Saturday, July 12, 2014

Junior Brown - I Hung It Up

Image from the Wik, baby
I can't believe that I've been posting country music each week for 6 years and never put up a song my Junior Brown.  If you haven't run across him, you're in for a treat.  He invented his own special guitar, with an electric 6 string on the top and a slide 6 string on the bottom.  He is nothing short of a virtuoso and his music never really hit the big time, but never fails to make my toes tap.

The lady playing the acoustic guitar in the video is the talented and dishy Mrs. Brown.



I Hung It Up (Songwriter: ?)
I used to drink I used to smoke
I used to be a troublemaker and it ain’t no joke
I hung it up I hung it up
Yeah, Well I hung it up baby, cause I’m getting hung up on you.

I got some telephone calls from a gal or two,
But I hung it up right up cause I want to talk to you, 
I hung it up I hung it up
Yeah, Well I hung up the telephone cause I’m getting hung up on you.

Well I cut out your picture from your high school book
And I hung it on the wall so I can always take a look
I hung it up I hung it up
I hung up your picture cause I’m getting hung up on you.

I took out my car for a Sunday drive
But I ran it through a fence watching you walk by
I hung it up I hung it up
Now I hung up the car cause I’m getting hung up on you.

I went fishin’ in the river but I snagged my line.
It got hung up on a stump cause you were on my mind.
I hung it up I hung it up
I hung it up baby cause I’m getting hung up on you.

Friday, July 11, 2014

Atlanta readers: formez vos Battalions!

Tomorrow we have the pleasure of hosting the author, raconteur, and Secret Squirrel Old NFO.  If you're in the area, stop by for what is always a very good time.  The secret squirrels will likely run on the wheel, and nobody does "That reminds me ..." like Old NFO.

Venue: Mac McGee's Irish Pub, Canton St. Roswell GA

Time: 11:30 - 2:00

So far I have confirmation from Differ, Coffeypot, and Charles B. Hodge, and a "definite maybe" from Dirk.  If anyone else wants to drop in let me know so that I can get us a large enough table at the Greatest Pub in the Universe.

So who is it that's collecting welfare?

It's not who you think it is:
That's the white underclass in America today... and the "welfare" recipients alone make up something like 15-20% of the population, never mind the "working poor" who earn enough to be means tested out of "welfare" programs.

All told, white, black, hispanic, and everyone else, this institutionalized underclass is something like 25% to 35% of our population, depending how you count it, and whose numbers you believe. Most of them don't live in the inner cities, or the "hood"...

They live in... Jacksonville Illinois.... or Kearny Arizona... or Waycross Georgia.

... and whether they are recipients of state "aid" or not, they are in what is known as an equilibrium trap.

If things were any worse, people would just leave. Go to another place with better education and employment prospects.

If things were any better, people could get ahead, and the local economy could grow.
This is a long but important post, one that highlights just how damnably hard it is to get incentive structures right, particularly in the public sphere.  RTWT, if you don't have a heart of stone.

Unconditional Surrender

Tokyo civilian dead after the firebomb attacks
Both Nazi German and Imperial Japan saw themselves as races of Supermen, destined to rule over lesser breeds.  Both underestimated their opponents.  Both overreached in their ambitions.  Both surrendered unconditionally to their foes.

They surrendered because they both lost the will to fight.  While some hardliners wanted to fight to the last bullet and baby, the countries and their leadership were exhausted and packed it in.  Seventy years of peace resulted.

This was in great contrast to the Great War.  A mere two decades after the November Armistice, Neville Chamberlin flew to Munich in a doomed attempt to avoid a second war.  What was the difference between World Wars 1.0 and 2.0?

It's because in 2.0 the losers knew that they had lost.  They had had enough of what their leaders had gotten them into.

The Czar of Muscovy muses on a surprising poll of the American public's opinion on post-war Presidents:
Last week, despite the intense suppression of the main stream media, the generally pro-liberal Quinnipiac polling team released a poll that asked folks who the best and worst presidents have been in living memory (since World War II, which is fair enough). The results were unexpected, at least by the Czar:

...

This chart is a stunning damnation of Obama. Americans have had it: they want Reagan back. They want his pro-growth programs, his foreign policy, his leadership. Not Hope and Change: America has finished with this. And coming in a mid-term election year, this poll just about punts the Democrats in the crotch.
The Obama Administration is very like the Imperial Japanese War Cabinet: arrogant, sure of their superiority over "lesser breeds" (for example, the ones that you find in Alabama or Oklahoma), convinced that their plans will result in domination and glory for their cause.  Indeed, Obama himself is perhaps the best example of the new Intellectual Class - credentialed but not educated, product of ideological indoctrination, thin skinned, dismissive of his opponents.

His "Hope and Change" mission is now revealed to the American People in its complete folly, just as the corruption of Bushido became revealed to the population of Tokyo.  Great damage is being done to this Republic and to its people.  The Czar continues:
Another item uncovered in the poll: yes, the country has changed its mind. 54% (a six-point lead) of the country wants Mitt Romney president. The Czar is beyond pissed about this, since no doubt that 54% more than includes the millions of Republicans who decided not to vote in 2012 because they were so sure Obama was done for on his own. You stupid morons. Stupid, stupid, stupid morons.
Here I must disagree with our Autocrat.  The Republic was not certain in 2012 that Romney's vision of the world was superior to Obama's.  Had Mittens taken up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the poll would have been much different.  The Senate would have stymied Romney just as the House has stymied Obama.  The Press would have had 18 months to savage the Romney Administration.

Most importantly of all, Obama's sad sack "Hope and Change" mission would not have been revealed to the American People in its full folly.  Indeed, Obama excels at campaigning, and at blaming his opponents for everything.  He would have been eligible for a second term.  He would at this very moment be gearing up his re-election campaign, and helping Democratic candidates in the mid-term elections.  The Press would be working overtime to help him, and them.

Instead, even the Press sees him as a sad sack lame duck, empty of vision or ability to lead.  He's no more use to them now, being ineligible to run for office.  The Democratic Party hardliners are in despair.  And remember, there will be two more years of President Empty Suit to keep that despair sharp.

