Happy Birthday, #2 Son

He has more hair now, and I have less, but it's cool to see him on the JROTC Drill Squad.

For a birthday present, his High School is giving him a final exam.  Thoughtfull, that.

Her Majesty's enemies die from a lack of international brotherhood and understanding, and by strength and guile ...

... but mostly by strength and guile.  Wow.  Big, shiny brass ones.  On a RIB.



Via SippicanCottage, via Gerard.

Twelve Days of Christmas - Heavy Metal

Yeah, I know that we haven't officially reached the first day.  But starting now takes us through New Year's Eve, after which Christmas is l4m3.  So there.



Besides, Satriani is awesome.  So there, again.

What would you write to your mom if you thought it was your last letter?

What would you write if you had to do it again?  2cents remembers his father in 1944.

Growing up in the 1960s meant that we were crazy about spacemen and WWII G.I.s - Rat Patrol was one of my favorite shows, back around 1966.  That was only 20 years after the end of that conflagration, so it was fresh in everyone's minds.  My fifth grade teacher was a Marine who fought his way across the pacific (yeah, we behaved ourselves, duh).

And so it was a shock that I never knew that 2cent's Dad was a veteran of Normandy, and the Bulge.  He never talked about it, until the late 1990s.  He told me that he had wanted to put it behind him at the time, that life was busy with career and family, making a life.

We would have hung on every word, because we were immersed in the war retrospectives.  He wasn't interested, and the few stories he did relate (like diving into a drainage ditch when they came under artillery bombardment, only to find that he was sharing the ditch with a half decomposed corpse) was enough to understand why.

Greatest Generation was no joke: no literary agents, just a can of whoop-ass for the Nazis, and then home to marry and raise kids.  He was a good man, and I'm better for having known him.

Ammo supplier review: BulkAmmo.com

Earlier in the year, Steve from Bulkammo.com approached me to do a review of their Internet/mailorder ammo service.  I did, but have always kind of felt a little bad, because after all, what could I say?  Steve dropped some ammo in the mail?  It wasn't particularly useful to any of you.

And so, finding myself in short supply of .303 Brit, I though I'd take his service for a test drive all on my own.  Three data points describe it:

Order confirmation: Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 7:17 PM

Order ship notification:  Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 1:41 PM

Delivery: Thursday 12/15, around 1:00 PM

Wow.  I now have sufficient .303 for upcoming maneuvers.  Even if my friends like to shoot the Enfield.  The price was good ($17/box), shipping cost was reasonable, it was all no fuss, no muss.

The only thing that was a little strange is that bulkammo.com doesn't seem to have a link on their home page for .303 Brit.  I had to use their search box to find it, but it came right up as in stock.

So if you're looking for a last minute gift for someone, you might want to check them out.  And remember, ammunition makes a great stocking stuffer.

Free Internet Literary Ice Cream

Perfidy isn't just a blogger, he's a novelist.  He's putting his Veil Wars on Al Gore's Intarwebz as he writes it.  Mil/Fantasy genre: US troops fighting goblins and dragons:

The enemy dressed their lines. The sun, setting off to the left, glinted off the edges of their swords. Lewis had seen those swords go through Kevlar like it was paper. Mystery. This group, the one that had been chasing them south from Ramadi, didn’t have bowmen. But the regiment that hit them the second time they tried to turn east, to pick up the highway and get the fuck out of Dodge, had. He’d lost 26 men to – he didn’t have a better word for it – ridiculously accurate arrows. Arrows. The US was loosing men to arrows for the first time since Little Bighorn.

Pretty cool, and I don't even really read fiction anymore.  What caliber for goblin?  Read on ...

For Old NFO - gettin' into the Christmas spirit

Midwest Chick had a great idea, so here's comin' atcha even across the Pacific ...



Although I have to confess being a little mystified at the problem.  You ever get me to the Islands at Christmas, you'll never see my haole ass back here again ...



I'm sure that 2cents will post soon about who did the best version ....

Worst. Parents. Ever.

