A reading of the text of S.649

The HuffPo has the PDF.

It's 49 pages and surprisingly hard to parse.  I actually don't think that this is to flummox people, but rather because there is a huge amount of cross-referencing with existing US Code, and amendments of older statutes.  For example, one of the "findings" seems to amend the HIPAA health privacy act to say that releasing patient health data to the NCIS background check system is not a violation.  My understanding of the law proposed here is pretty tenuous, and you should absolutely take this with an enormous grain of salt.

Surprise #1: I don't see anything about doctors being able to send your name to the NCIS as "armed and dangerous" as it were.  It's possible that I missed this because it's buried in 49 pages of opaque text, but I just plain didn't see it in the text.  Commenters who read the text, please keep me honest.

Non-Surprise #1: There's a lot of confusion over who is exempt from background checks.  For example, the folks at The Corner shoot and miss:

The Toomey-Manchin compromise language is finally public. Here’s the relevant part:

It shall be unlawful for any person other than a licensed dealer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed importer to complete the transfer of a firearm to any other person who is not licensed under this chapter, if such transfer occurs-
“(A) at a gun show or event, on the curtilage thereof; or
“(B) pursuant to an advertisement, posting, display or other listing on the Internet or in a publication by the transferor of his intent to transfer, or the transferee of his intent to acquire, the firearm.

Basically, there would need to be a background check for any sale that began with any type of published advertisement. If you heard through the grapevine that someone wanted a gun, you could sell it to him without a background check; if you saw his ad in a newspaper, you couldn’t.

I think that this is plainly wrong;  There's considerable effort in the text devoted to exempting family members - there's listing after listing of definitions, including First Cousins (and spouses), step-parents and step-children, siblings, uncles and aunts, etc.  The idea that you'd find out that your Uncle was selling his Winchester by reading the local fish wrap but it's OK because he's your Uncle just doesn't make sense. This section has a lot of confusion in the statute as written.

There's $400M allocated to provide grants to the States to improve their reporting systems.  This seems pretty harmless.  There's a stupid Blue Ribbon Commission established to study mass shootings.  No doubt many fine lunches and dinners will be enjoyed before the report is presented to Congress and the President.

There's more here (for example, transporting across state lines), but I'll need to reread it to figure things out.

Repost: Government Data Mining FAIL

I do this infrequently, but this topic is so apropos to the previous post that I thought it worth reposting in its entirety.  I'd point out the unbelievable prescience shown in the dawn of this blog (only 100 days old at the time - still had that New Blog smell!), but it's really kind of obvious, isn't it?

--------------------------------------------------------------

Anti-terrorist data mining doesn't work

One of the biggest problems in Internet Security is getting the "False Positive" rate down to a manageable level. A False Positive is an event where your security device reports an attack, where there's no actual attack happening. It's the Boy Who Cried Wolf problem, and if it's too high, people turn the security off.

Apple had a hilarious ad that spoofed Vista's UAC security a while back. The security is so good that the whole system is unusable:



Surprise! Seems that identifying terrorists by mining a bunch of databases isn't any better:

A report scheduled to be released on Tuesday by the National Research Council, which has been years in the making, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism 'is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.' Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects. The whopping 352-page report, called 'Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,' amounts to [be] at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.

The problem is not so much one of technology, as it is of cost. Suppose you could create system where the data mining results gave you only one chance in a million at false positive. In other words, for every person identified as a potential terrorist, you were 99.9999% likely to be correct. This is almost certainly 3 or 4 orders of magnitude overly optimistic (the actual chances are likely no better than 1 in a thousand, and may well be much less), but let's ignore that.

There are roughly 700 Million air passengers in the US each year. One chance in a million means the system would report 700 likely terrorists (remember, this thought experiment assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate). The question, now, is what do you do with these 700 people?

Right now, we don't do anything, other than not let them fly. If they're Senator Kennedy, they make a fuss at budget time, and someone takes them off the list; otherwise, we don't do anything. So all this fuss, and nothing really happens? How come?

Cost. If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.

There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billion bucks. So they turn the system off.

And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really. 5 year olds, too.

So the Fed.Gov sweeps it under the rug, thanks everyone involved for all their hard work, and pushes the "off" button.

As expected, the Slashdot comments are all over this:

I'd take their "no fly" list and identify every single person on it who was a legitimate threat and either have them under 24 hour surveillance or arrested.
The mere concept of a list of names of people who are too "dangerous" to let fly ... but not dangerous enough to track ... that just [censored - ed] stupid.

At least everyone's looking busy. The analogies to gun control pretty much write themselves.

The Senator Kennedy rationale to oppose the new Background Check law

The law is said* to include a provision allowing doctors to add the names of people they think are dangerously mentally ill directly to the list of Prohibited Persons used by the NCIS.  A brief consideration of Senator Ted Kennedy will show this to be a bad idea.

Consider: it seems to be exceptionally difficult to identify the people who become murderously insane, even when under a Psychiatrist's care.  Any decision about who is too dangerous or not dangerous enough will be made not based on a rigorously scientific basis, but on "hunches" or "feelings" or other qualitative analysis.  In short, it will miss a ton of people who should go onto the list (False Negative result) and will misdiagnose as dangerously insane a ton of people who really aren't (False Positive result).

For those late to the security geekery party, this is a layman's explanation of False Positive results:



Consider: Senator Ted Kennedy once found himself on the TSA no-fly list. Hilarity ensued.  It seems that the quality of the Fed.Gov "security" databases leave a lot to be desired.

Consider:

Todd Brown is the proud dad of an adorable little girl. A little girl that he found out, is on the TSA's list of potential terrorists.

It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.

Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.

Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.

This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.

An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:

They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.

Bingo.

