"I'm here to help."

This is the second of a series of three posts on the Health Of The Republic. The first post is a review of Stephen Holbrook's book on the Founders' view of the Second Amendment. The third post is about what motivates the government to act this way, and what to do about it .

Pretty much everyone recognizes this as part of what Ronald Reagan described as the most terrifying nine words in the English language:

I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

In a sense, this is unfair - there are a lot of solid folks working for the government, doing solid work. They do want to help. I know; I used to be one of those folks.

Quite frankly, I think that I did help, back at Three Letter Intelligence Agency, during the Cold War. And while I didn't carry a rifle, SIGINT and ELINT are important. So is COMSEC. It takes a lot of people, who don't get recognized, or thanked, but without whom we never would have come out of that strange, twilight conflict right side up.

There's no doubt that most of what gets proposed - we're talking government now - actually has tangible benefit to society. Sure there's the overhead of earmarks and the rest of the graft, but the output is usually something that's worthwhile. For a while, I used to think that this was the actual problem - that this was why government was always pushed to expand.

I think that the problem is more subtle. Cost-Benefit Analysis is a well understood discipline in engineering. It's hard to get right, which is why so many businesses go out of business. It's doubly hard in the public sector. The costs are almost never estimated correctly: Exhibit A is Massachusetts' new "Universal" health care that doesn't remotely cover everyone, but which is so mind-numbingly expensive that the only thing "universal" is its unpopularity.

Benefits are always oversold, too, so the entire analysis needs to be taken with a healthy additional discount for elected official's posturing. For a while, I used to think that this was the problem. While it's closer, that's not exactly it, either.

Like the Founding Fathers, we can't see where things will lead. Economists have know about the Tragedy of the Commons for centuries, that common resources will be overused to the point of destruction. Each small additional use gives a tangible use, now. Any negative effect is hard to predict - how bad, when, or who will be hurt.

The Cost-Benefit analysis falls apart, and so we get completely unexpected, and completely horrible results. This is the problem with creeping government.

Gordon Clark revolutionized surfing in the 1960s, with a new type of surfboard that was fiberglass (for strength) built around a foam core (for buoyancy). Think Beach Boys (or The Challengers, if you want something less squeeky-clean). In a lot of ways, if you think "1960s California", you think of the surf scene.

Gordon Clark is out of business now. It's not that he made bad business decisions; Orange County, the State of California, and the Environmental Protection Agency put him out of business:

To sum this up no one in the United States or for that matter the rest of the world uses equipment and a process like mine. It is very unique and there was nothing on earth ever built this way before.

This is just an extension of the methods everyone used when the first foam boards were built. I continued merrily along assuming this was the way things worked. No one copied much of my process or equipment and it was very successful. I used no outside engineering firms or other experts for the majority of Clark Foam.

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency used lawyers to prepare their citation. They used the word “standards” a lot. I finally realized with shock that the EPA has determined that my equipment does not meet acceptable or accepted “standards”.

All gone now, because of environmental and work place regulations. Was each regulation inspired by the desire to make things better? Sure. Nobody thought in 1975 that we'd end up here. Each individual regulation was a small nibble on the Common Pasture, the Town Green of a vibrant society. Now it's brown and barren.

Didn't see that coming.

I've linked several times before to an old post by Megan McArdle that illustrates this. It's well worth your time, but the pertinent part is that the institution of marriage turned out to be much more fragile than anyone imagined:

Public housing [in the 1950s] was, in short, a place full of functioning families.

Now, in the late fifties, a debate began over whether to extend benefits to the unmarried. It was unfair to stigmatise unwed mothers. Why shouldn't they be able to avail themselves of the benefits available to other citizens? The brutal societal prejudice against illegitimacy was old fashioned, bigoted, irrational.

But if you give unmarried mothers money, said the critics, you will get more unmarried mothers.

Ridiculous, said the proponents of the change. Being an unmarried mother is a brutal, thankless task. What kind of idiot would have a baby out of wedlock just because the state was willing to give her paltry welfare benefits?

People do all sorts of idiotic things, said the critics. If you pay for something, you usually get more of it.

C'mon said the activists. That's just silly. I just can't imagine anyone deciding to get pregnant out of wedlock simply because there are welfare benefits available.

Oooops.

Like the southern Californian surfing scene, it took a long time for the common pasture that was marriage's place in society to be trampled bare, and it was all done with absolutely the best intentions.

Didn't see that coming, either.

It's important to reiterate: with the exception of the expected level of graft by elected officials (smaller) and inefficiency of the bureaucracy (larger), these are good people who want to do good things. They want to leave society a better place.

They also don't know as much as they think that they do. They will look at you blankly if you ask them what the unanticipated consequences of their proposal is:

So if you were actually able to ban all legal guns, how would that reduce crime?

[Lots of over-estimated benefits and under-estimated costs redacted]

OK, what will this do to the rate of women killed by abusive boyfriends or ex-husbands, who can't get a gun to defend themselves. What does your study predict for numbers?

[Blank stare]

Dead homeowners are part of the over grazed Common Pasture of society. Women and kids, too. So are higher levels of gun violence.

Who gets hurt? This question needs to be asked any time someone proposes one tiny, incremental, almost unnoticeable further harvest of the Common Weal. Nobody is not an acceptable answer - someone always gets hurt, intentionally or not. Maybe this cost is outweighed by the benefits, maybe it isn't. But it's never zero.

Personally, I'm not willing to believe that someone who hasn't thought through potentially catastrophic consequences is either nicer or smarter than I am.

UPDATE 14 January 2009 07:45: Welcome folks visiting via Lissa. Thanks for the link, Lissa. Feel free to take a look around.

UPDATE 14 January 2009 09:29: Holy cow, it's a Tamalanche! Thanks, Tam. Feel free to look around. If you're interested in this post, you might also want to look at this one. And then buy the book. And if you're using the Safari browser, you'll want to read this (really).

UPDATE 14 January 2009 09:51: Billy Ockham (great blog name!) linked. Thanks!

UPDATE 14 January 2009 11:00: SnarkyBytes linked. Thanks!

UPDATE 14 January 2009 11:35: Outrageous Malfunction linked. Thanks!

UPDATE 17 January 2009 18:41: Billy Ockham has a follow-up about the Dickensian workhouses that is worth your time.

The Founders' Second Amendment by Stephen P. Halbrook

This is the first of a series of three posts on the Health Of The Republic. The second post is about the Tragedy of the Commons and why it leads to larger, more intrusive government. The third post is about what motivates the government to act this way, and what to do about it.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

We've forgotten a lot. The years slide gracefully into a pleasant blur, old men's memories cloud, and then fail. Inconvenient truths are put out of the way, up on that high shelf in the back of the store room. It's such a pain to get the step ladder to look, are you sure that you really want to see?

