Happy Birthday to FotB Libertyman

Libertyman is perhaps the most prolific commenter here, rarely missing a Dad Joke (or much else, in fact).

The Queen Of The World says "Happy Birthday, Sir Libertyman".  I say "Check your email".

Oh, and many happy returns of the day. 

Ella Langley - Choosin' Texas

If you listen to music on the radio you've heard this song.  In a way its a throwback to the 1970s when radio stations would play all sorts of genres - Johnny Cash, Rolling Stones, Engelbert Humperdink.

This is clearly a country song, but it has been all over pop radio - It set the record for the longest running single on the Billboard Hot 100 in history.  A song that tells a story that everyone has experienced gives it broad appeal.

And it's quite a good song.  The Queen Of The World really likes it, as do I.  People who like old school country will like it, since it really channels the Old School.  People who don't like country probably will like it (that Billboard Hot 100 thing).

The Queen and I shall watch young miss Langley's career with great interest.

Choosin' Texas (songwriters: Ella Langley, Miranda Lambert, Luke Dick, Joybeth Taylor):

Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee
I shoulda known better than to take him back to Abilene
I put him right back into her arms
I wasn't a match for that kind of spark

She's from Texas, I can tell by the way
He's two-steppin' 'round the room
And judgin' by the smile that's written on his face
There's nothin' I can do
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell

Well, I guess he forgot about the Smoky Mountain rain
Them old Hank tunes, the Memphis blues we used to sing
He always loved "Amarillo by Morning"
I should've taken that as a warnin'

She's from Texas, I can tell by the way
He's two-steppin' 'round the room
And judgin' by the smile that's written on his face
There's nothin' I can do
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell

When I'm eastbound and down, and I can't help but cry
'Cause I-40 gets lonelier with every mile
I'll know that his mind wasn't ever gonna change
'Cause his heart still belongs to the Lone Star State

She's from Texas, I can tell by the way
He's two-steppin' 'round the room
And judgin' by the smile that's written on his face
There's nothin' I can do, naw, yeah
It doesn't take a crystal ball to see
A cowboy always finds a way to leave
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell, no
Drinkin' Jack all by myself
He's choosin' Texas, I can tell

Come on, baby
Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee

 

Duke Ellington - Autumn Leaves

This has perhaps the greatest jazz violin of all time, by (sometimes trumpeter) Ray Nance.  Ozzie Bailey does a spectacular job on vocals in both French (written by poet Jacques Prévert) and English (by Johnny Mercer).  The music was composed by Joseph Kosma.

Fun fact: this was Yves Montand's signature song.  Just about everyone recorded this (Sinatra, Doris Day, Andy Williams, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, and Nat King Cole who recorded it in Japanese), but I love this version.
 

That is one righteous password

Ahem:

A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark's Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company's account protected by the password "123456." 

[blink] [blink]

I mean, don't these people go to movies? 

So let me bottomline this for the Tech Nerds.  Hollywood has known since 1987 that this is a bad password.

Hollywood.

1987.

So since the script was probably written in 1986, this has been the subject of silver screen mockery for forty years. 

Sorry to the good folks of Denmark.  It could be worse, though - Sweden has had people laughing at it for a good decade longer. 

Why Columbus discovered the New World and not the other way around

In the year 1000 A.D. an unbiased world observer would never have picked Europe as the region that would dominate the globe.  Probably they would pick China with its massive population or fabulously wealthy India.  The Islamic Caliphate would have looked past its sell-by date but would have beaten Europe by a mile.

In 1500 A.D. it would have been a closer match, but Columbus' small flotilla and the individual exploration ships sent by Prince Henry the Navigator to feel their way down the African coast compared very poorly with the huge Chinese treasure fleets that sailed all the way to Mogidishu.  Our unbiased observer would still have thought that Europe was the underdog.

Two centuries later and the sun never set on the British Empire.  How on earth did something this unlikely happen?

This is one of the biggest questions in the field of history.  The event is called the Great Divergence and in history it's a real thing.  Why did the Industrial Revolution happen first in Europe, and in Britain before anywhere in Europe?  It seems so unlikely as to be incredible.

In this day and age - and particularly on Columbus Day - it is frowned upon to ask these questions.  The Powers That Be tell us that Europe got rich by stealing indigenous people's wealth, conveniently ignoring the many other non-European powers that were much more brutal at doing that than the Europeans were.  The Mongol Empire in 1300 would have had poll position for World Domination, as would the earlier Abbasid caliphate.  If all it takes for World Domination is to steal other people's stuff, what was it about Europe that was different?