So riddle me this, Mr. Gun Control Man: Suppose Sumd00d goes to Shrink #1 who thinks he's dangerously insane and wants to put him on the list.  And then Sumd00d goes to Shrink #2 for a second opinion (that will be allowed under your nifty Obamacare thingie, right?) who decides that he isn't.  Which Doc had the False Positive diagnosis?  How does that play out under your new Gun Control proposal? If he's a U.S. Senator, it will get fixed, for the rest of us, what happens?

I keep saying it: adding crummy data to databases makes the databases crummier.  But well done shifting the cost of fixing the false positives from the Government to the innocent citizen.  Here's an idea: make Doctors who report false positive results to this database subject to medical malpractice lawsuits.  That'll drive down the cost of health care, right?

* So far I've been too busy/lazy to read the text of the legislation.

Who wants to meet for dinner Monday, 15 April near Herndon Virginia?

I have a trip to Herndon, and fly in Monday afternoon.  Anyone in the area up to meet for dinner?

So can you really hijack a plane using your Android smartphone?

A bunch of you are pinging me on the presentation at the Amsterdam Hack In The Box conference on Airplane hacking:

An extremely well attended talk by Hugo Teso, a security consultant at n.runs AG in Germany, about the completely realistic scenario of plane hijacking via a simple Android app has galvanized the crowd attending the Hack In The Box Conference in Amsterdam today.

...Here are some of the functions Teso showed to the HITBSecConf Amsterdam audience:

• Please go here: A way of interacting with the plane where the user can dynamically tap locations on the map and change the plane's course.
• Define area: Set detailed filters related to the airplane, for example activate something when a plane is in the area of X kilometers or when it starts flying on a predefined altitude.
• Visit ground: Crash the airplane.
• Kiss off: Remove itself from the system.
• Be punckish: A theatric way of alerting the pilots that something is seriously wrong - lights start flashing and alarms start buzzing.

Color me skeptical.  I say that because I've personally dealt with n.runs before.  They're an interesting bunch, combining serious security/hacking skill with a flamboyant (perhaps over the top) showmanship streak.  This leads to very enjoyable presentations with lots of LULZ from the audience, but you have to read the fine print.

For example, they will talk about all the crazy stupid stuff they found in the design - they have several slides on this in the presentation (slides 10 and 12, for example).  Everyone guffaws.  What they don't say, however, is whether this can actually be exploited.

And this is the key to a lot of my skepticism - in my experience, n.runs hasn't been able to exploit most of the vulnerabilities they talk about.  That said, some of what they find is exploitable, and is very clever indeed.

So what does all this mean?  I'm not at all sure that I believe their most spectacular claims (cf. "Crash the airplane" above).  As a matter of fact, I don't believe it.  Nor do I believe that they can change the airplane's course.  I do believe that they can spoof messages sent to the pilot's message console (cf. "Be punkish" above).

Security researchers pay a lot of attention to reputation.  Some confuse reputation with notoriety in the Press.  n.runs falls into that second category.  I recommend a very large grain of salt for these claims, based on my experience with them in the past.  Your mileage man vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.

It's either Thursday or not Thursday

Or maybe both.

I guess that "both" would be in the Schrödinger Dept. of Physics.  Seen on Facebook, along with this:

Wonder if Facebook is going to add a cool new feature "upload picture without cutting off the right hand edge".  That would be sweet.

Googling with the KGB

OK, it's not google (work with me here) and it's no longer the KGB (it's the FSB, work with me here), but I've shifted to the Russian search engine Yandex.  I like it quite a bit, and (perhaps unexpectedly) think that it's more secure than Google.  First, the highlights:

1. Russia has a bunch of excellent computer scientists, and Yandex seems to have picked up a bunch of them.  The Russians always excelled at algorithms (I'd go so far as to say that their mathematics training beats ours handily), and search is a game of algorithms.  I'm told that the Russian language is more difficult for computers to deal with than English (it is an inflected language, unlike ours), and so the Yandex algorithms originally developed for Russian really shine when aimed at English sites.

2. It gives me very good results - for most things I've been looking for, better than Google.  Google's blogsearch has become a joke, which is perhaps a testament to Google's internal lack of focus.  I find that bloggy related searches are much more productive on Yandex.

For example, I had no idea at all that I'd been linked to by Democratic Party News.  Google simply missed this, but Yandex sees all. And by "all" I mean a metric s**t ton more.  If you blog and want to see who's linking to you, take Yandex for a test drive.

And now we come to what brought me to Yandex in the first place: Google is evil.  We all know it.  Furthermore, Google seems to be playing footsie with the US Government Intelligence Agencies:

One privacy advantage Yandex has which Google never will: Yandex does not do business with American intelligence agencies.  I do not like the fact that Google has become an arm of US intelligence agencies. It is to their credit that Google discloses their relationship with the US government (most of Silicon Valley is in bed with the spooks, but they don’t talk about  it). It is the surveillance  state that I abhor. Yandex may very well be doing the same thing with the Russian government, but the FSB is a much smaller threat to American civil rights than our own spooks. While I see no immanent dangers from the all-seeing eye, and I am far from paranoid, the US is going through a weird time right now, and history is a dark and bloody subject. Do I really want the future government  to know what websearches I was doing in 2010? No, thanks,  tovarich.

I recall (from my days at Three Letter Intelligence Agency) the saying there are friendly foreign governments, but there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies.  Looking at the history of the last 15 years - from the Clipper chip to Carnivore to the strange privacy twilight that has descended after 9/11, I would tend to remove the ford "foreign" from that statement.

And once you do that, the question becomes stark: who do I think is more interested in the spoutings and bloggy poo flingings of your humble host: the Russian FSB or the FBI/CIA/NSA/it's-a-great-place-to-start?

To ask the question is to answer it, так?

And so fair thee well, Google.  I don't trust your rankings, and I think that the meat and potatoes of your business - search - is increasingly missing stuff I think is important.  And I simply don't trust you, or our Three Letter Intelligence Agencies.  I so don't trust you that I seem to be more comfortable with the FSB monitoring my search activity instead.

