Ray Charles - America The Beautiful

Alternate title: how The United States accidentally committed suicide.

Co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 and I have had a number of conversations lately about how when we both started blogging 15 years ago, we still had hope.  Yes, I cribbed the alternate title from histories of Rome, but there's a fateful dynamic at play today that mirrors what played out back then.

In 400 AD, Rome stood tall.  Sure, there were problems, but Rome was the only super power. 76 years later, it no longer existed.*  It was simply unable to respond effectively to the barbarian invasions - the problem wasn't a military one, it was structural.  The Legions were still strong, but the ruling elite could not use them effectively to keep the barbarians out.  You see, they didn't want to keep them out.

Barbarian hordes were an opportunity to various members of the elite.  The rewards of power and wealth to those at the top of the Roman Empire were so unbelievably vast that, well, a wandering barbarian horde might be able to be used to put somebody new on the throne.  And so the elites played 27 Dimensional Chess against each other until the Empire was overwhelmed.  What temporarily helped local Senators and Provincial Governors quite frankly led to the downfall of them all.  I'm looking at you, Constantine III.

And so to today.  The Ruling Class in this Republic is institutionally incapable of dealing with the problems facing the Republic because they don't want to.  Indeed, there is a dynamic at work: never let a crisis go to waste.  This has come about in a shockingly short time - twenty years or so.

But this happened to Rome as well.  Between 410 and 430 AD, the Eternal City itself was sacked and Spain and Africa were lost to the Empire - and with them went the tax revenue that had supported the Legions.  Today we have a President who is a feeble-minded puppet; the Emperor Honorious was (at the time) compared to a jellyfish.

The grandeur that was America was very great indeed, but so was Roman grandeur.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi, and all that.

Entering this Independence Day weekend I wish I could be more optimistic.  I  leave you with a song from the dark days after 9/11, a reflection of a time when the grandeur of this Republic was great, even though the dynamic that has led us here was already formed.

America The Beautiful (Katharine Lee Bates, Samuel A. Ward):

Oh beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self, their country loved
And mercy more than life

America, America may God thy gold refine
'Til all success be nobleness
And every gain divined

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain

America, sweet America
God shed his grace on thee
He crowned thy good, with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress,
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Oh beautiful for halcyon skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music hearted sea!

May God save this honorable Republic.

* Well, in the west, at least.

Dad Joke CCLXVIII

What did one Math Book say to the other? 

Man, I sure have a lot of problems.

Military personnel receiving smart watches in the mail

Of course, there's malware involved:

Service members across the military have reported receiving smartwatches unsolicited in the mail. These smartwatches, when used, have auto-connected to Wi-Fi and began connecting to cell phones unprompted, gaining access to a myriad of user data.

These smartwatches may also contain malware that would grant the sender access to saved data to include banking information, contacts, and account information such as usernames and passwords.

Malware may be present which accesses both voice and cameras, enabling actors access to conversations and accounts tied to the smartwatches.
 

These products may also be used for Brushing. This is the practice of sending products, often counterfeit, unsolicited to seemingly random individuals via mail in order to allow companies to write positive reviews in the receiver's name allowing them to compete with established products.

What to do if you receive one of these devices:

• DO NOT turn the device on.
• Report it to your local counterintelligence, security manager, or through our Submit a Tip - Report a Crime reporting portal.

 Freebies like this are the equivalent of "open your mouth and close your eyes."  Let's be careful out there.

15th Blogiversary

Actually it was a couple days ago.  Seems like kind of a long time.

Thanks to co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 who also started his blog around the same time but who has been writing here for years and years.

Also, I'm trying to convince The Queen Of The World to write here sometimes.  Leave a comment on what you think of that idea.

Dad Joke CCLXVII

Have you heard of the band 1023MB? 

They haven't got a gig yet.

If you have an Apple device, you need to update it right away

Security patches for vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild:

The list of affected devices is quite extensive, as the zero-day affects older and newer models, and it includes:

• iPhone 8 and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 5th generation and later
• iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini (4th generation), and iPod touch (7th generation)
• Macs running macOS Big Sur, Monterey, and Ventura
• Apple Watch Series 4 and later, Apple Watch Series 3, Series 4, Series 5, Series 6, Series 7, and SE

It is an interesting article there - the Russian security services (FSB) claim that NSA has been using this against Russian targets for the last four years.

Aesop, about the Internets that you just won ...

... you can pick them up in the usual place.

There are only two things I have to add to the discussion of the Titan/Titanic disaster:

1. OceanGate seems not to have considered that their target customer had enough cash to sue them into oblivion if things went Tango Uniform.

2. OceanGate's investors did not consider what their liability would be if things went Tango Uniform.

The legal proceedings promise to be epic.  And yeah, I don't care that the release that their customers signed mentioned the word "death" three times.  Doesn't release them from liability for reckless endangerment and misrepresentation. 

UPDATE 23 JUNE 2023 19:42:  Big Country gets an honorable mention with this one:

He has more, so get over there.  He's of a similar mind of the legal predicament that OceanGate is in.

UPDATE 23 JUNE2024 20:04:  Miguel has an important pro-tip.

