What can - and can't - be discussed at the "University"

The term "University" refers to the universe of knowledge, all of which is suitable for Intellectual study.  In theory.

As we all know: in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, this is not true.  And so to the "universe" of knowledge considered suitable to study at the Academy.

Suitable knowledge:

I was minding my own business at work this afternoon when I get a call  from the producer to Sean Hannity’s radio show asking if I’d come on to talk about Beyonce’s use of the word “bitch” in her newest song and the feminist dialogue around reclaiming this word, Snap Chat and use among teens to spread sexually explicit images of their peers without consent, and other sexuality related things in the news.

...

He goes on about how this type of indoctrination also happened at Yale and a “sexologist” (said with belittlement and sarcasm) came to teach about bestiality and incest. “Hey, what’s a “sexologist” anyway??”

So I explained. And I explained the Sex: Am I Normal” workshop he was referencing at Yale, even though it’s old news and I’ve already explained it a million times. I explained it’s about normal vs normative, and creating a safe space, and such but he kept interrupting me with “But what do YOU think about bestiality???” I again stated the program is not about my opinion, or a space for me to judge other people’s sexual behaviors, it’s about recognizing that sexual diversity exists for better or worse, but how  can you explain reason and logic to a person who has to bend the truth to get you to talk to them, and then when you talk to them belligerently repeats “Oh, c’mon, you’re a sexologist, you must have an opinion on bestiality so what is it!?” I took one last ditch effort to explain this is not what I came on to talk about and then thought, fuck it, and hung up.

I listened to this, driving back from the dog park.  Hannity was no more aggressive in his questioning than, say, a mainstream media reporter questioning a Catholic Bishop on abortion.  She was evasive, her sense of Entitled Princess firmly on display.  And she did hang up on him.  I guess she's never had to defend her positions before.  It was a pretty astonishing performance, actually, and one that seems entirely in line with the sense at the Academy of what's proper.  No doubt she will now be a hero in the Ivy Covered Halls.

Unsuitable knowledge:

As a public service, here's something that you should read if you really want to make a liberal's head explode like the fembots in Austin Powers. Or understand why the world's economy is the way it is. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes. The title is intentionally taken from Adam Smith, but Landes focuses less on describing economics per se, and more on the constraints that a society puts on their economy.

It traces the history of economic development over the last 1000 years, and asks some very politically incorrect questions:

• Why did China, the world's richest and most powerful country in 1000 AD not only lose her lead, but lose it so badly that it was dismembered by the European (and later resurgent Japanese) powers?
• Why did India, fabulously wealthy and populous, not conquor the west, rather than vice-versa?
• Why did England, an undeveloped backwater as late as 1500 AD, ultimately lead the Industrial Revolution and become the world's most powerful country?
• What explains the vast differences in economic development between the USA and Canada, and other New World countries? After all, in 1700, Mexico's GDP per capita was $450, not far short of the colonies' $490 (1985 dollars). In 1989, Mexico's GDP per capita was $3,500, vs. $18,300 for the USA.

These questions all tread on the line separating Approved™ racial groups from Western Aggressors™ and so cannot even be broached.  It's a part of the "universe" of knowledge that is forbidden on campus today, sort of like Darwin in the schools a century ago.  The subject cannot be discussed; moreover, it cannot even be thought about.  And so what I find interesting is the enfeeblement of Progressive thought over the last generation or two.  It used to be a robust intellectual school, able to win converts by the force of its logic:

What it ironic is that one of the giants of progressive intellectualism showed them the error of their ways, more than half a century ago.  John Kenneth Galbraith was very possibly the last of the first rate progressive intellectuals.  His 1958 The Affluent Society is something that somehow I'd missed reading.  Dad told me to take whichever of his books I'd like, and I grabbed that one for the plane ride home.

Reading it, it's easy to see why it was so hugely influential.  It is clear, it is logically consistent, it progresses step by logical step towards its conclusion.  Much of it has turned out to be wrong in the last 50-odd years, but none of it is the weak beer offered up by today's progressives.

It's quite a good read, and is well worth your while.  His discussion of Marx is outstanding; not so much in explaining the nuts and bolts of the economic theory (although it's perfectly adequate), but in laying out just why it was that Marx was instantly so influential.

Can you possibly imagine a Galbraith hanging up on a Sean Hannity?  Galbraith wouldn't have hung up,  he would have eviscerated him.

What is convincing proof of the bias in the Academy is precisely the same as what convinces that the Media are biased.  It's not what's talked about, it's what cannot be talked about.  We have lost the great questions and replaced them with piffle.  What a sad, pathetic state that the Progressive Intellectuals have in the space of a generation gone from John Kenneth Galbraith to Jill McDevitt.

Why the schools can't teach the very smart, the autistic, and boys in general

This is incredibly cynical, and incredibly right:

      The third lesson I teach kids is indifference.  I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do.  How I do this is very subtle.  I do it by
demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up
and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with
each other for my favor.  It's heartwarming when they do that, it
impresses everyone, even me.  When I'm at my best I plan lessons very
carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm.  But when the
bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we've been
working on and proceed quickly to the next work station.  They must turn
on and off like a light switch.  Nothing important is ever finished in
my class, nor in any other class I know of.  Students never have a
complete experience except on the installment plan.

      Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth
finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?  Years of bells will
condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer
important work to do.  Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their
argument is inexorable.  Bells destroy the past and future, converting
every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living
mountain and river the same even though they are not.  Bells inoculate
each undertaking with indifference.

There's a lot more, all of it as breathlessly cynical and astonishingly on target as this.  And I cannot read this without thinking about the Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

... We had it, but not too much of it and only as much as an
individual wanted.  People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic
just fine anyway, there are some studies which show literacy at the time
of the American Revolution, at least on the Eastern seaboard, as close
to total.  Tom Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population
of 2,500,000, 20 percent of which was slave and another 50 percent
indentured.

      Were the colonists geniuses?  No, the truth is that reading,
writing and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as long as
the audience is eager and willing to learn.  The trick is to wait until
someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on him.  Millions of
people teach themselves these things; it really isn't very hard.  Pick
up a fifth grad textbook in math or rhetoric from 1850 and you'll see
that the texts were pitched then on what would today be college level.
The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen behind
which schools preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach them
the seven lessons I've just taught you.

How big an Educational Establishment would you need if you only needed 100 hours (or 1000, or even 10,000) to educate the kids to the point where they could learn whatever else they needed on their own.  We're told that 10,000 hours is how long it takes to gain a mastery of any subject - rock guitar, carpentry, programming computers.

10,000 hours is about five years, working full time.  A cynic might say that's about how much time it takes to turn off a whole bunch of students from education - the very smart, the autistic (a different form of the very smart), and boys in general.

And so the furious resistance to metrics that define what success and failure mean for the Educational Establishment.

It seems that I'm a jerk

I was back at the dog park with Wolfgang (as is my wont but his bigger wont) and that dog was there again.  With another dog.  Pit bulls.