This country has flirted with what can only be described as fascism, according to Mussolini's definition: everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.  Obama has convinced the people that this was a horrific mistake, by essentially allowing the middle class to be firebombed by terrible policy.

If Romney had won in 2012 this realization never would have dawned and there would be loud calls to implement the rest of the Hope And Change fascist agenda.  In two more years this agenda will be so politically toxic that its proponents will have no choice but unconditional surrender.  Toxic because of the massive damage to the middle class that is blamed on Obama, not on Romney.  Sure, you'll still have the oddball hardliner like Vermont's Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders - but he's the Left's version of Ron Paul, and will have as much impact.

I pointed this out in 2012 when I endorsed Obama for President in a very unpopular post.  But this is how I called it then:
A RINO President will demoralize the one significant spark of change that we've seen, the only reaction to an out of control Fed.Gov, our only hope of putting the brakes on before we're as wrecked as Greece.  And quite frankly, a withering of the Tea Party reform movement will be a delight to a GOP Establishment every bit as corrupt and venal - and power mad - as Nancy Pelosi.

And so, it is our civic duty to take a hit for our Country.  Put Obama back in office, unfettered.  The orgy of Progressive overreach by Regulation will be sporadically (and mostly ineffectively) resisted by a corrupt Big Government GOP.  The Agencies will rule the land, and the economy will remain seized up.

And rather than a million Tea Partiers taking to the streets, it will be two million, or three. 
I was wrong in that there has not (yet) been a repeat of the massive public demonstrations that we saw in 2010.  However, the polls show that the spirit that informed the Tea Party movement is waxing.  Because of Obama.
Rebuilding a party that Reagan might actually recognize is what this country needs - and right now, damn it - and Mitt Romney isn't the man to do it.

Barack Obama is.
And he seems to be doing a bang-up job of it.

I for one welcome our new Grammar Nazi overlords


Comrade Misfit brings it, including a Col. Klink reference.  RTWT.

.700 Nitro Express - the caliber for Zombie Boris Karloff?

ASM826* posted on what caliber would you use if you (like the lady in the story) were attacked by a crazed rabid deer.  A bunch of you left comments which mostly boil down to "this is my carry piece; there are many like it but this one is mine."

That got me thinking last evening when out with a friend.  His brother and sister-in-law were visiting from New Hampshire and were going to watch the Walking Dead being filmed here in Atlanta.  What caliber for zombies has been hashed to death (T-Bolt is the go-to guy on why shotguns are not what you want).  But even he hasn't reckoned with the first Walking Dead, none other than Boris Karloff himself.

It's from 1936, and is an actual zombie story.  Karloff is a man wrongly convicted of a crime and executed.  His body is reanimated by a mad scientist and he searches out those who falsely accused him.  They all meet unpleasant ends, proving that Justice isn't just poetic, but can write in iambic pentameter.

And so the interesting question is what caliber for zombie Boris Karloff?  It's not just your average zombie, it's Boris damned Karloff.  As a Zombie.  I'm guessing that a regular carry piece might not be enough,  T-Bolt says no to shotties, but you need something a bit beefier than pistol for this, and Zombie Karloff doesn't travel in hordes.  12 gauge slugs?  Depleted Uranium 12 gauge slugs?

Holland and Holland double rifle in .700 Nitro Express**?  DIY Elephant Gun?

* Not only is be bringing the shooty goodness, he's getting me to bring some, too.  Win!

** Yikes!  Those are $100/trigger pull, but if you can't afford the ammo you sure as shootin' can't afford the rifle.  But if you can't drop a Zombie - even Zombie Boris Karloff - with 9,000*** foot pounds of impact force (!!!) then the Lord is calling you home that day ...

*** Double Yikes!  It seems that you can hand load these babies to 15,000 foot pounds of impact!  At that point, I'd expect crew served**** from a tripod ...

Via El Wik, here's the .700 Nitro Express next to a .45ACP:


The dang bullet is bigger than the entire .45 cartridge.  I'm not ashamed to say that I'm not man enough to fire this off hand.  Yowzer.

**** I think that if I sold the house, I might be able to afford one of these.  Wonder if there are any on Craig's List?

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Sanctuary - The Nikola Tesla Song

Happy birthday, Nikola!



Ya know, I can see the Master being a bit rockabilly ...

This baby has good musical taste


Ooh, snap!




Via Chris Lynch, who finds tons of cool stuff.

Geeky science jokes

I know that a bunch of you will like these.  Here's a sample:
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.  The first orders a beer, the second orders half a beer, the third orders a quarter of a beer, and so on.  After the 7th order the bartender pours two beers and says, "You guys should know your limits".
Lots more here.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

I was wondering why I hadn't been to tumblr for a long time


Oh yeah, I remember.

The media lose their ability to sway public opinion

At least on climate change:
Only 20% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the scientific debate about global warming is over, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Sixty-three percent (63%) disagree and say the debate about global warming is not over. Seventeen percent (17%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The BBC has announced a new policy banning comments from those who deny global warming, a policy already practiced by the Los Angeles Times and several other media organizations.  But 60% of voters oppose the decision by some news organizations to ban global warming skeptics. Only 19% favor such a ban, while slightly more (21%) are undecided.
But then 42% believe the media already makes global warming appear to be worse than it really is. Twenty percent (20%) say the media makes global warming appear better than it really is, while 22% say they present an accurate picture. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure.
The public may not know a lot about science, but they know when they're being sold something.

Hat tip: 2cents via email.

Don't worry about the security of critical infrastructure

We have Top Men working on it:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has mistakenly released hundreds of documents, some of which contain sensitive information and potentially vulnerable critical infrastructure points across the United States, in response to a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a cyber-security attack.
The Operation Aurora attack was publicized in 2010 and impacted Google and a number of other high-profile companies. However, DHS responded to the request by releasing more than 800 pages of documents related to the 'Aurora' experiment conducted several years ago at the Idaho National Laboratory, where researchers demonstrated a way to damage a generator via a cyber-attack.
Top. Men.  I'm sure that the people who will run your family's health care will fully live up to this level of competence. Oh, and I love this:
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) did not respond to a request for comment today by SecurityWeek.
Yeah, I'll bet.  So what's the big deal about Operation Aurora?  It's what didn't happen:
It’s been seven years since that turbine shook and the smoke came out, yet I always thought Aurora was a lost opportunity.

