time since it was made 900 years ago. It has been loaned to the British Museum by France after a major conservation project to stabilize the fragile textile
...
The wool thread embroidery-on-linen tapestry created as a visual record of the William of Normandy’s invasion of England in 1066, was woven in the Canterbury area around 1077. It was commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s brother, so when it was complete, the tapestry moved to Normandy and has stayed there ever since.
...
It will be exhibited at the British Museum from September 10, 2026, until July 2027. Pre-sales of tickets are already through the roof, with 100,000 sold since tickets for the first four months of the exhibition went on sale July 1.
In exchange for the loan of one of the greatest historic artifacts in French and English history, museums in Normandy will be loaned of the British Museum’s most famous objects, including pieces from the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon ship burial and the Lewis Chessmen.
The tapestry is so famous that people make memes using it.
If you're planning a trip to London in the next year, this should be on your list to see. Or you can go see it in Bayeux in Normandy and see the D-Day beaches.
Did you know that 10 + 10 is the same as 11 + 11?
10 + 10 is twenty; 11 + 11 is twenty, too.
(From The Queen Of The World)
Actually it has been for a couple of weeks. I've had a pretty bad case of blogger burnout - there's been a number of blog worthy topics and I just haven't been feeling it.
Meh.
Still, 14425 posts and 54948 comments is pretty decent. Especially the comments.
Thanks to everyone who stops by.
The parts of the world using the metric system refer to the sport as football. The United States calls it soccer. I don't mind the sport. It looks like an excuse to do a lot of running and occasionally to practice your acting skills when someone bumps you. I don't follow it, but I'm an equal opportunity sports ignorer. I'm not following pro football, basketball, golf or tennis, either.
However, I saw in the news that Australia lost to the United States 2-0 and Australians are saying it is the most embarrassing thing ever. Short memory down under, eh?
With the resignation of Sir Kier "Two Tier" Starmer, the UK is poised for its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. That's what happen in failed states.
[Homer Simpson] The seventh Prime Minister in ten years so far.[/Homer Simpson]
Busted Knuckles has an unimprovable sendoff for Sir Kier.
Tomorrow is Father's Day here in the States. I don't know where you are but this is what's Top Of Mind here.
From a musical perspective only Country Music really speaks to this. But it speaks in different voices as your kids grow up. Yeah, Country music takes you on that journey.
Three chords and the Truth.
When they're young
This is the easiest time for fathers. Trace Adkins sang about this better than anyone. I posted about this a long, long time ago. Reader Mark left a comment there:
The other day my oldest son, who is a freshman at UND (North Dakota, not that other 'ND') asked me if I remembered taking him, and a couple of his friends to Pizza Hut for lunch one day. He remembered it like it was yesterday. I lied to him. I told him I did, and I feel terrible about it.
Folks, it's not what we recall, it's what our kids do.
Amen, and amen.
The Queen Of The World likes this one. I think it reminds her of the time her Daddy took her fishing and she won the tournament.
When they grow up
Yeah it sucks, but kids grow up, and have to find their place in the world. Sometimes that means pushing back against The Man. As I posted at the time:
For years, Dad and I wouldn't talk. I had a lot of anger in me then, and it came out in strange ways. Bad ways. Sorry, I won't talk about what happened with #1 Son, but that he came out right side up didn't have much to do with me.
This Father's Day weekend, I think on both of those.
Growing up, I knew that my Dad was a great father. He set an example: he was a fine provider, although we didn't grow up with a lot. Not wealthy, not weepin'. He was someone who I could look up to, never doubting for an instant that we were everything to him. He adored Mom. And so it was a terrible shock to find out, in my forties, that he was made of flesh and blood. For a while, I couldn't forgive him for that.
I like to think of myself as a smart guy, and I must confess that it's very nice indeed when someone refers to me as a "wickid smaht bahstid". But I sure was an idiot when it mattered. Like Dad, I found - perhaps for the first time - that I, too, was mere flesh and blood. Full of Foolish Pride, and driving myself into a ditch.
I'll swallow my pride if you will.
That post is worth reading.
Sometimes they don't come back
We ask a lot of our sons. Some times we we ask them to to go to far away places. Sometimes they don't come back.
Reflections on Father's Day
I remember this being hard to write. It's hard to read now.
What I remember the most about being a father is is this:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
- Kalil Gibran, The Prophet
So let it be written. So let it be done.
Next week this blog turns 18 (!). That's a milestone that makes you think back on the journey.
This journey began in the lead up to the release by the US Supreme Court of the Heller v. District of Columbia opinion - in other words, this blog pre-dates Heller. Looking back on the last 18 years here, things are really different for the Second Amendment.
It's all well and good to have a Constitution that's written down in black and white, but that doesn't help much if the Legislatures ignore it and the Courts refuse to strike down infringing laws. That has changed, and while there are still pieces of broken Gun Control on the floor needing to be swept up, the change is profound. Let's take a quick recap on that and then talk about what it means.
