The youngest soldier of World War I

Sidney Lewis snuck off and enlisted when he was 12.  By his 13th birthday, he was in the trenches on the Somme.  But his biggest fear wasn't getting shot (or his Sergeant Major), but his Mother, who wrote to the War Office asking them to send him home.  She included his birth certificate, and the game was up.

What a very different world it was, a century ago.  Great story told well at the Daily Mail.

"It's not surveillance of people they think are guilty. It's surveillance of people they think are innocent."

Mikko Hypponen is the Chief Research Officer at F-Secure, one of the better antivirus companies.  He's one of the security True Believers who has spent his career fighting the Good Security Fight.  I've written about how NSA has made the True Believers angry.  You can hear it in his voice here.



The level of anger that the NSA has created among the community of Good Guys is hard to estimate, but it likely bigger than anyone thinks.  Right now, the NSA can still buy talent, but they have to pay for cooperation they used to get for free.  The best security guys are probably no longer available, because they're not the type that can be bought (they're the best - they have options).  Mykko is one of the best.

This issue will not go away, not with the people who matter.  Silicon Valley needs to listen to this, or they need to start offering negative financial guidance in their upcoming quarterly reports.

OK, so Healthcare.gov is a $600M sucking chest wound of FAIL

So riddle me this, wingnuts: how many programmers does it take to make a working health care web site?

Three.

No, really.  You should hit the link and then click through to their site.  It's a breeze - easy, fast, informative.  All adjectives that you don't associate with big government ...

Thought Crime

You will not read these double plus ungood scriblings of later day Goldsteins, Citizen.  These links are merely posted here to inform you that they are not to be linked.

What If ObamaCare, Too Big To Fail Banks and the State Are All the Wrong Sized Unit?

This thought-crime posting offers the following thought-crime graphic describing the growth of the State. You will not read this.

This Enemy Of The People suggests that Rousseau's "Popular Will" is not the underpinning of glorious revolution.  Or that it doesn't work and leads to slaughter of innocents.  As if any are truly innocent. Da, tovarich?  At least he shows that Locke fellow to be a criminal, as well as the entire American "Revolution".  Link is from Foseti so you know not to click, right?  RIGHT?

People's glorious Central Planning is Class Oppression?  Bah.  Send author to work camps.  You will not read.

How the Revolutionary Cadres are trained, for mediocrity and obsequiousness.  But this is secret, Comrade.  Those who blab outside the Inner Party will be liquidated.  Also via counter-revolutionary running dog Foseti.

Of course no list of Thought Crime is complete without Uncle Jay, but at least he can drink vodka, nyet?

Go, and do not read.  Instead look at glorious People's motorcycles, from People's Automotiv Collectiv #17:

So much better than nekulturny Chinese People's Revolutionary Motorcycle.

Bah.  What does cruiser motorcycle know about snow in Great Patriotic War?

Al Gore, where are you when we need you?

Damn, it feels like January.

To New Englanders this looks like May, but Camp Borepatch is in Georgia.  I was told that there would be warming.

Good news! The Democrats are going to fix Obamacare!

The fix is in, methinks.  But more good news: they have top men analyzing the problem.  Top.  Men.

Bonus yucks:

Living in the future is more interesting than I'd thought

This really isn't all that surprising, when you think about it.  Supercomputers in the cloud:

What runs faster than the majority of the world's supercomputers, costs less, and was used to research organic solar-power cells? The answer is Megarun, a 1.21-petaflop super that was spun up by Cycle Computing in the AMAZON CLOUD.

...

The system's peak performance of 1.21 petaflops would rank it as the planet's 29th most powerful computer in the top 500 supers of the world as of June 2013, Cycle Computing said.

The majority of the system ran on Amazon's CC2 instances due to the performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, Cycle told El Reg, though it did also use second-generation M3 processors, and the graphical-heavy C1 systems as well. Megarun's compute resources cost $33,000 through the use of Amazon's low-cost spot instances, we're told, compared with the millions and millions of dollars you'd have to spend to buy an on-premises rig.

$33,000 for the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world.  Wow.

So if we're living in the future, where's my flying car?

Fair winds and following seas to a Pearl Harbor veteran

He got to see his ship one last time. 

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

- George Orwell

Obama's Tipping Point

It's amazing how long things can last, and how quickly they can then collapse.  Like a great Oak Tree, dominating the landscape; a big storm comes by and suddenly it's kindling, revealed to all as hollowed out at the core.

What had seemed the day before to be solid is now a display of inner rot.  We see this all the time in the political arena: the ancient Bourbon Kings of the Ancien Régime had Versailles as their crib, for crying out loud.  In 1789 they gave the tip o' the crown to a decidedly Middle Class series of reforms; two years later the Royal Blood ran red in the ironically named Place de la Concorde.

I myself recall being on vacation, sitting in a sunlit piazza in Florence and reading the International Herald Tribune.  The Warsaw Pact was letting their people leave, rather than machine gunning them at the border.  It's over, I realized, and two short months later the Berlin Wall fell to sledge hammers from both sides.  Gone as if it had never been.

Mussolini was probably the most influential world leader in the 1920s, although the Professoriat doesn't want to tell you that today.  He was founder of the fascist political philosophy, a collectivist movement taking its name from the ancient Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks used by Roman officials as signs of office.  While each stick in the fasces is easily broken, the collection of sticks makes the fasces an intimidating weapon.

So just how influential was Mussolini?  I don't see too many of these now, but when I was a kid, these dimes were common:

That's a fasces on the back side of American legal tender (please don't anyone tell me that Franklin Roosevelt wasn't a fascist).  Mussolini was also author of the "Third Way" between Capitalism and Communism so beloved of modern Euro politicians who have absolutely no clue where the term came from.

But two weeks after the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943, his own Fascist Council voted him out and he was arrested.  Gone in the blink of an eye, and while Adolf Hitler sent a daring team of commandos to rescue him, he was done and ended swinging from a lamppost.

We see this over and over and over again.  The "best and brightest" who are at best "adequately predictable" see nothing but continued strength in the status quo, right before the bottom drops out.  The CIA thought that the Soviet Union was the world's third largest economy in 1989.  Oops.

Seemingly at the height of their power, and then gone.  And so to our own day.

The Democrats find themselves in the position of a Ceaușescu in 1988, or Louis XVI in 1790, or Mussolini in 1942.  They have promised great things to the masses, but have been unable to deliver.  The specific charges laid before the Democratic Party are thus:

• Obama ran in 2008 as a centrist, competent technocrat able to reach across the aisle and forge a bipartisan consensus.  Independents voted for his because of this.  It's clear to all that he's the most starkly partisan President of my lifetime (going back to Eisenhower).  Independents (justly) think they were lied to and are rejecting him, and rejecting the Democratic Party.