Booting a MITS Altair 8800

Set the boot loader via front panel switches.  No school like the Old School, baby.

Ever had a day when you wanted to smack everyone upside the head?

It happens to me sometimes.  And so to balance out my karmic debt, here's a cute kitten playing on an iPad:



Need to amuse a kitten?  There's an app for that.

Quote of the Day: Hope

So let it be written:

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

So let it be done.  Amen.

What came before the Internet, and inspired it

I've spent my career working on Internet related technology.  As not just someone trained in engineering but in history, I knew that the Internet concept dated to 1969 or so and an ARPA study on self-healing networks.  Lots of folks know that.

What I (and I dare say most people) didn't know was why ARPA gave a damn.  It was SAGE:



The closing lines of this video are prescient: SAGE created essentially all the technologies that we associate with the Internet:

The  SAGE system had many firsts: it was the first nation wide networked computer system. While it used special leased telephone lines and some of the first modems (at a blistering 1300 baud), it was effectively the internet, long before the internet. It was the first to use CRT screens. The first to use a “touch screen interface” via the use of light pens on the CRT. It was the first to use magnetic core memory. It was the first real time, high availability computer system. It was the first computer system to use time sharing. Many people attribute the genesis of computer programming as a profession to the SAGE system. Modern air traffic control, and computer booking systems of course, descend from the SAGE system.

And it could control fighter jets responding to bomber attack, from guiding them to the target, setting fire control, launching weapons, and returning to base.  And it was built using vacuum tubes and magnetic core memory, and went online a few months before I was born.  I was born in August 1958.  

While I never had a job replacing vacuum tubes in computer systems, my older brother (the genius) had friends who did.  They got paid to play cards in the computer enter - at least until the main CPU bucket started having problems.  Then they would hot-swap vacuum tube modules in the guts of the beast, and then all set down for the tedium of removing each tube for individual testing.  Eventually they'd find the bad tube(s), replace them, and go back to playing cards.

That was in the 1970s, and the technology was pioneered by SAGE.

If you read early science fiction - say, Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories - you get a flavor of the expected size of computers.  That was based on SAGE, too.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, who created the modern world with vacuum tubes, new-fangled modems, and iron core memory.  Wow.

LOL

Actively Disengaged rules.

Where do you want to hack today?

A bunch of folks emailed me about the CNN article on the Shodan search engine.  Shodan is cool, and I posted on it quite some time ago.  Here's a good overview of what it is and how it works.





Remember, only use your Powers for Good ...

Life without Sitemeter

Sitemeter's recent outage made me reconsider how much attention I was paying to traffic here.  On a lark, I decided to stop paying attention to it.  I haven't looked at the traffic stats for quite a while, and it's rather liberating.

I wonder if this means that I'm growing up as a blogger ...

The Dollar bubble?

Moldbug (as is his wont) brings teh Smart:

The dollar is already the global monetary standard - what creates any incentive to switch to Bitcoin?  If the dollar was financially perfect, there would be no such incentive.  The dollar is anything but financially perfect.

Probably the easiest way to see this is to consolidate dollars, Treasury notes, and in fact all securities explicitly or implicitly supported by the US Government - a strong argument could be made that this set now includes both the stock market and the real-estate market - as USG liabilities.  To put it crudely, a dollar is a share of stock in America.  Like a frequent-flier mile (which is also a liability), it confers no explicit rights, but can be redeemed for valuable privileges (especially on April 15).

This set of liabilities is constantly expanding - quite a bit more rapidly than the Bitcoin pool.  In plain English, USG leaks money.  It bleeds, in fact, like a stuck pig.  When we do accounting in a diluting equity like this, the rational way to track our positions is not by the number of shares, but by the percentage of ownership.  If we adopt this "normalized accounting," we see that normalized money is constantly being sucked out of our bank accounts.

The only thing that I'd add is that while the US Government can no doubt strangle Bitcoin in its cradle, the Gods of the Copybook Headings pay no heed to fiat currency.  The problem we may face is a combination of 1930s economic depression combined with 1920s Weimar hyperinflation.  Quite frankly, the Fed.Gov wouldn't need to raid your 401(k) account - just let inflation run at 10% a month and they take it all, via the Federal Reserve printing press.

Me, I'm a fan of hard assets.  Real property (not mortgaged), gold and silver (not paper, but physical assets).  Tam's idea of buying collectable firearms is a good one - if the bottom drops out of the economy the gats will be likely even more valuable.  Gunpowder and lead is optional, but only a store of value if you don't go shooting.

Good morning - I'm a real Cheerful Charlie today.  Hope 'n' Change!

Can I just say ...

... that being a grown-up is a pain in the keister?

Look up

I've traveled a lot in my day, and was fortunate that most of it came when upgrades were still plentiful and First Class meant something.  The life seemed glamorous to people looking at it - as opposed to those who lived it, who while the appreciated the quality of the wurst in the Lufthansa Senator Lounge, knew that it was just grabbing a quick bite on another if-it's-tuesday-it-must-be-Brussels business trip.  Another trip away from the family.

But every once in a while you find yourself in one of those moments when you realize at the time that you'll remember it years hence.  For me, it was a drive up the Neander thal (yes, that one), a bunch of random Germans showing me around their home city one weekend, and a particularly interesting conversation with a Flight Attendant in First Class on Air France.  He and I were the only ones up front on that flight to Stockholm, and it was intellectual mano a mano in a most enjoyable and memorable way.

But I never did a trip like Brigid did, nor did I ever write about it like she just did.  This is perhaps her best post ever, and you know what that means.  And she ends with this, which every traveler has engraved on his heart - but which few of us can give words to:

Nothing you wish for is easy, something I always told those that wanted to learn to fly but put it off saying they were too old, or didn't have the time or the money. If there's anything I have learned in life it is that. That love does not exist just in one place and in one instant and in one body out of all the time you have, all the bright light and streaming sky of your life, it is there, waiting for you, with no price tag but your happiness. It's within your reach if you just look up.