This Republic was forged in the fire of Revolution, and a fire it was. Nowadays people mostly get an airbrushed Morality Play, a sepia toned hymn of greatness-in-being, midwifed by a cast part Greek Chorus, part Einstein.

All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

The reality was different, and much, much more interesting. Stephen P. Halbrook reminds us of the crucible of our Republic, that it was a hot and turbulent debate. The book was designed to - and succeeds at - remind us of the assumptions about the necessity of an armed populace that was universal across both sides of the ratification debate.

We've forgotten that. The idea that four of the Justices of the Supreme Court could describe firearms as limited to militia use in the dissent to Heller v. District of Columbia says that it's not just Joe Everyman who sees this past in sepia hues, but the intelligentsia. They should read this book.

The Constitution was originally drafted without a Bill of Rights, and the Federalists did not want one. Pennsylvania's James Wilson summed up the reason for the absence (p. 192):

A proposition to adopt a measure that would have supposed that we were throwing into the general government every power not expressly reserved by the people, would have been spurned at; in that house, with the greatest indignation ... If we attempt an enumeration, every thing that is not enumerated is presumed to be given.

On the other side of the debate were the Anti-Federalists, who demanded a Bill of Rights. Benjamin Franklin was one of these skeptics, saying "this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it ..." (p. 176).

Halbrook ably describes the heated debate that raged between these two groups. In some states (Delaware), there was no debate at all; the Federalists ran the show. In other states, the Constitution was either ratified with an explicit demand for a Bill of Rights (New Hampshire), or was explicitly not ratified without one (Vermont). In almost all, the debate was hot. He quotes (p. 202) Massachusetts Federalist leader Theodore Sedgwick, complaining an opponent:

... is making every possible exertion & by the meanest and basest arts stimulating pub[l]ick passions. He says that it will be a government for great men & law[y]erss. That the people will be disarmed. That a standing army will be immediately formed &ca. &ca. &ca.

Neither group trusted the government. We've forgotten that. The Federalists are sometimes painted as the "Big Government" party. They weren't. So why did they oppose the explicit limits on a federal government that they didn't trust?

They thought that the people would rise up in revolution, all over again (p. 235):

The New York federalists were led by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, who had argued in The Federalist No. 29 that military establishments would not be a danger where "a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms," were ready to defend their right.

The book is filled with similar quotes. The casual reference to the armed defense of liberty is universal. Private ownership of firearms was not just thought A Good Thing by everyone, it was simply assumed.

We've forgotten this.

Ultimately, consensus mandated the Bill of Rights. And while technically a defeat for the Federalists, history has shown that they were right. Bit by bit, encroachment by encroachment, the power of the government has expanded. The Anti-Federalists were right, too: the militia did not leave their farms and workshops, massing on the town green, to dispute a couple of marginal tax rate percentages with powder and lead. Sedgewick's opponent saw more clearly than he:

He says that it will be a government for great men & law[y]erss. That the people will be disarmed. That a standing army will be immediately formed

God save this honorable Republic.

This book serves two purposes. It is exhaustive documentation to put to rest the (hopefully dieing) claim that the Second Amendment is a collective right, only intended for a Militia. Give a copy to anyone making this argument, or you'll make Baby Vulcan cry.

It's also a reminder to us - a Morality Play, after all - that even great men cannot see the future clearly, and what is casually assumed today can be under assault tomorrow. And that the small battles fought today are more important than a Gotterdammerung where nobody shows up.

UPDATE 13 January 2009 12:19: Welcome visitors from MArooned! Take a look around. More of this in the "Second Amendment" file.

UPDATE 13 January 2009 14:20: More on the difficulty in seeing the future here.

Well, it's better than Vista ...

Ouch.

Why there is no antivirus for Linux

It's been all spyware, all the time here at Borepatch lately. This is all focused on Windows - so how come there's no spyware targeting Unix?

A Zen Unix koan:

There was a novice who learned much at the Master’s feet, but felt something to be missing. After meditating on his doubts for some time, he found the courage to approach Master Foo about his problem.

“Master Foo,” he asked “why do Unix users not employ antivirus programs? And defragmentors? And malware cleaners?”

Master Foo smiled, and said “When your house is well constructed, there is no need to add pillars to keep the roof in place.”

The novice replied “Would it not be better to use these things anyway, just to be certain?”

I won't spoil it by stealing the ending - RTWT. There's a reason that Eric Raymond has the reputation that he has. Make sure to read the Unix Koans while you're there. My favorite (obviously) is about the Black Hat h4X0R.

It's not that Unix is impervious, but architecture counts. A lot of what's happening is driven by market share, but it's quite hard to see how it could be remotely this much trouble if, say, Ubuntu Linux had 80% market share.

Of, and if you want to learn a lot about how computers developed. you could do a lot worse than to spend an hour (or twenty) on Raymond's site with the Jargon File. I used to have one of those paper editions, from (I think) 1991. (Actual Jargon file is here, but you should read the other link which is pretty interesting)

Federal Regulor cries

Weeps. Real tears.

It seems that a Ms. Cheung runs the New York City bureau of the Securities and Exchange Commission. She signed off on the report that cleared Bernard Madoff of what turned out to be a $50 Billion dollar fraud. After being told dozens of times that it was a fraud.

So why's she crying? People are asking why her department didn't catch him. Fortunately, TJIC goes on a very amusing and 100% spot on rant.

This 37 year old is mature enough to suck down a nice government salary, she’s mature enough to have a nice government office, and she’s mature enough - well, maybe - to chief of the NYC branch of the SEC … but then she teers up when someone says “Uh, hey, you didn’t do your job” ?

RTWT, and his other stuff as well.

Uncle Sam's Credit Score

You and I have credit scores. So if Uncle Sam had one, what would it be?


Not good. Of course, Uncle has some resources that you and I don't, particularly the armed people who can collect taxes.

A College education bubble?

Coyote Blog has a very interesting post that compares and contrasts the housing bubble to what may or may not be going on with 4 year Liberal Arts degrees.

I can’t prove there is a trend, because I just can’t find a good online source, but 46% non-graduation rate strikes me as pretty high. And I would argue that there is, in addition to drop-out rate, a second figure one must consider. How many of those that did graduate could actually do with their degree what they thought they could? How many have a 4-year journalism degree from Michigan and now are working at Starbucks, either by choice or necessity? I call this the soft drop-out rate, the rate of, for lack of a better word, underemployment of one’s education investment.

Just as with home ownership, both federal and state policy encourages University attendance. The question is, does this bring people to the education market that really shouldn't be there? We've all heard about low income people who got $500,000 mortgages; is there a low income kid at Harvard majoring in Medieval Literature?