Now I have to say that I've known some sweet pit pulls, and they were nice dogs.  But this was the first time I was in a dog fight scrum with two of them.  Wolfgang was not pleased, nor was I. 
And so I waded into the fight and kicked the pit bulls off of him.  It seems that this makes me a jerk.

Mrs. Pit Bull Owner told me (after pulling her dog off) that I shouldn't bring my dog into the park on the leash "because they don't go after dogs off leash".  My response: Oh, so it's my fault?  She didn't seem to like this.  It seems that I don't have manners, or something.  Oooh kaaay.

We'll see what happens next time they're there.  I'm torn between bringing a baseball bat in the Jeep and bringing it for self-defense, or just reaching in and pulling them off him with my hands.  They'd bite me, of course, but at that point I'd just call 911 and report a pit bull attack in progress at the dog park.  Here in well-heeled Roswell, I expect 4 cop cars to show up in 2 minutes.  Maybe I'm wrong, but it would take care of the problem one way or the other.

Either way, Wolfgang won't have vicious dogs coming after him.  Like I said, this probably makes me a jerk.

Hacked by Pinkie Pie

I'm not making this up.  There's a hacker (quite good skillz, actually) who goes by the handle Pinkie Pie.  He won Google's Pwnium Challenge last year, so don't be hatin' on the bronies.  He's back in the news, with another success:

Google was offering $110,000 for pwnership (remote code execution with minimal user interaction), and $150,000 for persistent pwnership (also known as "a malware infection that survives between logins or reboots", or an APT).

However, Google just announced that it would dip into the $π,000,000 dollar prize fund to pay Mr Pie a a $40,000 consolation prize.

Well done to Mr. Pie, and well done to Google for reaching out to the White Hat community and rewarding them with prizes to make their products more secure.  And for showing that My Little Pwnie is a security model that can work.

Happy International Poetry Day!

There was a man from the Blogosphere
who'd post on the Internet for years.
Lives in his Mom's attic
but grows his blog traffic.
His content is simply cavalier.

Yes, it helps to be running a fever when you write posts like this ...

Daddy's little Princess

Is dangerous.

Macguffins - it's what's for breakfast

The Czar of Muscovy describes how I like to remove macguffins from Global Warming stories.  He gives me rather more credit than I deserve - there's nothing at all altruistic involved here, and I guess I need to confess.

I save them and have them for breakfast.  I love 'em.

Sure, sure - they're fattening and bad for my cholesterol.  That's why I only post on Global Warming every so often - the Doc says that I really need to cut back.

It probably wouldn't be so bad, except I like them best if you melt a little butter and whisk in a touch of snark, then drizzle it over the warm macguffins.  Man, that's some tasty snark for breakfast!

And so while I love it that y'all like my Global Warming posts, I'm really doing it for me.

Hey you kids!

Get the F off of my lawn.

I mean it.

The Titanic's last violin discovered after a century

It's disputed that the Titanic's band played "Nearer My God To Thee" in the doomed ship's last moments.  What's undisputed is that band leader Wallace Hartley and his fellow musicians stayed at their post, playing music to ease the terror of the passengers.  Hartley and all the band perished to a man.

Now, his violin has been identified, having survived the ship wreck:

The instrument used by Wallace Hartley was thought by some to have been lost in the Atlantic in the 1912 disaster.

But in 2006 the son of an amateur musician found it in an attic, complete with a silver plate showing its provenance.

...

Their research found that Hartley appeared to have strapped around him his leather valise – luggage case – in which he placed his violin moments before the sinking.

One theory is the bag would have aided his buoyancy in the water. The case and Hartley’s body were recovered together.

I find this to be very poignant.  Sacrifice hallows what it touches.

(via)

Keep your enthusiasm in check

But happy equinox!

I wonder what the Democrats are up to

DiFi's "Assault" weapon ban has been pulled because too many Democrats in the Senate won't vote for it.  This isn't a surprise - the Democrats from Red and Purple states aren't stupid (at least when it comes to re-election).

And so the situation makes me unhappy, because I don't understand their motives.  They aren't dumb, and they can count votes.  They may be ideologues, but they can count votes.  I don't see the upside, and so I suspect that I'm missing something important.

It must be more than simply whipping up their base.  The last 3 months have done serious damage to the re-election chances of Democrats in Red and Purple states, even without a single vote on new legislation.  The panic buying of guns and ammunition is showing no sign of dieing down - people aren't going to forget this soon.  So if the Democrats are going to pull a stunt like this, what's their upside that offsets the downside?

I don't see it.

Like I said, I must be missing something important because I don't think that the Democrats are this bad at politics.  Certainly recent elections do not suggest that they are.

Buddha kitteh

Is inscrutable.

Britain overturns its constitution in the course of a single generation

Britain's unwritten constitution was the pride of the Realm.  "An Englishman's home is is castle" was only one of many sayings that showed that the flame of Liberty burned bright.  Sadly, the light gutters and is being extinguished before our very eyes:

We are in the middle of a liberal berserker, one of those demented moments when "progressives" run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend. Inspired by Lord Justice Leveson, they are prepared in Parliament tomorrow to sacrifice freedom of speech, freedom of the press and fair trials. They are prepared to allow every oppressive dictatorship on the planet to say: "We're only following the British example" when outsiders and their own wretched citizens protest.

The motion for Her Majesty's Government to muzzle the Press passed by a vote of 530-13.  Press organizations and even bloggers (!) now will have to register with a Brit.Gov functionary or risk ruinous financial penalties.  Readers in the American Republic might consider the parallels with proposed firearms registration proposals.

Not even a quarter century ago, The Iron Lady was Prime Minister and the idea that British subjects could be stripped of their traditional right to free speech, to a fair trial, and to self defence would have been considered the ravings of a lunatic.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.

- John Stuart Mill

On this side of the Pond we can thank the Mother Country one last time.  Here, too, principle is cast to the gutter as Realpolitik becomes the core driver of our miserable political class.  But things are not as far along here as in Europe which is falling apart:

After speaking recently in Belgium, I declared, in response to an audience member’s suggestion that the European Union’s purpose was the preservation of peace, that “Europe”—in the peculiar, Soviet-style usage of the word now so common—does not mean peace, but conflict, if not outright war. We are building in Europe not a United States, I said, but a Yugoslavia. We shall be lucky to escape violence when it breaks apart.

We can thank the Founding Fathers as well, who scrupled to write down our own Constitution.  The First and Second Amendments are under assault here, but yet stand.  For now.

The destruction of what was good and noble in Europe is fair complete, and shall not take the remainder of the decade.  That will put an end to the idea that a European Model is worthy of emulation on the shores of the New World, at least for a couple more generations.

To my readers and friends in the UK, I offer my condolences.  It's a shame what has happened to  your country.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place. 

 – Horace Smith, Ozymandias

Too bad about Britain.  It used to be great.