Something New In 'Full Metal Jacket"

 I've seen Full Metal Jacket several times over the years. I don't know about the combat in the second half, I have no personal experience to use to form an opinion, but the boot camp scenes are as realistic as anything I ever seen. Lee Ermey as GySgt Hartmann is what every Drill Instructor on the field in 1977 wanted to be. 

Here a classic scene, where Hartmann is doing a hygiene inspection, and finds his problem child, known only as Gomer Pyle, with an unlocked footlocker and some contraband.

I was on a forum discussing the movie recently and I pointed out that the doughnut was unrealistic. Primarily because, in three months on Parris Island, I never had dessert of any type. No cake, pie, cookies, and definitely no jelly doughnuts. Secondarily, the doughnut is pristine. It's not squished, it has a good shape, and it still is covered with powdered sugar. If Pyle had somehow landed the doughnut from who knows where, he still had to get the doughnut to the barracks and into his footlocker. It would not have been carefully carried in a box, it would have been tucked inside his uniform.

I got called out for taking the movie too seriously by one person, supported by others, and in the ensuing discussion I realized what Stanley Kubrick and Lee Ermey had done, right in front of us, and I had never heard it mentioned or thought of it before.

The only explanation for the doughnut in Pyle's footlocker is that Gunny Hartmann put it there. He would have had a list of combinations for all the recruit locks. He bought the doughnut, put it in the locker, and left the lock open so he could "discover" it, and then punish the rest of the platoon while having Pyle eat the doughnut. This leads to the blanket party scene where the platoon extracts revenge on Pyle.

And Pyle knows. He didn't put it there. None of them had seen a doughnut since they got on the bus. The injustice is what fuels his anger. It is the end of his attempts to conform, to grow into a Marine like the rest of the platoon.

Dad Joke CCLXVI

If two vegetarians get into an argument, is it still a beef?

A Complete Unsurprise

 In March of 2020, as the world was getting ready to close the doors and everyone was wondering how many people were going to die of the new virus, a friend of mine that works in a research lab told me that every single person that worked in his department believed the virus had originated in the Wuhan lab. That there was ongoing research in Wuhan on gain of function using coronaviruses taken from bats. That political leaning had nothing to do with their opinions, it was just an obvious conclusion.

He never wavered from his opinion on this.  Said everything that made him a scientist pointed to it.

And he was right.

"Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli," Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was quoted as saying. Shi is popularly known as "the bat woman of China" and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV.

"Hu was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanised mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him," Chan added.

I suppose you could say, like Hillary Clinton, "What difference at this point does it make?" But I think it matters because this kind of research continues and that makes another outbreak inevitable. 

Dad Joke CCLXV

Why can't your nose be 12 inches long?

Because then it would be a foot.

Happy Father's Day

 

S.S. Minnow still going strong after 60 years

This is cool.

The day the Titanic's horn spoke again

Eighty-seven years after the Titanic slipped below the waves, the horn blew again.  This is the story of how that happened.

 

The crowd reaction on that day is really something.

Dad Joke CCLXIIII

What kind of lights did Noah have on the Ark?

Flood lights.

Django Reinhardt - Stardust

This is the kind of music that would be playing when I got home from High School.  You wonder what else Reinhardt would have recorded had he not died so tragically young.

More on the security email gateway hack

I've been posting recently about the Barracuda Networks compromise of their email security gateway.  It seems like it might have been the Chinese:

Chinese spies are behind the data-stealing malware injected into Barracuda's Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices globally as far back as October 2022, according to Mandiant.

Barracuda discovered a critical bug, tracked as CVE-2023-2868, in these appliances on May 19, we're told, and pushed a patch to all affected products the following day. 

...

Meanwhile, Mandiant, who has been working with Barracuda to investigate the exploit used and the malware subsequently deployed, today identified a China-based threat group it tracks as UNC4841, and said the snoops targeted a "subset" of Barracuda ESG appliances across several regions and sectors.

"Mandiant assesses with high confidence that UNC4841 is an espionage actor behind this wide-ranging campaign in support of the People's Republic of China," the Google-owned threat intel team said today.

Why do you rob banks?  Because that's where the money is.   If instead of money, you're after user data then email servers/gateways are a pretty rich target.

 

A message to commeter Birdchaser

You will remember the header at the cop of the comment box: Remember your manners when you post.

You didn't.  Boy, howdy.

Your comment didn't make it through moderation because of your very disrespectful and profane attack on me.  This is my place, not yours.  I don't care that you feel really really strongly about Donald Trump.  Cathedra mea, regulae meae.

I've only banned one person in the 15 year run of this blog (my abusive ex-wife).  Congratulations - you're number two.

Go away and don't come back.  All comments from you will be nuked without being read.

Antonio Salieri - Requiem in C minor

Today would have been my younger brother's 60th birthday, had he not died 100 days ago.  He was a complicated man, endearing and infuriating in equal measures.  You don't expect the younger to die before you.

Rest in peace.

Most people have heard of Antonio Salieri (if they have heard of him at all) as the sort-of villain in the film Mozart.  That sells him somewhat short.  His Requiem was performed for the first time at his funeral.