Now I must confess to being particularly interested in this question. Dad was a University professor, so we all grew up with the expectation that education pays. Quite frankly, this has been true for me and my older brother.

And #1 Son is a Junior in High School. College payments will be up close and personal Chez Borepatch, Real Soon Now.

So is it worth it?

I remember people saying that you make a million dollars more over the course of your life if you had a degree. That was a long time ago, so I'd expect that the number has gone up. But there are some pretty important variables that don't seem to be discussed much:

1. Some fields of study will pay better than others. I first majored in History and Economics, which put me in a good position for a low level job at the Federal Reserve or something. I quick like a bunny went back with an Electrical Engineering major, which did pretty well. I like history and economics (as you can see by looking at my recommended reading list), but I wouldn't want to live on it.

2. The return from top Universities is not clearly better than the return from state schools. I went to State U; older brother went to Washington University and Cornell. Both of us are doing well, but neither of us are working in the field we studied. He would have paid ten times what I did, but he is super smart, and had a National Merit Scholarship. Quite frankly, I haven't heard any of these schools publish data showing that the cost differential is justified.

3. Net Present Value Analysis is your friend if you're thinking of going to college. NPV analysis is the process of adding up all the costs of a project, adding up all the benefits of a project, adjusting for inflation, and seeing what Rate of Return (RR) you have. This is instructive, because you can compare the RR against the interest rate on the student loans. If the RR is less than the loan rate, you have a bad deal. The problem is figuring out what you'll be paid as a Russian Literature grad.

For me, it was a no-brainer. I got into a field where there was demand (so pay was good), I kept tuition costs down by going to State U (and living at home), and had very few student loans. In fact, my RR was kind of off the chart. This is very, very unusual, even in those days.

There's a point here, which is that young people are taking on very large levels of debt that very well may hinder, rather than help them achieve the American Dream. Coyote Blog again:

To illustrate this further, I want to end with something I have observed over the past year. During the last election, I sensed something in the average 20-something Obama supporter that went beyond just frustration with the incumbent President and the normal level of youthful flirtation with progressivism. I sensed a real anger that somehow some promise had not been kept to these folks. One interpretation of this is that these folks were all promised that a 4-year liberal arts degree would be the guaranteed ticket to success, and that their college degree would make them future leaders and the world would soon tremble at their pronouncements (seriously, just go read the marketing literature from any college). Having gotten this “promise,” they suddenly find the world doesn’t really hang on the every word of a 22-year-old who has never really been out of the womb, and the employers of the world are not beating the doors down to hire a gender studies major who wrote a really well-received thesis on the role of women in the Paraguayan post-modernist movement.

Coyote Blog points out the the Universities have been pretty much taken over by the faculty, who are running it for the benefit of the faculty - you could extend the argument to say that the same thing is true of elementary and secondary education as well, if you count the teacher's unions. This may be the trigger I talked about in Of What Use Is An Intellectual Class?

The Intellectual Class operates essentially as a Guild. The members (professors, senior newsroom staff, etc) have considerable control over who is hired and promoted. For many years, a small intellectual-left core group provided a subtle leftward weighting in hiring and promotion decisions. This has compounded over the course of many decades, until a slight leftward bias has become overwhelming. Over fifty years, the frog has been thoroughly boiled.

A result of the faculty control is an increasing political isolation - the faculty is much, much more liberal than the rest of the country. There is a trajectory in place that will be very hard to change, but which will almost certainly end up in a Really Bad Place. Untimately, it may get so bad that the system will get some much needed reform, but a lot of young Post Modern Analysis major will pile on crippling levels of debt first.

UPDATE 11 January 2009 10:18: TJIC has more.

UPDATE 21 January 2009 07:48: Megan McArdle has more here.

Dangers of winter exposure

It's cold here in New England. It's even colder in Ontario, where they warn about how winter exposure can be very, very dangerous:

There are many dangers that winter storms pose on people and animals that affect life and liberty. Below are a number of these that can happen during the winter and precautions and help that can be given.

They give a very good list of winter dangers, and what to do about them.

Not listed is "don't fall off of a ski lift":

In a bizarre incident that will surely lead to litigation (or an out-of-court settlement), a skier at Colorado's ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift last Thursday morning.

The victim suffered acute frostbite to the ego. Especially from the pictures taken by other skiers. Click through if you want to see the scene in the (ahem) all-together.

Let's be careful out there.

"Anyone can rat ..."

"... but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat."

- Winston Churchill

Pundit Kitchen is on fire lately.

We got the Hope - did you count your Change?

Faith Hill - It Matters To Me

Faith Hill is known for two things: a successful country music career, and being married to country singer Tim McGraw. They have been conspicuous in how they work together to balance career and family: alternating album releases to make sure that they each have time to spend with their daughters.

Since January is Hot Country Lady month here at Borepatch, I'll let Tim McGraw vouch for hers, from a 2004 interview with Larry Ling. King asked him how they met and fell in love:

MCGRAW: Pretty much. For me, it happened right away. It took her a little longer. I had to convince here.

LARRY KING: Oh, really? You were the chaser?

MCGRAW: Absolutely. Are you kidding? You seen her?*

It Matters To Me (songwriters Ed Hill, Mark D. Sanders) was hit #1 on the Billboard Country Charts in 1995, from the album with the same name. This is an acoustic version; the song starts about 40 seconds in to the video.

Baby tell me where'd you ever learn
To fight without sayin' a word
Then waltz back into my life
Like its all gonna be alright
Dont you know how much it hurts

When we don't talk
When we don't touch
When it doesn't feel like were even in love
It matters to me
When I don't know what to say
Don't know what to do
Don't know if it really even matters to you
How can I make you see
It matters to me

Maybe I still don't understand
The distance between a woman and a man
So tell me how far it is
And how you can love like this
cause I'm not sure I can

When we don't talk
When we don't touch
When it doesn't feel like were even in love
It matters to me
When I don't know what to say
Don't know what to do
Don't know if it really even matters to you
How can I make you see
It matters to me

* The CNN transcript shows this exchange ("You seen her?") as a statement ("You've seen her."), not a question. The transcript is wrong.  I was flipping through the channels when this aired, and watched the interview. I was struck by McGraw's response, and thoroughly charmed.

I hate spyware

Security is about the weakest link, and getting rid of spyware is a royal pain in the tail end. If you're getting a new computer, can you make sure that this doesn't happen to you?

You bet.

There's the expensive option, and the cheap option. Expensive means that you get everything that you want - it's only money. Cheap means that you give up a little, but $ave some coin.

Expensive Option: Get a Mac. My experience is that you'll spend about 25% - 40% more than a PC, but you don't need an antivirus. OK, there are, like, three viruses for the Mac. And there may be a New Wave of malware that runs on the Mac. I promise I'll tell you.