UPDATE 20 March 2013 12:05: Welcome visitors from Blazing Cat Fur!  Take a look around - lots of pondering the works of Statist Pricks here.

"Secure? Did we say secure?"

Oops:

IDG News Service - The majority of email and Web gateways, firewalls, remote access servers, UTM (united threat management) systems and other security appliances have serious vulnerabilities, according to a security researcher who analyzed products from multiple vendors.

Most security appliances are poorly maintained Linux systems with insecure Web applications installed on them, according to Ben Williams, a penetration tester at NCC Group, who presented his findings Thursday at the Black Hat Europe 2013 security conference in Amsterdam. His talk was entitled, "Ironic Exploitation of Security Products."

Williams investigated products from some of the leading security vendors, including Symantec, Sophos, Trend Micro, Cisco, Barracuda, McAfee and Citrix. Some were analyzed as part of penetration tests, some as part of product evaluations for customers, and others in his spare time.

Err, the security industry has some 'splainin' to do.  Don't think the Marketing departments are up to spinning this ...

Ugh

This bronchitis has been kicking my butt.  There's a ton of security stuff to blog, and I still owe the Czar of Muscovy a report on the Republican vs. Democrat who's more useless cage match (before the Myrmidons show up outside the Camp Borepatch Secure Perimeter).

But jeez.

And so I don't have anything, because I watched Ghostbusters (best movie of the 1980s?) and then Mars Attacks!  I'll stop slacking off soon, hopefully.

I mean, before the Myrmidons get here ....

Dog Park fail

Not pictured: lightening, thunder, hail, and the tornado siren. Wolfgang didn't even Mind retreating to the shelter of the Jeep.

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Worthy Cause

Linoge is running a fundraiser for Honored American Veterans Afield (HAVA):

If you all have been keeping up with the Honored American Veterans Afield fundraiser I am running, you will see that we have raised a touch over $1000 in the past three weeks, with about three more weeks to go. Honestly, that is not bad, at least not for fundraisers here.

However, there is a catch. As you can see, we have… well, a lot of stuff up for grabs if you donate to the organization – everything from a custom, one-of-a-knife Ka-Bar knife all the way down to some of my Russian Origami t-shirts I cannot manage to get rid of. I have not sat down and crunched the numbers of the total value of all those things added up, but suffice to say it would fall somewhere near, "A lot".

This strikes me as an excellent program, and well worth your attention.  So get Worthy Causing.

ClimateGate 3.0

The Czar of Muscovy emailed asking my take on the latest disclosure in the ongoing ClimateGate saga.  First, a recap for those who haven't been following along at home.

1. November 2009 saw the release of a large number of emails and some computer source code from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit by a person calling himself "FOIA".  The CRU was the organization most central to the UN IPCC reports on climate that drove the Kyoto Protocol in 1999.  The emails were very damaging to the reputation of the CRU scientists; most notorious was the email remarking that they had figured out how to "hide the decline" in recent temperatures.  This was ClimateGate 1.0.

2. The timing of the release scuppered any hopes for a follow on treaty to Kyoto.  December 2009 saw a global meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a new treaty, but the bombshells revealed in the ClimateGate release made the situation politically radioactive and encouraged already existing political opposition.  Copenhagen passed without any new agreements, and Kyoto expired.

3. Last year saw the release of a large encrypted archive of additional material.  Speculation was that this was FOIA providing himself political cover - if threatened with prosecution he could always threaten to release the password that would allow the encrypted archive to be unscrambled.  This was (rather absurdly) called ClimateGate 2.0.

4. FOIA has just emailed the password (along with a political manifesto) to a dozen high profile skeptical climate bloggers.  None of the bloggers has released the password, at FOIA's request.  Some are looking through the archive, although this is slow going (the uncompressed archive is 880 MB in size).  This is what people are calling ClimateGate 3.0.

My take is that it doesn't really matter.  We know who the corrupt scientists are already.  People who refuse to be convinced (for tribal and political reasons) that these scientists are not corrupt are unlikely to change their current position based on new information.  The public has already lost its support for major investments in climate change mitigation; while "hide the decline" was important here, the lousy economy is likely a bigger factor.

In short, the new release doesn't change the facts on the ground at all.  It may be that there is new damaging information yet to be released, but my take is that any impact will be around the margins.

As always, click on Clint in the upper right hand corner of this blog for my take on what the state of the science really is.

The pipes of Paddy's Day

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Cold calf's tongue

And Murphy's stout Mac McGee is open on Canton St in Roswell. It's awesome.




Happy Paddy's Day!

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That's some good mockery

Michael William Balfe - Cantata "Sempre pensoso e torbido"

Image via Wikipedia

On this St. Patrick's Day it is perhaps a bit mortifying to realize that Ireland's greatest 19th Century composer was known in Italy as the "English Rossini".  Unfortunate, that, if you're a Dublin boy.

He was perhaps the finest operatic composer of Victorian Britain (that should restore some national pride for the Emerald Isle today).  A child prodigy, he composed his first work (for performance) at age 7.    By the 1840s his reputation was established all across Europe.  Ultimately he wrote 38 operas and almost 250 other songs.

Sadly for Irish national pride, he (like so many other successful sons of Erie) retired wealthy to England.  No word as to whether he preferred Jameson's or Bushmill's, but the music is superb.

"Me and God's worked hard. Don't screw it up."

This is the best thing that you'll see all day long.  I promise.



Hat tip: American Digest.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

That sure was a fun film.  Fun with depth, but not too much depth, and not depth that challenges SWPL assumptions.

I liked it anyway, rather a lot.  Go watch it - it was nominated for a Golden Globe. The nice thing about well done films in the "adequately predictable" category is that it's the acting that makes them stand out.  It's particularly good here.

Also, it makes me want to go visit Jaipur.  That's not bad, either.

Reminder: one week for the Atlanta gunblogger meetup

Anyone in the Atlanta area who wants to get together for gunbloggy meetup social hilarity, next Sunday is the date.

Date: Sunday 24 March

Time: 2:00 - 5:00 PM

Location: Lucky's on Roswell Road in Roswell GA (they are dog friendly on the porch, and I'll bring Wolfgang).

I had Wolfgang there last weekend and it's a great place for people and dogs.  If you want to bring your dog, they're welcome.

Tab clearing

There's a new peer-reviewed paper out "confirming" Mann's "Hockey Stick" global warming paper.  It shows that things are hotter than they've been in 10,000 years.  The Press has been all over this, as you'd imagine.  You might have heard if it.  Well, Steve McIntyre heard about it, too.  McIntyre, you might remember, if the guy who took down Mann's junk "Hockey Stick" paper.  It seems that it's still true that it's a bad day if you're a climate scientist and Steve starts looking at your work.  Pwned.

Phoenix cop lies, gets innocent woman sent to death row for the death of her 4 year old toddler.  Overturned on appeal after 22 years because cop is a serial perjurer and that information was suppressed at her trial.  The State of Arizona is appealing to the Supreme Court.  Rope.