The real beauty of the Aurora demonstration was it clearly showed that a cyber attack could affect a physical process. The specific vulnerability they chose to achieve this, while not unimportant, was not the main point to take from Aurora. It was an effective and dramatic demonstration.

Aurora should have led a massive DHS and US Government push to address the insecure by design ICS that run the critical infrastructure. Instead of taking this and leading a massive PR and bully pulpit campaign building off of this expensive but effective demonstration, people lost their jobs because the video and secret got out.
Yup - H4X0rz can let the magic smoke out of the generator, and the Brass puts everyone on double secret probation.  Good thing this information would never get out.  Oh, wait ...



Pretty cool how the machine shakes from one end to the other, and then it's quite an impressive release of Magic Smoke.  I'm sure that will buff out ...

In related news, a photograph from the DHS' Cyber Security executive management meeting was also released.


Bootnote: This is actually a great demonstration of why it makes no difference which political party wins the election.  This took place under George W. Bush, and the nothing that resulted has continued under Obama. Top. Men.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Bob Acri - Bossa Nova Viejo


What do you mean, "Obama doesn't have a plan for foreign policy?"


The People's Cube delivers

How fast is the video you get via your ISP?

Neat tool to compare providers in your area.

All your light bulbs are belong to us

Yeah, I've been saying forever that security for the "Internet Of Things" isn't an afterthought, it's not thought of at all.  It seems that some of the Smart Lads decided to have a go at one of the new fangled WiFi enabled light bulbs.  Hilarity ensued:
Loading the firmware image into IDA Pro, we could then identify the encryption code by looking for common cryptographic constants: S-Boxes, Forward and Reverse Tables and Initialization Constants. This analysis identified that an AES implementation was being used.

AES, being a symmetric encryption cipher, requires both the encrypting party and the decrypting party to have access to the same pre-shared key. In a design such as the one employed by LIFX, this immediately raises alarm bells, implying that each device is issued with a constant global key. If the pre-shared key can be obtained from one device, it can be used to decrypt messages sent from all other devices using the same key. In this case, the key could be used to decrypt encrypted messages sent from any LIFX bulb.
Those of you who deal with Tech are already in full Face Palm mode.
References to the cryptographic constants can also be used to identify the assembly code responsible for implementing the encryption and decryption routines. With the assistance of a free software AES implementation [7], reversing the identified encryption functions to extract the encryption key, initialization vector and block mode was relatively simple. [My emphasis - Borepatch]
Shared secret is bad, mkay?



Le sigh.


[Uses the patient voice reserved for talking to beloved but slow children]

You see, Punkin, this is why we can't have nice things on the Internet.

Monday, July 7, 2014

If you follow me, the NSA may be following you

Hmmm:
EDITED TO ADD (7/3): The BoingBoing story says that this was first published on Tagesschau. Can someone who can read German please figure out where this originated.

And, since Cory said it, I do not believe that this came from the Snowden documents. I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there.
EDITED TO ADD (7/3): More news stories. Thread on Reddit. I don't expect this to get much coverage in the US mainstream media.
And this should make all my readers feel all warm and fuzzy:
One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.
Because I'm the #1 Google result (out of 13 million) for "How to hide your data transmissions from the NSA".  And guess who's the #1 Google result (out of 28 million) for "How to hack a classified network"?

I'll save a seat on the bench at the camps, you dirty terrorist.

UPDATE 7 July 2014 14:47: Post title changed from "Is there a second NSA leaker?"

The inevitable inadequacy of the Intellectual Class

Word.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Reminder: Blogmeet next Saturday

OldNFO will be in town, which is a great excuse to get together for lunch, conversation, and Secret Squirrel type goings on.  As it turns out, next Saturday is also the 150th anniversary of when General Sherman sent the 400 Roswell women mill workers north to concentration camps.  There will be reenactments, events, and local history.  If you're a New England Yankee (or like Differ, an Old England Yankee), then this is a chance to get an unusual and rarely taught glimpse into American history.

Time: Saturday 12 July, 11:30

Place: Mac McGee's Irish Pub, Canton St Roswell GA

Please leave a comment if you're planning on attending so we can get a big enough table.

Blasts from the past

Songs from my youth.






Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No.1

Erik Satie was a dirty hippie in a top hat, living the bohemian life in Montmartre with the other dirty hippies in top hats in the late 19th century Belle Epoch.  Musically, he seemed to know everyone who was worth knowing - like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

More (financially) important, he became the pianist at the famed Paris nightclub Le Chat Noir as well as the organist at the Rosicrucian temple.  Le Chat Noir paid regularly.

In short, he was a dirty hippie, rebelling against his bourgeois upbringing.  Along the way he became a bona fide communist.  All in all, he fits the profile of someone you would like to punch in the nose if you met him walking down the street.  But along the way, he wrote this:



I guess we can forgive even such as he, for music such as this.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Things that aren't mulch or weeds

Live blues at a Darwin's Burgers and Blues on Roswell Road in Marietta.  Holy cow, the Saturday lunchtime music was really good, and they seem to get killer headliners in the evenings.

Riding past the Big Chicken on a bike, with a buddy riding wingman on his bike.  How y'all get to the Harley place in Marietta?  Head to the Big Chicken and hang a left ...


Riding past the B-29 outside Dobbins AFB on a bike, with a buddy as a wingman yadda yadda yadda.

Shooting pool back at Camp Borepatch when we were done and the patrol was safely back inside the wire.

None of these involved weeding the rose garden, or spreading mulch.  Strange, that.

The best laid plans ...

I was going to do more weeding and mulching in the rose garden today - #2 Son and I have been chipping away at it for a week* - but a buddy told me that he's coming over to shoot pool and ride motorcycles.  Well twist my arm then.

I guess the roses can wait.  As Oscar Wilde said, I can resist everything but temptation ...

* It's a big rose garden.

GI body armor for the invasion of Japan

Trent Telenko has been doing a great series about all the things that we think we know about the War in the Pacific (particularly the planning for the invasion of Japan).  We think we know a bunch of things that are actually wrong.  His original research on these topics has been fascinating.  For example:
Why infantry body armor like the M12 is so disruptive for the established narratives boils down to one word — casualties. The deployment of 100,000 such vests would have reduced American infantry casualty rates from lethal artillery fragments in the invasion of Japan to roughly Vietnam levels. This means roughly 1/3 fewer combat deaths from artillery fragments and about an overall 10% to 20% reduction in total projected combat deaths. Depending on which of the historical casualty ratios you select for measurement, it means something on the order of up to 10,000 fewer battle deaths, in the event that the A-bomb hadn’t made the invasion superfluous.
The atomic bombs ended the war, but on August 9 we had detonated 3 out of the 4 that we had manufactured.  If the Japanese hadn't surrendered, we would have gone in anyway, and there was a lot of planning that had been done for this.  All of that got packed up into dusty filing cabinets and forgotten before the USS Missouri had weighed anchor from Tokyo bay.

Friday, July 4, 2014

The pets do not like fireworks

Neither Crash the Wondercat nor Wolfgang are particularly happy with all of the explosions going on around us.  It's like a thunder storm that goes on for hours.

Report from the Front Lines

It sounds like a war zone.  #2 Son and I are weeding and mulching the rose garden here at Camp Borepatch.  From the explosions going off all around us, I think I'll do a quick circuit to check on the concertina wire and claymores.

Fortunately it's in the low 80s and low humidity (thank you Hurricane Arthur!) but dang, this is making me mean, nasty and tired.


Good looking, too ...

Ray Charles - America the Beautiful

I love this song.



And there's no music more natively American than bluegrass.  This is an all-star cast of performers including the late, great Earl Scruggs*, and the virtuoso performances are really stunning:



* The only person to ever win two Grammys for the same song.  You could look it up.

Screw you, Google


An Independence Day Public Service Announcement

I don't usually do PSAs, but this holiday (on the shores of anglophone North America ex Canada; all others can tune out now; kthanxbai) involves explosive devices, and so this is an important safety issue that everyone should keep in mind.

Explosions can hurt (duh).  They will almost certainly cause burns, which are some of the most painful wounds you can get.  And so I agree entirely with the advice from childhood buddy 2cents (emailing from a secure, undisclosed explosives bunker somewhere south of 45° North):
Only a fool shoots off incendiary devices sober!  What if you blow off a finger or something?  Sober that would hurt.
Sure would.  I recommend drinking heavily.  These guys sure have been.



Yikes.  From the looks of things, they won't feel the burn until they sober up.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Rex Harrison - Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?

The older I get, the more true I think this is.



And to any of you that will ask what happened to Thursday evening blues?  This is it.  Oh, yes.

Review of Lord Of The Rings: Shadow Of Mordor

#2 Son sends this in-depth look at the upcoming LOTR game.



Note that this is a long, in-depth review. Multiple adverts warning.

No longer just for dirty hippies

Glastonbury is quite an odd - if impressive - place.  The town is a maze of crystal healing shops, almost a permanent Renaissance Festival.  The ruins of the great monastery are like nothing you've ever seen.  I actually have quite fond memories of our visit there.


That's #1 Son in the stroller.  Been a while since he was that small.  The hippy reference in the post title, of course, comes from the Glastonbury Festival, which used to attract the unwashed from the four corners of the globe.

Used to:
I wrote that (hope you can read it, click to enlarge) for Sounds Magazine back in 1979. Back then Glasto was a half arsed hippy dippie festival that you had to provide all the jollies for yourself, there weren’t even bars back then( except for us Back-stagers). There were hot dog and burger vans and folks knocking out Falafal and curries. All kinds of alternative lifestyle stalls and two stages… The Pyramid and the Other Stage. There were theatre, cinema and comedy tents/stages too, but this was all in its infancy then. Now there are over a hundred stages catering from everything from Jazz to folk to Indie to Rave to… well you just cannot imagine what Glastonbury is like unless you have experienced it. In sunshine or in rain, in hail and mud (the British spirit of the blitz really kicks in with the mud!). It is truly Alice through the Looking Glass for three days or so. A world you would love to live in but like Brigadoon, vanishes oh so quickly and you have to get back to mundane reality and the 9-5 come Monday morning.
It actually sounds like fun.  Maybe I'll get back there with #1 Son sometime.

Just doing my part to destroy the environment

No need to thank me, it's all part of being a Full Service blog:
Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

So what you’re supposed to do is, you write a blog post about this, you put a link to them in the sidebar using their “my blog is carbon neutral” graphic, they plant a tree in your name, it soaks up 11 pounds of CO2, and — violoncello! — your blog IS carbon neutral.

So let’s point out the utterly fucking obvious, shall we? There is no relationship between blogs and trees. Nobody is waiting around for a pingback before they go stick a spruce in the ground. This is an ongoing reforestation program (by the Arbor Day Foundation in the Plumas National Forest. In California) and these German greenie-weenies have just latched onto to display, once again, their weak (or dishonest) grasp of cause-and-effect.
But mockery is too delicious to pass up, so this blog will proudly wear a new badge:


Now if y'all will excuse me, I'm going to go cut down a tree ...

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

This holiday weekend, remember that freedom has always bloomed when watered by the blood of patriots

Up until this very day:

Jackie Rozek fights back tears after she is presented with a flag by members of the Patriot Guard Rider to honor her boyfriend, U.S. Army Pfc. Aaron Toppen during a visitation at Parkview Christian Church on June 23, 2014. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The Atlantic has a solemn and quite respectful photo series about the final return flight of PFC Aaron Toppen.  It's worth a look, and the pondering that will come with the look.  It reminds me of an Independence Day holiday these three years ago, when I was flying to Dad's Memorial Service.  I found myself flying with a fallen hero:
This was the view from the window on my plane, last weekend:


Photo credit: Borepatch
I was not the only one on that plane who hung back from the typical deplaning rush, watching as a dance as old as Death played out before me, out on the tarmac.  This isn't a game, and these men deserve that our leaders treat it as reverently as the military - and we - do.

Enjoy the fireworks this weekend, enjoy the time with your families and friends.  But spare a thought for those whose blood watered the Tree of Liberty.  It's their due.


John Kocur Quartet - Independence Blues

More jazz, really.


Funniest. Advert. Ever.



I mean, the best one died years ago!

(via)

Government Climate Scientists circle the wagon on crummy data

For a while it looked like the serious data quality questions about the historical climate databases might be addressed honestlyOh well:
Apparently the NCDC Press Office sent an official response to Politifact, which Watts obtained:


Are the examples in Texas and Kansas prompting a deeper look at how the algorithms change the raw data?
No – our algorithm is working as designed.
All right then.  Judy Curry sums the situation up:
As Wayne Eskridge writes, this issue is a political hot potato.   I hope that the NCDC scientists are taking this more seriously than is reflected by the statement from the Press Office.  I hope that NCDC comes forward with a more meaningful statement in response to the concerns that have been raised.

I’m hoping that we can see a more thorough evaluation of the impact of individual modifications to the raw data for individual stations and regions, and a  detailed comparison of Berkeley Earth with the NOAA USHCN data sets. 

...

NOAA needs to clean up these data sets.  Most importantly,  better estimates of uncertainty in these data are needed, including the structural uncertainty associated with different methods (past and present) for producing the temperature fields.
It is very possible that the NOAA scientists can't clean up the data sets, because political pressure from the current Administration.  The analogy to Progressives is the lead up to the Iraq war and allegations about changing the intelligence estimates to justify the invasion.  Here it's changing the "intelligence estimates" to justify preferred climate programs.  These programs will be massively regressive, falling disproportionately on the poor - as indeed almost all "green" programs do.

It's almost like a Democratic Party war on science or something.

Blogmeet with OldNFO

OldNFO is going to be in town for lunch on Saturday, 12 July.  Anyone in the Atlanta area who would like to meet up for lunch is welcome.  Please leave a comment if you're thinking about it so I can arrange a suitable table.

Location: Mac McGee's Irish Pub, Canton St. Roswell

Time: 11:30 until whenever.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

The most Interesting Woman in the World

Lived 1000 years ago:
Dangereuse de l'Isle Bouchard (Poitevin: Dangerosa; 1079-1151) was the daughter of Bartholomew de l'Isle Bouchard. She was the maternal grandmother of the celebrated Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was also mistress to her granddaughters' paternal grandfather William IX, Duke of Aquitaine.[1] As the mistress of William the Troubadour, she was known as La Maubergeonne for the tower he built for her at his castle in Poitiers. Dangereuse was a sobriquet she received for her seductiveness; her baptismal name may have been Amauberge.
Yeah, baby!  It's on my bucket list to date a woman known as "Dangereuse" ...


Except maybe from Kiev:
The following account is taken from the Primary Chronicle. Princess Olga [born c. 890 died 11 July 969] was the wife of Igor of Kiev, who was killed by the Drevlians. At the time of her husband's death, their son Svyatoslav was three years old, making Olga the official ruler of Kievan Rus until he reached adulthood. The Drevlians wanted Olga to marry their Prince Mal, making him the ruler of Kievan Rus, but Olga was determined to remain in power and preserve it for her son.

The Drevlians sent twenty of their best men to persuade Olga to marry their Prince Mal and give up her rule of Kievan Rus. She had them buried alive. Then she sent word to Prince Mal that she accepted the proposal, but required their most distinguished men to accompany her on the journey in order for her people to accept the offer of marriage. The Drevlians sent their best men who governed their land. Upon their arrival, she offered them a warm welcome and an invitation to clean up after their long journey in a bathhouse. After they entered, she locked the doors and set fire to the building, burning them alive.
Rumor has it that your Czar of Muscovy was Olga's boyfriend, but since he wasn't burned to death, this is entirely rumor and conjecture.  Because what happens in Kiev stays in Kiev, истолковывать?

Malware is like biological pathanogenic weapons

Once you release them into the wild, there's no telling where they will infect something.  The Covertress (on a hopefully remunerative hiatus) emails to point this out:
Security researchers have uncovered a new Stuxnet like malware, named as “Havex”, which was used in a number of previous cyber attacks against organizations in the energy sector.

Just like Famous Stuxnet Worm, which was specially designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear project, the new trojan Havex is also programmed to infect industrial control system softwares of SCADA and ICS systems, with the capability to possibly disable hydroelectric dams, overload nuclear power plants, and even can shut down a country’s power grid with a single keystroke.
Well done, Cyber Warriors of Freedom!  You slowed down the Iranians by months!  Err, but now there's a cleanup on Aile European Power Grid.  I'm sure that you're all over this, right?  Kthanxbai.

P.S. Stalin would have had you all sent to Siberia.  Or liquidated.

P.P.S. Morons.

P.P.P.S. Note to Progressives everywhere: Observe your Philosopher Kings in action.  Top.  Men.

The latest from the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

Share and enjoy!


UPDATE 1 July 2014 15:12: Typo in post title fixed.  Thanks to Sherman for pointing this out.

The pipes play "The Flowers Of The Forest"

As we anticipate the centenary of the War To End Wars, this is a modified version of last year's post about a whole generation who were butchered and damned.  Et lux perpetua eis, Domine.  Amen.

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

98 years ago today, nineteen Allied divisions went over the top in an all out assault on the Somme.  By the time in the day that this post went up (0701 AM EDT, 1201 British Summer Time), probably 10,000 British soldiers were dead.

When the sun set at the end of the day, 20,000 men lay dead.  Another nearly 60,000 were wounded, many stranded in no-man's land.  Stretcher bearers dared the machine gun fire to bring the fallen back to safety and medical aid, earning two of the nine Victoria Crosses awarded that day.  Wounded were recovered for the next seven (!) days from this day's assault, and then found that there were only 10,000 hospital beds for the 60,000 wounded.



The 1st Newfoundland Regiment had to leave the safety of the trenches 200 yards behind their own front lines, because the closer trenches were choked with dead.  The German machine guns mowed them down: the Regiment suffered 90% casualties in minutes.  Newfoundland may never have recovered from the loss of so many of its sons.

It was said that day that Lions were led by Donkeys. The ghosts of those lions are seen in this astonishing video from the battle.  You see one soldier shot just as he goes over the top.  His body slides back into the trench.



Libertyman commented last year and identified the music to that video:
The haunting music is from Pie Jesu from Requiem by Sarah Brightman.
It's a prayer, as is this:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.


The Somme was perhaps the most stark example of the futility of the Great War.  By the end of the battle, a million men were dead or wounded.  For this cost, the Allies pushed the front lines six miles towards Germany, a cost of 31 men per foot gained.




This was the day that Europe committed suicide, 98 years ago today.  It's been a long, slow motion self-immolation, but that is now fair complete.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Bootnote: You can visit young Willie McBride at his home in Authuile, France.

Monday, June 30, 2014

LULZ


Backstory here.

The Jayhawks - High Water Blues

Old is new.



"Alt" something sound FTW.

So just how good is the secure "Blackphone"?

Exclusive review:
Both Silent Phone and Silent Text work over broadband cellular or Wi-Fi. Combined, they’re like the privacy advocate’s version of Skype: they provide voice and video calls, conferencing, and text chat, but all via peer-to-peer key exchange without an intervening server. There’s also the added benefit of encrypted file transfer.

Silent Phone is essentially an encrypted SIP phone network. The Silent Circle cloud service provides a directory service that connects users’ account names and IP addresses and then brokers a connection between them based on a public key exchange. It also provides a bridge to Plain Old Telephone Service systems, allowing users to call landlines or cell phone users who are outside of the service, encrypting and anonymizing the source of the call. Silent Phone also can create peer-to-peer conference calls, with one phone acting as the hub for a conversation.

When you place a voice or video call to another Silent Circle user, there’s an exchange of public keys between the apps and then the call begins. As an additional verification measure, the system automatically generates a two-word verbal challenge that you can use to verify you’ve actually got a secure connection. Tap the words to confirm, and Silent Phone displays three green circles to show you’re secure.

...

So, we’ve verified it: Blackphone is pretty damn secure.
But not cheap.  Almost $900 for a 2 year subscription (although that comes with 2 family licenses that lets the same software run on plan jane Android smart phones).

I can think of a half dozen ways that the NSA could try to go after this, but the cool thing is that none of the attacks are trivial.  It would take effort on their part, and effort runs against their "automagically sweep up everything" strategy.  Essentially, it's a financial Denial Of Service attack against Ft. Meade's domestic surveillance effort.  And the NSA brought this on themselves by their over reach.

I'd point out that if you want one, you'll have to wait - their entire initial production run is already sold out and it's not even shipping yet.

Men are like cats, women are like dogs

Actually, this is pretty close (and very funny).


Hollywood respect for the troops

Sometimes it's in unexpected places:
Check it out: Golden-Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated actress Amy Adams, made the news Friday by quietly and classily giving up her first-class seat to a soldier on a flight.  This stunned me because most actors in Hollywood work their butts off and visit many a casting couch to get a first-class seat tucked away from the cattle in coach.  Truth be told, so do a lot of conservative pundits that I’ve had the misfortune to meet in my foray into this field.

...

Miss Adams was not only classy in giving up her first class seat to one of our warriors, but she also didn’t pimp out her good deed on Instagram with a selfie as some Kardashian stunt to solicit high praise for a staged act.  Matter of fact, we wouldn’t even know about what she had done had not ESPN’s Jemele Hill recognized her, watched the seat exchange go down and then tweeted about it.
I'm not sure when it started, but I'd managed to take somewhat of a dislike to Miss Adams somewhere along the line.  This has made me reconsider.  Well done.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

LOL


Shamelessly stolen from GFA.  He has more.

Something very interesting - and unprecedented - is going on with the climate databases

A few of you have emailed me about last week's reports that climate data has been "faked".  I've posted many times on how there are fishy things in the climate databases, so this didn't seem particularly new.  Also, there seemed to be a lot of skepticism in the skeptic part of the climate blogosphere.  Judy Curry has a post that sums the situation up nicely:
Last week, the mainstream media was abuzz with claims by skeptical blogger Steve Goddard that NOAA and NASA have dramatically altered the US temperature record.  For examples of MSM coverage, see:
Further, this story was carried as the lead story on Drudge for a day.

First off the block to challenge Goddard came Ronald Bailey at reason.com in an article Did NASA/NOAA Dramatically Alter U.S. Temperatures After 2000?  that cites communication with Anthony Watts, who is critical of Goddard’s analysis, as well as being critical of NASA/NOAA.

Politifact chimed in with an article that assessed Goddard’s claims, based on Watt’s statements and also an analysis by Zeke Hausfather. Politifact summarized with this statement:  We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

I didn’t pay much attention to this, until Politifact asked me for my opinion.  I said that I hadn’t looked at it myself, but referred them to Zeke and Watts.  I did tweet their Pants on Fire conclusion.

Skepticism in the technical climate blogosphere

Over at the Blackboard, Zeke Hausfather has a three-part series about Goddard’s analysis –  How not to calculate temperatures (Part I, Part II, Part III).  Without getting into the technical details here, the critiques relate to the topics of data dropout, data infilling/gridding, time of day adjustments, and the use of physical temperatures versus anomalies.  The comments thread on Part II is very good, well worth reading.

Anthony Watts has a two-part series On denying hockey sticks, USHCN data and all that (Part 1, Part 2).  The posts document Watts’ communications with Goddard, and make mostly the same technical points as Zeke.  There are some good technical comments in Part 2, and Watts makes a proposal regarding the use of US reference stations.

Nick Stokes has two technical posts that relate to Goddard’s analysis: USHCN adjustments, averages, getting it right  and TOBS nailed.

While I haven’t dug into all this myself, the above analyses seem robust, and it seems that Goddard has made some analysis errors.
Clearly, Goddard has made some substantial analytical errors.  The mainstream science community and most of the MSM have ignore this story.  But the plot thickens:
OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing.  For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.

In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news.  Watts pointed me to a post  by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas.  Excerpt:

So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.

From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.

...
Yet, according to the USHCN dataset, all ten months from March to December are “Estimated”. Why, when there is full data available?

But it gets worse. The table below compares the actual station data with what USHCN describe as “the bias-adjusted temperature”. The results are shocking.

In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.
This idea has been bandied about the 'net for five years or so - that the climate databases are filled with unjustifiable adjustments to the data that may make up much - or possibly all - of the reported warming during the 20th Century.  One of my first posts on (in 2009) this is titled How To Create A Scientific Consensus On Global Warming*:
All the Climatologists in the world will look at this data. How much do the adjustments change the results?

We don't know, but people are starting to look. They're starting to find that adjustments change the data a lot. They change the data so much that they show that the earth is warming when the raw data may show that it's cooling.

Let me say that again: Thermometers may be showing that the Earth is cooling, but adjustments to this data show a rapid temperature rise.
Remember "hide the decline"? 

So what is unprecedented about this?  Well, it seems that NOAA is now starting to take this seriously.  Curry again:
I’ve been in email communications with Watts through much of Friday, and he’s been pursuing the issue along with Zeke and help from Neilsen-Gammon to NCDC directly, who is reportedly taking it seriously. Not only does Watts plan to issue a statement on how he missed Goddard’s original issue, he says that additional problems have been discovered and that NOAA/NCDC will be issuing some sort of statement, possibly also a correction, next week. (Watts has approved me making this statement).
This is big, big stuff.  We will need to see how this plays out, but this is a seismic shift.  Curry does an excellent job of introducing a complicated subject, the players, and the dynamic.  I strongly encourage you to click through and RTWT.

Oh, and read my 2009 post, too.  Happy to be four and a half years ahead of NOAA.  No need to thank me, it's all part of being a full service climate blog.

* I have quite a few of my climate posts gathered here.  Probably need to update that, since the post is four years old or something.

This shows a little more skin than usual around here

What the heck.


The speedos were a thoughtful addition.

Georg Frideric Handel - Israel In Egypt (oldest recorded music?)

Queen Victoria opens the Crystal
Palace in 1851.  Image via La Wik
On this day in 1888, Col. George Gouraud used Thomas Edison's parafin cylinder to record Handel's oratorio.  It captured the sound of several thousand singers performing at the Crystal Palace Handel Festival, and is perhaps the oldest recorded music that we can still listen to.  Col. Gouraud (recipient of the Medal of Honor in the American War for Southern Independence) is dead these hundred years or more; the Crystal Palace burned to the ground in 1936.  But the recording gives us the ghosts of 125 years ago, performing to as much enjoyment in their day as we have in ours.



The original recording is identifiable in the digitized version of the original parafin cylinder.


Saturday, June 28, 2014

Travel isn't what it's cracked up to be

I have a younger colleague at work who found that he was needed in Passadena.  Being one of the younger pups, he was excited to be going to a place where he'd be surrounded by Southern California Belles.  I tried to warn him not to get his expectations too high ...


What to do if the police try to search your phone

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU, some good advice:
The absolute best way to protect your phone from police inspection is to keep it locked with a passcode, which will keep an officer from rummaging through your Facebook photos as you stand beside him in handcuffs.

“The most simple precaution you can take is to make sure your phone is locked and/or encrypted,” says Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The police may take your phone, may try to look at it unconstitutionally, but they won't be able to.”
This is good security practice anyway.  But the "interesting" bit comes after Officer Friendly decides he's going to look anyway.  Lots of good info about how to handle this at the link.

Caturday

After three and a half years I finally set up my pool table.  Crash the Wondercat approves.


The flash makes his eyes look like they're powered by a nuclear reactor, which is pretty funny.  But the felt is collecting white hair pretty fast which isn't as funny.

Why yes. I found Jesus at the Shooting Range.

Goober is situationally aware.

And when some nogoodnick asks you if you've found Jesus you answer, well, look at the post title ...

Icelandic Country Music

It's said that Country Music is about something that's happened to you, or to someone you know.  This song has happened to most of us, and some awesome neo-Vikings have created it in Iceland.

Route 66° North.  Yeah, baby.



This isn't American music, this is everyone's music.  Because it's happened to everyone, or to someone they know.  Or they'd like it to happen.  Freedom smells like a V-twin.

Friday, June 27, 2014

29 years without Route 66

It was Unrouted on this day in 1985.  If there's a better example that the Federal Government agencies are staffed with nincompoops, I don't know what it is.  Don't believe me?  Watch.



The road was so iconic that it inspired iconic music (recorded by everyone).  And so the Federales say nah - let's get rid of that.Think you could eliminate the entire office that did that and nobody in the Republic would notice.

Security Smorgasbord, vol 6 no 1

Paypal's 2-factor authentication is entirely broken:
Researchers at DUO Security claim to have found a way of bypassing a two factor authentication feature that secures logins to Paypal.com, eBay’s online payment service.

The vulnerability could allow an attacker who has stolen a Paypal customer’s user name and password to gain access to the account, even though the customer had enabled the more secure two-factor authentication option.
Two factor authentication is a big step up from the normal username/password.  Often it's implemented by sending you a random string of text and/or numbers via SMS to your phone.  This way, you need not only to steal the username and password, but the person's cell phone as well.  Unless the way the two factor authentication is implemented is broken.  Oops.  Paypal users, FYI.  Paypal said they're "working on it", whatever that means.

Why do you rob banks?  Because that's where the money is:
The experts at Kaspersky Lab have discovered evidence of a targeted attack against the clients of a large European bank. According to the logs found in the server used by the attackers, apparently in the space of just one week cybercriminals stole more than half a million euros from accounts in the bank.

The first signs of this campaign were discovered on 20 January this year when a C&C [Command & Control - Borepatch] server was detected on the net. The server’s control panel indicated evidence of a Trojan program used to steal money from clients’ bank accounts.

The experts also detected transaction logs on the server, containing information about which sums of money were taken from which accounts. All in all, more than 190 victims could be identified, most of them located in Italy and Turkey. The sums stolen from each bank account, according to the logs, ranged between 1,700 to 39,000 euros.

The campaign was at least one week old when the C&C was discovered, having started no later than Jan. 13 2014. In that time the cybercriminals successfully stole more than 500,000 Euros. Two days after GReAT discovered the C&C server, the criminals removed every shred of evidence that might be used to trace them. However, experts think this was probably linked to changes in the technical infrastructure used in the malicious campaign rather spelling the end of the Luuuk campaign.
If you bank online, you should check your account every day.

