Quote of the Day - Second Amendment edition

Elusive Wapati shoots, and scores:

Many on the right cite resistance to tyranny as the primary object of the Second Amendment, and while that may be true, that is not the primary use of the Amendment in my considered opinion. Instead, the Amendment reserves for the people the ability and the responsibility to protect themselves, and in doing so, forestalls the security vacuum (that typically results in heavier government policing) from occurring in the first place.

Interesting that this private security firm provides better security at half the cost. Another benefit for the people--specifically their civil rights--is that this private security firm, like any private party, will be held accountable for their actions in ways that police officers, as public officials, have not been and are not likely to be anytime soon.

Of course this is all considered to be Double Plus Ungood by all Right Thinking People®, because it reduces the dependence of the people on the Government.  That's why they "don't encourage self-help" because then reduces the incidence of crisis, and never let a crisis go to waste, right?

Synaulia - Music from Ancient Rome

Today is the 2766th anniversary of the founding of Rome on April 21, 753 B.C.  The Romans were great synthesizers, learning from many cultures and taking what seemed useful, turning it to their own purposes.

Music is a bit of a mystery because there are no musical scores from those times.  While the Greeks had a way of representing tone and duration, the Romans do not seem to have adopted it.

Because of this, the sound of reconstructed Roman music is somewhat conjectural.  We know that the earliest Roman music was adopted from their neighbors the Etruscans.  Later Greek influences would play a major role, and then others from provinces of their far flung empire.

The best evidence for sound is from the musical instruments of the day, many of which survived either in form or in historical description.  The Lute/harp, the horn (cornu), drums and other forms of percussion - these have been recreated by scholars who are essentially musical anthropologists.  Synaulia is perhaps the oldest of these groups, from the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden.  Their music has been included in films like Gladiator, and so has branched out from its original founding mission of education to include a certain amount of commercial success.



The sounds are authentic, what a composer like Emperor Nero would have known.  The score - melody and rhythm - are modern creations.  Conjecture.  It is, alas, the best that can be done, at least until such time as an actual score from the period is discovered.  If indeed any even exist.

Caption of the year

Quote of the Day

Here's why the gun control bill lost in the Senate:

You say "Gun control."  I hear, "We want you to defend yourself against a man who is a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier with your bare hands."

You say "Common sense regulations."  I hear, "We don't like these cosmetic features, like an adjustable stock or a foregrip, that make it easier for a woman to use."

You say, "If it saves just one life."  I hear "Except yours, you stupid bitch. We'd rather you get raped and murdered while waiting for the police to arrive."

You say, "Think about the children."  I hear "But not yours. We won't let you defend them, and if we find out you have a gun in the same house as a child, we'll take them both away."

You say, "Compromise."  I say, "Fuck you, you mewling cowards. I will not embrace victimhood. I will not willingly disarm. If you demand I give up my life just to make you feel better, you are selfish on a level that is beyond comprehension."

The banners don't have logic on their side, they don't have honesty on their side, and they don't even have passion on their side.  Not like this.  RTWT, which is epic.  Erin doesn't care what the gun banners think, and you shouldn't either.

Brava, Erin.

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

LOL

Sierra Oscar Bravo

I was going to do a Saturday Redneck, but James Zachary has it covered.

The SOB is a US Citizen, so no Guantanamo for him.  Damn it.

In praise of cops

I am sometimes harsh on the police, when some of them go overboard and violate the rights of American citizens.

That said, the Boston Police Department looks like they have officers who took fire from the SOB who blew up the Boston Marathon, in order to take him alive.  I expect that the intelligence that will be gleaned from the capture will be valuable indeed.

And the fact that the Police Officers were willing to take a bullet to get this intel is pretty much the definition of "hero".  Bravo Zulu, Boston PD.

R.L. Burnside - See My Jumper Hanging On the Line

Toe tappin' blues.

The soul of a nation

It's on display here.

Territory is but the body of a nation.  The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.

- James Garfield

I seem to have under-estimated the global appeal of the Tea Party

Huh.  Seems that the Tea Party's appeal extends to Chechen jihadis.  I hadn't realized that the Tea Party conspiracy was so, well, global.