• The Middle Class were told that his reforms would improve services and lower their costs.  They were assured in 2008 that he would not raise their taxes.  Now they're getting sticker shock because of vastly higher insurance premiums and copays.  While Lefties will claim that these aren't taxes, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that Obamacare was only constitutional because Congress could have implemented this under their taxing power.  Walks, quacks, duck.  Obama's repeated and emphatic promise that they could keep their insurance if they liked it is seen - and will be seen - as a blatant lie from the Democratic Party.

• Millennials are finding out that they have been well and truly screwed, bled to subsidize older, wealthier people who are in poorer health.  Unsurprisingly, they're breaking against Obama and the Democrats.  Asked which party can best solve the health care problem, 46 say Republican and 41 say Democrat.

Obama has hollowed out his constituency, chasing a philosophical will o' the wisp.  Even worse, he seems to be at his core a very arrogant yet insecure man; he has not staffed his Administration with a roster of strong lieutenants. Everything is blowing up, and he needs talent to help him - the talent he did not surround himself with. The Tumbrels of 2014 are beginning to rumble through the streets, and nobody in the Administration even knows the scope of their problem.  But they will.

Collapses come quickly because once the illusion of invincibility vanishes, it vanished suddenly.  One day the entire country is intimidated by the strongman Ceaușescu; two weeks later he's swinging at the end of a rope.  The masses who were afraid to oppose him lost their fear, and the apparatchiks who see a career path with the Great Man suddenly changed their minds.

That Tipping Point is happening here, and it's happening right now.  It's actually pretty stunning to watch (as indeed are all of these moments) because there's this sense that he can't really be this clueless.  Oh yes he can.

Remember Obama's acceptance at the 2008 Democratic Convention?  Remember the styrofoam pillars?

The Democratic Party's core constituencies are sure noticing now.  At the time, I blogged his convention appearance.  I pointed out the proper name for pillars used this way as faux props.  It's not a Temple, it's a Folly.

If Democratic Party rank and file are recognizing this, what do you think it does to their motivation to support the Party?  And what do you think it does to the Republicans?  Do they fear him more or less than they did 12 months ago?

To ask the questions is to see the future.  It is to see the outcome of the 2014 elections.  Where that leads us nobody can foresee, but the political landscape will no more resemble today's than the political landscape in Eastern Europe resembles that of 1988.  A generational shift is upon us.  It is a primal, elemental power that can be channelled - for good or ill - by a person of energy and vision.  We do not know who that might be, but we know for a fact that it is not Barrack Obama. 

So the Republicans are going to vote on Friday to fix the Obamacare problem?

Really?  Are they really that stupid?  And the Democrats are going nuclear on their caucus to oppose this?  Are they really that stupid?

To ask the question is to answer it.

The best argument against man-made global warming

Is history.  The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) drills into the glacier and analyzes the width of the rings.  Like trees with annual growth rings, each year sees the deposition of a new layer onto the glacier.  This is, in fact, the reason that glaciers exist at all - each year there is net new ice.

The rings go back for years and years.  So we can use these rings as a proxy for temperature - thicker rings mean colder and thinner rings mean warmer (more ice in colder winters, duh).  So what does the last millennium look like?

See the modest spike at the right hand side?  That's today, the Warmest! Year! Ever!  See the much bigger spike at the left?  That's what used to be called the Medieval Warm Period when Europe built all of those quaint Cathedrals and vinyards were to be seen in Scotland and Sweden.  The trough in between?  We used to call that the Little Ice Age with the Black Death.

Of course, the Hockey Stick paper from 1998 said that there was no Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age.  Because Science!  And shut up, wingnut.

So what if we extend this back further?  The GRIP data go way, way back.

See that big spike in the first century BC (middle of the chart)?  That's called the "Roman Climate Optimum" and is clearly way bigger than today's Hottest! Year! Ever! spike.  It's even higher than the Medieval Warm Period.  And the Roman Climate Optimum wasn't even the warmest - look at that massive spike on the left, around 1400 BC.  This was when Ramesses the Great and the Crete of Knossos flourished.

The temperature of our own time is a poor reflection compared to these.  Remember, Civilization was at its peak (for the time) - harvests were good and there was such a large surplus that vast armies and navies, and palaces full of artists were all present in large numbers.

But wait, we're not done.  Let's spin the GRIP record back even more:

This goes all the way back to the end of the last Ice Age (more or less).  What happened at the peak around 8000 BC (note that it's much higher than today's temperatures)?  This was the dawn of agriculture and the emergence of the first cities.  Just for grins, here's 400,000 years of GRIP temperature readings (note the Ice Ages and Interglaciation periods which were even warmer than the 1400 BC peak).  Remember this chart because we'll come back to it:

The common theme here?  Temperature peaks are not catastrophic, rather the reverse.  Civilization emerged and flourished during these ZOMGTHERMAGEDDON!!! times.  Civilizations collapsed (or retrenched) when the temperatures fell, like 1100 BC when the Egyptian New Kingdom collapsed, like 500 AD when Western Civilization collapsed, like 1250 AD when Europe began to starve and die.

You can get a lot more detail (and look at much, much longer views of GRIP) here, but you get the point.  The point is that we hear that today it's all about the CO2, it's only about the CO2, and nothing else counts.  There's no easy way to square that claim with the GRIP data.

Because we're not talking theory, like the warming catastrophists are.  Rather, we're looking at data.  Facts are stubborn things.

Their argument is that Greenland is only one place on the Globe, and tells us little about temperature elsewhere.  Interestingly, Greenland isn't the home of the world's largest glaciers - those are in Antarctica, where the Vostok project has drilled over 3000 feet (!) into the primeval ice.  Their ice cores track temperature back over 650,000 years:

Compare with the last chart.  Pretty close, right?  And today's temperature isn't as high as the post Ice Age peak even though CO2 has been increasing steeply (you can actually extract CO2 concentration from the ice cores; neato, huh?).

The it's all CO2 and it's only CO2 guys simply don't have an explanation to any of this.  Why was it hotter in the past?  Dunno.  Why did it get cooler in the past?  Dunno.  Why did civilization flourish when it was warmer than today?  Dunno.  What's going on today?  ZOMGTHERMAGEDDON!!! 

Ooooh kaaaay.  They don't need no steenking explanation.  Because Science!  And shut up, wingnut.