In the meantime, you'll save a cool $50 a year on antivirus cost. Over 4 years, that may pretty much eliminate the cost difference between the Mac and a PC.

You're pretty much screwed for games, but you can always run Windows inside Parallels. Just don't use a browser in your Parallels session, unless you want to get some free spyware. You'll have to pay for the Windows license, but I did say that this was the expensive option, didn't I?

Cheap Option: Ubuntu Linux. It's free, and it runs on cheap PC hardware. You can even get it pre-installed on the nifty, cheap Asus Eee PC netbooks. Internet and email work just fine, and you'll never get spyware. OK, OK, this might change, too, but I promise to let you know.

You don't get iTunes, but there are some nifty MP3 players like Banshee which will work just fine with your iPod. Amazon sells DRM-free MP3s, so it's pretty easy to live an iTunes-free life.

Note to Apple Marketing: You Are Teh Stupid.

You also don't get games, so you'll need to run Windows inside VMWare, or dual-boot Linux for every day or Windows for gaming. You'll have to pay for the Windows license, but new computers typically come with Windows pre-installed, so you're probably covered here.

Why go to the bother? Because you'll never have to worry about Nuking your Computer from orbit after it gets infected.

Getting rid of spyware

ASM826 asks a good question in a comment to yesterday's spyware post:

So the trojan this popup installs, how do you get rid of it? I got a user's machine, I think it's clean and then the next day it's back.

Welcome to the thankless world of IT Security, non-IT Security folks. Someone clicked on the dancing baby, or the phishing popup, and now the computer is "acting wierd." Slow. Applications don't start.

Infected.

First, shoot the user and hang the body at your company's front door, pour encourager les autres.

Now to the problem. Modern spyware has two nasty characteristics:

• It often installs its executable files using random names, so that you can't find it by looking for a file name.
• It often hides it's bootup sequence, so deleting most of the files means that it recreates them the next time the system starts. ASM826 is probably seeing this.
  

Now I've been in Internet Security for years and years, and this is a nasty, difficult job. I'm also lazy - as both my regular readers know - so I'll offer several things to do, in order from easiest to hardest. This may not actually be the best approach, but if you have less-than-smart spyware, you may get a quick win. In any case, it is often worth a try. Certainly for folks at home where this is their home computer, the effort will almost certainly be worth it.

Step 1. Try a bunch of antivirus scanners. I talked about a bunch of good free ones yesterday, so I won't repeat myself. I would recommend starting with the online (browser-based) ones, like Trend Micro's House Call. The reason is that some of the nasty malware will try to attack/shut down/delete antivirus scanners. I haven't heard of them doing this to the online ones.

I'd fire up one of these and give it a spin. Reboot when you're done, and see if the Spyware comes back. There's a decent chance it will, but if you run this while you're at lunch, you probably haven't lost much. You can try running all of the online ones in sequence before rebooting - in this case, more is definitely merrier.

Step 2. If that didn't work, try installing an antivirus agent. I gave a selection of good ones in yesterday's post. The malware may try to disable the antivirus, so you need to make sure that the malware isn't running, and for that, you need to boot into Safe Mode. Download the antivirus installer on a different computer, and copy the installer to a USB drive. Use the USB to install it on the infected machine when it's been booted into Safe Mode. Run the scan. This takes time, which is annoying, but won't hurt anything. If it works, then you don't have to try any of the other steps, which may indeed hurt something. Again, reboot into regular mode when you're done, and see if the system is clean (do the symptoms come back?).

Step 3. If that didn't work, you're in for some surgery. Here's where you can start breaking things, so be careful. If you're nervous, skip to the next step which sounds even worse, but actually isn't.

The first thing that you need to do is take out the infected computer's hard disk. Yeah, I know - welcome to the thankless world of IT Security. Put the hard disk into a clean computer. Boot the clean computer. MAKE SURE THAT YOU BOOT FROM THE CLEAN COMPUTER'S HARD DISK, OR YOU'LL INFECT THE CLEAN COMPUTER!

Try running the clean system's antivirus before you go mucking around in the Registry, or you'll make Baby Jesus cry. If that doesn't work, you can try to manually delete the spyware from the infected system's hard drive. There are detailed instructions at this site, although I'm not a big fan of Ad-Aware (can't say about Spybot). In any case, the clean computer's antivirus scanner will likely be as good.

Step 4. If none of this worked, then you Nuke it from Orbit. Back up the user's data, and then re-install the OS. You'll now have an unhappy user, because they'll have to reinstall their applications, and they'll be in iTunes DRM Hell, and probably lost their bookmarks, but their system is now guaranteed malware-free. Run Windows Update to get the latest security fixes, make sure that the antivirus is installed and up to date, and let them grumble about stupid IT can't fix my @#$% computer.

Welcome to the thankless world of IT Security. Mac and Linux fanbois can stop smirking, thank you very much.

Now my experience is that many corporate IT departments start with Step 4. It's just faster (meaning less expensive) to nuke it until it glows and then reinstall. If IT does a good job of backing up user data (some don't), then this is actually the preferred strategy, as any scan can miss something, but Hydrogen Fusion won't.

Quote of the Day

After last year’s wretched Grace is Gone, this is John Cusack’s second anti-war humiliation, this one written by the man himself, which helped to inspire a brand new term: Hasbeentard.

From Dirty Harry's Place.

The Patriot Microchip

Old Blind Dog has the skinny. Run, don't walk, and RTWT.

Just put down any drinks first. You know that guy who snorted milk through his nose in 7th grade? Don't be that guy. You've been warned.

UPDATE 9 January 2009 16:16: Southeast Texas Pistolero linked, with pre- Saturday Redneck snarky goodness! Heh.

U C My Blog? Sweet!

When cruelty and holidays collide, the weak-willed find solace in self-pity and comfort foods. And now, Despair Inc. is pleased to announce that we've combined BOTH into a radical new offering.

Introducing Bittersweets® - The Valentine's Candy for the Rest of Us.

From the folks who brought you the De-Motivators come Valentine's Day De-motivator candies for that special someone.

"Dejected" sayings include:

I MISS MY EX | PEAKED AT 17 | MAIL ORDER | TABLE FOR 1
I CRY ON Q | U C MY BLOG? | LOSS LEADER | A FINE WHINE
MOMMY ISSUES | DIGNITY FREE | DORK MAGNET | PURE NAUSEA
WE HAD PLANS | MAIL ORDER | SETTLE 4LESS | I'M HOT INSIDE
"Dysfunctional" sayings include:

ANNULMENT | I BEEN CREEPIN | HE CAN LISTEN | GAME ON TV
CALL A 900# | P.S. I LUV ME | DO MY DISHES | BOOTY INFL8N
PAROLE IS UP! | AWFUL INLAWS | SUB PRIME | I WANT HALF
RETURN 2 PIT | NO FIX 4 DUMB | RATHER DRINK | MUTUAL DISGUST
"Dumped" sayings include:

I GOT SOBER | HE FIT U FAT | U LEFT SEATUP | USED U 4 FUN
JUST A FRIEND | BACK 2 KENNEL | DORKA PHOBIC | U HAVE A BLOG
RUSSIAN BRIDE | CELEB8 THX2U | DOG IS CUTER | TRADIN YOU IN
FORGET WE MET | KISS A FROG | SHE IS 22! | HE HAS A JOB
Maybe Richard Batista should get some.