After all, China invented gunpowder.  Why did Europe perfect it?  Why did little England perfect the sailing Ship-of-the-Line?  Why did the Divergence start and why there?

Today I offer two books for interested readers that explain this.  One of these could never be published today, and the author would never get tenure today.  Fortunately (if that's the right word) David Landes is safely dead and doesn't have to worry about The Usual Suspects getting him denied tenure.

Landes was a big deal in Economic History, authoring the section on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History.  Late in his career, perhaps 30 years ago, he wrote The Wealth And Poverty of Nations, an economic history whose title was unashamedly stolen from Adam Smith.  Landes insisted that social systems were key, and that some societies allowed progress towards a Great Divergence while other societies stifled attempts towards that progress.

In other words, if your society doesn't support the right efforts it doesn't matter how much of other people's wealth you steal; you're going nowhere.  We see this in the history of Spain which became fabulously wealthy by stealing New World wealth but squandered it, ending up at the bottom of European power rankings.  You could say exactly the same thing about the Mongol empire, or the Caliphate.

Landes' arguments in the book are considered double-plus ungood by the woke crowd, so you might want to pick up a used copy from Amazon.  The chapter on Argentina is particularly interesting in this age of President Milei.  Interestingly, Milei was an Economist, and may have read Landes' book.

A second recommendation is less controversal with the woke crowd but is joined at the hip with the Great Divergence.  The political cycle world wide has been the emergence of an empire, the collapse of the empire, and the rise of a successor empire.  We see this in China, in India, in Mesoamerica.  

But not in Europe.  Europe only had one great empire, Rome.  When it fell, it was not replaced.  Walter Scheidel wrote a book exploring why this unusual circumstance happened, Escape From Rome.  Using Landes' analytical framework, the Roman Empire did not encourage the types of behaviors that could have led to an Industrial Revolution, because those behaviors were seen by the Authorities as subversive to the state.  But when Rome fell, there were unusual circumstances in Europe that prevented a new empire from rising in its place.  Then competition between the poor emerging states set Europe on a very different path from the rest of the world.  Basically, Europe escaped from Empire while the rest of the world didn't.

Both of these books are relevant on this Columbus Day.  We are offered a litany of European sins (which quite frankly are mostly true but are hardly unique to Europe).  All politics is local, so the Woke brigade must needs tear down Western Civilization by means fair or foul.

But facts are stubborn things, and the Great Divergence is a fact.  Another fact is that the sun really did not set on the British Empire.  Understanding "why" is always more important than knowing "what" - but that understanding starts with the "what" and Landes' and Scheidel's books are your entry point to this.

Because it's a fact that Columbus did discover the New World.  It's a fact that the New World did not discover the old.  It's a fact that the great Chinese treasure fleets were suddenly gone like they had never been, and that Vasco da Gama opened India to Europe, and not India sailing trading ships up the river Thames.

Facts are stubborn things.  Things happen for a reason.  History will tell us, if we listen. 

Cancer update

So they sent me for a PET scan, to see if the cancer had spread.  It hadn't.  Nice.

A PET scan is kind of like an MRI, but first they inject a die that gets absorbed by cancer tumors.  A radioactive die. It came encased in a big lead shield.  I thought they're going to inject that into me?  Yup.

I also got the first of the hormone injections.  It wasn't bad, and the only real side effects have been fatigue.  The Lupron starts at the end of the month; that's where I expect side effects.

They're scheduling a spacer, which is a gel injected next to the prostate.  It will let them be more accurate with the Death Ray beam, keeping it focused on the lesions and not zapping parts of me I want to keep.  Radiation will be every day starting in 2 or 3 weeks and will go probably until the end of the year.

All in all, not as fun as a barrel of monkeys but not so bad so far. 

The man who made the Internet possible

Divemedic has been geeking out about home network stuff which has been a bit of a walk down memory lane - I once had a supervisor who turned down my request for a 2400 baud modem "because you can't read that fast".  You see, at 1200 baud, a text file comes down at around one line per second, and a fast reader can read that fast.  Sorry, Borepatch, no speed for you.

And quite frankly, nobody in the late 1980s got much speed.  We had big VAX computers and the standard wisdom was that "You'll never get more than a megabit per second out of TCP/IP".  And it was standard wisdom because nobody did.