Now remember, these are the scientists who "hid the decline" in the ClimateGate email releases.  This short (and very accessible) video explains precisely how they manipulated their proxy data to hide the decline.  Cliff Notes version: they wouldn't have manipulated their data if their proxy data wasn't showing that temperatures were going down.



The data that got hidden is shown at about 2:30.

Quite frankly, I believe that this is the strongest evidence against the theory that rising CO2 is significantly changing the climate.  Of course, looking at all of this data is very anti-scientific of me, but you know what a beastly Denier I am.

Internet Explorer: another day, another Day Zero bug being exploited

If you use IE as your primary browser, I recommend switching to Firefox for a month.  Or two:

Security researchers have discovered new zero-day vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that are already being harnessed by hackers to run a new type of drive-by attack.

FireEye, the security firm that discovered the attack method, said that the flaw is present in various versions of Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, while running Windows XP or Windows 7.

...

Malware slung via the latest exploit is designed to load directly into the memory of victimised Windows PC, bypassing the hard drive. The tactic makes it harder for antivirus software or similar security tools to detect and block the attack.

However, simply rebooting compromised machines would appear to remove them from the botnet, so what this new type of attack gains in stealth, it loses in persistence. FireEye posits that "the use of this non-persistent first stage may suggest that the attackers were confident that their intended targets would simply revisit the compromised website and be[come] re-infected".

Microsoft is said to be patching the last Day Zero* bug in today's Patch Tuesday (we won't really know until it comes out).  But it's concerning that we hear about this only after exploits are circulating in the wild.  While all programs (including Firefox) have security bugs, Firefox tends to be much faster in getting fixes out.

So get Firefox.  Err, and reboot.  You'll feel better.

* A "Day Zero" bug is a security flaw that is being exploited by malware, and for which no fix has been released.  Nasty stuff.

Remember when you Open Carry, the Press is not on your side

The Vulgar Curmudgeon muses on the OC event at the Moms Demand Action lunch:

Bad form in my book, you are not helping your cause and are instead seriously reinforcing a negative image.

That makes all gun enthusiasts look bad and we don't want that.

Capiche?

This is the kind of shit the media laps up and runs with, it makes their job easy.

Wise up people.

Word.  It doesn't matter that you're all meek as lambs.  It doesn't matter that you brought your daughters to the event.  It doesn't matter that you have logical arguments prepared.

The Media hate us, and they will go out of their way to find the camera angle that makes us look like the Das Reich division.  It's what they do, and it's best for everyone to keep this in mind.

And quite frankly, there's no getting around this.  Maybe if the group is comprised of nothing but armed women and girls with pink rifles.  But even that's no guarantee.

Until someone figures out how to get around this instinct of the MSM to set us up, you're just being photographic canon fodder for the antis. 

Brothers in Arms

America doesn't look to World War I on this day.  We have a different focus of our gaze.  The view is different, yet the same.

Liam Clancy - Green Fields Of France

Americans really do not understand the full horror of this day. They do not have a folk tradition that causes them to tremble a little inside, from hushed stories told to them when they were small. You can get the full measure of that here.

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the dead heroes in 1915,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sing The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1915,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined forever behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sing The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who was butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sing The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sing The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Doolittle Raid last toast

The Doolittle Raid survivors assembled for the last time, toasting with the 1896 Cognac that had been saved for the last 50 years:

Known as the Doolittle Raiders, the 80 men who risked their lives on a World War II bombing mission on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor were toasted one last time by their surviving comrades and honored with a Veterans Day weekend of fanfare shared by thousands.

Three of the four surviving Raiders attended the toast Saturday at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Their late commander, Lt. Gen. James "Jimmy" Doolittle, started the tradition but they decided this autumn's ceremony would be their last.

"May they rest in peace," Lt. Col. Richard Cole, 98, said before he and fellow Raiders -- Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, 93, and Staff Sgt. David Thatcher, 92 -- sipped cognac from specially engraved silver goblets. The 1896 cognac was saved for the occasion after being passed down from Doolittle.

Hat tip: Rick, via email.

Thoughts on Veteran's Day

The citizens of the United States have a different relationship with the Military than many countries do.  The Military is seen as being part of the citizenry (and actually vice versa, as a reading of the Second Amendment will show).  In many countries the military is seen as separate and distinct from the populace.

This isn't unique - the same dynamic has long been in play certainly in the Anglosphere, and other nations as well (c.f. Switzerland).  This has resulted in the Military being seen as high status, and commanding broad respect through society.

It's the soldier, not the reporter who has given us
Freedom of the Press.
It's the soldier, not the poet, who has given us
Freedom of Speech.
It's the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the
Freedom to Demonstrate.
It's the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the
Right to a Fair Trial.
It's the soldier who salutes the flag, serves under the flag and
whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who gives the protestor the right to burn the flag.

- Father Dennis O'Brien, USMC

And so in the United States, today is the celebration of Veteran's Day.  The rest of the Anglosphere (and other places) hold today as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, recalling the Millions slaughtered in the Great War which ended 95 years ago today.  America does not need a Remembrance Day, as we have our own Memorial Day holiday (an outgrowth of the American War of Southern Independence a half century earlier than the War To End All Wars).

As a result, there's less sadness here.  On these shores, today is a day for the living, not for the dead.  We see signs at small restaurants saying "Veterans Eat Free", which would be difficult for those asleep in Flanders' Fields.

But even here it's worth a moment's reflection on the War where Europe committed suicide, when a whole generation was butchered and damned.  And how they nearly took us with her, then and 20 years later.  It's rarely the politicians who caused the problem who bleed.

Thanks to all who served, including Dad, Uncle Dick, and nephew Daniel.  The citizens - of whom you were once part and to which you returned - are grateful indeed that this nation does not fear its own Armed Forces.

Helping the Philippine Hurricane victims

It looks bad in the Philippines, as you might think after being hit with perhaps the strongest tropical cyclone in history.  Thousands are dead, many more thousands in immediate need.  Friend  Burt emails with background:

You know my wife is from the Philippines, so you also know we're keeping a close watch on the events there.

The recent earthquake was centered between the islands of Bohol and Cebu.  The damage was bad, but it could have been a lot worse than it was.  Unfortunately, some very old churches - some dating from the 1800s and earlier - were seriously damaged.  But some newer buildings were also destroyed.

My brother-in-law lives just up the road from the Gaisano Country Mall (google maps) which partly collapsed.  His office is - or rather WAS - in the building across the street, which also partly collapsed.  I was there last year - I know EXACTLY where these buildings are.  The earthquake also closed shipping to Bohol by destroying the concrete shipping facilities in Tagbilaran.