Heller v. D.C. (2008) stated as the plain law of the land that Second Amendment rights apply to individuals, not just to State Militias. It kind of seems ridiculous to actually have to write this today, but that was the "accepted" legal understanding prior to Heller.
McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) held that Heller applied not just to the District of Columbia, but to all the States (via the 14th Amendment).
New York Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) was the hammer blow. It established that the meaning of the Second Amendment as it was understood at the time was what it really meant, and that gun control laws had to demonstrate that the laws are consistent with that. This flipped the switch - no longer would citizens have to demonstrate that they have a right, but the government has to demonstrate that they don't.
This is what has left all those broken pieces of Gun Control cluttering up the floor. Sure, they still need to be swept up, but look where things are now:
So what does all this mean? The biggest advancement in Second Amendment rights has been the normalization of the idea of firearms. The biased media has a really hard time today in painting us as a fringe community.
Heck, SCOTUS just ruled that the Fed.Gov cannot prevent firearms purchases by people who smoke pot. The ruling was unanimous. Conservative Alito and liberal Kagan co-authored a concurring opinion. It's cats and dogs living together.
This has even been absorbed by the lower courts - the District and Circuit Courts of Appeals. It's great if SCOTUS makes a ruling, but if the lower courts don't enforce it then it doesn't carry much weight. We saw a fair amount of this during the years after Heller. Now we don't. Sure, there will always be the rogue District Judge who allows a plainly infringing gun control law, but these are getting struck down on appeal.
We're no longer the weirdos, the weirdos are on the other side. The Class War against gun owners is pretty much over.
That's one heck of a change in 18 years.
Divemedic has a must-read post about what science is and is not. Quite frankly, it is a brital - and much needed - takedown of "Trust the Science". I won't excerpt any of it because you need to read the whole thing, but he includes example after example of "Settled Science" which resulted in horrifying tragedy. Some of these won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, for crying out loud.
Yes, he also talks about COVID without belaboring it.
However, in his excellent discussion about science as a process, he does not (much) delve into what happens to that process when it gets corrupted by moneyed interests. ClimateGate was perhaps the gold standard of that, explained spectacularly by Dr. Richard Muller from UC Berkeley's Earth Sciences Department.
There are two things to point out here: Dr. Muller is not one of those beastly Science Deniers like your humble host, be is a professional climate scientist and the driving force behind a climate database that is less corrupt than the others - the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature series.
The second thing to point out is the guy at the center of the ClimateGate scandal - and the scientist who Muller will no longer read papers published by him - was one of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Assessment Reports. These are supposedly the gold standard science, and it is entirely corrupt.
Scientist Hal Lewis explained why the establishment keeps doing this in his spectacular resignation from the American Physical Society (basically the professional association of Sheldon Coopers):
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise.Emphasis from me.
There is a reason that I have post tags for junk science and climate bullshit. There's a reason that there are dozens or hundreds of posts tagged with those. The science was bought and paid for, just like Divemedic's nutrition science example.
It's ironic that what is finally killing Global Warming is the manic push for AI datacenters. The big money is on to chasing a better graft.
Dad Joke: If a cow doesn't produce milk, is it a Milk Dud?
Mom Joke (Courtesy of The Queen Of The World): No, it's just lactose-free.
I'm not a fan of his name. I have half a mind to call him Duce (like Mussolini).
May as well have a really cool boat:
Most boats are a carefully considered compromise designed to cover as many bases as possible: floating holiday home, party island, offshore cruiser – jack of all trades, as the saying has it, master of none.
Safehaven Marine’s Barracuda SV11 eschews all those compromises, becoming the jack of a single trade, master of one. Its single dedicated purpose is to conquer rough water and transport its crew safely, regardless of conditions.
...
There are no hot tubs, no teak deck option, no rise and fall TV. But there is a rise and fall gyro stabilised machine gun platform that emerges from the foredeck, controlled from the wheelhouse. Bulletproofing and a gun rack for the AK47s are also on the menu, should its customer base require it.
Oh, and it's a stealth boat.
It seems like this is something being pushed by the Boston.Gov:
Oooooh kaaaay.
I am SO glad I got out of there. Didn't even get cut up too badly going over the wire at the border ...
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.
Wolfgang would welcome the outcome, but would want to bite the old owners.
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.
I don't know if this is on everyone's Top Ten list of great blues songs. I suspect it is on everyone's list of Top Ten Blues Songs to Sing at Karaoke.
Via Insty, here's proof of the utter futility of gun control:
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.
Friend Burt emails me to say that the U.N. Climate Panel Quietly admits Its Doomsday Climate Scenarios were completely "Implausible".
They've been admitting this for years and years. Here's a post from the archives from 2019:
Climate scientist Judy Curry testified before Congress, and this is really interesting:
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.
Via Chris Lynch, this is a very interesting post:
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.
Highly, highly recommended.
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.
That's a horse riding Dynasty.
danielbarger left a comment to yesterday's post about Starship:
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.
Casey Handmer covers this well in the post I linked to:
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.