Enter a fellow named Van Jacobson.  He looked at the source code for popular TCP stacks and decided that it could be improved.  WAY improved.  TCP wasn't implemented in the operating system, as an OS service; rather, it was implemented in a user application.  The problem with this, thought Jacobson, was that every time you wanted to send a packet the OS had to do a context switch to let the (user-land) data structure containing the packet go to the OS kernel.

Jacobson thought this was stupid, and that networking should be the job of the OS.  He hacked IP into the Unix kernel and all of a sudden not only were you getting more than a megabit from TCP, a single Sun Workstation could saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet.

IBM basically said that this was because Ethernet was stupid and primitive, and IBM's Token Ring network enforced bandwidth sharing.

Enter Jacobson again.  He defined a mechanism called "Slow Start" which he added to his hacked TCP code. Basically, whenever you started to send data, you would start slowly and increase the speed gradually until you hit congestion.  What he found was that not only would his Sun workstation saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet, but 5 or 6 Sun workstations would saturate that same network while gracefully sharing the network between them.

So why do I say that he made the Internet possible?  Imagine a bandwidth-constrained Internet - constrained either because Internet Protocol was too slow or because more powerful computers hogged all the bandwidth.  There would be no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Netflix, no Zoom.

And it instantly made Sun Microsystems into the Ferrari of computers.  As Networking took off, Digital Equipment Corporation couldn't compete with lower cost workstations that were much, much faster.  That was it for VAXen, and for IBM's Token Ring, and for ISO's Open Systems Interconnect protocols, and for Asynchronous Transfer Mode.  The problems that these technologies were designed to solve were suddenly obsolete.

All because of Van Jacobson.

Not many people remember this time of massive upheaval, but we all owe Jacobson a huge thank you. 

You guys are a bunch of nerds

The comments to yesterday's post were simply hilarious.  I clearly am not the only nerrd around here.

Oh, and Rick T - sometime I will have to tell you about watching a guy install a vampire tap but forgetting to use the spacer while drilling into the cable.  Drilled right through the center wire ...

Happy Birthday, Ethernet

Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox released the Ethernet spec on this day in 1980.  This is why old timers sometimes refer to it as "DIX Ethernet".

And yes, I am one of those old timers. 

Comprehensive study identifies all Roman roads

Well, for some values of "comprehensive" and "all":

The study published earlier this week mapped out the roads into what the Roman network could have looked like at the peak of the empire's power, sometime between the 2nd to 4th centuries AD. That network of main roads and little countryside paths didn't centralize in Rome, though. Tom Brughmans, classical archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the leads on the project, told Reuters that, "...when we consider all movement within the entire Italian peninsula, we were shocked to discover that the most central road actually follows the opposite Adriatic coastline, bypassing Rome altogether." 

It is said that history is 90% n geography and 10% common sense.   It would make no sense at all for traffic from Hispania to Syria to be routed to Rome.  The direct route goes via Constantinople:

Hopefully Stanford's Orbis will be updated to include the new found roads.  We've seen Orbis here before. 

 

Commercial shipping is being hacked

I haven't blogged about this, but apparently it's a thing now and has been for maybe a decade.  This is a really good breakdown of what one of these attacks could do (and more importantly, could NOT do) to a container ship or a tanker.

Well THAT was fun

Yesterday was recoil therapy with Big Country.  He brought a collection of Enfields and a Springfield 1878 trap door in 40-70 which was great fun.  Another guy had a "Quigley" rifle = a Sharps 1874 in 45-120 (!).  That one kills on one end and maims on the other.

Many thanks to BC for participating in an experiment to see if going to the shooting range is effective in treating cancer.  Probably not, but I feel better already. 

Helicopter Gunship vacation

Viva Las Vegas, baby:

At Gunship Helicopters we offer:

• The only place in the world you can shoot full-auto belt fed from a helicopter as a civilian
• 71 acres of mountainside range space
• A truly authentic military experience

I was surprised that they have packages under $1000, but they get more expensive pretty quickly.  But things like this make me proud to be American.

 

What caliber for Orca?

Something weird with Orcas started around 6 years ago in the Straight of Gibraltar: Orca pods started ramming sailing boats.  Hundreds of boats have been attacked, so many that there is a Wikipedia page about the situation. 

Well it seems that yachtsmen have started returning fire: 

 I dunno - a pellet gun is maybe not my first choice.  But since this is Europe, it may be the best option they have.

Twenty-Five Years

 

 

Remember. 

 

 

Recommended blog

FotB Tom Lindsay has a very interesting blog: The Whiskey Trail which is all about, well, cocktailblogging.  He has a very fun series of posts on the James Bond drinks (with recipes) and even includes Kina Lillet blanc in the martini.  10/10.

As an Old Fashioned admirer, I really quite like his New Fashioned.  Clever, that. 

Highly recommended. 

A blog comment I received from The Queen Of The World

Plague Monk left a comment on my post about Dolly Parton's passing.   The Queen of the World was not amused.  She emailed this to me because I require Blogger registration to comment:

Usually I just rant to you in private but this was too big!!!

I’m once again impressed at how kind you are to your most ignorant of readers. The moron that commented about pissing on Dolly Parton’s grave is clearly a troll yet you were polite in your response to the most asinine of low life idiots that ever stepped up to prove the serious decline of intelligence ever exhibited in black and white. Its very clear he found the movie 9-5 to be as realistic as Superman and Ghostbusters and was therefore offended, thus yet another example of the current snowflake mentality the rest of the intelligent world has to live with while wishing there was a law that would allow the thinning of the herd!

I have never registered to allow myself to make comments on your post for fear you would have to quickly ban me and thus cause much marital strife, but once in awhile DAMN!! Can’t you just call an asshole an asshole?!?!!!

I love you.  Your hair looks nice.

Tacticalshit.com

I really wanted to like these guys, because (a) what a great name, and (b) they had fun stuff like soda can launchers.  Plus they are an American company, not one from Red China*.

Except (you knew there was an "except" coming, didn't you?) The Queen Of The World ordered a gift from them three weeks ago and all she's seen from them is an order confirmation - no shipping notification, nothing.  Still hasn't been shipped or received.  Maybe it's all Chinesium or another Minnesota Learing Center, I don't know.

Anyone else had any experiences like this from tacticalshit.com? 

* I use the term "Red China" to annoy the Usual Suspects. 

Well, great

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.

Florida takes action against Flock cameras

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. 

 

Dolly Parton - Stairway to Heaven

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.

This is a photo from when she opened a branch of her Imagination Library in London (of all places, but it was at the start of her 2008 "Backwoods Barbie" European tour).

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:

• She was called the "Iron Butterfly" for her tough business negotiation, having turned down Elvis' (Elvis!) request to cover I will Always Love You. He wanted too much money - half of all royalties in perpetuity. She said no. 
• She was Entertainer of the Year - one of only seven women who have ever been given this award. 
• 45 Grammy nominations, 7 awards (she wuz robbed). Two Academy Award nominations.
• Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. Country Music Hall of Fame, and Songwriter's Hall of Fame. 
• A 2003 tribute album to her featured covers of her songs by Melissa Etheridge, Allison Kraus, Shania Twain, Norah Jones, and Sinead O'Connor. Yowzer.
• American Idol had a "Dolly Parton" night where everyone had to perform one of her 6000 (!) songs. 

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.

Rest In Peace and rise in Glory, Dolly Parton

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. 

Deep History

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.

Battle of Trafalgar news

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.

What do you call someone who doesn't back up their data?

Dataless:

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.

Here we go again. Not, this isn't the "Hottest Year Ever"

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.

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.

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:

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:
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.

And what Science®-denying Tea-Bagging place did I get that?  From the Fed.Gov's weathermen, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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:

1. The reported data are fiddled and are untrustworthy.
2. The record data are not fiddled and are trustworthy.
3. It's summer.  It's hot, hot, hot ...

Hey, Bustah!

Cool archaeology news

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 Champag

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 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 department's cunning new password security scheme

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.

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 ...

Angels and Ministers of Grace defend us.  And remember - this was the IT Department that did this.

Sigh.

This is why we can't have nice (security) things on the Internet.

"Justice Department" are a bunch of big Poopy Heads

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.

AI Hilarity

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 ...

The Four Rules, This Time With Emphasis

Just to review.

Treat all firearms as if they are loaded.

Never point the firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy.

Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

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. 

 

Dad Joke CCCLXVIII

Tuna sends in another one:

Want to hear 2 short jokes and 1 long one? joke joke Joooooooooke 

When Britannia ruled the waves

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.

And go leave OldADSarge some commenty love. 

Armor Piercing ammo

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. 

Bayeux Tapestry back in England for first time in 900 years

This is cool:

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.

Dad Joke CCCLXVII - I was told there would be no math

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) 

This blog is old enough to vote

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. 

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 "May Issue" (you had to justify why you needed a permit, and the Goverment might - or might not - issue one) 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.