Luckily, my wife's family in Cebu and their homes were ok.

The recent storm pretty much destroyed whatever was left of the seaside homes and fishing villages along the coast near Tacloban on the island of Leyte.  The pictures you're seeing on the news are the worst of the disaster.  Tens of thousands of people have lost their lives and their homes.  I know someone who's immediate relatives live in Tacloban... and they haven't heard from anyone there in days.  They fear the worst.

The Philippines has a pretty serious "rainy season" every year, and minor flooding is not an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence.  I've been there during rainy season, and some places are low-lying enough so that you wade around in water up to your ankles almost everywhere - and sometimes up to you knees.  That's why some homes are built up above the ground on bamboo posts: literally, to "stay above water"!

Filipinos are hardy, courageous, and people of faith.  They will put their lives back together and rebuild their homes, schools, and businesses.  And they'll do it without begging for anything from anyone.

Of course, if you or anyone you know wanted to send a donation to the Philippine Red Cross, it wouldn't hurt a bit.

America's friendship with the Philippines goes back a long way.  If you have something to spare, it's going to friends.

Two riders in the house

#1 Son passed the Motorcycle Safety Course.  The DMV isn't open tomorrow, but the next day he can take the certificate in and get his Class M endorsement.

Then we'll see how much riding I'll get to do ...

"Selfless". "Heroic". Suuuure.

Not sure if I'll go see this film

I'm a huge fan of Alan Turing, and at least a moderate fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, but the film reeks of political correctness:

Keira takes on the role of Joan Clarke while Benedict plays Alan Turing [WENN]

The 'Sherlock' star had also been styled appropriately for the time, and wore a grey suit with a matching trench coat, and carried a brown briefcase whilst chatting away to his co-star.
Filming of the highly-anticipated movie began last month, and according to reports it will be a dramatic portrayal of the life and work of Turing.

Following his time of working at the top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II, Turing was later criminally prosecuted for his homosexuality in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom.

He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison, but died in 1954, just over two weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning.

Eric Raymond discussed this a while back:

The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died. I am not in the least surprised by any of this; in fact I have been half-expecting such inversions ever since I began noticing, twenty years or so ago, the increasing mythologization of Turing’s life.

...

But the queasiest thing about the myths of Turing-the-exemplar and Turing-the-victim is how they’ve become intertwined. It says no good thing about the year 2012 that Turing’s supposed marginalization by the society of his time has become in many popular accounts a perverse credential for his greatness. In fact he was not marginalized at all – he was a prominent Cambridge don and a hero of his country.who had been awarded the Order of the British Empire. Rather than confront Turing’s homosexuality, the British authorities from the arresting constable on up tried to look the other way and gave every easy out they could; Turing, through some combination of carelessness and self-destructiveness, took none of them.

I'd watch more TV and films if it didn't seem so full of indoctrination.  And quite obvious indoctrination at that.

John Williams - Hymn for the Fallen

Tomorrow is Veteran's Day, perhaps better known in most of the Globe as Remembrance Day.  It is a day for reflection on those who gave that last measure of sacrifice for home and hearth, for King and country.  The world is filled with the graves of the fallen, and will likely see new ones until the World is remade.

This weekend, we are called to reflect on these men.  Art, at its best is there to help lead the way.  Classical music used to offer many selections for solemn days like this.  Fortunately, Classical music has found a niche where it yet thrives, with talented composers writing new music for the cinema.  Perhaps the greatest of these in our age is John Williams.  He wrote this for the film Saving Private Ryan, where it played during the final credits.  Music like this makes it worth waiting through the last scrolling text.



Today and tomorrow think on those that went into that maelstrom of fire and blood.  We honor the ones who returned home.  We remember those who did not, who today rest in foreign graves.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

- LTC John McCrae, No. 3 Canadian General Hospital, Dannes-Camiers, France

The Ventures - Pipeline

So much less squeaky clean than the Beach Boys.

A pack, not a herd

The news report of the kidnapped woman rescued by her family is a masterful piece of understatement:

Arceneaux's cousin approached the home, kicked in the door in and entered, [Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Department Captain Kip] Judice said. Inside, he found Thomas with the woman. Thomas then began stabbing Arceneaux, and a confrontation ensued.

"The cousin, who was armed, began firing several shots at Thomas," Judice said. "After a couple of shots, [Arceneaux] was able to get free of him and they escorted her out of the house."

...

Meanwhile, officers who heard the gun shots fired surrounded the home, Judice said. Upon entering, they found Thomas' lifeless body on the ground. He had sustained several gunshot wounds.

Thomas' cause of death is not known, Judice said.

Lead poisoning?  A terminal case of he needed killin'?  Holes that let the air in and the blood out?  I'm just guessing, of course.

No charges have been filed against the man who shot Thomas, and it is unlikely that the man will be charged, Judice said.

I'll bet they want to pin a damn medal on him.  That's a hero, right there.

And what's interesting is that this piece of vigilante justice is reported in approving tones by ABC News.  We're winning.  Armed self defense of other people has seeped into the mainstream.

I've created a new tag in honor of this post: Righteous killings.

Quote of the day

#1 Son is in the Motorcycle Safety Course today.  I sent him a text asking how it was going.  His reply:

Pretty good.  Things got a lot better once I got into second gear.

Life is never as good when you're stuck in first gear ...

It looks like NSA is hiring

Looking for "a few good geeks", according to their advert.

The Slashdot comments are running around 90% anti-NSA, which sort of corroborates my last post.

And a comment leads to this bit of win (after the annoying non-NSA advert):

Google security engineer on the NSA spying

"Fuck these guys":

But after spending all that time helping in my tiny way to protect Google -- one of the greatest things to arise from the internet -- seeing this, well, it's just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips. 

He's joined by a colleague who writes about seeing his systems mentioned in the NSA Powerpoint slides:

The packet capture shown in these new NSA slides shows internal database replication traffic for the anti-hacking system I worked on for over two years. Specifically, it shows a database recording a user login as part of this system:

http://googleblog.blogspot.ch/2013/02/an-update-on-our-war-against-account.html

...

We designed this system to keep criminals out . There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason .

What we see here in both of these posts is very bad news for NSA.  What we see is the passion so frequently seen in long-time Internet Security people.  I can confirm that one of the motivators for choosing this line of work is a sense that you're fighting the Good Fight.  That while you're making a good living, you're also making the world a better place.