She should put some of these together into a book.  I'd pay cash money for a hardback first edition of that.

The University and Say's Law

Image via Wikipedia

Jean-Baptiste Say was a notable French economist during the early years of the Industrial Revolution.  That revolution was truly revolutionary in the sense of entirely changing how people lived and worked, and the social structures underpinning society.

And in its early years, it was not at all clear to anyone just what was going on.  Say - a big enthusiast of free markets and competition - attempted to explain it.

What's interesting is that the most commonly found statement of Say's Law comes not from Say or his contemporaries, but rather from John Maynard Keynes.  I myself learned Keynes' formulation when I was an 18 year old undergraduate:

Supply creates its own demand.

Basically what Keynes meant was that hey, what was spent building a stock of inventory (say, a factory that creates solar cells) represents money that went into the economy, and so demand overall went up because of the resulting fiscal stimulus.

Well, sure, but that doesn't mean that demand for solar cells went up.  Or more precisely, if I spend $500M to build something, that doesn't mean that anyone else will think it's worth $500M.  This is the well, duh school of economic analysis in action.

And so the the University.  Universities have for years - since the years shortly after World War II - been telling people that a University degree is the ticket to a high paying job.  Just as in the early years of the Industrial Revolution it appeared that there was an inexhaustible demand for cotton fabrics, it appeared for decades that modern economies had an inexhaustible demand for University graduates.  And so the diploma mills mushroomed, because after all supply creates its own demand, right?

In an article published in the journal Human Relations, Belgin Okay-Somerville (PhD, Human Resource Management) from the University of Aberdeen and Professor (of Human Resource Management) Dora Scholarios from the University of Strathclyde claim that the number of "skilled jobs" no longer matches the number of "skilled workers".

This means that graduates have no choice but to take rubbish jobs or, at best, "intermediate level" positions.

Naturally these are a long way from the sort of jobs once dished out to graduates in the days when a degree was a rare badge of distinction, rather than something which fell out of your cornflakes packet following three years of alcohol-fuelled fornication.

The Scottish-based trick-cyclists surveyed 7,787 graduate employees, finding that just 379 met their criteria for what defines a good job. These smug and satisfied employees worked in managerial, professional or associate professional occupations and had already racked up between 5 and 15 years in the real world after graduating.

But well done on the alcohol-fuelled fornication, not to mention leftie indoctrination!  It's funny how the Professors are so scornful of Say's Law (as expounded by Keynes) when they've been flogging it more any anyone in the Free World for decades.  I guess that Irony 101 is no longer taught at the Academy these days.

Epitaph for the Iron Lady

Word:

But there’s one other way to tell what a great woman Margaret Thatcher was. Take a look at the people who hate her. If there is another woman in the world who was despised by more despicable people, I can’t think of one.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Stoker

Steam engines (steamships, fixed engines, and steam trains) were staffed with stokers, men who shoveled coal fuel into the firebox.  Large ships had massive crews of stokers: the Titanic had 163 stokers and 13 foremen to keep its ravenous boilers fed.  Shovel by shovel, perhaps 5 or 10 pounds at a time, the fuel was moved from storage and into the boiler by hard manual labor.  Now it looks romantic:



Me, I'm glad I don't do this to put food on the table.  This weekend I moved 80 wheelbarrow loads of mulch.  Here was the mulch pile when I started:

Here's what it looks like now:

I figure it was between 4000 and 6000 pounds of mulch that got moved.  I expect that the stokers of the titanic would have kicked mulch in my face for being such a girly man.  Like I said, I'm glad that I only do this when I play Gentleman Farmer.  But the rose garden looks pretty good.  Go Team Me!

70 loads of mulch

That's the tally so far.  Making progress, but dang I'm getting worn out.

He was weak

Friend and former co worker (and gunny-biker dude) Burt emails to point out that Mighty God King, while no longer posting on, err, the Mighty God King, is still relevant to today's news.

Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral-Sinfonie"

Image via Wikipedia

Growing up, this was my favorite Beethoven, which meant my favorite classical music.  For some reason it makes me think of spring and puttering around in the garden.  No doubt Disney's "Fantasia" had a part of that.

The symphony reflects Germany's love of nature, which Beethoven felt in full.  Unusual for his works, it is a series of tone poems  telling a stor in each of the five movements: the listener arrives in the the country, the listener is by a brook, the country dance, a thunder storm, the storm's aftermath.

The piece took Beethoven two whole years to write, perhaps the longest of any of his works.  If you feel like me, you'll agree that it was worth the wait.

The symphony's importance was such that Walt Disney chose to include this in his groundbreaking film Fantasia, which appears here.

Well, I only had Wolfgang helping me garden

Could have been worse.

Coldest March since 1883

In Germany, at least:

Complaining about the weather has reached epidemic proportions in northern Germany this "spring." And with good reason. With Easter just around the corner, meteorologists are telling us this could end up being the coldest March in Berlin and its surroundings since records began in the 1880s.

...
High pressure system Jill and low pressure system Dieter have joined forces to torpedo an Easter full of the flowers and pastels we have come to expect. The average temperature in the northern German states of Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt has been minus 2 degrees Celsius (28.4 degrees Fahrenheit) this month. If Jack Frost doesn't head back to Siberia soon, this March could break the record established in 1883, two years after records began.

As a point of reference, the Brooklyn Bridge didn't open until April 1883.

Me, I blame Global Warming.  It causes everything:

Mulch

It's what's on tap for today.  I figure 40 wheelbarrow loads will about do the rose garden.

Ooh.  In other news: the weather forecast for Camp Borepatch includes a 70% chance of whining about aching back and muscles.