UPDATE 19 April 2013 12:53: This is me, rolling my eyes:

According to NPR Counterterrorism Correspondent Dina Temple Raston, who spoke with officials about the Boston attacks, “April is a big month for antigovernment and right-wing individuals.”  What makes this such a good month for attacking innocent Americans?  Apparently, April 20th is the anniversary of the Columbine shootings and it is Hitler’s birthday.

Click through for the recording so you can listen to the stupidity in its full glory.

Just remember, these people are entirely convinced that they're ever so much more clever than drooling morons like your and me.

Pondering

So what would have happened if Mitt Romney had won the election?  What's the likelihood that he would have stood up to John McCain, Toomey, and the squishy Republicans on universal background checks?

Me, I think that we'd have a new gun control law on the books today.

Hey Democratic Senators! Obama and Biden say the gun control votes aren't over!

Want a bunch more votes in the run up to next year's elections?

How many Democrat Senators do you think want POTUS and VPOTUS to just STFU?  10?  Or is it 20?

It's always a good flight when you're going home

Hey, lookee:




That right there is a subway going to the gates. Dulles airport is now no longer the stupidest airport in the country.

The TSA is still the stupidest agency in the government, though. The guy ahead of me had his mini Swiss Army knife swiped by a TSA goon too dumb to realize that it's 2" blade is now OK.

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Most Android phones are unpatched and unpatchable

It's so bad that the ACLU is complaining:

Yesterday, we filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate the major wireless carriers for failing to warn their customers about unpatched security flaws in the software running on their phones. These companies—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile—have sold millions of smartphones to consumers running versions of Google’s Android operating system. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these phones never receive critical software security updates, exposing consumers and their private data to significant cybersecurity-related risks.

In a 16-page complaint filed with the FTC, we argue that the major wireless carriers have engaged in “unfair and deceptive business practices” by failing to warn their customers about known, unpatched security flaws in the mobile devices sold by the companies.

Android itself gets patched, but the handset vendors (Samsung, HTC, etc) and carriers aren't making them available to subscribers.  Apple has a much better model for the iPhone.

Getting old

Every single word is true.

Why support for gun control is fading away

Eric Raymond has an interesting post that starts with an analogy that most will find familiar and ends with an explanation for why the "middle ground" is less influential in the gun control debate:

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine yourself in an alternate United States where the First Amendment is not as a matter of settled law considered to bar Federal and State governments from almost all interference in free speech. This is less unlikely than it might sound; the modern, rather absolutist interpretation of free-speech liberties did not take form until the early 20th century.

In this alternate America, there are many and bitter arguments about the extent of free-speech rights. The ground of dispute is to what extent the instruments of political and cultural speech (printing presses, radios, telephones, copying machines, computers) should be regulated by government so that use of these instruments does not promote violence, assist criminal enterprises, and disrupt public order.

The weight of history and culture is largely on the pro-free-speech side – the Constitution does say “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. And until the late 1960s there is little actual attempt to control speech instruments.

Then, in 1968, after a series of horrific crimes and assassinations inspired by inflammatory anti-establishment political propaganda, some politicians, prominent celebrities, and public intellectuals launch a “speech control” movement.

Here's his ending:

The members of these organizations know that many people advocating “reasonable restrictions” and advocating “common-sense regulation” are not actually seeking total bans and confiscation. They’re honest dupes, believing ridiculous collective-rights theories because that’s what all the eminent people who gave Prettyisland’s book glowing reviews told them was true. They honestly believe that anyone who doesn’t support “common-sense regulation” is a dangerous, out-of-touch radical.

Free-speech advocates also know that some people speaking the same moderate-sounding language – including most of the leadership of the speech-control movement – are lying, and are using the people in the first group as cat’s paws for an agenda that can only honestly be described as the totalitarian suppression of free speech.