That National Vulnerability Database that was taken down because it was infested with malware?  Seems it's been infected for months.  Uf da.

GDP is closely correlated with energy consumption, so proposals to eliminate inexpensive power generation like coal screw the developing world.  Environmentalists hate the poor?  Well knock me over with a feather.

What will really pop the higher education bubble?  The bad outcomes are disproportionately effecting women:

Do these realities register? Not really, and explaining them to the future feminist “superstar” in question won’t help much. They’re certain that they are all special snowflakes, and that is the end of the conversation. Men suffer from irrational ambition as well but, as evidenced by our inferior rates of degree attainment these days, we aren’t being suckered into the academic ruse quite as readily as women are.

There are millions of broke dudes running around confident that they can all become big time producers, rappers, athletes, musicians or businessmen, even if there is little objective reason to believe so. The difference is that not quite as many of them are tying a college education (and the large amounts of debt that come with it) to these ambitions. Their female counterparts, who are all dying to be big time designers, fashionistas, writers, courtroom superstars (like the ones they see on Law and Order) and the like, are carrying much larger debt loads to service their ambition.

Higher education screws its students; women and minorities hurt the most.  I must be a sexist, oppressive tool of the Patriarchy.  Or something.

Was there a coup attempt in North Korea?

Watch global cyber attacks in real time.  Cool.  Not sure how accurate it is, but it's pretty dang cool.

It seems I'm a sexist, oppressive tool of the Patriarchy

Judgy Bitch muses on the study showing that men who like big boobs are sexist:

Benevolent sexism is when men treat women nicely. ANY special treatment, like opening a car door, or giving up your subway seat, when done for a woman, by a man, constitutes sexism. Differential treatment on the basis of gender is always, ipso facto, sexist.

Unless it’s women treating men differently on the basis of gender. That’s okay then. No opening doors, you sexist, condescending pig! But I will totally let you carry that heavy box for me.

...

I really don’t understand the rationale behind wanting to live in a world in which people are not pleasant to one another and do not notice one another’s physical attributes. What is to be gained by defining men’s tendency to be polite and cordial to women as OPPRESSION? There is so much to be lost, obviously, but what is gained? What do we gain when we refuse to see one another as fully human, including aspects of our gender and sexuality?

Is it a question of all the fat miserable bitches making sure no one is treated with kindness because they themselves are not? There is another solution to that, you know: lose some weight and try smiling.

I've been so shamed by the Sisterhood that I shall offer a penance, and promise to toe the line.  As much as I can ...

Need coffee

Err, but I think I'll wait for the pot to finish brewing ...

Cheese, Gromit!

Wolfgang and I share a cheese tray at a local dog-friendly restaurant.




The first really warm spring evening brings out the crowds (and the live music) for al fresco enjoyment.




Wolfgang is still getting used to crowds.

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Reagan sure was a crazy, senile old man

The "Star Wars" program only stayed alive because he wouldn't let it die: (1987)

The question is no longer whether Star Wars will work. Rather, in the face of repeated findings by independent experts that it won`t, the mystery is its continuing political and financial survival. What`s keeping it afloat? The buoyancy comes from President Reagan`s fervently expressed faith in Star Wars as the principal military innovation of his administration, along with a misguided national faith that for every serious problem--from hostile missiles to dread disease--science and technology can provide an answer. However, the onrushing reality is that both ingredients are rapidly fading. So are the fortunes of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars.

He pushed this program in the face of repeated opposition from the Democrats of the day: (1986)

U.S. Rep. Marty Russo (D., Ill.), speaking Sunday at a press conference organized by the Illinois Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, denounced increased spending by the Reagan administration on the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly called ``Star Wars.``

``It could cost from $1 trillion to $3 trillion to develop Star Wars, and they still don`t know if it will be outmoded in a number of years,`` Russo said on the University of Chicago campus. ``We should try to do something to stop the nuclear arms race instead of encouraging it. We should be working toward a comprehensive test ban treaty.``

What a senile old geezer!  What a waste of money!  Wait, what? (today)

In the wake of North Korean missile and nuclear tests and what seems like increasingly belligerent pronouncements from Pyongyang, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Friday that the US is beefing up its missile defense system.

That system, 30 anti-missile missiles based in Alaska (26) and California (4), is to be increased to 44 defense missiles in the coming years.

“We will strengthen homeland missile defense by deploying 14 additional ground-based interceptors, GBIs, at Fort Greely, Alaska,” Secretary Hagel said. “These additional GBIs will provide a nearly 50 percent increase in our missile defense capability.”

It is said that hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.

Dealing with RoboCop

The Black Hat Briefings has been the best computer security conference for a decade or so.  Twinned with Black Hat is the not-corporate DEFCON meetings, often described in days past as where the freaks come out.  In a good way.  Kind of.

Well DEFCON has come a long way, baby.  The Director of the NSA briefed it.  The Feds have turned the tables on the long standing "spot the Fed" game by going there and hosting a panel called "Spot the l4m3r".  And the quality of the talks have gone way, way up.  This one from last summer's conference (by a West Point professor) is particularly interesting - RoboCop is already here, with automated detection and enforcement.  So what are the implications?



It's sobering that perhaps the only thing standing between us an dystopia is the Police Unions.

BTW, I'm planning on going to Black Hat and DEFCON this summer.  Any of y'all who are in IT (or Law Enforcement) should seriously consider going, too.  We could even have a blog meet, perhaps at the annual DEFCON machine gun shoot in the desert.

UPDATE 15 March 2013 14:49: This is the kind of cool stuff you get at DEFCON now: Building an open source drone. "Weaponized Lego" FTW.  And exempt from the ITAR because it's open source.  Cool.

Ironic hack is ironic

The National Vulnerability Database is the world's most complete repository for information about security bugs.  The database contains information on tens of thousands of security issues across all operating systems and applications.  As you'd imagine, it's an enormously useful resource for folks in my line of work.

The NVD is currently off-line.  It's off-line because they got hacked:

The federal government's official catalog of software vulnerabilities was taken offline after administrators discovered two of its servers had been compromised. By malware. That exploited a software vulnerability.

The National Vulnerability Database is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and has been unavailable since late last week, according to an e-mail sent by NIST official Gail Porter published on Google+. At the time of this article on Thursday afternoon, the database remained down and there was no indication when service would be restored.

"On Friday March 8, a NIST firewall detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet," Porter wrote in the March 14 message. "NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline. Malware was discovered on two NIST Web servers and was then traced to a software vulnerability."

Actually this picture is a bit unfair.  This situation shows how pretty much anyone can get hacked these days.  If you're sloppy you'll get hacked faster, but even if you're good you are at risk to persistent attackers.  I don't know the folks at NIST and the NVD but I expect that this describes them: They understand the importance of security, they know the impact of a security breach to their organization's reputation, and they invest in security technology and staff.

And they still got hacked.  What's new in the last couple years is that people who have a clue are now getting owned.  That shouldn't give anyone the warm fuzzies.