I'm taking the house, the kids, and my dang kidney

That there's some divorce. Boy, howdy:

Richard Batista can live with his broken heart. He just can't bear his cheating wife living with his healthy kidney.

The Long Island doctor wants the one-time love of his life to pay $1.5 million for the organ he bestowed on her eight years ago in a gift meant to save her life and their foundering marriage.

Now far be it for me to mock a man who is clearly in emotional distress, but we've seen this sort of thing before:


Q. How is a divorce in Alabama* like a Tornado in Texas?

A. No matter what, someone's fixin' to lose a trailer.

* No, this isn't stuck up Massachusetts snobbery; we used to say this in Atlanta, so it's stuck up Georgia snobbery.

Strike Three

It seems that Major League Baseball has been serving up bogus ads for antivirus scanners, which in reality lead you to malware that takes over your computer. And this isn't the first time.

ScanSafe, a company that provides malware scanning for large companies, tracked banner ads served from the popular website for more than 72 hours. The ads use a modus operandithat's all too common: They present visitors with a popup masquerading as a Windows dialog box that informs them their machine has been struck by spyware and offers a rogue anti-virus program that supposedly will fix the problem.

Now you should be very suspicious any time you're browsing some random web site and you see a popup saying "d00d! Ur's like totally pwn3d! I gotz a free antivirus 4u!!!1!" Like this:


There are good, free antivirus scanners available, from reputable companies. Here are some that I recommend. Tell 'em Borepatch sent you, for an extra 10% off the low, low price of free.

Trend Micro House Call. You need Internet Explorer for this.

Eset Online Antivirus Scan. Probably need IE for this, too.

F-Secure Online Antivirus Scanner.

Kaspersky Free Virus Scanner.

Panda ActiveScan.

There are free downloadable antivirus scanners, too. Instead of running these in your browser, you install them and run them on your computer. I recommend all of these.

AVG Virus Scanner. We use this here Chez Borepatch, on the Windows machines.

Avast! Home Edition.

Clam Antivirus. It's a bit more manual (it identifies malware, but you need to delete it). But it's Open Source.

So there's no reason to go to the local bootlegger for your free antivirus needs.

Common Sense Food Control

The Massachusetts Government is taking courageous, far-sighted action to stop the epidemic of gun violence obesity in the state. The following manefesto shows what our overlords HopenChange leaders have in mind:

1. The NRA's Fast Food Industry's agenda is wrong.
2. An increased public presence of concealed weapons Pig Candy is dangerous.
   
3. The Second Amendment Declaration of Independence does not refer to a private individual right to own firearms the pursuit of happiness.
   
4. More laws should be enacted to prevent trafficking and prohibited purchases of weapons Twinkies, and police should be given the tools they need to prevent both.
5. The assault weapons Trans-Fat ban should be re-enacted.
6. An American glorification of guns Fast Food fuels an embarrassing and destructive culture of violence us getting laughed at by Euro-snobs.

First they came for the cigarettes, but I was trying to cut back on the smokes, anyway. Then they came for the Evil Black Rifles, but I'm a hunter, or something. Now they're after my Cheeseburger. Come the Revolution, you'll shut up and eat your damn arugula.

Damn, I'm hungry.

Hat tip: Michael Graham.

Songs of your life meme

New meme time. The rules are pretty simple:

1. For each year you've been alive, post a song title (with performer name) that was released that year. There's some flexibility here - singles, albums, and Billboard Top Songs Chart will all be within a year of each other, but tend not to overlap. You have a song and a date, you're good to go.

2. You have to post songs that you own, or have owned in the past, or your parents owned when you were a child. If there's a year where you just don't have a song, then pick any old song from that year, but mark that year with an asterisk (*).

3. Ladies do not have to list more than the most recent 29 songs. A Gentleman never asks a Lady her age. If you want, though, list 'em all.

4. Once you've posted, tag 4 other bloggers.

Here are the bloggers I'm tagging:

JayG, because I suspect he's got some sweet Motorhead stuff. Or Brian Setzer, Drive Like Lightning (Crash Like Thunder).

DirtCrashr, because whatever he has, it isn't California Dreaming.

Brigid, to see if she has any Jefferson Airplane. Of course, that's more than 29 years, so you know I'm no Gentleman. Whatever it is, it should be yummy.

Edge, because I only have one Movie theme. He'll have a bunch.

Here are my songs. Since I'm really old, there are a lot. You've been warned. Big Redneck shift occurs around 1992.

1958 Duke Ellington, Autumn Leaves
1959 Tom Lehrer, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
1960* Ray Charles, Georgia on my mind
1961* Patsy Cline, I fall to pieces
1962* Roy Orbeson, Crying
1963 Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire
1964 The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night
1965 Shirley Bassey, Goldfinger
1966 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Zorba the Greek
1967 The Monkees, I'm a Believer
1968 The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun
1969 Neil Diamond, Sweet Caroline
1970 Chicago, 25 or 6 to 4
1971 Gordon Lightfoot, If you could read my mind
1972 Don McLean, American Pie
1973 Pink Floyd, Money
1974 Ray Stevens, The Streak
1975 Queen, Killer Queen
1976 Boston, Foreplay/Long Time
1977 Pink Floyd, Sheep
1978 Meatloaf, Two Out of Three Ain't Bad
1979 Dire Straights, Sultans of Swing
1980 George Benson, Give me the night
1981 Dan Fogelberg, Ghosts
1982 Men at Work, Down Under
1983 Bryan Adams Cuts Like A Knife
1984 Huey Lewis and the News, I Want A New Drug
1985 John Mellencamp, Small Town
1986 Genesis, Throwing It All Away
1987 10,000 Maniacs, Verdi Cries
1988 Bruce Hornsby and the Range, I Will Walk With You
1989 Indigo Girls, Southland in the Springtime
1990 Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Moon and St. Christopher
1991 R.E.M., Shiny Happy People
1992 Travis Tritt, T-R-O-U-B-L-E
1993 Garth Brooks, Ain't Goin' Down ('Til the Sun Comes Up)
1994 Vince Gill, Go Rest High On That Mountain
1995 Alison Kraus and Union Station, When You Say Nothing At All
1996 Shania Twain, (If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here
1997 Toby Keith, Dream Walkin'
1998 Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Mr. Pinstripe Suit
1999 Faith Hill, Breathe
2000 Santana, Smooth
2001 Lonestar, I'm Already There
2002 Johnny Cash, Hurt
2003 Matchbox 20, Unwell
2004 Tim McGraw, Live Like You Were Dying
2005 Breaking Benjamin, Rain
2006 Kellie Pickler, I Wonder
2007 Martina McBride, Anyway
2008 Miranda Lambert, Gunpowder and Lead

FYI, here's an excellent site that not only lists the Billboard Top 100 songs for each year, but they let you listen to them!