Increasingly, the difference between these groups becomes irrelevant. What has happened is that four decades of strategic deception by the leadership of the speech-control movement has destroyed the credibility of the honest middle. Free-speech activists, unable to read minds, have to assume defensively that everyone using the moderate-middle language of “common-sense regulation” is lying to hide a creeping totalitarian agenda.

Given that the honest middle doesn't know very much about the subject, and given that their motivation is to appear "non-partisan", they increasingly find that rather than being perceived as peacemakers, they are scorned by both sides.  If you want to be a peacemaker, this is bound to be a turn off.

So not put yourself in the position of one of these people, with the Democrats and the MSM (redundancy alert) whipping up a hysterical frenzy over gun control, full of for the children and have you no shame.  Is that going to win you over?  Given that you don't have particularly strong feelings on the matter, you're likely to shrug your shoulders and tune all the gun control ravings out.

Essentially the dial it up to eleven!!!1! strategy of the hard left has alienated the honest middle that used to side with them.  The pro-gun side, of course, is highly motivated and turns out to vote.  Thus, yesterday's disaster for the Democratic Party.

The saying goes that you should assume that any organization is being run by a cabal of its most bitter enemies.  The Democrats are making a run at wrestling the name "Stupid Party" back from the Republicans.

Live by Class War, die by Class War

Borepatch, March 30, 2013:

... the Democrats are finding that they're driving the electorate into the arms of their opponents.  Remember, an election looms next year.  Memories are short, but not that short.

Some people are worried that a bland vanilla [gun control] bill will make it to the Senate floor and then a swarm of extremist amendments will be rammed through via legislative sleight of hand.  This won't happen, for many reasons:

1. The Red state and blue state Democrats don't want to vote on anything here because it's radioactive.  No matter the sleight of hand, at the end of the day you have to vote.
2. The more extreme the amendment, the more radioactive it will be.  Dianne Feinstein doesn't care, but Joe Manchin sure does.  Harry Reid, for all his faults, knows how to count votes.
3. The House won't pass it, no matter what the Senate does.  John Boehner has done a masterful job trapping the blue and purple state Democrats: by saying that they'd take up any bill the Senate passed, he gave the green light to the most radical wing of the Democrat Party to push their unwilling middle strongly towards the left.

I believe that the Senate will vote gun control down, in a massive defeat to Obama personally and the radical wing of the Democratic party.  But the damage has been done.

The Democrats' Annus Horribilus is fair begun.  The economy is fading (again), the Obamacare mandates and costs are getting ready to bite, and the President has not only shown himself to be incapable of getting his agenda passed but has also shown that he has no loyalty to fellow Democrats in Red or Purple districts. 

More importantly, those fellow Democrats have show that they have no loyalty to him, and are unwilling to die on the hill of his radical agenda.  As next year's election approaches, they will increasingly throw him under the bus. As Joe Biden would put it, that's a Big F***ing Deal.

Pretty fun to see full scale Class Warfare break out among Democrats.

Bad idea

Hilarious bad idea.  Kind of what you'd expect from a site called ExplodingWhale.com.

You're welcome.  And this is pretty funny, the TV show "COPS" in the Star Wars galaxy.

Happy birthday, Ford Mustang

If this isn't the greatest car ever built, I'm not sure what is.

Image via Wikipedia

49 years old today.  Maybe I need to get me one of these old beauties for next year's half century mark.

God's Laughter

We used to live in the Washington D.C. suburbs, and now I somewhat unexpectedly find myself back on business.  As it turns out, Mom is also out here, visiting my older brother and his family.  I had a lovely time with them and their kids' Middle School homework chaos last night, well worth the hellacious drive from Herndon VA to Ellicott City MD at rush hour (yes, I love my family that much).

But on the drive home, I thought of the many years we lived here, Back In The Day.  And so I took a drive down Memory Lane (Rte 29), past the first place we ever owned.  It was a walk back through time, to a simpler day, with simpler problems.

I remember our "new house" and how the (15 year old) air conditioner went out.  Man, it was hot, back in the summer of 1990.  I remember how my Electrical Engineering degree had taught me how to read the information plate off of an electrical motor.  I remember going to an electric supply store and getting an equivalent blower, and installing it.  I remember the satisfaction when the cold air came on.