UPDATE 6 April 2013 11:49: Here's the mulch pile before I started.  Wolfgang is half way up the pile.  He helpfully "found" my work glove.

10 loads in.  You can hardly see a dent in the pile.  Or on the garden.  I figure that it won't be 40 loads, it will be 100.  And I probably have enough mulch.  Oof.

UPDATE 6 April 2013 14:52: 30 loads in now, and hardly a dent in the pile. I think I've covered maybe a quarter of the garden, so that says there's some work left to do.  Double oof.

The Coal Porters - Sail Away, Ladies!

What goes around comes around.  Bluegrass is perhaps America's Ur-Music, born in the Appalachian mountains from immigrants hailing from the British Isles.  Bluegrass has had a renaissance of late, and has fair jumped the Pond back to the Mother Country with some young London hipsters, the Coal Porters.

Well, a group that's been around for 20 years may not qualify as "young" these days, but it's introducing a whole new generation of young hipsters to some great music.  The circle is complete, and hopefully will remain unbroken.  In both the New and Old Worlds.



Sail Away, Ladies! (songwriter: Traditional, arranged by Carly Frey)

Ain't no use to sit and cry

sail away, ladies, sail away

you'll be an angel by and by

sail away, ladies, sail away

don't you rock 'im, daddy-o

don't you rock 'm, daddy-o

don't you rock 'im, daddy-o

sail away, ladies, sail away!

I got news from Charlotte Town

sail away, ladies, said away

big St. Louis a-burning down

sail away, ladies, said away

I got a home in Tennessee

sail away, ladies, sail away

that's the place I wanna be

sail away, ladies, sail away

come along, boys, and go with me

sail away, ladies, sail away

we'll go down to Tennessee

sail away, ladies, sail away

hush, little baby, don't you cry

sail away, ladies, sail away

you'll be an Angel by and by

sail away, ladies, sail away

Secure Perimeter is Secure

Not all security failures are this obvious, but security failures at your house are something that you want to avoid.  Fill Yer Hands has some good advice on the subject.

What passes for "thinking" among Progressives

Moldbug has a typically thought provoking post that (again, typically) challenges the all-too-comfortable thought terminating clichés of Progressive "intellectuals".  It opens with this delicious skewering of one of the giants of Progressive Intellectualism:

Felix Salmon has a very good job.  He gets paid - and paid well - to pretend to think.  He's very good at it.  You have to respect anyone who's good at his job.

But if by some misfortune you are actually capable of thinking for yourself and, worse, enjoy it, you cannot have Felix's job or any job like it.  Not only is Felix not paid to think, he is not allowed to think.  Thinking is above his pay grade, as they say in the military.  A private who thinks he's Napoleon is not only not Napoleon, but not a very good private.

Rather, Felix's job (as with all legitimate journalists or columnists - though the former are not even allowed to pretend to think, which must really sting) is to communicate the thoughts of his sources, rewording them as if they were his own thoughts.  His sources are legitimate thinkers - professors, policymakers, and priests.  Just kidding.  Obviously there are no priests.

Nonetheless, his sources (no sources, no journalist) have obtained distinguished titles at important institutions, which is (a) very difficult and (b) something Felix probably once tried to do, but couldn't.  If he disagreed with these distinguished sources, humbly and respectfully offering his own contrary opinion, they would look very puzzled, as though their golden retriever had attempted to engage them in a debate about Thomas Aquinas instead of fetching the goddamn ball.  Then, they would find a new dog.  An excellent fido is our Felix - but the planet has no shortage of dogs.

The idea of the Cathedral is one that I find important to understand the structure of modern politics.  This sums it up pretty well:

During the US-Russian Alliance, Communists took control of the governing institutions of the US. I use the term “Cathedral” (courtesy of Mencius Moldbug) to describe these institutions. Generally, the term refers to the institutions that run the country. Specifically it refers to the media, bureaucracy and elite universities.

A nice way to illustrate the fact that the Communists controlled these organizations is to look at the career of any known Communist agent. Let’s take one of the best known, Alger Hiss. Hiss’s career (including after he was accused of being a spy and after being in jail) included stints at: the State Department, the United Nations, clerking for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, the Justice Department, some Senate Committees, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and – naturally – Harvard Law.

If you don’t know what I mean by the term Cathedral, it’s basically that list. Really, the only way it could be better is if he’d worked at the New York Times.

Given the reaction of these groups to Hiss’s trial, there’s no doubt that if Hiss had managed to avoid jail, many of these places would have re-hired him.

There's probably a post or three on how the Cathedral now occupies what used to be called führerprinzip.  Looking at that list of institutions, is it any wonder that certain thoughts are considered so double plus ungood that not only cannot they be voiced, but they cannot even be thought?  But remember, these Progressive "intellectuals" are so much smarter than you and me.

All the Deadly Sins

I only posted this because kx59 made me.

Rasmussen: 44% think Government likely to confiscate firearms

New poll of likely voters brings no surprise:

Forty-four percent (44%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the government will try to confiscate all privately owned guns over the next generation or so, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifty percent (50%) feel gun confiscation is unlikely. This includes 20% who think the government is Very Likely to make this move and 23% who say it’s Not At All Likely.

Sample size = 1000; margin of error +/- 3%.

Via Althouse, where a lively discussion is going on in her comments section.  I think that this one wins the Internets:

Henry said...

Obama should propose a revolutionary "green guns" program. Green guns will create green guns jobs. A cash for clunker guns program will remove rusty muskets from collector's cases. A high speed green guns corridor between Berkeley and Cambridge will cost $1B and bog down just West of Walnut Creek. The green guns program is guaranteed to produce no actual guns. Everyone wins.

4/4/13, 12:06 PM

Unsurprisingly, people who trust the government a lot (what Rasmussen calls the "Political Class", barf) think that the Gubmint won't do this, by 59%.  Normal people think that the Gubmint will, by 55%.