Busy right now

Life is talking in its Outdoors Voice. It's loud. Real loud.

No blogging for a bit.

Screw 'em

Via Insty, word that the New York Times may go out of business in the next six months.

Lots of discussion and handwringing about this, like it's somehow bad for the Republic.  It's not.  The assumption is that the media reliably informs the electorate.  It doesn't.

A marketing person would say that they're damaging the brand. We certainly see this with the public's reaction to the media: By 5-to-1 Public Thinks Media Trying To Elect Obama. Chart the New York Times share price over the last 5 years and you'll see the downside of what they are doing. Perhaps the most important intellectual tool I learned in Economics, was qui bono? When something doesn't look rational, ask yourself "who benefits"? This is the key to the mystery.

The media establishment has rotted to its very core, over a very long time.  The rot is institutionalized, meaning that the media cannot reform itself, any more than Gorbachev could reform the communist system - there are too many members of that establishment who are inested in the system to let it reform.

So if the news is so slanted that the public overwhelmingly thinks that it's biased, is it possible for someone who follows the media to understand what's happening in the world?  And if not, isn't the world better off without them?  They - along with much of the rest of the Intellectual Class - are actively damaging the fabric of society.

From the article, the most clueless graf:

If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. 

As Obi-wan would say, you have done that yourself.

And the horse you rode in on, fellows.

UPDATE 6 January 2009 22:13:  Steven den Beste says more or less what I said, but in more words.  And smarter.

Have a Twitter account? Change your Facebook password

Three's been a huge phishing attack against Twitter users, involving a fake Twitter login screen.  It seems that this is allowing the attackers to break into Facebook accounts.  If you're a Twitterer, change both passwords.

Here is my warning, based on my blog posting of November 10, 2008. (Twitter apps: fun or dangerous?) If your Twitter account was compromised you must change your FaceBook password immediately. Now, if you do not use the same ID on Facebook as you do on Twitter and you most certainly don’t use the same password then no worries. But if you, like many people (well, me for instance), use the same FaceBook ID as your Twitter ID and you just lost your password to a Chinese phishing attack, then your Facebook account is compromised as well.

If you don't use Twitter, or don't use Facebook, or have different accounts on each, then you don't have to do anything.

Hack your neighbor's WiFi in 7 minutes

UPDATE 11 January 2009 16:58: Boy, howdy, is this popular with Google search strings. Anyone who came here via a Google for "hack your neighbor's wifi" should go read this. No joke.

Go ahead - I'll wait.

/UPDATE

Not you, of course. Like me, you should only use your Powers for good.

But this guy shows you how easy it is for someone to hack your Linksys, and set it up so that you can't use it any more. It's a better video demonstration, but embedding is disabled, so you'll have to click through. Or you can watch this guy:

Both these guys use Linksys as an example, but it really doesn't matter which brand wireless router you have: Netgear and D-Link will be the same.

So how do you keep this from happening to you? It's actually pretty easy.

Step 1: Change the router's password. Both of these demos start by assuming that the router is a Linksys, and then using the password that ships from the Linksys factory. If you change this password, then the Bad Guys have to guess the new password, and you've made things enormously more difficult for them. Just choose a good password. On a Linksys, you do this via the Administration menu.

Step 2: Turn on Wireless Encyption. Once again, both of the demos relied on open (unsecured) wifi networks. Unsecured networks let any Tom, Dick, and Harry* connect to your network. If these guys couldn't connect, they couldn't change the password. Don't use WEP, since it's teh broken; WPA, while not great, should be OK for just about anyone who doesn't live next to evil H4X0r d00dz. On the Linksys, this is done by going to the Wireless menu, and then selecting the Wireless Security sub-menu. You'll need to enter a 10-digit numeric password (encryption key). I blanked mine out, not that you'd try to break into the secure facility that is the Borepatch Compound.

That's it. The YouTube videos won't work on you now. Well done, you.

Oh, and the most important part? Write down the router password and encryption key. There's a way to reset the router to the factory settings, but that defeats the whole purpose. While I may lose my Security Cred for saying this, I like to tape this information to the router itself. Look, anyone with physical access to your house doesn't need to hack your wifi, so the risk is pretty hard to see.

* Or Borepatch. While I was traveling last week, I had problems connecting to the (properly encrypted) network at my in-law's house. You might think that the neighbors had unsecured wifi; I couldn't possibly comment.

Editing home video in Linux

I'm a bit rushed (what's new at work?), so I'll be brief, but Liberty is in a jam, looking for some cool Open Source goodness to edit vidz from his Handycam.

The Gimp is my preferred image editing software (you can see my chicken scratching here).  It's a free, full featured image editor perfect for doing up Presidential Campaign Bumperstickers and what not.  But it's for still images only.

Except it's Open Source, which means that all kinds of people add their own code.  Code like video editing.  Seems like lots of people:

• Cinepaint: retouch your films, frame by frame.  Used in Hollywood.
• DeviantArt's tools.  Looks more roll-your-ownish.  You can do animations!
• ZS4 AVI converter.  Runs in Gimp.  May do other formats.
• Stuff at GimpTalk.  Probably a lot of stuff.

ObDisclaimer: I haven't run any of this, and some of it may not work.  But The Gimp is Teh Awesome, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if you find just what you need here.

Liberty, I hope I've defended my geeky Linux cred here.

iPhone screenshots

You can take them yourself. Hold down the Home button, and then press (and release) the Sleep/Wake button. Presto!

It's actually kind of cool that the screen flashes when you take the screenshot. The picture goes in your camera roll, which is exactly where I'd look for it.

Hat tip: on-a-mac.

Security plugin for Firefox

Phishing is the "art" form of trying to fool a user into disclosing their password or account information. Paypal accounts have been a high-priority target for years, and Paypal has a surprisingly good* "Can you spot the Phish?" challenge.

