Kentucky Headhunters - Big Boss Man

There's a lot of anger in this country right now. People think that they're being pushed around by a government that's out of control. That they're being told to shut up and do as they're told. That their intellectual betters are in charge now.

People know how that turns out. Meet the new Boss Man, same as the old Boss Man.

You know, there's a country music song for that.

The Kentucky Headhunters are a great old band from back in the day that we still used to talk about "Southern Rock". They've been playing since the early 1980s, but had a break-out moment at the end of that decade. They scraped up $4,500 to make a demo tape, which they sold at concerts. This attracted the studio's attention, although the record execs thought that the sound was "too regional". The band knew their listeners better than the marketing guys, though:

They thought it was too regional, and that no one outside the area would get it, but what they didn't see, was the reaction we got to it every night that we played it in front of a crowd, and it didn't matter where we were playing either.

The album, Pickin' on Nashville had four singles hit the country charts, won a Grammy, won them the Best New Vocal Group award from the Academy of Country Music (ACM), and Vocal Group of the Year and Album of the Year from the Country Music Association (CMA).

People know what they like, and know what they don't like, and don't need some MBA in a suit to tell them.

Big Boss Man was made famous by Elvis, rocked up by the Kentucky Headhunters on the album of the same name, and perfectly captures the mood of the nation. Sometimes a line is changed; instead of I'm gonna get me a woman/one who will treat me right, it's performed I'm gonna get me a boss man/one who will treat me right.



Big Boss Man (Songwriters: Al Smith, Luther Dixon)

Big boss man, can't you hear me when I call?
Big boss man, can't you hear me when I call?
Can't you hear me when I call?
Well you ain't so big, you know you're just tall that's all.

Well you got me workin' boss man
Workin' round the clock
I wanna little drink of water
But you won't let big Al stop

Big boss man now can't you hear me when I call?
I said you ain't so big, you know you're just tall that's all
Big boss man, why can't you hear me when I call?
You know you ain't so big, I said you're just tall that's all.

I'm gonna get me a boss man
One who's gonna treat me right
I work hard in the day time
Rest easy at night
Big boss man, can't you hear me when I call?
Can't you hear me when I call?
I said you ain't so big, you're just tall that's all

I'm gonna get me a boss man
One that's gonna treat me right
I work hard in the evenin'
Rest easy at night
Big boss man, big boss man, can't you hear me when I call?
I said you ain't so big, you're just tall that's all
All right, big boss man
It's all right

I'm gonna get me a boss man/One that's gonna treat me right

See you in November, Congress.

The rationale behind "Deem and Pass"

From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine.

How to pick a strong password

There's a snarky saying among IT professionals, that users are an infinitely renewable source of security risk.

There's certainly a difference in motivations between users and IT security folks, which generates a lot of frustration in the latter group. IT needs to manage risk; users are supposed to get their jobs done (in other words, make money for the company). It's a truism that we say that security is everyone's job; users say security is IT's job. I mean, look who gets paid for it.

There's a quite interesting research paper out from Microsoft's Principle Security Researcher, that argues that this attitude on the part of users is rational:

We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort. Looking at various examples of security advice we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot.

I work pretty hard to filter out irrelevant security news and advice here, because I think that there's something to that. The people who get jazzed about a daily dose of triple propeller head security news probably aren't regular readers here. The security industry in general does a poor job of filtering out the noise, which leads to the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome:

He offers the following as reasons why:

• Users understand, there is no assurance that heeding advice will protect them from attacks.
• Users also know that each additional security measure adds cost.
• Users perceive attacks to be rare. Not so with security advice; it’s a constant burden, thus costs more than an actual attack.

I (mostly) agree with the perception, although I think that attacks via passive downloaded malware (say, from advertisements that exploit vulnerable browsers) shouldn't be considered "rare".

IT also offers complicated advice. For example, this is typical for how to pick a secure password:

Password rules place the entire burden on the user. So, they understand the cost from having to abide by the following rules:

• Length
• Composition (e.g. digits, special characters)
• Non-dictionary words (in any language).
• Don’t write it down
• Don’t share it with anyone
• Change it often
• Don’t re-use passwords across sites

As a public service, here's how to pick a very strong password that is easy for you to remember. Think of a sentence or a phrase that describes something about you that you will remember. For example:

I used to live on Pond St. when I was 6.

Now take the first letter from each word, preserving capitalization and punctuation:

IutloPS.wIw6.