Thursday night blues

Tonight it's over at Southern Belle's place.  Holy cow, that's some good stuff.  Like Belle says, that's the right stuff.

So Sumdood is retiring from the Tonight Show?

I heard he's funny.  Is it Deano?



It's OK to dangle a participle if you're wearing a long jacket.  Heh.  Not sure who this Sumdood is, but he sure seems funny:

"Bigger than the Beatles"?

I don't think so:

With a 27-1 second-week blast to the top for "Can't Buy Me Love," the Fab Four locked up the chart's entire top five:

The Billboard Hot 100, April 4, 1964

Position, Title
No. 1, "Can't Buy Me Love"
No. 2, "Twist and Shout"
No. 3, "She Loves You"
No. 4, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"
No. 5, "Please Please Me"

Go ask your parents about these songs, kids.  And yes, it was this much of a sensation.  Girls would go to their concerts to scream until the passed out.  As you can hear, it was impossible to get a good live recording of their concerts.:











It's hard to overstate how big a part of my childhood this was.

Deadly Sin? I don't understand.

Srlsy.  I don't get it.

Judgy Bitch is the new Rachel Lucas

Those of you who've been around the Intarwebz have run across Rachel.  I posted before pointing to one of her epic rants:

I remember the first time I encountered this sort of opinion – that if women were in charge, humanity would live in peace. I was 11 or 12 years old and read it in a book, and I swear to god, I actually laughed out loud. I remember thinking, this fool has obviously never met any females.

...

Like the bitches in my 7th grade homeroom class. For reasons known only to Satan, a group of them decided they hated a girl named Cassie, who lived near me and was actually a really sweet kid. These girls befriended her for a while, let her into their “friend”ship ring of evil, and then suddenly one day when she walked in, they completely ignored her. I remember her crying later at lunchtime, and I heard that she’d told them that her stepdad drank beer in the evenings and now those little snots were telling the whole school he was an alcoholic. That rumor never died.

But that’s nothing. Wait until high school, when the competition for boys gets serious and the rumor-mongering takes on apocalyptic proportions. This is when the girls start calling each other sluts just because they like the same guys. There was a cheerleader at my high school who got pregnant in 11th grade and she went from being the one all of us envied to the one we all called dirty, dirty names. The boys never really said anything but the girls, oh sweet Jesus, we were brutal. On the bathroom wall, someone wrote in lipstick, “Tiffany is the WHOREleader! Keep your legs closed SLUT.”

Sugar and spice, my ass.

Then we grow up and start having babies, becoming those sainted “mothers” Sally [Fields] is talking about. You know, like Britney. Or more seriously, like this woman or this woman or this woman.

That's the least of the rant.  Sadly (for us, I presume happily for her) she found Mr. Right and became the happily married Mrs. Right, which tends to cut down on the amusing Intarwebz ranting.

Into the fray steps Judgy Bitch with rants like this, about a feminist hand me the smelling salts Victorian melt down because an obituary of a pioneering female rocket scientist dared to mention that she was an exceedingly fine cook:

These things are not buried in some deep, dirty, secret part of the internet that is almost impossible to access. It would have taken Jezebel ten minutes to find out that articles and obituaries that refer to male scientists are just as likely to talk about their family, their spouses, their children, their hobbies.

So what is the source of feminist bitterness about women, incredibly intelligent, accomplished, brilliant women who are capable not only of building propulsions systems that keep satellites in orbit, but ALSO of making beef stroganoff, being great moms and loving wives?

Personally, I think it’s the order of priorities that pisses feminists off. The feminist ideal is this:

Me
Me
Me
Me
More me
My cat
More me
Yoga
Book club
Shopping
Pissing and moaning
How much will I get if I divorce him now?
Should I fuck the new intern? He’s kind of hot.
I hope that asshole doesn’t think I’m making dinner tonight
Shit, I chipped my manicure
Should I get a venti or a grande?
My house
My kid
My husband

Women like Yvonne have an entirely different set of priorities:

Husband
Children
Work

Epic, simply epic.

At this point I could point out that my Sister-In-Law is an actual rocket scientist, or that long time readers will not the prevalence of family posts here despite my Internet Security techie ramblings, or my admission (somewhere here, I swear) that Roberta X understands antenna theory in a way that I never could, and that doesn't hurt my widdle ego one widdle bit.  But quite frankly, I don't much care what the Politically Correct crowd dislikes.

I am glad to see someone as Politically Incorrect writing rants as epic as Rachel used to.  If you haven't spent time there (either place, really), then you're missing some of the best commentary (sharp as the finest English Cheddar) around.  Snark, delivered in multiple 55 gallon drums.

You know the guy who's missing that?  Don't be that guy.

Thank you, Petula Clark

For an irreplaceable part of my childhood.



This is from last New Year's Eve, but Ms. Clark has a new album coming out.  All you kids, go ask your parents (or grand parents).

UPDATE 3 April 2013 21:30: Here's Grammy winning performer Miss Clark singing this in her prime - 1967.  You crazy kids out there need to know that she's sold 70 Million records.



Man, I need a Martini. This is a visit to a Lost World.

Now that is a strong password

LOL.

Blackberry social networking shares pr0n

This kicked over my gigglebox:

Using a Blackberry Z10 for a little one-handed surfing might be more public than desired, as the social-sharing baked into the OS likes to share, um, everything.

Blackberry OS10, used on the Z10 handset, integrates social sharing deep into the OS and many users opt in to alerting Blackberry Messenger contacts about their musical preferences.

As the system is also linked to the video player, BBM contacts are getting notified about porn preferences too, which might prove more embarrassing than the latest single from One Direction.

You have zero privacy.  Get over it.

Why I carry a .45

The old joke is "because they don't make a .46" but there's more to it than that.  It's maybe a bit gauche to quote your own posts but this sort of sums it up:

But why do you need a standard capacity magazine?  Because after she emptied her revolver into the guy, he went back to his car and drove away.