Unicorns become possible again

Congratulations to blogfriend (and real life friend) Weer'd Beard, who (with Mrs. Weer'd) is expecting his first child.  This is the start of a long adventure, as you already know.  Enjoy the journey my friend, it's worth it.

As I wrote then looking back on the road that I've walked and that Weer'd is embarking upon:

Watching your children grow should make you think of how you grew. Watching your children grow should make you think of your parents, watching you grow. Watching your children grow should make you think of them, watching their children yet-to-be-born grow.

Time is a great river, never quite still in its flow. It's easy to get all caught up in the action in the eddy of the moment, and not see the flow towards the sea.

I hope that you have as much joy as I've had from this journey, Weer'd.

Bullies

In a week, Wolfgang will be 10 months old (and nearly 100 lbs!).  He's well into his "teenage" years, and for the last 3 weeks or so his play has been more aggressive.  That's been a problem, because I don't want to be "that guy with the big, mean dog".  And so I've been working with Wolfgang on timeouts when things get a little too spirited.

He's gotten quite good at coming when I call - even out of a scrum of dogs all wrestling with each other.  He's a good dog, and I can't really take much credit for training him, although it's good to know that I can control him with voice commands even when the fur flies.  It's been a noticeable improvement over the last few weeks.

And then at the park today there was some punk of a dog that decided he was going to pull out the "Alpha Dog" routine, even though Wolfie clearly outweighs him by 20 pounds.  And I saw the downside of my cunning plan.  Where ten seconds of full out response from Wolfgang, pinning the other dog down, would have reset that dog's attitude, Wolfie was shying away (and looking at me as he did it), even though I would give him encouragement.  I've trained my puppy to be bullied.

Dang it.

Because Wolfgang will attract this sort of thing.  He's almost always the biggest dog around, and so is the natural starting point for all the Alpha wannabes.

Has anyone else been in a situation like this?  I don't want to train him to fight on command, but I don't like seeing him knocked around because I've taught him some manners.

Gee, Doc - I'd like a second opinion.

The old ones are the best ones.

Well, I did not expect that

I actually like this doc. Can't remember the last time that happened.

I think it's because he combines data-driven explanation of his thought process/decision tree with a decent sense of humor. That sort of appeals to my engineering background.

My ticker seems to be in good shape. The Doc's view is that people die from either heart disease or cancer, so he's running tests oriented towards that.

And he more or less said I should suck it up with the cough. He said that some Docs prescribe things to get their patients to shut up. He offered to write me a prescription but said I'd likely be better in a week or so with it or without it. Kind of refreshing, that honesty.

All in all, a lot less frustrating doctor visit than usual.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I hate going to the Doctor

But with (probably) bronchitis, that's the plan for this AM. Bah.

A word to the wise

St. Patrick's Day is coming.  Party responsibly.

Britain. It used to be great.

First went their right to possess weapons to defend themselves.  Now goes their right to speak their minds:

The three main parties are all deciding how they will kill off the last vestiges of freedom of the press in Britain.

Ed Miliband was hoping to sit down with David Cameron and Nick Clegg later on Tuesday or Wednesday to agree a historic new deal which would see newspapers regulated like the BBC.

But fear not, Citizen Subject, all shall be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.  And if any of the newspapers dare to try to squirm out of the regulations, another quote from the same old, old play would apply:

... in this country it is found good, from time to time, to kill one Admiral to encourage the others.

An unwritten constitution is only as good as the Government's intentions.  Not that a written constitution is often much better.  But as they say, the dark night of fascism is always falling on America but somehow always landing in Europe.

In the New World, we have a more muscular view of our rights, and while the fascists are working 'round the clock to extinguish them they at least now have to explain how what's plainly written down and ratified isn't what it plainly says.  This goes for both the first and second amendments.  This (make sure you listen to the part starting at around 9:30.



For hundreds of years we've been different than the Mother Country.  Too bad about Britain.  It used to be great.

Let a Thousand Gun Control Flowers bloom

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

- Napoleon

Via Sebastian, we see just what the "Gun Control Loophole" really means to the Senate:

• Enacts defacto universal gun registration, because of record keeping requirements.
• All lost and stolen guns must be reported to the federal and local government. This means everyone will have to fill out the theft/loss form, and not just FFLs. You only have 24 hours to comply. If you lose a gun on a hunting trip deep in the woods, and can’t get back home to fill out the form in 24 hours, you’re a felon and will spend 5 years in federal prison.
• Want to lend a gun to a friend to go hunting? It’s a 5 year in prison felony.

There's more, so very much more.  The mask had to come off, in the form of actual text that the Senate votes on, although Chuck Schumer seems to have hid this from as many people as possible for as long as possible.

Add in the Congresswoman who said that banning assault weapons was only the prelude to banning handguns.  Add in the California police chief who said that they'll be able to disarm Americans in a generation.  Add in the Washington law that would allow the police to come into your house without a warrant or probable cause to check on your guns.  Add in the Governor of New York's comment that confiscation is an option.  Add in a sitting United States Senator's remarks that confiscation might be required.

Now add John Boehner's statement that the House will consider any plan that the Senate passes.

Napoleon looks down, and smiles.

In 1949, Mao drove the Kuomintang from the Chinese mainland, taking nominal control of the Middle Kingdom.  But as in any rapid takeover, the unanswered question was who was a true believing communist and who was a running dog Imperialist?  Mao decided to smoke them out.

In 1956 Mao introduced a program for the People to offer criticism to the Party, with the stated aim of improving the People's Revolution.  "Let a thousand flowers bloom" was the slogan, and criticism was offered liberally.  Astonishingly, the next year a draconian crackdown of the criticizers sent most to their deaths or to prison.  As Mao said, he had enticed the snakes out of their caves.

And so to the election of 2014.  Elections are choices.  The Left believes in gun control as a fundamental principle; majorities of both parties reject this.  We are not often given the chance for an actual bi-partisan choice.  John Boehner is enticing the snakes out of their caves.

Cream - Stormy Monday

But tuesday's just as bad.  And Wednesday's even worse.



I don't know that Eric Clapton is the greatest guitarist of all time, but I don't know that he's not.

Wait, Krispy Kreme sells Cheeseburgers?

I did not know that.  Has bacon!

Excellent summary of the Global Warming debate

Goober has a long, detailed introduction to the debate that is a great starting point for your friends who have open minds on the subject.  Here's his introduction:

We humans are a funny lot.  We like to think that we’ve evolved beyond the animals around us – and in large part, we have.  However, it never ceases to amuse me how we can all be so quick to fall back into tribalist mindsets and start flinging poo at each other over things in which we disagree.  It is even funnier when you consider that half the time, we are arguing past each other, and aren't even bothering to understand what the guy we're arguing with is actually trying to say.. 

One of the more polarized poo-flinging contests of late has been the debate over global warming.  This one, too, causes me to laugh quite often.  These are the 5 reasons that we will never be able to have a constructive discussion about global warming.

I actually think that this post is free of the tribal bias that he posits (correctly) as the major impediment to conversation.  Like I said, I think that you can give this to any of your friends who are open minded and they will read it through.

I'd suggest that two more issues need to be raised, both of which are tribal.

#6.  Much of the science is astonishing hackery.  "Hide the decline" is only the tip of the ice berg - the entire "Hockey Stick" graph set the (ahem) gold standard for the rewards to be had by scientists willing to flog junk.  Indeed, the impetus of the skeptic push back grew entirely from this sense of "that can't be right - good Lord, that isn't right" that to this day permeates the scientific establishment.  You can argue whether all the grant funding for "Global Warming Research" is driving this or not, but the plain fact of the matter is that much of the "consensus" view has been shown to be not just junk, but trivially shown to be junk.

#7.  It's not science, it's religion.  Most people are not scientists, but are happy to get the blessing of scientists that their policy preferences are "scientific".  People who think that we should use less fossil fuels will simply not want to listen to what the state of the actual science is.  They're glad to listen when it reinforces their worldview, but will have no interest when it challenges that view.  And here is Goober's point drawn most sharply.

When the subject of gun control comes up my response has lately been that I'm not opposed to gun control, just to stupid and useless gun control.  That either ends the topic or leads to an actual discussion, as I challenge people to explain why a, say, Assault Weapons Ban isn't stupid and useless.  Socratic Method FTW.

Maybe I need to come up with something similar for global warming, along the line of not discussing science with people who don't have the slightest idea what the science actually says but who are thoroughly convinced that it means that their liberal prejudices are all dressed up in white lab coats.

But you know how nasty I am.  Nasty enough to point out what's going on during the WARMEST YEAR EVER!!!!

A major winter snowstorm is snarling flights and trains across Europe, creating chaos for thousands of travelers today (March 12).

Frankfurt, Europe's third-busiest hub, halted all flights around noon local time (around 7 a.m. ET) after heavy snow continued overnight from Monday into today, according to German news broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Paris is canceling flights, too, and a business colleague is stuck at the company's Paris office.  Global Warming True Believers™ will sniff about the difference between weather and climate, and then run off like Chicken Little the next hot summer's day.  Like I said, liberal prejudices dressed up in white lab coats.

Stonehenge - a pre-historic Burning Man?

Seems so: Scientists® say so!

"Stonehenge was a monument that brought ancient Britain together," the leader of a new boffinry team, Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, said.

"What we've found is that people came with their animals to feast at Stonehenge from all corners of Britain - as far afield as Scotland."

Pearson and his team from the universities of Manchester, Sheffield, York, Durham, Bournemouth and Southampton were given permission to excavate and study for the first time more than 50,000 cremated bone fragments from 63 people buried at Stonehenge.
The boffins now believe, after a decade of research, that the site was a burial ground first, long before the first massive sandstone block was lugged into place. It looks like Stonehenge started out as a burial ground for the ancient elite, families who were interred there around 3,000 BC, 500 years before the construction of the monument.

Just before the stones of the monument went up, around 2,500 BC, the site was home to vast communal feasts, analysis of cattle teeth from 80,000 animal bones shows. Up to a tenth of the entire British population headed to the site to celebrate the winter and summer solstices but also to build the monument itself.

What, you're not sure about this?  What are you, one of those Deniers?

The unshifted paradigm

Why does education stink?  Why does it do such a terrible - and such an increasingly terrible - job of educating children?  What do you expect of an organizational model developed in the 19th Century, based on the factory system?



At this point I think that it's fair to say that most teachers like teaching (at least, in theory) and that most teachers dislike the educational institution (the bureaucracy).  Competition can help, but only at the margins (because the institutions will suppress it as much as they can - after all, the bureaucracy enjoys its power as much as all bureaucracies do, and will seek to preserve itself).

So what do we do?  How do we change to a better model?  Immodestly, I have a suggestion: use the military model.

The sound that you just heard is the collective LOLwhut??? from the world's education colleges.  Stick with me.

The military is very highly trusted, at least in America because of its competence.  This is in great contrast to the militaries of other countries - cold war wargames of Soviet vs. NATO struggled to accurately map the rigidity of the Warsaw Pact command structures where (largely for reasons of political reliability) quite high ranking officers had very little tactical decision making authority.  For example, a Soviet Colonel might not have any more authority for troop movement than a US Second Lieutenant (or even a senior NCO).

Sounds like the current educational establishment where the teachers are forced to teach to the test, right?

In contrast, the US military focuses on the objective.  Units are given the goal and very often left to their own planning on how best to accomplish the objective.  Since they know the lay of the immediate land and the situation on the ground, this has produced amazing results.

Your objective is to capture that hill

So what's the objective of a 21st Century educational system?  What do we expect kids to know when they're done?  This is the problem - it's not defined.

We used to know the goal - you were expected to know reading, writing, math, American (and some World) history, basic science, and a sprinkling of art (music and theatrical, mostly).  This was the "Canon" of Western Civilization, from Shakespeare to Darwin.

What's the "Canon" for the 21st Century?  Alas, there is none, and will be none.  There are far too many vested interests, political shapers, lobbying groups, and the various ticks and parasites attached to the political and educational establishment to ever define such.  Any discussion of forming such a Canon would be undermined by the educational bureaucracy - can't have the lower level teachers showing up the managers, can we?

Of course, every company that is still in business has long left behind the old Industrial Revolution organizational structure.  The ones that didn't are no longer in business.  You see, survival means pleasing the customer when the customer can choose to buy someone else's product, or none at all.  Public education is shielded from this sudden death.

Of course, education is likely not about education.  As for education policy wonks, Galbraith described their adequate predictability: Among Progressives, the stated need for new ideas is often a replacement for new ideas.

Paradigm, unshifted.  Maybe inshiftable.

Tracking the hackers

Interesting talk by Mikko Hypponen from antivirus company F-Secure.



If the Fed.Gov is worried about people downloading designs for 3D printed ammunition magazines and for CNC AR lowers, expect to see virus infected designs posted.

Why I like Firefox

It got pwned last week at the Pwn2Own contest, and there's already a fix out for the problem:

That was quick!

Mozilla and Google have already pushed out patches to stop the exploits that got past their browsers at this year's PWN2OWN competition!

Firefox goes to version 19.0.2, fixing what Mozilla describes as a Use-after-free in HTML Editor:

→ Mac and Linux users of Firefox may be wondering where 19.0.1 went, as they won't have seen such a version. It was a Windows-only update to deal with some Windows-specific graphics card troubles. There were no security fixes in it.

Chrome also has fixes for the less serious but equally brand new issues identified last week.  Both Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Apple (Safari) need to get the lead out.

The three axis problem

Using "left" and "right" to describe politics is a fool's errand, not least of which is that the axis is subject to manipulation of a not-very-subtle sort (Communist USSR = "left" and Nazi German = "right" in which galaxy?).