Carnegie Mellon University has long had one of the best computer security departments, and they've come up with Perspectives. It's a plug-in that installs in your browser (Windows and Linux only; sorry Mac fanbois), and tells you when a secure web certificate isn't any good. From their web page:

The extension provides two primary benefits:

1. If you connect to a website with an untrusted (e.g.,self-signed certificate)*, Firefox will give you a very nasty security error and force you to manually install an exception. Perspectives can detect whether a self-signed certificate is valid, and automatically overrides the annoying security error page if it is safe to do so.
2. It is possible that an attacker may trick one of the many Certificate Authorities trusted by Firefox into incorrectly issuing a certificate for a trusted website. Perspectives can also detect this attack and will warn you if things look suspicious.

* The same is true for HTTPS sites with certificates that contain mismatched domain names (e.g., www.gmail.com uses a certificate for mail.google.com) or certificates that are expired.

I loaded this, and it seems entirely automatic. Recommended for Firefox users (i.e. all of you). It'll take you 2 minutes. The Paypal challenge is painless, too.

We're in ur servers, reading ur data

Seems World Bank could take a closer look at their Chinese site. Seems someone's been giving them a dose of shooty goodness, done in ASCII Art.

Maybe they got hacked from a Teletype machine?

Hat tip: The Dark Visitor.

Modern Typewriter

Marko posted a few days back on the joys of the Typewriter. I never did much with a Typewriter after typing class in Jr. High School, but did a lot on this sweet little baby (actually one just like it). A Teletype.

The University had a bunch of these hooked up as terminals to the mainframe. No video display; rather, everything was printed onto a roll of paper (sort of like you see in the paper towel dispenser in your kitchen).

Hard to play games, although we did a fair amount of Wumpus. There was a bit of danger to this, because there were never enough terminals, and the paper output was a complete audit trail of your session. If the admins caught you playing games when there was a line waiting, you got sent to the card punch machines.

Like the time I got caught using one of the admin's passwords during the blizzard of '78. By the admin.

Ahem. Now I use my Powers for good.

Security was still an issue, because people would root through trash cans to get passwords off the paper. So the Teletype machine (actually the computer program that ran the teletype) would backspace and print different characters over where your password would go. It's been quite some time, but I think the "backup and retype something different" routine ran 5 or 6 times; by the time it was done, the paper where your password would go was simply black with typed and overtyped characters.

But as Marko says, time waits for no man, and all good things must come to an end. Today, the Teletype lives on in only two forms: captioning for the deaf, and the login process for interactive terminals on Unix and Linux (tty01, tty02, etc).

Alas, the Teletype seems to have taken ASCII Art to the grave with it. Where have you gone, Joe Dimagio ASCII Snoopy Calendar?

Quote of the Day

As I was going through the dictionary, checking the word above, I noticed that #5 in the list of definitions for the word “Tool” was Dan Froomkin.

Random Nuclear Strikes hits center mass on the MSM. RTWT.

HuffPo channels Borepatch, episode 1

Seems they think that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a scam. The post is really quite good, so you should RTWT. Nothing new for either of my regular readers, though, but nice to see them talk themselves down from the ledge (on this, at least).

More astonishingly, the reader comments seem to be roughly 12 to 1 in favor of Mr. Ambler's thesis, which is that AGW is the new Flat Earth theory. I only waded through the first page, so I could be off base here, but it's quite a welcome outbreak of sanity at HuffPo.

So how come? Why should we all of a sudden see one of the core planks of the Watermelon left (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) get thrown under the bus*? And how come this is "episode 1"? Will there be more?

You bet, Scooter.

Bruce has an interesting suggestionabout what's happening:

Perhaps this is the precursor to how the Left plans on setting the table for all the "Obama Cures Planet" headlines we're likely to see in the near future.

Maybe, but I think that this will be the shiny packaging, rather the holiday present inside. We've seen a very pronounced dynamic over the past eight years:

1. Democrats and their allies in non-governmental organizations (Greenpeace, etc) use unhinged ranting to paint Bush/Cheney administration as evil.
2. Democratic allies in the biased news media (redundancy alert) pick up Democratic talking points ("Bush Lied", "Squandered international goodwill") and use them to frame debate.
3. Feedback loop (go to step #1) causes increasingly unhinged ranting on the left (NSA listening in on phone calls from someone overseas to someone else overseas is "illegal spying").
   

So what's going on here with HuffPo, who were front and center in step #2? Well, first of all, Mission Accomplished with all the hopenchange. Second, the messiah now has to actually, you know, govern. So a bunch of what y'all have been ranting about is going to disappear, very quickly.

The war in Iraq? Old talking points: quagmire. New Talking points: we won.

"Illegal" Spying? Old talking points: well, it was, like, illegal. New talking points: responsible defense of the nation. Sorry, nutroots.

The war in Afghanistan? Old talking points: more troops = more violence. New talking points: crush al-Qaeda. Sorry, nutroots.

Get ready for a whole heapin' helping of backtrack, folks. Bruce is probably pretty on-target about how this will be spun ("Huzzah Hopenchange!"), but the sound you hear is a lot of blunt instruments being tossed into the bushes. They're not needed to beat political enemies anymore, and would only make things more difficult for The One.

* Yes, I mixed my metaphors. I like to use a cocktail shaker and ice, but that's just me.

Republican Party is looking for a clue

And they want your thoughts. Now, I'm not a Republican, but they deserve some props for letting people submit their questions. Here's a good one:

Please tell us what the 10th Amendment to the Constitution means to you?

Unfortunately, I think we all know the answer to that one. David Codrea cuts to the chase:

I want an unequivocal statement from each candidate on the right to keep and bear arms. I should note that Mr. Blackwell looks good*, and Mr. Steele's bizarre advocacy that "society should draw line" about the right to own semiautos** makes him about as acceptable to gun owners as Barack Obama.

If you're Republican, you might want to toss your own ideas into the ring. I'm not at all confident that the GOP will be strong on Second Amendment issues, although I'd like to be wrong.

Hat tip Southeast Texas Pistolero.

Back to the frozen north

Traveling, so blogging probably won't resume until tomorrow.

UPDATE 4 January 2009 01:05: Back. Snow's not too bad (only a couple inches).

Sarah Palin runs Linux

I have proof.


Oh, and Governor? If When you run for president? We have a running mate for you. Just sayin.'

Range Report - Smith & Wesson 625

JohnOC was generous enough to take me and nephew Dan shooting today at the Scottsdale Gun Club, and share his Smith and Wesson 625 with us.

Revolvers are very simple devices. The cartridge is loaded into the cylinder, the cylinder is swung into the frame, and the pistol is ready to fire. The cartridges stay properly aligned because the base of the cartridge has a rim. The rim is larger than the cylinder.

Now this is a very interesting revolver. Not because it's chambered in .45, but because it's chambered in the rimless .45 ACP cartridge, instead of a rimmed .45 like the .45 Long Colt.

