It's that kind of week

Made of win

Trust me, watch this.



Young miss Jordan was 8 years old when she performed this on Norske Talenter (what looks to be the Norwegian version of American Idol).  Wow.

(via)

Grumpy

That would be me.

Bah.

Your moment of Zen

Southport, N.C.  A lovely little town, although the property values are approaching the absurd.

Snowden helped, rather than hurt

Says former aide to Colin Powell:

The leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about US worldwide surveillance have helped rather than harmed America, and the leaks haven't endangered lives. 

Lawrence "Larry" Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the last Bush administration, said that he believed Snowden's assertions that he leaked out of concern for the US breaking both domestic and international law. 

"I think Snowden has done a service. I wouldn't have had the courage, and maybe not even the intellectual capacity, to do it the way he did it," he told Salon magazine.

Snowden told the truth and is on the run.  General Clapper perjured himself to Congress and has yet to be prosecuted.

Badass of the year

Russian Special Forces officer surrounded by ISIS calls in airstrike on himself.

Hat tip: Chris Lynch.

Jesus Christ Has Risen Today

Yes, I know I posted this on Easter before,  If you're lucky to go to a church with a superior choir and organist, this as a recessional will make the hair stand on end and let you know precisely what Easter is about.



If you're lucky.  The Lord is risen indeed.

Wounded, Not Broken

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for

--Paulo Coelho .

It's said that the longest journey that a man will ever take is the eighteen inches between his head and his heart.  Some don't survive that trip. Those left behind pick up the pieces as best they can, but things are never fully complete.  Pieces are lost.  We see the picture, and the gap, all at the same time.  Forever incomplete.

This road has a fork, a choice of two paths.  One leads to the dead end, the washed out bridge, the sudden crash that leaves you broken.  The other leads on, to whichever rendezvous with destiny is in our stars. This is the hard path. It is a path that we will travel scarred and wounded.

We are wounded because we loved that which is lost to us. We get up and continue the journey because we love that which remains.

The Deity has given us free will.  We always stand at that fork in the road, and He steps back to let us choose.  He forgives us when we turn away, looking at that hard road, after all, his Son did, too.

Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me ...

The story of the Cross is not the story of Jesus alone. When the suffering on Good Friday happened, there were others that took their own hard path and stayed. Mary his mother, Mary of Magdala, and John the Beloved. They stood and gave witness. They accepted the suffering when they could do nothing more, and as that most horrible slow death by torture happened, they grieved because they loved.

And the story of the Resurrection is not the story of Jesus alone. The first witnesses are Mary his mother, Mary of Magdala, and Joanna, women coming to the tomb in their grief with spices to properly anoint the body. They find the tomb empty.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?
 

It was unbelievable. A man returned from crucifixion. Resurrected. It is still unbelievable. Do we dare believe?

So, this Easter, I am wounded, not broken. We have all been given the gift of life and life is for the living. The story of Jesus is story of a life lived with courage and joy. It is not just Good Friday and the Cross. Life is new births, laughter, moments of joy, a lover's kiss. Life is resurrection. Life calls me to bind my wounds and live on with that same courage. To remember what was with nostalgia and to look forward to what is yet to come with hope.

This Easter day, may the Spirit fill you to overflowing, even to that part of you which may never again be whole.

He is risen. 

Alleluia.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
--Martin Luther

 

**Cowritten by Borepatch and ASM826

Seen at the Harley dealer

The riding class is using the new 500 cc model (I think this is the one built in India). It doesn't sound like any Harley I've ever heard, but neither does the V-Rod. Sounds like a Honda, in fact.




All tricked out for newbie riders who might drop it. The folks at this class were doing OK, though.

But this was my lucky day for shopping ...

Common Core math

It's awesome.

Seen at a church

Awesome.

Free trade considered harmful?

98% of Economists agree that free trade is beneficial for both countries in an exchange, and should be part of your healthy breakfast.  Eat more.  More, more, more.

The problem is Bastiat's "seen and unseen" problem.  It's easy to measure trade volumes, so that's what we do.  That's what the Economists look at, which is why they all tell us it's good for us.  They're right in that assessment, as far as it goes - what they see is beneficial.

But what about what they don't see?  Andy Grove dies this week, and the ex-Intel CEO had some very strong feelings about important things that are hard to measure.  The unseen:

The lesson Grove had learned at Intel was that success was all about scale. As soon as a country loses its high-tech manufacturing base, it forgets how to do many things, and loses its ability to scale in a new marketplace. The spoils go to those who retain a competitive manufacturing base. 

TVs were a good example, Grove wrote. Princeton economist Alan Blinder had written that the absence of TV production in the USA, as TVs became a low cost "commodity," was a good thing. 

