Happy 250th, America

World Cup

 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?

The UK is a failed state

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. 

Country music for Father's Day

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.

The surprisingly reinvigorated Second Amendment

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:

1. Gun permitting is not dead, but it's coughing up blood.  "Shall Issue" permitting is the law of the land - governments have to prove that you shouldn't be allowed to carry rather than you justify why do need to.
2. Most States were "Shall Issue" in 1990.  None are today.  In fact, half the States don't require you to have any permit at all to carry a firearm. 
3. "Assault Weapons" Bans are the last refuge of the desperate.  Liberal Legislatures that pass these today know for certain that they will be struck down.  Increasingly, the Courts are imposing restraining orders preventing the laws from going into force while they are being litigates.
4. The National Firearms Act of 1934 is a pale shadow of its former self.  Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" (which was anything but) repealed the tax on suppressors.  The Tax Code is really the main way for the Fed.Gov to impose the law here; no tax, no law.

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.

 

Science is not magic

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.

Go and read. 

Dad Joke CCCLXVI - Dad Joke, Mom Joke

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.

Seen around the house

Deuce, our Grand-dog.  10 weeks old, so he's still a baby.  We're going to do some training.

I'm not a fan of his name.  I have half a mind to call him Duce (like Mussolini).

Summer is boating season

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. 

Boston, amirite?

It seems like this is something being pushed by the Boston.Gov:

I'm afraid I don't even understand what they're talking about.  Does this mean dudes in dresses learning about periods, or the other way around?  Quite frankly, the terminology may be intentionally confusing.  Just shut up and nod your head, right?

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 ...

Radney Foster - Angel Flight (Radio Tower Remix)

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.

Congrats to OldNFO

Blogging 19 (!) years. 

1500 dogs rescued from Wisconsin puppy mill

Wolfgang would welcome the outcome, but would want to bite the old owners.

The breeder lost his license but likely won't go to jail.

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.

Buddy Guy - Mustang Sally

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. 

Massachusetts demonstrates the futility of gun control

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. 

 

No, the Climate Change Establishment has not changed their approach

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. 

Downstream prosperity

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 2026 sports photo of the year

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.

That's a horse riding Dynasty. 

Efficiency and the Space program

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.

1.  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.
2. 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.

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. 

Starship - Past and Future

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.

Earth Day

I would have something to say about this nonsense but The Silicon Graybeard has it pretty much covered.

Miguel, too. 

Artificial Intelligence confirms Borepatch

Sixteen (!) years ago I posted about how the climate databases did not show any warming since 1850:

So what does the raw data look like for all 4495 stations?

Other than a short term blip in the 1990s, we see no warming at all since 1850. None.

Let me say this simply: The raw (unadjusted) weather data from the largest historical data set shows no warming for the last 150 years.

Now Grok 4.1 has answered a query about the same subject:

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 ...

Friday Night Rumba*

45 minutes of sultry music.  You're welcome.

*See what I did there?

The Aral Sea is coming back to life

This is unexpected good news.  You have to click through to watch because embedding is disabled.  

Update on the Bluehammer exploit

Steven emails in to ask if this is real.

1. Yes, this is a real vulnerability. 

2. It impacts all Windows 10 and 11 systems.

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. 

And all of a sudden, I was ten years old

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.

Doris Day - Fly me to the moon

Yeah Artemis is crazy expensive, but it's still a big deal. 

And we love us some Doris Day ...

Miklós Rózsa - Overture to Ben Hur

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. 

Where's Borepatch?

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.

Man, I love Florida. 

I Didn't See This Until Today

 Obviously, I'm a couple of days late. 

The photo of the year for America's 250th birthday

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.

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.

OPSEC

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.

 

 

 

Hector Berlioz - "Resurrexit" from Messe Solennelle

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).

A copy of the entire work was discovered in 1991. 

LOL

I never looked at it that way. 

Apple's iPhones and iPads are now certified for NATO classified data

Wow.  And just plain-jane iOS, too.  Out of the box. 

As someone who ran across (into?) "Secure Operating Systems" more than once, this is a big deal. 

Chuck Norris - The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You

Rest in peach, sir. 

The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You (Songwriter: Tirk Wilder)

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. 

GPS jamming in the straight of Hormuz

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.

Update on the Herculaneum scrolls

As background, I've posted several times on the Herculaneum scrolls, here here 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.

Very, very cool

 

An Open Source Intelligence assessment of the Iran war

Via a link from HMS Defiant (who is on quite a roll lately), this is a very interesting analysis of the war from Open Source Intelligence sources (i.e. non-classified published sources).  Very, very interesting indeed.

Turlough O'Carolan - various Irish tunes

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 half millennia.  

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)

Paddy Treacy - Charlie's Bar

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 - Night In That Land

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. 

Write Europe off

As HMS Defiant points out, there's no There there:

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.

This wave of destruction is now unstoppable.

Sure looks that way to me.

Secure Your Home Network: Simplified Mint Linux Installation

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. 

Somehow I missed this

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. 

The shameful decline of the Royal Navy

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.

Jeremy Clarkson on the USS Eisenhower

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 Blues Brothers - Soul Man

The 1980 film assembled an all-star cast of musicians.  This was perhaps the weakest song in the movie. 

How far back in time can you understand English?

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.

New Zealand Navy grounding update

I posted about this 15 months ago. Midwest Chick has an update:

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 lesbian “diversity hire” captain of a Royal New Zealand Navy ship that ran aground and sank off Samoa has been charged with negligence along with two other officers over the loss of the vessel.

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 ...

Midwest Chick adds this tidbit that I had missed:

This isn’t the first time that a NZ naval diversity hire damaged a ship. It happened in 2024 with a different female captain.

And that’s what happens when you choose diversity over competence. Wonder if the New Zealanders will actually learn from this??

Now maybe our own Navy could do something about our (multiple) female commanders who run into ships on the high seas. 

 

Bravo Zulu, Coasties

A cruise ship got stuck in the ice off Antarctica, and the Coast Guard (by chance) had an icebreaker nearby.  Well done. 

Country Comfort - Waimanalo Blues

I stumbled across this and like it.  Not sure if it's Country or not, but if it's finger-pickin' then you're at least Country adjacent. 

Tatiana Eva-Marie & Avalon Jazz Band - La Mer

11 Million views can't be wrong. 

Borepatch, you magnificent Bastard! I read your blog!

So Donald Trump seems to be following the ravings here.  Consider this post from December: 

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:

Boy, those Democrats are crazy, aren't they? 

You're welcome.

Johnny Horton - Battle Of New Orleans

We are fresh off of President's Day, and this is one of the few country songs that name-checks a President. 

Don't buy TP-Link home firewalls

This is pretty skeevy:

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.