These kids will grow up to be latter day Lizzie Bordens.

The King of Wu and the Election of 2012

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

- Sun Tsu

The annals tell us that the King of Wu was considering employing Sun Tsu, but wanted to test him to ensure his worthiness.  The King commanded Master Sun to take one hundred of his concubines and turn them into a regiment of soldiers.  Master Sun bowed and turned to his task.

He divided the Ladies into two platoons, each commanded by a Concubine who was one of the King's favorites.  Master Sun assembled the platoons in the courtyard.

Soldiers, right face! commanded Master Sun.  The concubines giggled.

Master Sun explained the need for discipline, and for soldiers to obey orders without question.  Then he repeated the command to face right.  Again, the concubines giggled.

And so Master Sun ordered the execution of the two platoon commanders, the King's favorites.  The King was shocked, and very unhappy.  Master Sun explained that if soldiers understand their orders but fail to carry them out, the officers are at fault.  The executions took place, and suddenly the platoons found themselves able to face right.

The Czar of Muscovy muses on the upcoming election, and the vital need for us to hold our noses and vote for whichever of the RNC's favorite concubines is allowed to get the nomination.  His reasoning is smart and clear, and compelling, and you should read the whole thing.

My only point of dispute is that it does not address the problem facing this Republic, which is the rapaciousness of the institutional ruling parties.  Both of them, who have discovered that they can loot the public weal with a zeal that would have left Genghis Khan jotting down notes.

And so the Czar is entirely correct when he says that Obama is more damaging than either a President Romney (spit!) or a President Gengrich (spit?) would be.  But that is aiming at a tactical goal, and will in the long term profit us little.  It aims at victory in a single battle, not the necessary crushing of the opponent's will to fight.

The Progressive Agenda is dead, a shambling corpse that doesn't realize that it's hundred year run is over.  Obama is the best illustration of this, implementing policies nobody understands for reasons that nobody fathoms, other than they are called for by it's ancient, wizened philosophy.  They simply don't work in any practical sense, and everyone can see that.  All they do is square the circle of the Faculty Lounge ideology while dialing public corruption by the ruling class up to eleven.

Even the Democratic Party masses feel this.  Enthusiasm is way down from 2008, and you have to figure that a huge amount of cash will be budgeted in an attempt to get people to the polls in November.  Those people didn't need that prodding in 2008.

So, think on what 2013 will bring, with the beginning of the second Obama administration: continued economic thrashing, continued (publicly visible) cluelessness about what to do, cluelessness about the newly nuclear Iran and the Middle East atomic arms race that will be getting under way then, continued grand pronouncements from our Professor in Chief (uttering all the approved Faculty Lounge pretty ideas) that is widely tuned out by even the Democratic Party faithful.

And, as the Czar points out, continued rapaciousness of a Democratic political establishment at a level unprecedented in the Republic's history.

The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

- Sun Tsu

I would agree with the Czar that the time for battle is now, except for two things:

1. The stink of corruption has not yet led to Congressional criminal investigations.  Between Fast and Furious and Solyndra, there are billions of dollars and hundreds of deaths that have yet to be publicly laid at the feet of the Progressive Altar.  Battlefield preparation for that fight is not yet complete.  If the Republican Party cannot be trusted to do even this, then they cannot be trusted with the White House.

2. For the attack to succeed strategically (as opposed to tactically), the fight must be led by someone credible.  The country thirsts for good government, but neither Newt nor Romney represent this.  For a while, it was to be hoped that Perry could hold that standard high, but this has not come to pass.  The opposition is still leaderless.

And so I must respectfully disagree with our Autocrat's call.  Replacing a weak, corrupt Obama administration with a weak, corrupt Romney administration wins a battle but possibly loses the war.  Nothing there causes a collapse in the will to fight among Progressives.  The analogy is the Cold War - the Soviet Union didn't fall until the Soviets themselves believed that the jig was up.

And so the best bet for the country is to let the Zombie shamble on, with limbs falling off for four more years and the stench of necrosis rising even to the nostrils of Progressives high in their Ivory Tower.