I remember putting up a steel garden shed at the top of the hill.  Dang, it was hot, that summer of 1992.   I mixed and poured a concrete slab and put up the shed more or less by myself.  I still remember how the steel roof was hot screwing the pieces together.

I remember the walks I took my German Shepherd Jack on, up to the softball fields.  Dang, it was hot on those summer mornings, but he needed the exercise and so off we went.  The shade kept us both alive, and he was pretty good at using that shade to hunt around for softballs.  I remember when he finally died, and how I dug a grave for a 110 lb German Shepherd in July.  Dang, that Maryland sun was hot, but a proper grave was his due.

I remember pushing #1 Son's Little Tykes car up the hill in the back so that he could ride back down it, laughing and laughing on the way.  I remember raking leaves into a pile that he ran and jumped into.  I remember the blizzard of January 1996 where 2 feet of snow paralyzed the area.  I remember shoveling the driveway all the ay to the unploughed street.  I remember making a snow fort with tunnels that #1 Son could crawl through.  #2 Son was 2 weeks old then.

I remember leaving for a new job posting, one that would take us to London.  I remember saying goodbye to my old dog Jack at his grave in the back yard.  I don't expect I'll forget that.

All this came back to me last night, as I drove back down Memory Lane.  All that and more.  Kierkegaard famously said that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.  That has the full measure of Scandinavian pessimism on display, but I can't really argue the point.  I stopped at the house - I think that I only went back because of Jack - and thought back on all the hopes, all the dreams, all the plans that we had back then.

I'm pretty sure that I heard God laugh.  I don't think that He was laughing at me, but if I wasn't laughing is it proper to say that He was laughing with me?  Maybe that is Him poking at me to get a clue, that He is waiting for me to wise up.  I hope that the Lord is patient indeed.

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.

-  Søren Kierkegaard

If I listen, I think that He is laughing with me.  If I listen.

Boy, that was fun

The meetup last night was a blast: tanks and code breaking, shooting and geeking, it was a meeting of minds.  The next time I see him, I shall thank Mr. Gore for his most excellent Information Superhighway that allows us to find other people who shapre our interests.

Many thanks to the folks who turned out, some going a couple hours out of their way.  And yes, I need to get the stinkin' Garand.  And come back up next month for a blogshoot.

The world is filled with soft targets

It was ever so, and will always remain so.  Whoever was behind yesterday's attack in Boston reminds us of this unavoidable fact.

This is a fact that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, just like a shooting at a school makes a lot of people uncomfortable.  There's a desire for order and predictability, an escape from chaos, that drives many towards erecting great stone rings, or pyramids, or enacting gun control laws, or the USA PATRIOT Act.

But when all that activity dies down, when "something" is accomplished (no matter what the something might be) the cold fact remains.  The world is filled with soft targets.  It ever was so, and ever will be.

Say a prayer for the dead and wounded, hug your kids, and know that the world remains chaotic and evil sometimes walks among us.  You can be ready to react to that or not.

The final toast

The first blood that the USA drew after Pearl Harbor was the Doolittle raid.  It had been a bad five months, with the Imperial Japanese forces going from victory to victory.  The raid was a huge morale booster, and the 62 men who survived the raid and the rest of the war were heroes, sought after and feted across the Republic.  There was a movie about it.



In 1959, the city of Tucson presented the survivors with 80 silver goblets (one for each man in the raid) and a bottle of 1896 Hennessy VS cognac.  The survivors have met each year since, but have never opened the bottle.  Instead, they've been saving it for a final toast.

Today, they meet for the last time.  Time has done what war could not, and only four of the fliers remain.  This is their final reunion.  The bottle will be opened, and a toast made by those present to those accounted for.

Fair flying and God Speed, Doolittle Raiders.

Hat tip: friend Ralph in email, whose step Dad fought in the Pacific Theater.

Can I just say ...

... that the iPhone GPS directions blow chunks?  They managed to triple my travel time and land me on the toll road.

Good grief, this is about enough to get me to replace the damn thing with Android.