This was the Atlanta suburban Mom who when they guy broke into her house took her kids and hid in a crawl space.  He broke down 4 doors to get to them.  And so when there was no place yet to run and no place left to hide, and with her children behind her, she shot him.

And shot him again.  And again.  And again.  Again.

And so he left.

Think about that - when she shot her gun dry, he turned around and left her house.

[blink] [blink]

There are two choices: standard capacity magazines holding more than ten rounds of 9mm, or .45 ACP hollow points.  Shoot him a lot or shoot him with something that will put him down.  I'm not trying to restart the caliber wars, but people who think that 7 round magazines are the shiznit don't have any idea what they're talking about.

Blogroll updates

I had thought that it had been a year (!) since I updated the blogroll.  Yes, I suck.  I'd say that it's been an interesting year, but that's whining.  Nobody wants to hear that (well, I sure don't), so here are some great blogs you should go check out.

Lawrence Person's Battleswarm blog should be on your daily read list (at least while Google Reader yet draws breath).  He did a simply epic trolling of the leftie/feminist community (but I repeat myself) on April Fool's Day - so epic that the butt-hurt Progs got his article taken down.  Undetered, he posted about it ()name and shame, baby - name and shame).  That attracted dozens of comments, including butt hurt Progs in an echo trolling.

[stands]

[*clap*] [*clap*] [*clap*] [*clap*] 

Plus, Lawrence has asked three times if I'd blogroll him. Did I mention the "I suck" part. (If anyone else has emailed asking me to add them, ping me again because I promise to try to suck less).

Nothing About Everything is from frequent commenter Goober.  Despite his nom de blog, he is a bit of a polymath - Boats, cigars and whiskey, and the science of organic farming:

Like the E. Coli that was recently found in the farmed produce from one German organic farm that recently made the news for sickening hundreds of people and killing 29.  We now have one German “organic” farm that is responsible for the deaths of more people than the much-maligned Gulf oil spill, Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Fukushima Nuclear disaster combined, but you won’t hear about that in the news, I’m sure.  

You know how many people have been proven to have been killed by the dangerous chemicals used in non-organic farming?  Zero.  Zippo.  Zilch.  Nada.  (Unless you count industrial accidents either at the place of manufacture or the farm, itself).  

You can have your organic limes.  When I drink my Tequila, I savor the wonderful pesticide aftertaste.  You can savor the bacteria-ifested cowshit all over your limes if you want, but count me out.

He is clearly and Enemy Of The State™, and I'll save him a seat on the bench at the Camps.  We can talk about whiskey, and science and stuff.

Livin The Dream is trapped behind enemy lines in the People's Republic of Maryland.  Next time I'm up there we'll need to get together with T-Bolt to talk about 'splody stuff, fishing, and heavy-duty house remodeling:

The house was built in 1910 and we remolded the entire first floor new hard wood, ceramic tile,  granite fire place surround and wainscoting I will miss that old house but not the amount of work that needed to be done to the rest of it somehow I lost the pictures of the bathroom that I built it was truly unique with a walk around shower wall so my 95 year old grand mother could just use her walker and walk in.

Or cooking - venison goulash and cornbread, yum indeed.  Another polymath.  We seem to collect 'em here in our little corner of Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway.

In the knock me over with a feather category, I find that Kathy Jackson has blogrolled me.  For the two of you who have been trying to get your money out of Cypriot banks or something and haven't run across her Cornered Cat site, she's well worth spending a week or two going through her archives.  If you are a man and want to get your wife/girlfriend into shooting, Kathy's place should be your first stop.

Simon Grey writes on politics and society from the reactionary-libertarian perspective.  I've linked to his posts repeatedly which if you're a frequent reader is hopefully all you need to know.  I don't always agree with him but he seems to be another sigma from the mean higher in intelligence than I am.  Go, read.

Den Of The Wolfman posts on guns and prepping.  I expect that come TEOTWAWKI, he'll be the guy living in style:

I'm trying a new experiment. One of the things that I work towards on a regular basis is bringing all my various skills close to home. A big part of my prep plan is SHIP (SHelter In Place) rather than SHOW (SHelter Out in Wild) now that we have a young'un. And a big part of that plan is having food sources within walking distance.

I can grow a garden- I learned that last summer, and I'll be growing it a bit this year, and see what I can eke out of it. As it stands, we are still eating last summer's zuchinni, which I froze as it came ready. Meat is a little trickier- that'll be a barter situation at best, right now. And bread...

Oh, bread! I don't know if this is clear, but I love baking bread. Normally I'm a lousy baker, because I'm not real good at following recipes, but bread is a different story. Its a little bit alive, a little bit flexible, and a whole lot of satisfying. My new pet is a yeast culture.

So there you go - great blogs.  I still suck, but in future I shall endeavour to suck less.

Robert Johnson - Me and the Devil Blues

Just because.

Man shot by mother of two in home invasion sentenced to 10 years in prison

Breaking news on a high-profile case:

WALTON COUNTY, Ga. —

A burglar shot multiple times during a home invasion will spend 10 years in prison for the crime.

...

Investigators said Slater broke into a Loganville home on Henderson Drive in January and pursued a woman and two children inside. Investigators said Slater broke through a bedroom door, a bathroom door and a closet door before he reached an attic crawl space where the woman was clutching a .38-calibur [sic] handgun.

She must have been compensating for something, like four broken down doors.  But that's not possible, because I heard that the attacker would have just taken her gun away from her.  Or something.

But why do you need a standard capacity magazine?  Because after she emptied her revolver into the guy, he went back to his car and drove away.

Politicized science

Here's the problem:

The problems lie of course not the academic community as a whole but a vocal and aggressive subset, egged on by an uncritical media and a chorus of fellow travelers. Most of the community are solid scientists, who strive to do good work. But the public face of climate science is represented by the most vocal and politicized elements. As readers here know, I could write a book about the unseemly shenanigans that have gone on in the area of disasters and climate change.