Will there be damage such as the Czar described?  Certainly.  But until the Progressive movement decides that the game is over, there's simply no possibility of correcting what's wrong.  Sure, you might win a battle here and there, but nothing significant will change.  And change has to happen in the GOP establishment as well.  If they think that they can simply dial the Progressive Agenda down to 8, well they're part of the problem too.

As to Romney?  I don't care that he's the GOP Establishment's favorite concubine.  He has to go, because he's the GOP Establishment's favorite concubine.  Only then will the party face right.

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

- Sun Tsu

Frederick the Great - Symphony in D Major

Image via Wikipedia

The Eighteenth Century was all about order (intellectually speaking), whether ordered liberty in Mr. Jefferson's great experiment (building on Locke and Hume), or the centralizing monarchs like Louis XIV or Frederick the Great.  They had a very different view of the role of the state, but that view was an ordered one.

Music reflected the philosophy of the day, and baroque music was no less fiddly than baroque architecture.  Balance prevailed, and the great bombastic romanticism of Beethoven had to wait for the next century.

Frederick was raised to be a general, and while his childhood was extremely harsh and unhappy, that training stuck.  Despite the wishes of his father, he became quite an accomplished musician, indeed taking his flute with him on his many campaigns.  His talent led to a set of compositions (typically for the flute - after all, write what you know).  This musical creativity was only one facet of what seems to have been one of the finest minds of the day: he spoke six languages (and read Latin, ancient Greek, and Hebrew).  He was friends with Voltaire.  Anticipating Mark Twain, he attempted an improvement of the German language:

... writers pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence.

And he fought a never-ending series of wars against his neighbors.  Strange what causes someone to be named "the Great".

Merry Christmas to you too, Calvin

Playdough, paper mache, flour and sugar, filmed on sumdood's dining room table.  Result?  A Christmas homage to Calvin & Hobbes.

Via Chris Lynch.

Sheryl Crow and Brad Paisley - Run, Run, Rudolph

Yeah, her opinion on toilet paper is goofy.  This is just fun.



Country music doesn't give people a lot of opportunity for guitar work like that.  Pity.

Robot Pr0n

Even better, Battlebot pr0n.  And even even better, battlebot pr0n where the robots were built by Middle Schoolers.

Tacitus has the story, with video.  Cool.

Worst. Movie. Ever.

Blogging is off schedule today, because last night we watched what must be the most amazingly craptacular movie ever made.  I'm talking, of course, about Dune.

I was quite a fan of the book, back in college, and so when the movie came out, a bunch of us went out to the opening.  We were all left speechless at the drool-inducing badness that is this film.

Now a little of this, in all honesty, is Frank Herbert's fault.  You have plot holes: the loyalty conditioning of the doctor is broken by the old So you haff relatifs on Gedi Prime, ja? thing?  And the most suspicious mentat in the galaxy doesn't even think about this?  But this was in the book, so we can't blame the film.

And the cast was pretty good, too.  Francesca Annisis more than just eye candy, but there wasn't much here for her to do - despite having one of the most critical roles in the book.  The other actors were pretty wooden, despite their talent (I mean, come on - Patrick Stewart?).  It was almost like they were marionettes, moving across the stage propelled by strings.

The problem is that the screenplay stinks.  The sweeping canvas of the narrative is everything, and all else is sacrificed for it.  Yes, you only hace 100 minutes, so you have to cut something, but characterization?  And even that wasn't enough.  The first rule of fiction is don't tell me - show me.  This film keeps rolling out a narrator to tell us what they couldn't figure out how to work into the action, and couldn't bear to cut.

And so, it was like watching a train wreck.  With a story this compelling, with actors if this talent, with a $40M budget (in 1984!), they gave us a turd.  Well, David Lynch gave us this turd of a screenplay.  What a waste.

I'd be interested to see what Peter Jackson could do with this.