Just about all of the long-time security guys I know (and I know a lot, having been in this field for going on 30 years) feel this way.  Certainly all of the best feel this way.

That's what the NSA has violated.  In a sense, the best security guys will now look at the NSA with feelings similar to what they'd have looking at a rapist.  Actually, it's worse than this: the NSA is supposed to be one of the guardians of security (I'm looking at you, National Computer Security Center).  They're supposed to be protectors, and instead have violated those who were in their care.

Now that you understand the emotions, think on the consequences.  As long as people thought that the NSA was also fighting the Good security Fight, there was quite a lot of good will and common ground.  Sure, they were the Federales, and a big bureaucracy, but they were the Good Guys.  Lots of us were willing to help out.  I've posted here about some of the programs they have (no, I'm not linking to the posts).

Now, it's different.  I don't know that I go quite as far as Google's Brandon Downey, but I sure know where he's coming from.  And I sympathize with his outrage.  And I'm not the only one.

Sure, NSA will be able to buy some talent, but they'll never get the best.  What they used to get for free now will have a price tag.

And the best talent will now be thinking on ways to make the NSA's job harder.  I think that this is the biggest cost of the whole PRISM program, one that will in the long run make us less safe in all sorts of ways.  That's a damn shame, because the program seems to be pretty much ineffective:

I remember when the NSA was pretty effective.  That was a while ago.

Big and Rich - The 8th of November

Monday is Veteran's Day in the United States (Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth).  It's the anniversary of the day that the guns finally fell silent in the War To End All Wars.  It was a nice thought, anyway.

Veterans are respected across the political spectrum (here's uber left magazine The Nation's list of top songs for Veteran's Day; it's a good list).  That respect is earned, often hard earned.  Men do this - make these sacrifices - for their homes, families, societies.  A lot don't ever return to those homes, or return as changed men.

Today's song is about both of those types of men, and how they earned the respect that we pay them.



The 8th Of November (Songwriters: Big Kenny, John Rich)

Said goodbye to his mamma
As he left South Dakota
To fight for the Red, White, and Blue.
He was nineteen and green with a new M-16
Just doing what he had to do.

He was dropped in the jungle
Where the choppers would rumble
With the smell of napalm in the air.
And the sergeant said, "Look up ahead"

Like a dark, evil cloud
1,200 came down
on him and 29 more.
They fought for their lives
But most of them died
In the 173rd Airborne.

On the 8th of November,
The angels were crying
As they carried his brothers away.
With the fire raining down
And the Hell all around
There were few men left standing that day.
Saw the eagle fly,
Through a clear, blue sky
1965, the 8th of November.

Now he's fifty-eight
And his ponytail's grey
But the battle still plays in his head.
He limps when he walks,
But he's strong when he talks
About the shrapnel they left in his leg.

He puts on a grey suit
Over his Airborne tattoo
And He ties it on one time a year
And remembers the fallen,
As he orders a tall one
And swallows it down with his tears.

On the 8th of November,
The angels were crying
As they carried his brothers away.
With the fire raining down
And the Hell all around
There were few men left standing that day.
Saw the eagle fly,
Through a clear, blue sky
1965, the 8th of November.

Saw the eagle fly,
Through a clear, blue sky
1965.

On the 8th of November,
The angels were crying
As they carried his brothers away.
With the fire raining down
And the Hell all around
There were few men left standing that day.

On the 8th of November,
The angels were crying
As they carried his brothers away.
With the fire raining down
And the Hell all around,
There were few men left standing that day.
Saw the eagle fly,
Through a clear, blue sky
1965, the 8th of November.

The 8th of November
The 8th of November

He said goodbye to his mamma
As he left South Dakota
To fight for the Red, White, and Blue.
He was nineteen and green with a new M-16
Just doing what he had to do.

Confession time

I think that it's been a year since I've been shooting.  Not a year since I carried, or a year since I loaded the magazine, but still.

Probably need a shooting buddy.

We're winning

The gun culture is leaking into the Intarwebz collective.

Yes, it's a Rule 2 violation.  But we're winning if it shows up at the Cheezburger place.

Things to remember when you lose your health insurance

Obama is really sorry about something.  I don't think it's about anything he's done, but he's really sorry.

Your old policy wasn't any good.

Stupid obstructionist Republicans.

Anyone who opposes the law is a terrorist.

Harry Reid says the law is working.  And Republicans are a joke.

When Obama said if you liked your insurance you could keep it ("period") he really meant something much more subtle and nuanced for you to understand.  What a great orator!

Hey, look over there - Gay rights!

So some Gun Magazine editor wrote something that got him fired

We've seen this before.  Srlsy.



My blog was bit once by a møøse ...

Suddenly I feel old

#1 Son is in the Motorcycle Safety Class tonight and through the weekend.  I've insisted that he do this before he rides.  It's a Dad's job to be the Safety Nazi for his kids.

But #1 Son isn't just starting to ride, he's getting ready for his Cisco certification, which will be the gateway to his first real job.  Soon he'll head out on his own journey as an adult.  You want to see your son grow to Honorable Manhood, and so this is gratifying indeed.

But damn.



How the hell did I get so old?  I mean, it was just last year that he was just like this:

Now he's a bad-ass biker dude.  Damn, I feel old.

Thursday evening Blues concert

Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Johnny Winter, Mike Bloomfield, and Junior Wells.  The whole concert is here, exploding with Win.



You're welcome.  Damn, they can play.

A thought experiment: what if Mitt Romney were President?

In the dark of night come evil thoughts.  Suppose that Mitt Romney had won last year's election and was President.  What might we expect to see from his administration?  Other than more Gun Control?

I think that we'd see President I-saved-the-Olympics jumping in to make Obamacare "work".  Mitt is a fixer, and a fixer must needs fix something.  Saving a program like this would win him a second term, with a grateful MSM gushing on the "unexpected competence and respect for social justice" from the Romney administration.

I'm starting to wonder* if you could do a global search and replace here, substituting "Chris Christie" for "Mitt Romney".

* OK, I lied.  I don't wonder at all.

Love the RINO or kill the RINO?

It's a cage match!  In this corner, your Gormogons and embracing your inner RINO:

Conservatives--or, perhaps, non-statists of all stripes--need to quit giving up on candidates when there are only two or three disagreements on policy. The Left is really good at this; they will stick with their wo/man if there is agreement on one or two things. They use that small area of agreement to build an echo chamber that is very difficult to tune out, let alone counter. And the more voters require 'ideological purity' at the cost of political efficacy, the harder it is to beat back the liberty restrictions endorsed by the statists.