So why go rimless in a revolver? Because you want to sell to a military that had standardized on the rimless .45 ACP round when it introduced the 1911 pistol. The military quite sensibly didn't want to stock two different types of pistol ammunition, so Smith and Wesson had to make a rimless cartridge work.

They did this with Moon Clips, stamped circles or (half circles) of metal that let you snap 6 (or 3) rounds of rimless ammunition into the clip. The clip holds the rounds ready to be inserted into the cylinder - you can see two moon clips ready to go in the picture.

This makes reloading very fast indeed. Pop the cylinder open, hit the ejector to drop the expended shells, pop in the moon clip, shut the cylinder, bang. This was the first time I'd used them, but I'd think that with practice you could reload as fast as you could with a magazine-fed semi-automatic pistol.. What you're doing is trading time-to-load away from the range for time-to-load on the range. The fit is pretty tight, so it's a lot easier if you use a tool designed to load the clips.

You'll also likely want to use a tool to pop the empty rounds off the clips, since they're in pretty tight. You can do both loading and unloading without the tools, but I probably wouldn't want to.

John is a very good marksman, in great contrast to me. I can do decent groups, but mostly only when I slow fire. John encouraged me to try rapid fire. This expanded my groupings, but I was pleased to find that I was (mostly) able to keep things in center mass. I'll work on rapid fire groupings, as a 2009 New Year's resolution.

Oh, and the standard disclaimer:

I'm not any kind of gun or shooting expert. I like shooting, and shoot a fair number of different guns, but I'm really a dilettante. Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited.

I don't do scientific, repeatable tests. There's no checklist, although that's not a bad idea. I write about what I like and don't like, but it's pretty much stream of consciousness. Opinion, we got opinion here. Step right up.

I'm not a shooting teacher, although I do like to introduce people to shooting. Maybe some day I'll take the NRA teaching class, but until then, you get a dilettante's view. You'll get opinion here, but if you get serious about shooting, you'll want to get someone who knows what he's doing to give you some pointers. It can help.

And oh yeah, shooting things is fun.

UPDATE 2 January 2009 21:05: Nice picture of speedloaders at JayG's place.

Off to the range

I went a month without going shooting, and now this is the third time this week. Yay, me!

AAR to follow.

Congratulations, AZ Rifleman!

Congratulations Arizona Rifleman, who popped the question to his soon-to-be-better-half. Best wishes.

Brioche

Holidays mean feast (not dinner, but a celebration) - and that means baking. Brioche is my favorite holiday bread to make, because not only is it really tasty as a basic bread, it is a blank canvas that you can use for all sorts of things. The dough is infinitely flexible: chop some Kalamata olives and fresh basil for the dough, and you have olive loaf. If you're patient, you can make cinnamon rolls, too.

I have to warn you, though - these can cause fist fights, if you try to save them for a late sleeper.

Now brioche is french, which means that it can get infinitely elaborate. Both my readers know that we don't often do elaborate here. In fact, I like to cheat whenever I can get away with it. This is a cheat, but it's also a pretty good win.

First, start the yeast. Put one packet of yeast in 1/4 cup warm (to the hand) water, with a pinch of sugar. In 5 minutes you should have swinging yeast bachelor pad, foaming as the yeast makes more yeast.

Brioche is an enriched bread, so now you need to enrich it. Beat 2 eggs and a cup of milk, and then (here's the cheating part), microwave it to take the chill off. You're going for room temperature, so be careful. You're going to add it to the yeast, so if it's hot, you kill the yeast, which is bad baking juju. When it's room temperature, add it to the yeast.

UPDATE: Doh! I forgot to mention the butter. Add 4 tablespoons melted butter to the egg/milk mixture, which is another reason to have it room temperature (so it doesn't congeal). This isn't a low-fat bread.

The flour is by nature tricky. While you will likely use the same amount every time, how much you use will probably be different than how much I use. Humidity is a big factor, and can change the quantity by a half cup per loaf. I go by feel, which isn't much use in a description.

Add a cup of flour (for this, I like bread flour, but usually buy whatever is on sale - I said I cheat), and stir into the yeast. Now add a half teaspoon of salt.

Bread Tip #1: Probably the biggest mistake new bakers make is to forget the salt, which gives a very odd taste to your bread. It will be very obvious if you forget the salt.

Now add another cup of flour, and stir it in. Then another. By this time, you'll probably be mixing (kneading) with your hands. The kneading is important because it develops gluten, an elastic protein structure which gives bread its texture.

Bread tip #2: You'll never over-kneed. You will under-kneed, and this is a crying shame. You should kneed for around ten minutes, which is why I like to kneed as I add flour (I said I like to cheat).

I kneed by feel, which means I stop adding flour when the dough stays together in a big mass and doesn't stick to the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit in a warm place for 2 hours (I said it would be easy, not quick). I like to turn the oven on for 2 minutes, then turn it off. You now have a warm-but-not-too-hot place to hide the bread to rise.

After 2 hours, punch the dough down and divide into 4 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, and then drop the balls into a loaf pan. Cover with the plastic wrap and let rise for another hour.

Bread Tip #3: This method of dividing the dough and letting the balls rise together will give you an interesting shape to the finished loaf, for that special ooh - aah moment at the table. If you want, you can get all french and jiggy, and weave strings of brioche dough together. The result is wicked impressive, but you could just drop the dough en masse into the loaf pan if you want.

After the second rise, bake at 375 degrees for 35 minutes or so. The loaf should should hollow when you tap it.

Bread Tip #4: When you pre-heat the oven, add a pan with an inch or so of water: the added moisture will give you one last hail-Caesar-we-who-are-about-to-die-salute-you rise for the loaf.

Now, as I said, brioche is a canvas. So unleash your artistic side, and triple the recipe. Make a loaf as described above with the first third. Kneed in 1 cup chopped olive and 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil to the second third, and bake as above.

For cinnamon rolls, roll the last third out to about1/4" thick. Cover with brown sugar and cinnamon, roll into a log, and slice into 3/4" pieces. Put the pieces into a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with more brown sugar and cinnamon, and put a thin pat of butter on the top of each roll. Cover with plastic wrap.

Now comes the cheating/magic part. Leave it on the counter overnight. It will rise all night and you'll get huge cinnamon rolls for that special ooh - aah moment at the table.

In the morning, you heat the oven (don't forget the pan of water) and bake for 22 to 25 minutes (more surface area than the loaf means quicker baking time).

Now I'm certain that Brigid would do an insanely good Cinnabon-style-only-good frosting, but that would require skill and work, and so would violate my cheating philosophy. Besides, I don't think that the rolls would last long enough to frost.

Hmmm - you could probably use this to make a very passable Venison Wellington, though ...

UPDATE 1 January 2009 17:04: Oops, forgot the butter. Added now.

Bravo, Squeeky!

What a terrific way to start the year.  Nice rings, too.