The climate community won't fix this situation until practicing scientists start publicly saying enough is enough

Yup.  And here's the problem:

Climate change researcher James Hansen, the long-time head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is retiring from government employment to campaign for policies that he believes must be adopted to avoid impending catastrophic global warming, reports the New York Times. Back in 1988, on a blistering hot DC day in June, Hansen testimony at a Congressional hearing brought man-made global warming to the broader public's attention. Skeptics have questioned just how accurate Hansen's 1988 predictions have turned out to be ...

"Questioned"?  Boy, howdy:

From their Die kalte Sonne website, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt and Dr. Sebastian Lüning put up this guest Post by Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim (Oslo) on Hansen’s 1988 forecast, and show that Hansen was and is, way off the mark. h/t to Pierre Gosselin of No Tricks Zone and WUWT reader tips.

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO ₂ increase (blue), constant increase in CO ₂ emissions (green) and stagnant CO ₂ emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO ₂ emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) .

To summarize: Hansen underestimated the amount of CO2 that would be released into the atmosphere by 66%, but overestimated the warming that would result by 150%.  His "Scenario C" shown here (the one which almost maps to the actual recorded temperatures) assumed that there would be no increase in CO2 at all after 2000.

The great thing about science is falsifiability - that science makes predictions that can be proven wrong.  It is said that "the scientist proposes and nature disposes" - scientific hypotheses are mooted and abandoned when the predictions do not come to pass.  Nature has pretty clearly disposed of Dr. Hansen's hypothesis.  It can only be a good thing for him to leave the scientific establishment for the (no doubt much more remunerative) post of a lobbyist.

Doh!

I've been posting on the breakdown of the new "hockey stick" paper, and I forgot the first thing from this blog that went viral on Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway:

I made it on the handy-dandy Clippy-o-matic.  Come to think of it, you could do another one:

Looks like the Climate Science Establishment have created a mock-o-matic!

Global Warming causes blizzards

Monster snowstorms have paralysed much of the UK:

LONDON: Britain's military was called into action Tuesday to airdrop fodder to farms cut off by freak spring snow as thousands of homes remained without power for a fifth straight day.

A Royal Air Force (RAF) helicopter was deployed in Northern Ireland in a bid to reach remote farms where estimates suggest up to 10,000 animals have been buried beneath snowdrifts 20 feet (six metres) high.

Here's a picture of the drifts from Wales.  Notice that the snow is taller than the backhoe that is trying to dig a path:

Source: BBC

It's not just been a single freak storm.  The month of March was the coldest in the UK in half a century:

This weekend's great Easter getaway will be accompanied by some of the coldest March weather in decades, with temperatures in the UK set to drop to their lowest levels since 1962.

Met Office figures show that from 1 March to 26 March the UK mean temperature was 2.5C (36.5F) – three degrees below the long-term average.

This makes it the joint fourth coldest in the UK, in records going back to 1910. The coldest March in the UK was in 1962, at 1.9C (35.4F).

But remember, the Science® is settled!  p > 95%.  Oh, wait:

The light green shaded area is the 95% confidence interval of what the models predict; the solid line is the actual climate.  You'll see that there's been no warming at all since 1997.  And that's with some dodgy fiddling of the numbers.

So why does the post title claim that this is all caused by Global Warming?  Because everything is caused by Global Warming!



And this is simply hilarious:

Funniest April Fool's Day prank

Anti-drone shotgun loads containing depleted uranium.  Well played.

Lucky Gunner's Drone Shells - A Product Courtesy of LuckyGunner.com
 

Hat tip: the Captain.

Latest climate "Hockey Stick" paper - scientific misconduct?

Wow:

However, here I document the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct, as defined by the NRC. I recommend steps to fix this mess, saving face for all involved, and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity.

The paper I refer to is by Marcott et al. 2013, published recently in Science.

Just, wow.  Pielke's post is long, and detailed, and very damning.  And remember, Pielke is a "luke warmer" - believing that temperatures are rising and it's partially the fault of CO2.

Marcott's paper was a reconstruction of the climate over the entire Holocene - the last 11,000 years.  It showed a rise to a maximum around 500 B.C. and then a slow cooling until a warming spike during the last century.   Steven McIntyre (the man who shredded Michael Mann's original hockey stick paper) has a further shredding of Marcott's late and weak FAQ response to the many criticisms of his paper:

Marcott et al have posted their long-promised FAQ at realclimate here. Without providing any links to or citation of Climate Audit, they now concede:

20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.

Otherwise, their response is pretty much a filibuster, running the clock on questions that have not actually been asked and certainly not at issue by critics. For questions and issues that I’ve actually raised, for the most part, they merely re-iterate what they already said. Nothing worth waiting for.


They did not discuss or explain why they deleted modern values from the Md01-2421 splice at CA here and here. Or the deletion of modern values from OCE326-GGC300 as asked here.

Nor do they discuss the difference between the results that had (presumably) been in the submission to Nature (preserved as a chapter in Marcott’s thesis).

Nor did they discuss the implausibility of their coretop redating of MD95-2043 and MD95-2011 as discussed here.

Instead of dealing with actual questions, for the most part, their “FAQ” filibusters about questions that no one was asking in connection with this study.

Other than that, it's awesome.  I for one would love to know the names of the scientists who participated in the Marcott paper peer review.  It would be interesting to ask them their opinions. Remember, this paper was published in Science, ostensibly the most prestigious Scientific Journal in the world, and it was the blogosphere that found the problems, not the scientists.

One wonders if there is none so blind as him who will not see.  OK, one doesn't wonder, actually.

Hitler finds out that Google is shutting down Reader

Heh.

Time begins anew

It's Opening Day, and we all know what that means:



Hey baby do you come here often?  Only each year ...