In the other corner, Six brings this cri du coeur:

With loss after loss, bad candidate after bad candidate, betrayal after betrayal and disappointment after disappointment here's where we are now. After yesterday's Virginia race I'm afraid that a parting of the ways between you and I has finally come.

Read carefully. I will never again vote for any candidate with an R beside their name if they even have a whiff of the Republican establishment. Period. And I'm not a lying progressive who promises a period knowing all along that they don't really mean it. Period means period. And lest you think I'm a lone voice crying in the wilderness take a very long look around. You will see that I have a lot of company and such good company it is. I will however take every chance I get to vote for a conservative who primaries one of your chosen few. Stuff that in your pipe and take a nice long puff.

Both are passionate, well reasoned, and well worth your time.  The contrast does a good job of summing up what is quite frankly a civil war for the soul of the Republican Party.

The only thing that I have to add is the distaste for the Chamber of Commerce and Big Business spending big bucks on establishment candidates who will vote for big pork barrel laws like Cap and Trade (*cough* Mike Castles *cough*), "Comprehensive Immigration Reform", and the like.

I'm thinking that this may put me more in Six' camp*, but your should read and think on both of these.

* My objectivity may be compromised by this post from 3 years ago where I once again took issue with the Republican establishment:

This November [2010 - BP] will see the breaking of the Democratic Party, which is half the battle. But everything will come to naught if the Republican Old Guard is not also broken. There is quite frankly no evidence that they will change their old ways unless we break them. Christine O'Donnell may be crazy like a Cat Lady, but she serves the purpose of breaking them. She is particularly useful in this, because it sends the following message:

We'll vote for the Village Idiot before we'll vote for you lot.

Some will say that the Democratic Party is killing this country. I can't argue with that. However, the Republican Establishment is killing the country, too - just a little slower.

Think strategically, not tactically. If we are to die, it's better to go fast than slow. The proper response to the contempt being shown us by the Republican Party Old Guard - vote for us because we suck less than they do - is to return that contempt with interest. Vote 'em out, every Man Jack and Woman Jill. If they're an incumbent, get rid of them.

But still, read both of those posts.  This is the discussion of our day, well stated on both sides.

The elections of 2014 and the Reckoning

Carteach leaves a comment to yesterday's post about how Obamacare is screwing over the Middle Class, and the implication for the Democrats in next year's elections:

I suspect the Democrats will do fine in the upcoming elections.

Trained barking seals seldom turn on their trainers, as long as there is even the smell of a dead fish around.

That's the typical calculus, and a not bad analysis in general.  Certainly it underlies the Democrats' strategy of buying off favored interest groups for votes.  The problem is that it fails here.  Mencius summed this up pretty well, speaking in generalities:

There are three basic attitudes toward government in America today. There are people who believe government is there to serve them; there are people who believe government is there to serve others; there are people who believe government is there to subsidize them. In our medieval metaphor, these correspond to peasants, gentlemen, and varlets respectively. The last is the caste Marx called the "lumpenproletariat" - and he was no fan of this group, or of political movements that exploited it. Respectable people say "underclass."

When gentlemen look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to help the underclass, those whose plight is no fault of their own. When peasants look at progressivism, they see a movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants' money to buy votes from varlets. Who, in the peasants' perception, abuse the patience and generosity of both peasants and gentlemen in almost every imaginable way, and are constantly caressed by every imaginable authority for doing so.

The Middle Class are the peasants here, and Obamacare will vastly increase the cost of their health care, in order to fund a big government vote buying scheme for the underclass.  A movement whose purpose is to employ gentlemen in the business of public policy, by using the peasants' money to buy votes from varlets.

When you consider that the median American family pays essentially no Federal Income Tax but still shells out 25% of their gross income in tax payments, Obamacare by itself looks like it may double that.

Let that sink in for a moment.  The median income family may see their out of pocket taxes (at all levels: Federal, State, and local) go from 25% of their pre-tax income to a cool 50%.

Nobody's vote is getting bought here.  The Middle Class is not just seeing the biggest tax increase in history*, but are seeing their taxes double due to Obamacare.  All so that the Democrats can buy some votes from some other people.

The Middle Class will be incandescent with rage come election day next year.  There's no spin in the world that will cool that rage.  That anger will be so profound that very likely millions of voters will show up at the voting booth.  They won't be there for revenge.  Oh no.

They'll be there for a Reckoning.



* Yes, I know it's not a "tax", it's insurance payments. The only reason that insurance rates are changing is because of the new law, and the only reason that the law of the land stood the test of a Supreme Court challenge is because SCOTUS said (in John Robert's masterful majority opinion) is that Congress had the power to do this via the taxing clause in the Constitution. Walk, quack, duck.

Don't open Microsoft Office documents sent to you via email

Certainly not from people you don't know, and it's probably a good thing to reply to senders you do know asking if they actually sent the original email.  There's a new security bug that is being exploited in the wild where attackers send a word document containing the attack:

Today we released Security Advisory 2896666 regarding an issue that affects customers using Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Office 2003 through 2010, and all supported versions of Microsoft Lync. We are aware of targeted attacks, largely in the Middle East and South Asia. The current versions of Microsoft Windows and Office are not affected by this issue. The exploit requires user interaction as the attack is disguised as an email requesting potential targets to open a specially crafted Word attachment.  If the attachment is opened or previewed, it attempts to exploit the vulnerability using a malformed graphics image embedded in the document.  An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the logged on user.

If you follow the link to Microsoft's announcement they have links to tools that will make you safe until they come out with a patch to fix it.

The Democratic Party's 2014 implosion

Time to get the popcorn, because the game is only just now starting.  We are going to witness a historical repudiation of the Democratic Party in next year's election - worse even than the debacle of 2010.  And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

The story that's causing the panic in the Party today is the complete failure of the Healthcare.gov web site which, after burning through $600M, is so pathetically inadequate that nobody will say how many people successfully used it for its intended purpose (buying health insurance policies).  The fact that nobody will say tells us all we need to know about the system.  Dead On Arrival, the promises that it will be up and running on December 1 are laughable.

And so we will see the story of "incompetent Government Obamacare program" continue for months.  That's what's fueling the panic.  And that's not the story of next year's coming disaster.

The disaster arrives once the web site starts working.  Sometime next spring, enough band aids and rubber bands will be affixed to the servers so that large numbers of people will be able to actually enroll and purchase insurance.  The story then will be the sticker shock that will hit the majority (and possibly the large majority) of people using the site.  Premiums will approximately double, as will deductables.  It's hard to tell just how bad this will be because there are no actual measurements to work with, just estimates.  But it will be bad, so bad that (like the healthcare.gov collapse) even the biased MSM will be forced to cover the story.

Next summer will be a deep pit of despair for Democratic incumbents running for reelection.  We may not see many campaign appearances due to mobs of angry hecklers turning out to shout down the speeches.  But that isn't the worst that the Party will go through.

Obama delayed the Employer Mandate for a year, moving the implementation date from 1 January 2013 to 1 January 2014.  The reason is that while 15 Million people purchased individual insurance policies (the Individual Mandate), most people get insurance from their employers.  So what happens there?

The Insurance companies will spend Q1 next year figuring out what plans will need to change to meet the Obamacare mandate (likely they already know this already).  They will also figure out what will happen to plan cost (hint: it won't go down).  Starting in the Summer of 2014 corporate HR departments will start receiving updated plan and cost information for their employee's policies.

This has to happen, because companies have to budget for 2015.

And so in the Autumn of 2014, employees will start receiving notice that their health care plans will be different - very different.  Costs (co-pays and deductables) will go up significantly and physician networks will be restricted.  The best case scenario for the Democrats is that some companies in competitive industries (high tech, oil exploration) will eat most of these costs, but for tens of millions of Americans, they will go through the same shock that people in the individual insurance market will have gone through.

What happens in Autumn 2014?  There's an election.

So riddle me this, dear reader: what are the Democrat's chances with perhaps 50 Million people steaming mad at the Democratic Party's signature accomplishment, their biggest "victory" in 50 years?

Next year will be a rolling thunder of terrible news for the Democratic Party.  It will be a disaster of such magnitude that the MSM won't be able to defend them.  The story will be unstoppable, and the story is that the Middle Class has been screwed by the Democratic Party.  This will hit harder because women voters (a traditional Democratic constituency) will be livid that their family's health care is a lot worse and a lot more expensive.

The current talk about incompetence is actually doing the Democrats a temporary favor.  Once the system starts working and the costs become unarguable, there will be hell to pay.  Get the pop corn, this is going to be fun to watch.

Veteran's Day military discounts

Old NFO has his annual list of participating companies up.

Adapt and emprovise

I'm certain that the gloves help in the cold, too.

Quote of the day

Sabra muses on the psychology of poverty:

You may have seen a news story circulating about how poverty makes you stupid.  It's not that stupid people are more likely to be poor, either.  It's that when you are impoverished, so much of your brainpower is devoted to just keeping your head above water that you don't have any left to figure out how to improve your life.  I know from personal experience as an adult that it can feel as though you are reeling from one emergency to the next.  How the hell do you get ahead?  How do you build up savings when you have to decide which bill to put off until next month?  How do you get a new, better job when the hours of the one you're working right now are so screwy you can't schedule an interview?  There's almost no breathing room.

...

Poverty is not a moral failure.  Ending up poor when you started out poor is the default, just like ending up middle class when you start out middle class is the default.  The error comes in the common belief that middle class is the standard and that poor people can easily end up middle class unless there's something wrong with them.

That's one smart lady.  RTWT.

New climate reconstruction of the last 10,000 years

Take a look at the chart (ocean temperature over time) and try to guess how the Press will describe it:

Here's the New York Times:

The study finds that the rise in ocean heat (and temperature) in recent decades is far faster than anything seen earlier in the Holocene, the period since the end of the last ice age. But the researchers say that this rise is from a relatively cool baseline.

You really can't make this up.  Of course, this is the real story:

The article itself presents a Holocene temperature reconstruction that is very much at odds both with Marcott et al 2013 and Mann et al 2008. And, only a few weeks after IPCC expressed great confidence in the non-worldwideness of the Medieval Warm Period, Rosenthal et al 2013 argued that the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period and Holocene Optimum were all global events.

The whole thing is simply absurd.

I wonder if the Project Leader's name is Igor

If not, it should be:

One of Google's most advanced data center systems behaves more like a living thing than a tightly controlled provisioning system. This has huge implications for how large clusters of IT resources are going to be managed in the future.

"Emergent" behaviors have been appearing in prototypes of Google's Omega cluster management and application scheduling technology since its inception, and similar behaviors are regularly glimpsed in its "Borg" predecessor, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to The Register.

I have personally witnessed networks becoming self synchronizing since about 1987 or so.  It's alive!

Pondering mortality

Youtube is an interesting place, turning up things you hadn't looked for or anticipated.  My mortality is to be found there, among a lot of copyright infringement.

I ended up in the Youtube World War I blind alley, with a lot of original footage and later interviews with aged vets.  There's quite a lot there which you're likely to see here in a week or so for Remembrance Day.  But it made me start pondering the Great War v2.0.  You see, when I was a wee lad, the old veterans were from the Great War, like "The Last Tommy".  The town Dads were veterans of the Great War v2.0.  Now the last of the veterans of the War To End All Wars is gone, and so our gaze shifts to veterans of v2.0.

And in that gaze, I see my own mortality.

You see, the age of the oldest veterans is remarkably constant around 111 years old.  This goes all the way back to the 17th Century, and so is a good benchmark for when WWII vets will finally muster for the last reunion.

I was born 13 years after the end of World War II.  Assuming that the youngest veteran of that war was 17 when he got issued his M1, that would make him 30 years older than me.  111 years minus 30 is 81.  Dad was 2 years older than that when he reported for his last muster.

Bah.  This sort of analysis makes me want to get a Ducati.  And a smoking hot Italian girlfriend.  Live fast, die young and all that.

Kevin Baker on Opera

The music, not the browser (which I recommend for its good security).  But he disses my man Wagner, along with all the others.  I find that I'd replied two years ago.  Just proved my Time Lord credentials, I guess.

But Kevin has Dilberts.  RTWT.

That's some yummy art

This is one of the best ads I've seen

I imagine that most people don't need this at all.  Everybody else needs it really badly.

Greens draw fire from Greens

Incoming!

Four of the best-known scientists espousing the belief that humanity's carbon emissions are an immediate and deadly threat have issued a statement begging their fellow greens to support nuclear power.

Doctors James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley co-signed an open letter over the weekend in which they address "those influencing environmental policy, but opposed to nuclear power". The four scientists write that "continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity's ability to avoid dangerous climate change ... there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power".

While I don't buy in to the whole climate catastrophe scenario, this actually makes sense on a number of levels:

1. Nuclear power can provide not just base load power, but can also cover peak demand times.

2. Nuclear power does not depend on intermittent power sources (wind, solar, and to a certain extent hydro).  It's there 24x7x365.