Heh

135 Million views on Youtube, and I only just now find it.

Tab clearing

Ever wonder what happens to all the recycling you so dutifully do?  Most of it gets dumped.

Gasoline sales are not down to 1970s levels.  They are down 10% from the peak 10 years ago.

What does the greatest living scientist think about Global Warming?  Choice quote: “I just think they don’t understand the climate. Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”

Is al-Qaeda finished?

The best blog name ever?

What is the real plot of Cinderella?  Perhaps that's better asked what's the RealPolitik plot?

There's been a 10x increase in the number of euthanasias performed in Belgium in the last decade.  I have to confess that I feel torn here.  On the one hand, my belief is that you have the absolute right to suicide (generally a bad idea, but the right exists).  On the other hand, it's unclear what this right means to, say, and Alzheimer's.  If you bump gramps off with a pillow over his face, you're a felon.  If the National Health Service does it, you inherit.  Unsavory.

How the Internet works, blog division

I laughed and laughed.  The comments are priceless.  And yes, that's exactly how blogging works.

Nah, can't do it

The Renaissance Faire has a "Pet Friendly" weekend coming up, and Wolfgang is a friendly pet.  That got me thinking: I wonder if there are costumes people dress their pets in for that sort of thing.  And boy, howdy:

But then I thought better of it.  On second thought, let's not go to Camelot.  It is a silly place.

NOVA Blog Meetup

Time: Monday, 15 April 2013 at 6:30 PM.

Where: Jimmy's Tavern, 697 Spring St., Herndon VA

Please leave a comment confirming that you'll be there.  I'll call and make a reservation because it looks like there might be a crowd.

Musings on Renaissance Festivals

There are lots of people who dress up (including #2 Son).  Most of the really good costumes are worn by people who work there, but not all.  You even see entire families in costume.

There are more corsets per acre here than probably any other place on earth.  Kilts are well represented as well. 

Chocolate covered bacon was a bit of a disappointment.  That rather took me by surprise.

I expect that JayG would be fun to go to a Ren Faire with.  I might even break down and get a kilt if he wore his.  I'd need to work out for a couple months before going though - the kilted men seemed to fall into two categories - fit and good looking, and out of shape and not good looking.

Not all of the best looking costumed people seem to work there. 

There's a lot of overpriced junk for sale.  There's what look to be pretty high quality swords and knives if you look.  They're not at all cheap.

The shows are almost universally very funny.  A lot of the vendors are as funny.

Yesterday was opening day, and was packed.  It took 2 hours (!!!) to get out of the parking lot.

William Byrd - Consort Songs

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday (and today) was the Renaissance Faire, an excuse for people to dress up in odd costumes and eat turkey legs while watching jousting.  It's pretty goofy, but a lot of fun if your imagination runs that way.

It's tissue-thin "story line" is that it "recreates" early 16th Century renaissance society - without the yucky plague and beheadings of the real thing.  But if we're going to let our imaginations run that way, it behooves us to listen to some actual renaissance music.

William Boyd was one of the most famous English composers of the mid-sixteenth century.  He was born too late for Harry of the many wives but was prolific and influential during the reign of Good Queen Bess.  He developed Consort Music, where "consort" refers not to the many wives of the Monarch but rather a grouping of chamber instruments.  He also wrote considerable church music.

You see, he was not just making a living from selling music to as many as would commission it, but he was a Roman Catholic in an England where that was uncomfortable and even dangerous.  But he avoided the most subversive sort of agitators, and his reputation was such that he died an old and wealthy man.

This is the real music of the middle renaissance.  You're unlikely to find it at your local Ren Faire.  Pity, that.

How the Internet works

Actually, that's exactly how the Internet works ...

Armed and dangerous

#2 Son suits up.



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Lazy blogger

I overslept, and was busy last evening.  Life is cutting into my blogging time.  Besides, Weer'd is doing Saturday Redneck this morning: bluegrass Don't Fear The Reaper.  Sweet.

Spring

Offered without comment.





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I would so go see this movie

Hat tip

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: