Deep thinking at the HuffPo

No, I'm not joking.  The question of what it is to live, and love, and to fully be human is the great question of our time, just as it has been so down through the ages.  At HuffPo, Tracy McMillan (one of the writers of Mad Men) looks at this question through the lens of you're a thirty-something woman who's not married.  I cannot recommend her post more highly.

There's a lot there for the men, too:

When it comes to choosing a husband, only one thing really, truly matters: character. So it stands to reason that a man's character should be at the top of the list of things you are looking for, right? But if you're not married, I already know it isn't. Because if you were looking for a man of character, you would have found one by now. Men of character are, by definition, willing to commit.

It's said - truthfully, in my mind - that the definition of "manly" is written by young women, in each generation.  However, the wisest of these recognize that part of this definition is that a man controls himself, by committing to his woman.  And recognizes that the commitment is no sacrifice.  Guys who whine about their commitment are viewed by other men - real men - as unmanly.

But most of this is for the ladies.  I expect that most of my readers are men, but for any young ladies in the audience, you need to RTWT.  Especially this:

No, you want someone better than you are: better looking, better family, better job.


Here is what you need to know: You are enough right this minute. Period. Not understanding this is a major obstacle to getting married, since women who don't know their own worth make terrible wives. Why? You can fake it for a while, but ultimately you won't love your spouse any better than you love yourself. Smart men know this.

We sure do.  And her conclusion deserves to be engraved in marble, in letters of gold:

The good news is that I believe every woman who wants to can find a great partner. You're just going to need to get rid of the idea that marriage will make you happy. It won't. Once the initial high wears off, you'll just be you, except with twice as much laundry.


Because ultimately, marriage is not about getting something -- it's about giving it. Strangely, men understand this more than we do. Probably because for them marriage involves sacrificing their most treasured possession -- a free-agent penis -- and for us, it's the culmination of a princess fantasy so universal, it built Disneyland.

The bottom line is that marriage is just a long-term opportunity to practice loving someone even when they don't deserve it.

It's a different, and more modern way of saying this:

Love is patient; love is kind
and envies no one.
Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude;
never selfish, not quick to take offense.
There is nothing love cannot face;
there is no limit to its faith,
its hope, and endurance.
In a word, there are three things
that last forever: faith, hope, and love;
but the greatest of them all is love.

- 1 Corinthians 13:4

I cannot recommend this post more highly.  The author has drunk deeply from the Cup of Life, and shares this wisdom with us.  The Free Internet Ice Cream is nourishing indeed, for the soul.

Ooh, pretty!

I for one had never considered the idea of leather grips for a 19-by-God-11, but they sure are pretty.  Seems some people like how they feel, too.

Me - and I'm sure that this is a dead giveaway of some sort of moral flaw - I like me some Mammoth Ivory grips.

Open Carry: Pistols vs. long guns

This seems to be the topic that ate the gunblogosphere.  Unc tries again, bringing the truth ("You guys suck at marketing. And that’s it.") and gets tons of comments along the lines of we didn't break any laws or some such.

Granted, but you're not winning hearts and minds, you're scaring the White People.  I think I can prove it, in a way that gunnies will feel in their gut.

It's an old story that we've all heard before.  A sheriff is having a cup of joe at the lunchcounter when one of the town ladies spies his pistol.  She asks him if he's expecting trouble.  He replies, "No, ma'am.  If I was expecting trouble, I'd have brought my rifle."

A pistol says "I carry this because it's portable, and you never know what might happen."  It gives all sorts of openings for polite conversations about the value to the Republic of a citizenry that can react quickly to the unexpected.

A long gun says "something is going down."  People start to edge towards the door.

It's not about you and your rights.  It's about the people you're trying to convince, and instead are scaring.  Please don't scare the White Folks by making them think that something bloody is about to go down. Eyes on the prize.

Gettin' my Wookie Seurat on

The Czar of Muscovy describes me as a "non-boulevardier", which is true.  But it wasn't always.  These days, I'm more comfortable hanging out at the shooting range, but Back In The Day, I used to haunt the First Arrondissement, hanging out with Georgie Seurat and the crowd.  L'hotel La Sanguine was just down the street from the church of La Madeleine, which was cheek-by-jowl to the Place de la Concorde.

As you can imagine, the difficulty was my Wookie Suit.  Even though this was a particularly classy one - made of Carmague musk rat fur - some of the crowd thought it was too over the top.  Gaugain in particular, although he didn't like anything except for naked Polynesian girls.

But Georgie thought it was tres magnifique, and even snuck me into one of his paintings.  See if you can spot me - although I always thought he made my butt look too big.

Photoshop courtesy of #1 Son.  Did himself proud on this one.

Shoot To Reset - Mechanics

I posted yesterday about how the "Shoot To Reset" trigger technique did a whole world of good for my groupings - and especially for my speed.  Here's how it works.

Apologies for the lousy picture quality - taken in low light with my iPhone camera and blown up.  This is the first stage, where the finger is just placed on the trigger, but before any slack is taken up.  Notice in particular the large amount of white space behind the trigger in this photo - that's a testament to just how far you have to move the trigger to fire the pistol.

Obviously, make sure that you're following the 4 Rules when you do this.

This is the second stage, where the trigger has been pulled back to the trigger break, the hammer falls on the firing pin, and the round heads down range.  Notice that there's almost no white space at all behind the trigger.  Moving the trigger across all that white space gave all sorts of opportunity for the muzzle to drift off target (or more likely, be pulled off target due to my poor mechanics).

But unless you're firing a fully automatic weapon, you have to release the trigger before you can shoot another round.  If you release it all the way, you have reintroduced all that white space that you'll have to cover.  This is where Shoot To Reset comes into play.

This is the third stage, after you've released the trigger to the reset point.  On the Glock, you could both feel this in the trigger and hear a click when the reset point was reached.  Notice that there's no slack to take up - the white space behind the trigger here is much smaller than in the first picture (maybe only 40% as big), but you're still ready to fire.

So what does all this mean in a practical sense?  I shot four magazines (shown below; note that the last one - on the right hand side - was where I was doing a different experiment with my grip, and so should be ignored).  The three of interest were an initial slow fire ("take all the time you want") control group, and then two groups of medium/quick fire (no slower than one round per second).

Both of my medium/quick groups are the same size as the slow fire control, which I found to be nothing short of astonishing.  The second of the med/quick groups might have even been slightly smaller than the control (!).

Remember, this was the first time I'd ever done this - my first 20 or so shots using this technique.  If you're like me, it'll work for you too.

I guess this makes sense.  Just as removing parts will tend to increase the reliability of mechanical devices, removing part of your motion sequence will improve the reliability of your actions.

UPDATE 17 February 2011 11:53: Welcome visitors from Say Uncle!  You might want to follow the link to by first post on Shoot To Reset,  which has a bit more on the subject.

I also shamefully forgot to thank Sam at the Roswell (GA) Sharpshooters USA, who took the time not just to describe the theory to me, but to work with my mechanics as well.  Very much appreciated, and highly recommended.  Anyone who can make me shoot decently is a Higher Being; if you're in the market for this sort of thing, you can do a lot worse than seeking him out.

Be polite, but have a plan

Good advice, which extends beyond personal self-defense to financial self-defense.  The Six's wife lost her wallet, with all the expected credit cards and everything.  The Six offers up some good advice:

Many of us carry our lives in our wallets or purses. ID, credit cards, cash and all the things society requires us to have to maneuver through the various roadblocks. Those things tend to represent the sum total of our identification lives. The loss of such is more than just the hassle we must endure to replace them, it's the opportunity for the immoral to steal, sometimes more than just material things.

With identification, credit cards and a Social Security card the clever thief can steal your very identity with all the attendant problems that you'll endure. What can you do to protect yourself? The keys are speed, diligence and reporting.

RTWT, which is very much worth your while.

Here comes Obamacare

Good and hard, if we're getting to be "more like Europe":

The [U.K.] National Health Service is today condemned over its inhumane treatment of elderly patients in an official report that finds hospitals are failing to meet “even the most basic standards of care” for the over-65s.

And who are the dastardly neo-con lying liars who say this?  Sarah Palin perhaps?  Nope, it's the UK Government:

Ann Abraham, who as [UK Government] health ombudsman carries out independent investigation of complaints against the health service, said: “The findings of my investigations reveal an attitude – both personal and institutional – which fails to recognise the humanity and individuality of the people concerned and to respond to them with sensitivity, compassion and professionalism.

Ann Abraham is clearly a liar.  Progressives by definition are kinder, smarter, and in every way superior human beings.  Government Employees are honorary Progressives.  So they can't possibly fail to recognize the humanity of patients.  Q.E.D.

A study of pensioners who suffered appalling treatment at the hands of doctors and nurses says that half were not given enough to eat or drink. One family member said the maltreatment amounted to “euthanasia”.

Some were left unwashed or in soiled clothes, while others were forgotten after being sent home or given the wrong medication.

In several cases considered by the Health Service Ombudsman, patients died without loved ones by their sides because of the “casual indifference” of staff and their “bewildering disregard” for people’s needs.

Silly Ombudsman, didn't they know that they were supposed to take the Blue Pill?



Notice the failure of the NHS here.  By their own admission, it wasn't cost cutting (the Red Pill vs. the Blue Pill).  It was an institutionalized want of basic humanity, that didn't give food or water to elderly patients.  And not to one or two patients.  Half of them.

It's health care provided by the Department of Motor Vehicles.  It's Obama's Transformational Agenda in action - more critical services provided by the Government, and only by the Government.

Can every Progressive who (a) wanted national health care and (b) wants us to be "more like Europe" please shut up and take a seat in the back?  Let the Grown Ups handle things.

Shoot to reset

Man, it's cool.  I'd never heard of it before, but this is a nifty trick that doubled my shooting speed without expanding my groups.  Range Report on this tomorrow, but basically it goes like this:

1. On the firing line, with your pistol pointed at the target, take up the slack on your trigger.  This is your reset point. 

2. Squeeze the trigger the rest of the way to fire the gun.  Do NOT let the trigger all the way out.  Instead, let your trigger fingermove back to the reset point.  The pistol is ready to fire again.

It's possible that some pistols with little slack won't benefit from this technique (i.e. there's very little distance between the reset point and the break), but the Glock I shot had rather a lot of slack.  I'd expect a 92 would benefit a lot as well.  1911, maybe not so much.

It seems that this technique of minimizing the movement of your trigger finger reduces the opportunity for that movement to move your aim point off.  If you're a particularly good marksman, this might not be very much use at all - you already have the muscle memory to keep this from happening.  But for a duffer like me, it was nothing short of astonishing.  My moderately fast groups ("shoot once a second") were no bigger than my slow groups ("take all the time you want").

Report and pictures tomorrow, but I have to get the boys fed.  But man, I'm doing this again.

UPDATE 16 February 2011 15:01: Updated post with pictures here.

Password-fu

Not here, over at Paladin's.  He shows you why a good password is important.  With numbers. [Link now dead, unfortunately.  See the update below  - Borepatch]

The only thing I'd add is that you can make it even stronger if you shift from a password to a passphrase.  The problem with passwords is that as you add the complexity that Paladin rightly suggests, they get harder to remember.  A passphrase doesn't have that problem.

Step 1.  Think of a sentence you can remember.  "Borepatch is the most boring Blog EVER!" is a good start.  You can use anything you like, as long as you'll remember the sentence.

Step 2.  Take the first letter of each word.  I have "BitmbBE!" - pretty incomprehensible, but I can mumble it to myself as I type it.

Step 3. Profit!  Err, or something.  There isn't any step 3 - you got your passphrase in step 2.

And now head on over to Paladin's to see how long it would take someone to crack it.

UPDATE 29 August 2017 16:16: Peter emails to point out the link was dead, but also to point out that he has a password strength checker, on a page that has a great overview of how to create strong and easy to remember passwords.  Recommended.

Excuse me ...

... while I crash.

Valentine

And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love - if it finds you worthy - directs your course.

- Kalil Gibran, The Prophet

Quote of the Day

I Want A New Left simply nails this:

What would be astonishing to any leftist from the Thirties is how their whole world of leftism has simply vanished, because for them class was paramount, and the idea that leftists one day would talk of white privilege while saying nothing about class privilege would be unimaginable.

To all the moon-eyed progressives who wonder where in the world the Tea Party movement came from, who wonder what's the matter with Kansas, who wonder how why they never anticipated the loss of "Reagan Democrats", this is your starting point.

Hint: your current coalition precludes your old coalition.  Hint #2: think about poor white males, and what your coalition offers them. Hint #3: just because a group won't ally with you, doesn't mean that it won't ally with someone else. 

Criminy, if the Left were intellectually vigorous, you'd read this sort of analysis in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times.

UPDATE: As I point out here, the Democrats are no friends to the Working Class:

It's clear that the Democratic Party is contemptuous of the working class, and this is a big part of why I haven not been a Democrat for years. They're all about the Underclass, Racial/Identity Grouping (Blacks, Hispanics, and Women; not Asians or poor Whites), and the Government/University/Public Sector Unions representing left-wing Intellectual SWPL, sucking the surplus generated by the Proletariat they despise.

And they wonder why they lose elections.

Could the CXPST attack take down the Internet?

Stan writes to ask my opinion on the new CXPST denial of service attack, and whether it really could take the Internet down.

First, a quick overview of the attack.  Most Internet devices that most of us deal with are end systems - typically servers, like the ones that live at www.google.com or some such place.  There are another set of devices that are typically invisible (in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind sense): routers.  These are specialized computers that figure out where each message needs to go so that it gets delivered to the proper location.  The broadband router in your house is a very small version of this.

The routers at the Internet core are massive in comparison.  They need to be, because they need to know where everything lives on the Internet.  The only way that this can work (because nobody knows what the Internet really looks like) is that the routers talk to each other, and explain where things are.  This all happens automatically, by a protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

The CXPST attack is said to use a combination of techniques to overload the core routers, causing them to crash.  Stan asks: is there anything to this?

Maybe.  Let me break down the components you'd need.


1. Massive zombie botnet army

The attack needs a really large number of computers to work, because there's a ton of data to collect.  Something along the lines of a quarter million computers.  So I haven't bothered to say "don't try this at home", because most of us don't have a botnet of 250,000 pwned computers.

But some people do.  A sadly large percentage of computers - even those "protected" by antivirus - are infected.  Maybe 30%.  So this part is pretty plausible.

2. Internet reconnaissance

If you want to attack the core routers, you need to know where they are.  Since they don't have easy to remember names (like www.google.com), you need to figure this out on your own.  There are programs to do this - traceroute is an elegant hack and will give you a list of all the routers that sit between your computer and your destination.

The problem is that there are many paths through the 'net, which go through many different core routers.  This is where the botnet army comes in, with a ton of zombies figuring out the paths through the 'net to identify the top choke points.

But yeah, this is just programming.  Plausible.


3. BGP vulnerability

While rare, attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in routing protocol software have been seen before.  But that's not really what we're seeing in this attack.  Rather, it's a timing attack, where you use the protocol as intended.  CXPST tries to overwhelm a router so that it removes itself from the BGP interactions with its fellow routers.  Then as it "clears its head" and starts to rejoin the BGP community CXPST targets a fellow router so that it goes down as the first is coming back.  The intended outcome is to introduce rolling instability that cascades through the core, ultimately turning into a chain reaction that ultimately melts down the entire core.

You see why you need a lot of reconnaissance from the botnet - you don't need one core router to target, you need a bunch.  If you only have a few, it's quite likely that your attack will fizzle.

So plausible or not?  I'm a bit skeptical here.  Timing attacks are nothing new, but you have to know what you're doing for them to work, and remember that nobody really knows what the Internet looks like.  Nobody watches BGP in action, you the pool of expertise to get the timings right is really limited.

Could you?  Maybe.  I'd think that the intersection of the groups understand BGP timings and have a whopping great botnet army may be limited to nation state actors.  Plausible, but unlikely.

4. Motivations

Here's where it gets dicey.  This sounds about right:

Ordinary botnet owners would never launch such an attack. They’re making far too money from spam and reaping malware’s credit-card number fruits to want to kill the Internet. It is conceivable though that a rogue nation could attempt to wreck the Internet in a cyberwar.

In the long run, a CXPST attack would be stopped, but for a few hours to a day or two the Internet could conceivably be knocked out.

The people who plausibly could do this either probably wouldn't want to, or they are Intelligence Agencies who would probably only do it as a hostile act.  China almost certainly has the capability to do this to us (we're likely the country most dependent on the Internet), but with all the economic activity that relies on Internet Just In Time communications (and with how their economy relies on ours), it would probably take them down, too.

I'm not at all sure I see the motivation among these people.  Then again, that may just point out the limits of my own imagination.

Bottom line, the number of interesting new attacks is an infinitely renewable source of risk.  Robustness and resiliency are prudent, but no guarantee.  But I'm not using this as an excuse to top up the diesel for the generator.

The cars of the future

As seen in 1948.




No flying cars here - after all, we do liven in the 1948 people's future - although at least one of these looks like it should fly.

Via #2 Son.

I was going to post ...

... but it's a fine day today:

I'm going for a walk.  And although our old town in Massachusetts is very pretty, it's not so much today:

The weather forecast for Roswell, GA today: Sunny, with continued fair gun laws.  The air smells of freedom, too.

I'll be back later, but if y'all will excuse me, I have to go leash up the dogs.

Justice delayed

Ten years ago, Chandra Levy was murdered.  Congressman Gary Condit was convicted by the Press, if not by a Court of Law.  Good thing, too, since he didn't commit the murder:

Ingmar Guandique, the MS-13 gang banger who brutally killed Chandra Levy back in 2001, was sentenced to 60 years by a DC superior court today.

RTWT, as it's really about the media's unaccountability, and understandable lack of interest in accountability.  I would like to add one point, that helps explain how they handled this (as well as many other) stories.  The media doesn't care about the truth.  The media cares about the story.

They're selling fishwrap, or hemorrhoid cream, or the President's Day sale.  The stories themselves are the pretty wrapping around the adverts.  Nothing wrong with that, of course - the profit motive is not just demonstrably more effective than the alternatives, but more moral.

But they're after eyeballs.  The media feeding frenzy about Condit was because they thought this would goose their circulation, or viewership.  The truth or lack thereof was quite besides the point.

And thus the downplaying of their role in destroying a man's life, a decade ago.  If they were to actually own up to their responsibilities, and admit their blunder, this might cause people to question what they read or watch.  That might depress circulation or viewership, which means less hemorrhoid cream sold.

Remember this the next time you see the New York Times editorialize that corporations should not have First Amendment protections, but media companies like the New York Times Company are an exception because they serve a higher purpose.

CMP Garands with tracers

Cool.

Maybe they're not so stupid after all

House Continuing Resolution cuts EPA by 29%, prohibits funding for Greenhouse Gas regulation:

The continuing resolution, which would fund the government through the end of the fiscal year, is the latest attempt by Republicans to stop EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans argue that pending EPA climate rules will destroy the economy and result in significant job losses. GOP lawmakers, including House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), have introduced legislation to permanently block the agency's climate authority.

The bill would block funding for all current and pending EPA climate regulations for stationary sources.

...

The continuing resolution makes massive cuts to the EPA's budget. The legislation cuts EPA funding by $3 billion, 29 percent below fiscal year 2010.

Well done, pulling the rug out from under the Democrat's strategy of passing laws via regulation, rather than via a Congressional vote.

On the other hand, there's still plenty of stupid left in the party:

If [Mitt Romney] runs, and he will, his origination of [the Massachusetts Health Care mandate] policy will give his opponents in the primaries a stick so large to beat him with that no amount of clever one-liners purchased from high-paid freelance political speechwriters and joke writers will be able to mitigate the damage. And that’s to say nothing of Obama talking throughout 2012 about how he doesn’t understand what the Republicans are complaining about — one of their lead candidates agrees with him!

I know Romney thinks he can get away with saying there’s a difference between an individual mandate at the state level and one at the federal level, and that might technically be true, but it’s not true when it comes to the conceptual origins of the policy. Plus, it’s sophistry.

To be completely honest, I can’t understand why on earth he is even bothering to run. This isn’t an albatross. It’s a two-ton weight chained to his torso, and he’s not Houdini.

I've said before that Mitt was an OK Governor, from what I saw in Massachusetts.  A Republican will have to compromise with the Legislature in that bluest of Blue states.

What I object to is his claim that he's the most conservative of the crowd.  If that's true, why didn't he veto the stupid Assault Weapon Ban there?  We all know that he was looking for a "signature" accomplishment, which is why he enthusiastically pushed the beta test of ObamaCare.  Fine, whatever.  Just don't imply that I'm an idiot, and that I'll swallow your CPAC "Conservative" posturing.  It makes you look like a liar.

There's a huge lack of trust in the political establishment today.  Mitt is establishment to the core, and is in fact a poster child for why there's a lack of trust.

Open Carry FAIL

Seems some OCers in Michigan scared the townspeople at the library.  Like carry a shotgun into the library scared the townspeople.  Yeah, it was legal.  It was also stupid.

The whole point of Open Carry is to normalize gun ownership.  You're trying to demonstrate that normal people own guns.  You are basically engaged in a marketing exercise, to persuade the great undecided middle of the electorate that people they know and like own guns, and that it's no big deal.

Scaring them isn't accomplishing what you set out to, duh.

But a bigger fail is what people wrote in comments over at Breda's place when she expressed her distaste of the whole escapade.  Comparing Breda to Japete?  Srlsy?

FAIL.  Not only are you not convincing the great undecided middle, you're now alienating your own team.  Failfailfailfail.

You want to normalize the perception of gun owners, you need to be polite.  Otherwise you'll make people think that gun owners are jerks.  Eyes on the prize, people.

Unless, of course, your point was to show that you have a big swinging one.  In which case, stop pretending that the point of OC is to normalize the perception of gun ownership.

UPDATE 14 February 2011 12:52: Papa Delta Bravo has an outstanding post on this topic.

Riddle me this ...

On the first episode of Top Shot's season two, the teams chose their own members.  So why were the girls picked last (or nearly so)?