Arnold Kling proposes that we use three separate sets of axes, one for Progressives, one for Conservatives, and one for libertarians.  The advantage is that it is prescriptive about how each will process information, so you can (theoretically) better communicate with someone in another tribe.

For Progressives, the axis is Oppressed-Oppressor.

For Conservatives, the axis is Civilization-Barbarism.

For libertarians, the axis is freedom-coercion.

Kling explains the social revolution of the 1960s using this model:

Along the civilization-barbarism axis, they view it as a slide from civilization toward barbarism.


Of course, progressives see it entirely differently. Along the oppressor-oppressed axis, they view the cultural changes as favorable, because women were liberated (a conservative would put scare quotes around “liberated”).

Along the libertarian’s coercion-freedom axis, the picture is mixed. On net, did the cultural changes lead to more or less government coercion? It is hard to say. For example, in the area of Civil Rights, I would argue that getting rid of Jim Crow laws reduced government coercion. (Note that in the early 1960s, prominent libertarians tended to take the states’ rights position, which strikes me as misguided.) However, there is a sense in which today government is overly intrusive on matters of race. (You may be happy with that if your concern is with the oppressor-oppressed axis, and you believe that government is helping the oppressed.) I would prefer that government model treating people as individuals by refusing to classify people by race (You may be very unhappy with my suggestion if you think that the oppressor-oppressed model is significant).

This gives a suggestion on how to frame arguments.  For example, a libertarian arguing against gun control with a Progressive might frame the discussion in terms of how past gun control laws were disproportionately targeted against oppressed minorities (c.f. Jim Crow laws) and that the expected impact of proposed legislation will disproportionately impact racial minorities and women.

He also has a survey you can take to find out which of the three axes you primarily work on.  Interesting stuff.

Of course, it may be that none of this matters because everything is about tribes.

The death of the middle class

I can't argue with a single word of this.

I'd think that there would be a winning political message in this, but the Republican party is hopelessly statist and would rather feed the Big Government beast (at the expense of the middle class) and pay off their big business friends.  The Democrats only care about the underclass and big business anyway (and actively despise the middle class who show all too much initiative for the Dems liking).

Bottom line, the country is screwed.

It brings to mind the hollowing out of the Roman Republic, when the backbone of society - the small freeholders who made up the core of the army - all fell into poverty and went on the dole.  After that, it was just a matter of which Imperial group came out on top.  Sulla or Marius, Caesar or Pompey, it didn't matter to the old Roman middle class.

Democrat or Republican party, it won't matter here.  This is related:

To be perfectly honest, the fundamental problem with free trade is not that the federal government allowed foreign companies to sell their goods in the US, but that the federal government imposed a massive regulatory regime on domestic producers, as well as costly taxes, and generally onerous labor laws.  The US government basically hamstrung domestic businesses, than invited their less-restricted foreign competitors to compete in the US market.  The results are not surprising.

Americans should be livid at the federal government for destroying economic prospects and transferring their wealth to elitist corporate overlords.  The fact of the matter is that major corporations have benefitted from this massive betrayal of the American people as it has allowed them to gut American wages by hiring poor people in third-world countries to the jobs that American workers are essentially legally prevented from doing (or at least competing on price).  As a consequence, the unemployment rate is extremely high, wages are low, and now the benefits of free trade have disappeared as prices of food and energy continue to rise.  But at least the corporate elites have enjoyed billions in profits as well as multimillion dollar bonus checks.  This particularly insidious form of crony capitalism has ensured that future generations of Americans will seeing their standards of living erode while the corporate elites who betrayed and brainwashed, with help from elected politicians and corrupt bureaucrats, live high on the hog.

There's not an inch of difference between the two parties on this.  Clinton signed NAFTA, along with a bunch of new regulations.  Bush increased the number of countries in Free Trade Agreements from 3 to 16, and added a ton of new regulations (hello, Sarbanes-Oxley, which destroyed the high tech startup IPO market).  Obama has, well you see what's going on.

The only thing I'd add to Simon Grey's excellent analysis is that both parties conspire to keep the borders open, and that illegal labor undermines legal labor just like when the currency is debased.  When the Romans cut the amount of silver in their denarius, people stopped taking the old, pure silver denarii (because nobody could tell if they were good or not).  Bad money drives out good, and illegal labor drives out legal in the presence of minimum wage laws.

Bah.  Must be Monday.

ZOMG! Sarah Palin is so dumb!

Behold ye, the Philosopher Kings of the Left.

That's quite a scientific experiment

The first 5 minutes of this talk are only the speaker explaining how he used to be very, very wrong.  He's since changed his mind, reversing entirely his views on how to slow climate change, based not on computer models but on experiments repeated on millions of acres of former desert, all returned to grassland.  His message: we can reduce the level of atmospheric carbon, restore grasslands formerly lost to the desert, and feed millions of poor people.

We just need to think differently.  We need to think scientifically.



This is very, very inspiring in a results matter sort of way.  I'm happy to consider myself to be this sort of environmentalist.

Unintended consequences

Wow.

And double wow.

Joseph Haydn - Symphony No. 101 in D major, "The Clock" (finale)

You did remember to turn your clocks forward an hour, didn't you?  After all, tempus fugit, especially when Congress gets all up in your horological business.  At lease we have Haydn to help wake us up after a missing hour's sleep.

The second movement has a "ticking" rhythm  that gives this symphony its name.  I find it a little monotonous (and I dare say that on a missin hour's sleep I'd find it annoying), and so we'll have the finale here which is a delight.

As you were. Smoke 'em if you got ' em

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The most cost-effective fighter of World War II

Compare and contrast:

The goal of conflict is to destroy the enemy.  This calculates the total cost of each type of fighter and divides that cost by the number of enemy planes destroyed.  The numbers were really surprising.

Some caveats:

1. This doesn't take into account ground attack and shipping targets which were a major target of both the P-38 and P-47 fighter-bombers.

2. The Hellcat was purely a Pacific Theater fighter, and introduced after the loss of the most experienced Japanese pilots at Midway and other 1942 battles.  The lopsided kill-to-loss ratio really stands out, but is explained by that.  Compared to the others, it's shockingly inexpensive - a third the cost of a P-38.

3. The Mustang was pitted against what may have been the most formidable opponent, the Luftwaffe before pilot attrition in the Spring of 1944 degraded it.  The fact that it performed so well against that foe makes it (by the numbers) make this the most cost-effective fighter of the US forces.

I expect that all y'all will correct me in the the comments ...

Sources:

WW2Aircraft.net, Warbirds and Airshows, Bouwman.com, Wikipedia pages for P-38/P-47/F6F/P-51

Sawyer Brown - The Walk

I'm going to #2 Son's JROTC Ball tonight.  I missed it last year because I was at FOB Borepatch in Austin, now I'll be able to experience how he's mostly grown up.