3. All of the pollution products of nuclear power are very nicely isolated, geographically speaking.

I actually see this as the scientific community giving up on things like carbon taxes and Cap and Trade.  And even with the wrong motives, at least they are pushing affordable, reliable power sources.

Anchors away

Except that expression* means "raise the anchors", not "drop them on the tug boat".



I shouldn't have laughed, but I did.  For a while.  But this shows you just how dangerous the day-to-day life of the mariner is.  The tug was pinned to the bridge by the incoming tide.  The energy in the tow cables is so great that if the cable snaps, anyone in line with the cable has a good chance of dieing from the rebounding line.



* Intentionally misspelled.

OK, this would be pretty cool

Bet you'd have better luck with the chicks riding this than on a big ol' Hog.  Not that you'd ever care about that ...

Wow, the PC Police are really cracking down on things named after Native Americans

The Washington Redskins are in so much trouble over the name that, well, others are taking preemptive action:

With the current controversy surrounding the name of the Washington Redskins, the state of Oklahoma announced today that it will be proactively changing its name to Abovetexas.

"Many people don't realize that "Oklahoma" is Choctaw for "Land of the Red People," stated official Native American representative Juan Pendejo, a white Hispanic person of Native American heritage and a cousin of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The state of Texas did not return calls, but rumor has it that their initial response was that "Nothing is above Texas.

Heh.

Motorcycles are to help you relax

To help you get rid of some of the stress in your life.  Stress like the bolt that holds the gear shift to the motorcycle snapping.

But hey, it was downhill almost all of the way home.  Any now I've had my workout, pushing the thing all the way back.  Winning!

This is music you won't hear in church

And a crying shame it is, too.



Gov't Mule brings John The Revelator.  The Spirit is strong with them, even if they won't be on the Play List at your church anytime soon.

Joseph Haydn - Pieces for a Musical Clock

Joseph Haydn is very often the "go to" guy for any particular musical topic, because his compositions ranged so very far and wide.  This is the fifth or sixth post here that includes his music - more than Beethoven, or Bach, or Mozart.  Wagner may be the only composer to get more air time here at Borepatch, and it's because I have a particular favorite one of his works that I've posted repeatedly.

Haydn, in contrast, was a solid infield fielder.  Good glove up the middle and a quick bat.  You won't hurt your chances bringing him into the game.

Check your clocks, because we (here in 'Murica) have gone off of Daylight Savings Time.  Haydn has an organ piece for musical clock.  Now batting, Joe H ...

Woah

Man, I didn't know that the bike would go this fast:



Speedometer in klicks, but 200 kph is damned fast (at least, it seemed that way the last time I was going at that velocity).  This is a young man's game.

But this is some pretty serious marketing.  Modestly NSFW, but only very modestly.

What I looked at today

BMW F800ST.  Even used it's spendy, but it's nicely tricked out with ABS brakes, bags, and a center stand.  It's a lot more stable than the V-Strom was - I'm pretty comfortable with both feet flat on the ground.

But damn, Beemers seem to be even spendier for what you get than Harleys.  And they seem to inspire the same sort of customer loyalty.  What do you think?  Worth the extra cash?

In other biking news, my raid gear works great in the rain.  Ask me how I know.  Also, #1 Son takes the Motorcycle Safety Course next weekend.  I'll need another bike soon.

Of course the airport shooting was at the security checkpoint

This is the obvious place.

Motorcycle windscreens vs. shotguns

Interesting marketing.  And they're honest enough to show that their screen doesn't stop bullets.

Jim Reeves - Drinking Tequila

25 years ago today a fellow named Robert T. Morris released the first Internet worm.  The world of Internet Security was never the same.  If you though that it was a stretch to join Internet Security and Country Music, then you must be new here ...

Robert T. Morris (soon to be known to the tech community as RTFM) wrote the worm as an experiment in self-replicating code - a program that automatically jumped from computer to computer.  He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and ended up convicted in a court of law for his trouble.

The computer security term for a program that spreads like this is a worm, and a nasty thing it is.  Teqila  (and its cousin Mextal) sometimes come with a worm in the bottle.  It's thought to be muy macho to drink the worm.  And so we find the intersection of computer security and Country music.  Yes, tequila is involved.

You say that like it's a bad thing.



Drinking Tequila (Songwriter: ???)

I'm just gettin' back from Juarez Mexico
And I'll tell you something I want you to know
My poor head is aching it throbs and it twirls
From drinking tequila and teasing the girls
Don't get me wrong because I'm not complaining
I have no regrets I am only explaining
For all of you fellows that ain't had the thrill
A drinking tequila and teasing the girls
Heeee ha happy tonight the maidens are dancing out in the moonlight
Heee ha on top of the world drinking tequila and teasing the girls

Moonlight and flowers make night so appealing
The breete from the garden comes tenderly stealing
A beautiful maiden then whispers your name
And suddenly both of your hearts are aflame
Her dark eyes are gleamin' her raven hair shining
You pull her up closer your hearts are entwinning
Her warm lips are thrilling you're out of this world
From drinking tequila and teasing the girls

If down in Juarez you should happen to be
The Cafe El Gusto's the place you should see
They claim that they have and I know it's so the prettiest dancers in old Mexico
When Spanish maidens start squirmin' and dancin'
It's sure to set any young heart to romancin'
Your troubles get lighter your worries unfurl
While drinking tequila and teasing the girls
Heeee ha happy tonight...

Holy cow

South Park is hilarious.  Who else would have thought to combine Obamacare, Canadian pharmacies that ship to the US, and Mylie Cyrus into a single episode.  Genius.

And this is incredibly subversive, since it's mostly watched by the younger folks.  Genius, again.

BIOS rootkit that communicates via ultrasonic sound

This is scary, worthy of Halloween:

Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. He didn't know it then, but that odd firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume most of his waking hours.

In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux.

...

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping "airgaps" designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities.

A good rule of thumb is that you should be suspicious if you see IPv6 from your computer, especially if it's encrypted.  If you're remotely interested in security, you should read this.  It's quite a good writeup, and shows just how bad things have become.

The Bad Guys are very good indeed.

You know how I said that the NSA has gotten a lot of techies really angry?

DIY encrypting phone.

Haloween is about kids

This isn't how a parent wants to remember Halloween: The Flight of the Fallen Soldier.  RTWT.

I experienced one of those myself, on a Delta flight one Independence Day holiday.

Valor is a gift.  Those having it never know for sure whether they have it until the test comes.

- Carl Sandburg