That's one heck of a password right there, and is something that is easy to remember for you, and very hard to guess for an attacker. And it takes care of the first 5 bullet points listed above. Well done, you! And this is hard to argue with:

We have argued that the cost-benefit trade off for most security advice is simply unfavorable: users are offered too little benefit for too much cost.

Better advice might produce a different outcome. This is better than the alternative hypothesis that users are irrational. This suggests that security advice that has compelling cost-benefit trade off has real chance of user adoption. However, the costs and benefits have to be those the user cares about, not those we think the user ought to care about.

Anyone in IT really needs to read this. Anyone interested in security should take a read, too.

UPDATE 19 March 2010 13:44: Dr. Boli offers some (ahem) excellent security advice.

There's a reason that you change your passwords

Especially if you're a business. Especially if you fire one of your computer people:

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

The headline reads Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely. Anyone want to bet that he just logged into the web portal using the same password that he'd used when he was still an employee? And that the web portal gave him a nice menu of recently purchased cars, so that all he had to do was point and click?

He's not a hacker. He's not even a script kiddie. He's a click kiddie.

Passwords. Change 'em when someone leaves, people.

How bad is the Canadian health care system?

It's so bad that the brits are outraged:

God knows, I’ve spent enough time in accident and emergency at Oxford’s John Radcliffe over the years, sitting with my sobbing children in a room full of people with swords in their eyes and their feet on back to front. But nothing can prepare you for the yawning chasm of time that passes in Canada before the healthcare system actually does any healthcare.

It didn’t seem desperately busy. One woman had lost her face somehow — probably a bear attack — and one kid appeared to have taken rather too much ecstasy, but there were no more than a dozen people in the waiting room. And no one was gouting arterial blood all over the walls.

After a couple of hours, I asked the receptionist how long it might be before a doctor came. In a Wal-Mart, it’s quite quaint to be served by a fat, gum-chewing teenager who claims not to understand what you’re saying, but in a hospital it’s annoying.

RTWT. Dudes, when the brits say your health care stinks, you're standing in a pretty deep pool of FAIL. Health care run by the DMV, right there.

Hat tip: Doug Ross.

Congratulations Sabra and Pistolero!

Who have tied the knot. Best wishes for many years of happiness!

The funniest thing I've read on Health Care ...

The Czar of Muscovy brings the snark, and it is like the springtime sun on a field of flowers:

The President, however, probably is expressing to undecideds that this bill is his legacy, and if it fails, Hope and Change will fail, the balance in the Force will collapse, and Dick Cheney will kill all the Jedi younglings. And unless they all want to live on Dagobah citing five-year-old sci fi films, they better vote yes.

Heh.

But he also brings the smart, and unsurprisingly points out many of the same things from my last post.

P.S. The Czar is only 32% evil. I suspect that he, like Obama, has operatives that do his dirty work.

The smartest think I've read on Health Care "reform" is at FireDogLake

Srlsy. Obama is causing the Democratic party to fracture, and Jane Hamsher lays out why:

The claims made by the administration about the virtues of the health care bill are outright fabrications. As Marcy Wheeler has documented in her post entitled “Health Care and the Road to Neofeudalism,” it does not control either insurance premiums or health care costs. Forcing 31 million people to buy a product they don’t want and can’t afford to use does not constitute health care reform. Once again, the poor get used as human shields so corporations can be the beneficiaries of massive government bailout.

Yup. She then gets to the heart of the matter:

Rather than actually helping the poor, this bill is a dangerous and unprecedented step on the road to domination of government by private corporate players who use it to suppress competition and secure their profits — the textbook definition of fascism.

You could quibble about that definition, but there's no doubt that classical fascism and corporatism are very closely linked. Big Business loves Big Government, because it lets them suppress competition that would erode their profit margins. Rather than having to compete on quality, serive, and price, they look to government to reduce or eliminate competition. Government in turn looks to the companies to finance their campaigns, making it hard for political competitors to succeed.

Nice work if you can get it. And Obama's blown his credibility over there:

Cokie Roberts said on This Week that the reason the health care bill is so unpopular is because the public option campaign dragged out its passage for so long. She’s right. By forcing the President and members of Congress to keep passing the public option hot potato and reporting on the corruption, lies and lack of affordability that were the hallmarks of the bill, it allowed the public to measure the gap between what Obama says and what he actually does.

That in itself has value, because without broad awareness of the bad faith with which the President engaged in the health care debate, it was difficult to get people to shake off the pixie dust of the 2008 election and deal with the reality of what progressives are up against.

It's been clear that Obama's goal has been a transformation of the country. What's now gaining traction on the left is that that transformation is about the Big Government/Big Business alliance.

If indeed this bill passes, people across the country will have to start examining the basic assumptions with which we have heretofore approached politics. The thing I have learned above all else in this campaign is that the corporate control of government is much more extensive than I ever imagined, and the tools we have to fight its influence are ineffective.

We need to develop new partners in the fight, because there is tremendous public will to resist and the old ones can’t be trusted. We also need a new language to describe it, because the old “right-left” paradigm is firing past the true opponent.

Amen (emphasis mine). Hamsher and I don't agree on a lot, but there is a common recognition (over there and over here) that the system is rotten, and the little guy is getting screwed.

Obama's fractured his base, in a way that's gone far beyond "blue dogs". This article is so filled with anger as to suggest that he's not going to get them back. Anything he says after this will be viewed as "pixie dust".

Highly, highly recommended.

Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.

Deem and Pass

So the plan is not to vote on the Health Care bill. Rather, the plan seems to be to vote on a rule change that will cause the bill to have passed a vote.

OK. Suppose that the country is so outraged over this that the Republicans take not only the House (which more or less everyone expects), suppose they take the Senate, too. Could Congress pass a "rules change" that would invalidate this Health Care vote?

And even if the Republicans don't re-take the Senate. Could a Republican House revoke the rule, retroactively (e.g. prohibiting expenditure of government funds in support of any law that did not have an up-or-down vote)?

Frankly, I'm mystified. This has SCOTUS written all over it. And SCOTUS won't want to get between the People, the Congress, and the President. So which circuit is best to file the appeal?

Obama's Wag the Dog moment?

KurtP and Wolfwalker left some comments on yesterday's post about bunker buster bombs being shipped to Diego Garcia. They made me wonder, what if Obama's serious? What would be his motivation?

Wag The Dog is a terribly fun - and terribly cynical - film from the Clinton years, about a President who manufactures a military crisis with Albania in the run-up to an election. Finding himself massively unpopular, he creates a crisis to rally the nation in the days before the election.



Cynical.

So, as a thought experiment, could this be a model for an October strike on Iran? Consider:

• Democrats are tanking in the polls. This election cycle is a looming disaster.
• Democratic voters are discouraged, while Republican/Independent/Tea Party voters are energized. If Democrats stay home, the expected defeat will be a rout.
• Jewish voters are overwhelmingly Democrat, and the recent tussle with Israel has normal Democrat (jewish) allies expressing dismay. This feeds the "discouraged Democrat voter" meme.
• Obama is seen as soft on America's enemies, which by itself is not a major issue, but added in with all the rest hurts him with the independents and "Reagan Democrats".
• The Europeans (particularly the French) are disgusted at the administration's rolling over towards the Iranians. Their squawking is likely to be muted.
  
• The "hit them from the air" approach was the staple of the Clinton administration. Check out the name at the top of the letterhead over at the State Department.
  

I certainly don't hold out any hope that Obama has principles that would get in the way.

So - take out the Iranian processing plants in October. It rallies the Jewish lobby, plus Centrist Democrats, plus (probably) a bunch of Independents. Of course, it infuriates the retards Netroots, but they aren't enough to turn disaster into victory anyway.

As the Mythbusters would say, "Plausible". Do I think it will play out this way? Probably not. But it's a thought experiment, remember?

Of course, this contradicts the Czar of Muscovy's analysis. All I can plead is that Israel taking out the reactors doesn't help Obama.

The Selective-Reality Based Community

Weer'd Beard wins teh Intarwebz with this comment to an earlier post:

Selective reality is the name of the game with these people. Remember guns are only for killing, and they ignore when a homeowner scares off an invader with a shotgun, or a woman kills a rapist with a .38.

Just the same way when we pointed out that Texas and Florida had snow on the ground, and Virginia and North Carolina had FEET of snow and the towns were crippled, the global warming freaks said "Weather is not climate"....but now that it rained for 3 days, its climate change...not JUST weather.

Man, we're sure seeing this lately. Consider health care. Andy Freeman leaves a fabulous comment over at Eric Raymond's place:

> BTW, healthcare can be made more efficient.

Not by the US govt. See medicare, medicaid, and other us govt healthcare for a strong argument. They’re actually not any cheaper than private.

If you disagree or claim that the US govt could do better, I’ll make you the same “put up or …” offer than I make everyone who disagrees.

You get all of the money that is currently spent by every US govt (local, state and federal) on health care for anyone. Yes, employees too, not just medicare/aid, va, and ihs. Heck, I’ll even throw in the money and employees in companies that get >80% of their revenue from govt contracts. You get to do anything that you’d like to provide them health care – you can set up whatever payment scheme or contracts that you’d like (however, you don’t get to force doctors to take what you offer). You can change liability laws and/or can allow imported drugs (as long as private folks get to play by the same rules).

If you run the numbers, you’ll see that I’m offering you >40% of the population and >40% of current health care spending and you get free rein to make whatever changes you like.

The only hook is that your per-person budget gets cut 5%/year in years 3-6. That’s a total of just over 20%, which should be slam dunk considering the claims of 30% savings. And, I’ll even let you keep the money if you want to spend it covering additional people.

At the end of year 6, we’ll evaluate. Unless, of course, the folks covered revolt first.

Deal?

And no, you don’t get to argue how well you’d do. You have to actually do it.

Are there already some data points that the folks in the "Reality-Based Community" could study? Like maybe Massachusetts?

“I was afraid of what we had already been getting in Massachusetts, and at that point in 2008, I was aware that it wasn’t working,” he said. Separately yesterday, [Massachusetts state Treasurer] Cahill accused Obama of “propping up” the Bay State’s health plan with federal aid in order to help push the Democrats’ plan through Congress.

“The real problem is that this . . . sucking sound of money has been going into this health-care reform,” Cahill said. “And I would argue that it’s being propped up so that the federal government and the Obama administration can drive it through.”

You don’t get to argue how well you’d do. You have to actually do it. There's some reality for you. The data suggests fail. The process is opaque. Big changes are being railroaded through by sleight of hand, on a straight party-line basis. Polls already show that large majorities no longer believe that the government has the consent of the people.

But this time it will be awesome.

Oooooooh Kaaaaaay. I wonder what color the sky is on their planet?

Common Sense Gun Bridge Control

The Angry Patriot calls for some. Hom much longer must the scourge stalk this land?

Do it for the children.™

Bootnote: Older brother (who is wicked smaht) went to Cornell. Even back in the 1970s it was famous for its gorges, and the kids who'd only go half way across the bridges.

Riddle me this

Will all the people who think that the New England Journal Of Medicine is the cat's meow when it comes to the "A gun in your house is 43 times more likely to kill your family" change their tune and poo-poo the magazine now that it reports that a boatload of doctors are fixin' to quit if Obamacare passes?

Johnny Cash - Danny Boy

I'm not a huge fan of the song, but since it is St. Patty's Day (Top o' the morning!), here's Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rogers:

Boum!

Via Don Surber, we hear that "bunker buster" bombs have been sent to Diego Garcia:

From the Sunday Herald in Scotland: “Hundreds of powerful US bunker-buster bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 Blu bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.”

Hmm.

...

Having all that hardware located with range of Iran — and letting Iran know it — beats 10,000 UN resolutions.

And since even the French are at teh end of their patience with Iran, here's a classic French song on the subject:



Boum (Songwriter: Charles Trenet, translation by Google):

The clock goes tick-tock-tick-tick
Birds of Lake pic-pac-pic-pic
Glug-glug-glug go all turkeys
And the pretty bell ding-dang-dong

But ... boum!
When our heart makes boom
Everything says boom
And it is love that awakens

Boom!
They sang "Love in Bloom"
At this rate boom
Ringing boom in the ear

Everything has changed since yesterday and the street
Has eyes that look for windows
There's lilac and hands are tense
On the sea the sun will appear

Boom!
The orb of day makes boom
Everything says boom
When our heart makes boom-boom

The wind in the woods is hou-hou
The deer at bay is me-ee
The washer is broken frictions burglary (err, thanks Google!)
And wet feet are a cop-plop

But ... boom!
When our heart makes boom
Everything says boom
The bird said boom, the storm is

Boom!
The whole world go boom
Everything says boom
When our heart makes boom-boom

UPDATE 19 March 2010 12:31: Oh, well. It was fun to speculate, at least for a while.

Quote of the day

Boy, there's a whole lot of smart bottled up in this:

Smart, inexperienced people inevitably believe that they know more than the rest of us, and that they should be acknowledged as our leaders because of their Ivy League-demonstrable intellectual superiority. These smart yet inexperienced people, whom I’ll refer to as ‘fools’ to reflect their ignorance of how the world works due to their stubborn belief that intelligence equals wisdom, further believe that any objection to their leadership or their ideas is due to ignorance and fear on the part of the less-enlightened. Further, the ‘fools’ believe that there are smart, evil people who exploit the fear and ignorance of the less-enlightened to thwart the ‘fools’ as they seek to raise us all out of the muck of present-day society and culture. And finally, ‘fools’ believe that their intellectual superiority by itself can overcome any type of resistance or hostility including hostile resistance from less-enlightened nation-states, because intellectual superiority always trumps physical or military superiority.

From a comment to a post over at Volokh about a more-or-less impenetrable intellectual paper on the new class warfare. The comments by themselves at Volokh will give you more IQ points than the paper, or maybe an Ivy League education.

The (unjustified) intellectual self-regard of the educated class is an infinitely renewable source of hilarity.

Added: This is simply superb, in a (very) pointy-headed way.

Borepatch: only partly evil

I have scientific proof*:



Remember, I didn't spend six years in evil medical school to be called 'Mr', thank you very much!

And because it's completely obligatory, an evil musical interlude:



* Probability > 95%.

Now that's a scary looking rifle

Bling for your AK, yo:


Via Every Day, No Days Off.

Hollywood goes out of business, episode MCMXLIII

Via Bob at The Drawn Cutlass, we find that Hollywood thinks that there's no market for war films.

If Matt Damon can't sell an Iraq war film, perhaps this is a lost cause for Hollywood.

...

"We're disappointed," says Nikki Rocco, Universal's head of distribution. "And to tell you the truth, I'm puzzled. You've got the same great director and actor, in same style of film they did in the Bourne movies, just in a different place."

But that place has been merciless on Hollywood, which continues to try to make a hit out of the Mideast conflict. Other Iraq war films, including The Kingdom ($48 million), Body of Lies ($39 million) and Brothers ($29 million) featured big stars and little box-office returns.

"It didn't help that the big kahuna (Alice) was zapping business from everyone," Rocco says. "But maybe (war) is something that's in our face so much every day, people aren't wanting more of it in their movies."

People just don't want war stuff, at least enough to invest their time and their entertainment dollar? Is there a way that we could empirically test this? If only someone could come up with a measure of how valuable the market thinks something is.

Oh, wait - we call that "money". OK, so can we have an example of an entertainment franchise based on a war situation? How about Call Of Duty?

So what has the franchise grossed?

The Call Of Duty series has surpassed 55 million unit sales to date worldwide, taking a whopping $3 billion in retail sales in the process.

Is there a Hollywood movie franchise that we can compare, to see how much more (or less) the game has made? There is indeed:


Here's the lifetime gross of the six Star Wars films:

• Star Wars, $460,998,007
• The Empire Strikes Back, $290,475,067
• Return of the Jedi, $309,306,177
• Episode I - The Phantom Menace, $431,088,301
• Episode II - Attack of the Clones, $310,676,740
• Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, $380,270,577

Add 'em up, and you get a bit over $2.1B. The Star Wars franchise is about two thirds as lucrative as one of the first person shooter War simulations.

"Alice" was in theaters? "You've got the same great director and actor, in same style of film they did in the Bourne movies, just in a different place."

Yeah, but you have a blame America, blame the troops downer of a film that has all the nuance of a shovel hitting you in the back of the head. Those other films are also just like this. You think your audience are a bunch of idiots, who need you to lead them to Enlightenment (but can't make it too hard, or they won't Get It).

And you wonder why nobody goes to see your lousy film?

Democrats lie

As a former Democrat, it's sad to have to write this. Joe Huffman lays it all out on Gun Control (and let's face it, that's not a Republican issue).

Ah, you might say - there's Bourgeois truth, and there's Revolutionary truth. Bourgeois truth is simply an unconnected collection of sterile facts - like Joe's evisceration of gun controller's claims. Revolutionary truth is that which advances the cause of Revolutionary Progressivism.

You might call them lies, although they're lies in the service of a particular political end. "Vast Rightwing Conspiracy" is one. "The planet is undergoing rapid, unprecedented, and catastrophic warming" is another. "Gun control saves lives" is another.

There's a massive trust deficit in this nation, where the people simply do not believe what they're told by the Political Class.