History repeats itself because nobody listens the first time:
The security industry is adding layers of defensive technologies to protect systems rather than addressing the most substantial, underlying problems that sustain a sprawling cybercrime syndicate, according to an industry luminary who painted a bleak picture of the future of information security at a conference of hundreds of incident responders in Boston Tuesday.

Eugene Spafford, a noted computer security expert and professor of computer science at Purdue University, said software makers continue to churn out products riddled with vulnerabilities, creating an incessant patching cycle for IT administrators that siphons resources from more critical areas. The problem has grown so bad that today businesses are rushing to invest in many of the latest security technologies designed to detect infections without any ability to efficiently address them, Spafford said.

“Instead of building secure systems, we are getting further and further away from solid construction by putting layer upon layer on top of these systems,” Spafford said. “The idea is for vendors to push things out rather than get things right the first time.”
Spaf is one of the luminaries of the industry, and is absolutely correct here.  It's getting much worse with poorly coded apps for smart phones.  Just wait for the "Internet Of Things" to computerize your house ...

Is it OK for me to hate on Google Glass users?  Please?
Google Glass wearers can snoop on passcodes and other sensitive information with only a passing glance, according to a proof-of-concept demo by security researchers.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Lowell were able to use video streams from wearables like Google Glass and the Samsung smartwatch to capture four-digit PIN codes typed onto an iPad from around three metres away.
ASM826 has been posting about situational awareness.  Be aware of who's near you when you're at the ATM.

The Republican Party in the "Awkward Stage"

The GOP Senate runoff election in Mississippi is instructive at how useless that party is in the cause of restoring the Republic.  Consider:
A Republican Party campaigning on making the Senate “conservative,” used liberal Democrats to preserve an incumbent Republican and defeat a conservative. The actual conservatives are the outsiders with the GOP establishment doing all it could to preserve its power at the expense of its principles.


The problem for those who call themselves Republicans is that it is harder and harder to say exactly what a Republican is these days. The great lesson from Mississippi is that Republican means, more or less, that if elected the party will reward its major donors, who are just different than the Democrats’ major donors. Policy differences are about different donors, not an actual agenda to shift the country in a different direction.
Consider:
“[They] orchestrated flyers that called me a racist,” [McDaniels] said. “They said I would end food stamps for everyone. They went into the same communities with speaker trucks and said that I was trying to suppress votes in those communities. They did every dirty trick in the book, behaving just like liberal Democrats do.”
Consider:
National advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association and the American Action Network have gone to bat, with the NRA rushing to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s aid
As if we needed another reason to despise the NRA ...

Consider:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question,
now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked
from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already
it was impossible to say which was which.
Consider:
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
....

On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. But most people are still standing around numb and confused, knowing something's wrong with the country, but hoping it isn't quite as bad as they're beginning to suspect it is.
....

Something's eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many.
Or you can relax in the belief that the Party of Caesar will be checked by the Party of Antony.  And the circuses are entertaining and the bread is free.

Doubled

That's what ASM826 has done to the number of comments left here by y'all over the last couple days.  I'm pretty thrilled having him post here, and I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one.

I have been not too bad about getting posts up (and *ahem* wordy posts at that), but ASM826 is doing yeoman work getting this to be a place that you like to hang out.  That's pretty awesome.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Bill Wyman & Rhythm Kings ~ Chicken Shack Boogie

Some Boogie Woogie as a little change from the usual Thursday Blues.


How to get away with murder

Be a cop:
As Saenz was dragged back outside for transport to the hospital to be treated, he struggled with officers but never left the ground, his hands clamped behind his back in handcuffs. Officers couldn’t control Saenz, but he didn’t appear to be much of a credible threat to either of them, with his hands in cuffs behind his back and his pants falling down. He was certainly a nuisance and refusing to cooperate, but wasn’t much of a threat.

After struggling with Saenz for several minutes and apparently getting frustrated  with their inability to get Saenz sufficiently subdued, one of the officers, El Paso Police Officer Jose Flores, pulls his pistol and shoots a downed and restrained Saenz from behind, twice, killing him.

Note the muzzle flash.  This execution was captured live on video.  The result of a policeman shooting in the back a possibly mentally ill, handcuffed man lying on the ground?
Prosecutors have refused to charge Flores for what appears to be an execution born of nothing more than an officer’s frustration to get a restrained suspect to comply.
So what's the difference between the picture above and this one?


The answer, of course, is that there's no difference at all to the men lying on the ground.  Yeah, Godwin's Law and all that.

Does the USA advance in the World Cup?

It's currently a draw at halftime.  We advance if we beat Germany, otherwise the outcome is complex and dependent on the score against Germany as well as the outcome of the Portugual-Ghana game.  Nat Silver's 538 has a nice breakdown of whether we advance or not:


More complicated than the Infield Fly Rule ...

Musing

Obama wanted to fundamentally transform the Republic.  If you take that to mean "end the Pax Americana" then he has largely succeeded.  The results from Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the East China Sea, and other places shows pretty clearly that this is likely a very bad thing indeed for the world's population.

While I'm completely sympathetic to the notion that the USA should not be the World's Policeman (particularly when most people hate us for that), I wonder if the Nobel Peace Prize committee is having second thoughts.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The meaning of Life

It's more than 42:
My advice?  Take it easy on yourself.  Life is far from perfect.  You are far from perfect.  You’ll make mistakes.  You’ll do stupid stuff and cost yourself money or standing.  It will be inevitable.  The search for the storybook perfect life is one of futility.  No one has ever had it.  Seeking it is folly.  Do your best, and take pride in the fact that you are doing your best, and be content with that.
That's one wicket smart fellow, right there.  RTWT.  It says this:



Make peace with God and make peace with yourself
In the end there's nobody else ...

Geek tip: how to extract specific pages from a multi-page PDF file

This is uber geeky, and so if that's not your bag, Baby, then you might want to skip this.

I recently had to break down a multi-page PDF file into different PDFs - basically, rearranging the file into logical sections each as its own file.  This is neatThis, too.

As you'd expect, there are ways to combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF as well.

We now return you to a less geeky normal blogging schedule.