Man, I'm SO glad I moved away from Massachusetts

This bit of idiocy is from the town where we used to live, and the High School where the kids went.  #1 Son emailed this with the comment Kinda makes me glad I got out of L-S when I did.  Me, I couldn't stand them, but this is a case of the stupid: it burns:

Several L-S High parents have forwarded me the text of this email from their principal, Scott Carpenter, letting students and parents know the rules for celebrating “the winter solstice and several cultural and religious holidays.”

The most important rule: “we want to make sure no one feels excluded...[therefore] decorations tied to a religious holiday (of any religion) do not have a place in the public areas in and around our school.”

...

Here: read the email for yourself. Then tell me when Lincoln-Sudbury and the rest of uber-liberal Massachusetts went insane.

'Tis the season to celebrate the winter solstice and several cultural and religious holidays. The tradition of decorating the "senior spot" is a long-held one, and is acceptable as long as certain guidelines are followed. In the spirit of L-S culture, where we want to make sure no one feels excluded because of his/her identification or non-identification with a religious group, we have decided in previous years as a whole school (staff/ student committee on decorations) that decorations tied to a religious holiday (of any religion) do not have a place in the public areas in or around our school.

Please remember if you decorate, that winter scenes, snowflakes, lights are OK; anything connected to Hanukkah, Christmas, or other religious holidays is not OK. Please avoid Santa and Christmas trees, menorahs, stars of David, or other symbols of individual religious holidays. As in the past, decorations may be put up any time after December 15th. Also, prior to decorating, please run your plan by your housemaster.

I was paying almost $1000 a month in property taxes there, two thirds of which went to this idiot's school.  Holy cow, I'm so glad that we got out of dodge - I can feel my IQ dropping just reading this gent's email, and I'm a thousand miles away.  Imagine how much brain power is being leached away by this guy for the poor sods left there.

The Aussies like to (contemptuously) refer to Brits as "POMEs" - Prisoners Of Mother England.  Maybe it's time to start talking about POMMs - Prisoners Of Mother Massachusetts?

The collapse of the Euro, a Morality Play in two acts

Act the First: O tempora! O mores!

Everyone knows that the single currency allowed profligate Southern European countries to borrow at very favorable exchange rates.  The Germans are miffed because they (rightly) expect that everyone is looking to them to bail out all this spending.    But all this currency experiment did was to temporarily deform the financial structure of Europe - once the lid started slipping off, rates are (surprise!) right back to where they were.

Hey, thanks for all the implied backing of the spending spree, deutsche volk!  No wonder Frau Merkel is miffed.

Act the Second: Buddy, can you spare a dime?

What isn't getting much play at all is what the Eurozone did to the economies of the periphery:

This is all you need to know to understand why Germany made out like a bandit from the single currency.  The Euro's strength was pegged to the needs of the German economy, and so German manufacturing exports simply soared.  While production across Europe struggled, things were humming in the Bundesrepiblik.

Add in the property bubble (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal), and the average Joe was left outside in the cold, with his nose up against the window pane, watching his northern European neighbors feast.  No wonder that Yannis, Marco, Filipe, and João are miffed.

Epilog: The unbearable lightness of being in the Eurozone

There's simply no squaring this circle.  If Germany wants to keep its manufacturing exports, it will have to pay southern Europe. They won't.   If southern Europe wants low borrowing rates, they have to accept ruinous monetary policy that is destroying their economies.  They won't.

Stick a fork in it.

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

The term "intellectual" has come into disrepute, with too many examples of the shallow, facile, and quite frankly not very well educated held up as exemplars.  A true intellectual requires courage, to examine your own original premises, to discard them if found wanting, and to stick by them even if the winds of fashion blow the other way.

Christopher Hitchens was such and intellectual, as to almost redeem the term single handed.

Fearless is a word that comes to mind reading his books.  He was never afraid to tell you what he thought.  That's not unusual these days, but Hitchens would tell you why he thought that way, and present deeply reasoned arguments in support of his thesis.  This made him stand out, especially from his fellows on the left.