In a way that's a depressing thought.  Of course you don't want your kids to stay kids forever.  Of course there's a satisfaction in seeing them grow to honorable manhood.  But it reminds me that this road we all walk ultimately has an end.  The meditation, of course, is on the journey, not the destination.

Of course, there's a Country Song about that.

Sawyer Brown is a band that walks that same road of growth.  Starting out as a really unremarkable country pop group, they matured into balladeers with some depth.  That journey I see so clearly today is one of those themes.

Dang it.

The Walk (Songwriter: Mac McAnnaly)

Down our long dusty driveway
I didn't want to go
But I set out with tears in my eyes wondering
Daddy took me by the hand
Looked out at the school bus and his little man and said
"Don't worry boy it will be all right"

Cause I took this walk you're walking now
Boy, I've been in your shoes
You can't hold back the hands of time
It's just something you've got to do
So dry your eyes I understand just what you're going through
Cause I took this same walk with my old man
Boy, I've been in your shoes

Down our long dusty driveway
I set my mind to go
I was eighteen and wild and free and wondering
Daddy took me by the hand
Looked at the world and at his grown man and said,
"Don't worry boy it will be all right"

Cause I took this walk you're walking now
Boy, I've been in your shoes
You can't hold back the hands of time
It's just something you've got to do
So dry your eyes I understand just what you're going through
Cause I took this same walk with my old man
Boy, I've been in your shoes

Down our long dusty driveway
This time we both would go
He had grown old and gray
And his mind was wandering
Daddy took me by the hand
Said, "I know where we're going and I understand
Don't worry boy it will be all right"

This walk will be interesting tonight at the JROTC Ball.

Science should show its work

This tells you where it got the data.

If you're as suspicious of the data as I am - that the data do not account for Urban Heat Island, that adjustments are almost always in the positive direction, etc - then it's possible that the temperature has actually declined in the last 16 years.

Hitler has a blog?

Not getting much traffic, I see.  Funny stuff.

Kat tip: KurtP.

[Sigh] Time to patch Java

Again:

Oracle today pushed out the third update in less than a month to fix critical vulnerabilities in its Java software. This patch plugs a dangerous security hole in Java that attackers have been exploiting to break into systems.

Java 7 Update 17 and Java 6 Update 43 address a critical vulnerability (CVE-2013-1493) in Java that security experts warned last week was being used in targeted attacks against high-profile targets.

It's being exploited in the wild, for pwnage and lulz.  Again.

“The company intended to include a fix for CVE-2013-1493 in the April 16, 2013 Critical Patch Update for Java SE (note that Oracle recently announced its intent to have an additional Java SE security release on this date in addition to those previously scheduled in June and October of 2013),” wrote Oracle’s Eric Maurice.  “However, in light of the reports of active exploitation of CVE-2013-1493, and in order to help maintain the security posture of all Java SE users, Oracle decided to release a fix for this vulnerability and another closely related bug as soon as possible through this Security Alert.”

You can get the patch at the link immediately above, or you can do like me and simply disable Java.  In Firefox you go to the pulldown Firefox menu (the orange box in the upper left corner of the browser window) and select "Add-ons".  You'll see Java.  If the box says "Enable", it means that it's turned off.

You find instructions on turning it off in other browsers here.

Dustin Hoffman could answer that question

The Nelson, Georgia proposal that requires all citizens to buy a gun is a serious proposal

It should be treated as such.  A number of people have posted opinions that classify this proposal as being idiotic or tyrannical.  It is neither, as careful thought will show.

Firstly, Nelson's problem is real: they have one full-time policeman, which means that there is no officer on duty better than 70% of the time.  I have no idea how serious a problem this is; I don't know the crime rate in Nelson, and the population is so small that it's likely to measure easily - the variance each year could very well be quite large, because crime rates are measured in events per 100,000 population.  Nelson is home to around 1,200 souls.

Let us assume that the Nelson city council has a working understanding of the crime situation there.  They have thwo options to address it.

1. Raise taxes and hire more police.  This means going from one officer to a force of 4 (you need more than 3 to cover 24x7x365 because weekends, vacation, and sick days are a fact of life).  This is, as you have noticed, a quadrupling of the force.

2. Accept lower levels of service.  Don't hire them, and rely on county sheriffs or other towns for as much help as they can provide.  This is in fact what they are currently doing, and the town council notes that response times are quite large when the town police officer is not on duty.  They note that the town residents are responsible for their own safety and protection during that time.

There's no magic here.  What the proposed ordinance does is put the townspeople on notice that they are, and have traditionally been considered police;  Sir Robert Peel's principles of policing say this explicitly:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Traditionally in this land we call people living under this principle "the militia".

Once again, there's no magic at work here.  The Nelson town council have chosen option #2, because option #1 is prohibitively expensive and there is no option #3.  They are reminding the citizens what the situation is and what responsibilities the citizens face - willing or not.  If the citizens of Nelson think that this is the wrong decision, they are entirely free to vote the town council out of office at the next election.

But the proposal is not idiotic, and in fact is a very American solution with a very, very long history.  In colonial times all able bodied male citizens were required to be enrolled in the militia.  If you saw that as an infringement on your rights, you could always pull up stakes and move.  Those that remained (i.e. most of them) were required to purchase a gun and ammunition suitable to militia service.  If someone was too poor to buy one, the town collectively purchased one for him.

This is the tradition that informs Nelson's proposed ordinance.  It is a 250 year tradition, and a quite practical solution to the problem of the common defense.  Again, any citizen of Nelson who dislikes this is free to vote the town council out of office, or to pull up stakes and move.

And so it's simply wrong to say that this is dumb, or an unreasonable infringement of our Constitutional rights.  The men who wrote the Constitution would have seen this as astonishingly normal and unremarkable.

Now it's not clear that this law will pass, and if it does it's not clear whether it would be enforced.  Kennesaw. Georgia has had a similar law on the books for decades, and it's never been enforced even once.  It doesn't look like it will be.

But the law serves notice to both citizens and criminals as to what both can expect.  There's a virtue in clarity, and this provides it in bushel basket loads.  And the message does in fact get absorbed: when Kennesaw's law went into effect, crime fell 27% the following year.

This discussion under way in Nelson deserves our respect.  The proposal may be undesirable for any number of reasons, but it deserves a hearing on the merits.  Those of use can use this as a useful discussion with leftists who are willing to have an open mind.

Alvin Lee - The Bluest Blues

Quote of the century

Relax, citizen.  Those were Bad Men.  If they didn't deserve to die, they wouldn't have died.

Srlsy.

Boot note: well done Twitter, using a https connection.  Now just tell us that you're not logging connections from people like, well, me.  Or giving that data to the gubmint.

An experimental weapon with experimental ammunition

This is one of the great scenes in Hollywood history.



Man, that's one fine rifle.  From a time when they made fine movies.

George Patton, in his own words

Safe for work words, no doubt because the Army made him watch his mouth.



It's very interesting to hear where the audience applauds.  I wonder how different audiences today would respond.

Actually, I don't.