"I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."

Smart developing nations have long ignored Ricardo's "Comparative Advantage" argument, for precisely this reason.  Alas for our corrupt political class.  They've sold our future to Wall Street for a mess of campaign contributions.

Rest in peace, Andy Grove.

Is it time to end the War On Drugs?

Experts say no.

Well, they're experts, right?

(via)

Jim Hall - Good Friday Blues

More like jazz than blues, but perhaps that leads to the introspection fitting the occasion.

Hackers take over city water purification system

Change the settings on how the water is treated:

A group of hackers, previously involved in various hacktivism campaigns, have accidentally made their way into an ICS/SCADA system installed at a water treatment facility and have altered crucial settings that controlled the amount of chemicals used to treat tap water.

This strange hacking incident is described in Verizon's 2016 Data Breach Digest (page 38, Scenario 8), a collection of case studies that the company's RISK team was brought in to investigate.

The victim of the hack is a company that Verizon identified under the generic name of Kemuri Water Company (KWC). As the RISK team explains, the company noticed that, for a couple of weeks, its water treatment center was behaving erratically, with chemical values being modified out of the blue.

Suspecting something was wrong - and something that its IT staff wasn't able to spot - the company brought in Verizon's RISK team to investigate.

KWC was exposing its internal network to the Internet

Good idea, Scooter.  Stalin would have had you shot.

The fall of Rome and a lesson for our times

From Victor Davis Hanson:

And I’ll conclude with a spoiler from his finish because I think it’s so profound. Describing the fall of Rome to a band of thugs after a much smaller Roman Republic had defeated much larger and more dangerous threats:

“Fast forward to the 5th century AD, is this the Roman Republic, 1/4 of Italy? No. It now encompasses 70 million people, from Mesopotamia in the East to the Atlantic ocean in the West, to above Hadrian’s Wall in the North to the Sahara Desert in the South, one million square miles. And they’re attacked, not by a formidable power, the inheritor of classical military science like Hannibal, but a thug like Atilla with some Huns and Visigoths and Vandals. By any measure, the threat was nothing compared to the threat that Romans faced when it was much, much smaller. But why in the world could they not defend themselves….?

The answer is…in 216 BC a Roman knew what it was to be a Roman. And they were under no illusions that they had to be perfect to be good. All they believed was they had an illustrious tradition that was better than alternative and could be better even more…In 450 AD I don’t think the average person who lived under the Roman Empire…knew what it was to be a Roman citizen, he did not believe that it was any better than the alternative. And when that happens in history, history is cruel, it gives nobody a pass. If you cease to believe that your country’s exceptional and has a noble tradition, and it is good without without being perfect, and it’s better than the alternative – If you cease to believe that! – there’s no reason for you to continue, and history says you won’t. And you don’t.”

Can we learn and change course? Or are we doomed to travel that road once more?

It's a long but excellent talk at the link, full of insight.

I-95: the Spring Break highway

Literally:

MELBOURNE, Fla. - A crash involving two tractor-trailers hauling beer and chips overturned on Interstate 95 in Brevard County, spilling the snacks all over the roadway and blocking lanes for hours on Wednesday morning.

The crash was reported at milemarker 187 in Pineda Causeway just after 3:30 a.m.

Florida Highway Patrol said the tractor-trailer carrying Busch beer was driving southbound on I-95 when the driver attempted to move into center lane and swerved to avoid another vehicle.

The front of the Busch beer truck then struck the Frito-Lay truck, prompting the Frito-Lay truck to overturn and spill beer and chips onto the roadway, according to FHP.

No mention as to whether a salsa truck was in the area.

Hat tip: Rick, via email.

Yikes!

Best money that guy ever spent.

Let's play the Intellectual Consistency game!

Heh:

Double heh:

More here.  Of course, we all have our own inconsistencies.  Mr. Emerson's excellent advice is what I like to fall back on.

(via)

Your Apple everything is vulnerable

Patches for Macs, iPhones, tablets, TVs, the whole shebang:

Updated Apple has today emitted security updates for pretty much everything it makes, and you should install them as soon as you can because it's all bad news. 

iPhones, iPads and iPods should grab iOS 9.3, Macs should fetch OS X 10.11.4 or Security Update 2016-002 for non-El Capitan Macs, Apple Watches should get watchOS 2.2, and Apple TVs should install tvOS 9.2. Your hardware should eventually offer the updates to you automatically, or you can follow these instructions to get going right away.

The details are pretty boring to anyone who isn't a security geek like me, but these are pretty serious.  Let's get patching.

UPDATE 25 March 2016 09:27: If you have an iPad, DO NOT update it with this patch.  It seems that the patch has been bricking iPads left and right.  Apple says it's working on a fix.