The Left used to have a great intellectual force, before it was consumed from within.  In a sense, Hitchens was the last of that tradition.  His grounding in his leftish principles caused his break from the modern left - and his regular career at The Nation - which he describes here:




People who titter at this are frivolous.

He did not flinch from reality, or the necessity of standing up for Western Civilization.  Unlike much of today's left, Hitchens saw the hard won gains of the Left from its days of vigor worthy of defense - indeed armed defense if needed.  His contempt for today's shallow, glib leftists was withering, and deserved:



But his flirtation with libertarianism never really stuck: Hitchens was inescapably (and unashamedly) a man of the Left, before the days of its collapse into today's degraded pap of multiculturalism.  Unlike them, Hitchens didn't flinch from recognizing fascism when he saw it, or agitating against it.  Those he saw as worth our efforts: the working class; women; art, music, and philosophy.  His scorn for so called "radicals" who were firmly in the grasp of the status quo was perhaps unique, and rang more loudly for that.



He was unshakably atheistic, to the very end.  I found this exchange charming, with his description of his close friendship with people of deep faith, but where mutual respect led to an "armed truce".



I will miss him.  I didn't always agree with him, but he always made me think.  I admire his unwillingness to flinch from principle, I admire his celebration of what is good and just about our civilization, and I admire his unashamed, vigorous defense of what he thought right.  I regret that his like will not come our way again soon.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 - 2011.

Relax! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has got this!

It's For Teh Childrenz®

Via Theo.

Is your car running funny?

Want to get it fixed?  Try rebooting first:

My car seemed to behave itself for about two blocks, and then completely stopped responding to input. For five terrifying seconds, I was trapped on the train tracks idling forward at 2kph wondering if I would regain control in time to avoid becoming street pizza.

A few moments of adrenaline later and the car picked right back up, giving me enough oomph to pull into the nearest parking lot. After my nerves had calmed down I finished the journey to the dealership; the car naturally behaved perfectly fine as soon as I pulled onto the lot.

...

The mechanic ran a pile of diagnostics and came back to me with results that shocked me - the problem was, more or less, a computer error.

This is the reason why I will never use a car autopilot, when they become available.  The software is too stupid, brittle, and easily caught in esoteric edge cases to trust my safety to.  I may not have the choice if my flight is on an Airbus, but I can draw the line at my own ride.

And this isn't just the usual Luddite carping you've all come to expect; this is my considered opinion as someone who has spent his career in a field (Internet Security) that wouldn't even exist without a bumper crop of computer bugs, refreshed with each new product release.  If people were better at designing programs, I'd have a different job.

Business is good.

So if your car suddenly starts acting funny, my advice as Ashok the Tech Support droid is to pull over and reboot.  Depending on your car's Operating System, of course.*



* You know, the System you are Operating.

The Stupid Party

Can't argue with any of this:

At this point, the RNC believes that if they could just have Bush, without the "rage" against him; that everything would be perfect.

In Romney, the RNC believes they have their "perfect" guy.

Romney has that same tractability, reliance on advisers and advice, and most of the loyalty to individuals and the organization that Bush had (though not as absolute by any means); without the unfortunate tendency to use the wrong word at the wrong time, or piss people off just by opening his mouth... or for that matter... breathing.

They could not be more wrong...

Oh, they've got the guy they want; and he is exactly that. They're completely right about that part. They're getting exactly what they think they need... Exactly what they want...

The problem is, they want the wrong thing.

They're firmly convinced that so long as they can shape the image, and the message, of the Romney campaign (and later, the Romney administration); and they keep "their guy" on message, they've got a guaranteed winner.

In this, they are DANGEROUSLY incorrect.

What the RNC don't understand, is that the American people don't want, what the Republican machine wants.

I stand by my statement that I will vote for Obama before I vote for Romney.  Chris just lays out the same argument in a different style than I did.  The RNC doesn't get it that I see them as more dangerous than Obama's crowd.

It's like the old Bourbon monarchs, restored to the trefoil throne after the Revolution: they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.