Dad Joke CCLXIII

What do you find  shaking at the bottom of the ocean?

A nervous wreck.

Security vendor oops

I recently posted about the security appliance vendor Barracuda's woes, with a critical bug in their email security gateway appliance.  Well the problem is worse than people thought:

Despite pushing out patches addressing vulnerabilities in its Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances in May, today Barracuda issued an urgent warning that all affected devices need to be taken offline and replaced immediately.

The ESG remote command injection vulnerability, tracked under CVE-2023-2868, was already under active exploit since October 2022, Barracuda said in its initial May 30 disclosure. A patch was released on May 20, but by June 6 it was determined the patch and subsequent script pushed out to counter unauthorized access weren't enough to secure impacted ESG devices, according to the advisory.

"Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level," Barracuda warned its customers in an update. "Barracuda's remediation recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG."

I'm struggling to think of another example of a security device that had to be junked after an incident.  I imagine that this isn't actually the first such incident, but no others come to mind.

Ouch.

Usually this sort of thing happens when a very old device reaches end-of-support/end-of-life.  At that point you've gotten your investment from the device and it's time to upgrade to something modern - but this cycle is often ten years.

To Barracuda's credit, they are shipping new devices to effected customers.

10 years after Snowden

Edward Snowden released his bombshell revelations ten years ago.  These showed that there was mass government spying on US citizens by US intelligence agencies; it also showed without a doubt that General Clapper perjured himself before the US Senate when he denied that this was the case.

Ten years later, Snowden is a refugee from the US Government, and Gen. Clapper is free as a bird (and guilty as sin).  This tells you much about how much trust to put in the US Government.

There are two excellent retrospective articles about this: The Register walks us through much of the narrative about the who, what, and when of the last ten years.  Highly recommended.  Here's the TL;DR:

"Ten years have gone by," since the first Snowden disclosures, "and we don't know what other kinds of rights-violating activities have been taking place in secret, and I don't trust our traditional oversight systems, courts and the Congress, to ferret those out," Wizner said. "When you're dealing with secret programs in a democracy, it almost always requires insiders who are willing to risk their livelihoods and their freedom to bring the information to the public."

Bruce Schneier has a fascinating piece from the perspective of someone who was involved with the disclosures.  Also highly, highly recommended.  Schneier is a security big wig, and so there's a fair amount of security industry inside baseball.  For example:

I ended up being something of a public ambassador for the documents. When I got back from Rio, I gave talks …at the IETF meeting in Vancouver in November 2013. (I remember little of this; I am reconstructing it all from my calendar.)

What struck me at the IETF was the indignation in the room, and the calls to action. And there was action, across many fronts. We technologists did a lot to help secure the Internet, for example.

And this prediction from your humble host has stood the test of a decade:

The two highlighted items really get to the heart of why the security industry is so angry about what the NSA has been doing.  They spent years establishing a relationship of trust with the industry and researchers.  Then they exploited that trust for personal gain at the expense of everyone else.

While I don't at all want to minimize the horrific crime of child abuse, that will give you a bit of the flavor of how the security industry looks at Ft. Meade now.  It was a rape, a rape of those who had trusted them as teacher and protector.

This is going to cause enormous problems for NSA.  I simply don't see how anyone will ever want to cooperate with them outside a public forum.  Nobody who values their reputation will be willing to be accused of slipping an NSA mickey into a crypto library.

And nobody on a standards body will ever again listen to NSA recommendations for changes to algorithms.  As a matter of fact, those recommendations will make the hair on the back of people's necks stand up, and lots of people will start to reverse engineer the NSA's math to see what games they're playing.

The last ten years have sure been a wild ride.

An animal that survives in space

This is a Tardigrade, an animal that is about half a milimeter long.  What's interesting is that is can survive in very extreme environments.

They have been found in hot springs.  They've been found in the deep ocean.  They've been found living under ice sheets.  They can go without food or water for 30 years, during which they enter a sort of suspended animation state where their metabolism drops by 99.99%.

They can survive temperatures approaching absolute zero, and in 2007 they were sent into orbit and once returned to Earth were reanimated.  There's currently talk that they could live on Mars if there were anything for them to eat.

Pretty wild.
 

D-Day + 79 (years)

There's quite a discussion in the comments over at Peter's place about whether Lindbergh was right (probably) and by implication whether we should have sat WWII out.

Once the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor and then Adolf Hitler declared war on us the following day, that ship had sailed.  These men fought because we had been attacked, and because Hitler had thrown his hat into the ring with Tojo.

As Big Country likes to say, period, dot.

Having stood at the top of that ridge at Omaha beach, and having walked the grounds of that cemetery, remember the men of that day.

Even security vendors get hacked

Barracuda Networks is a long-established security vendor (you've likely seen their billboards in airports).  As it turns out, their email security gateway has a vulnerability that the Bad Guys have been exploiting for months:

A critical remote command injection vulnerability in some Barracuda Network devices that the vendor patched 11 days ago has been exploited by miscreants – for at least the past seven months.

Barracuda said it discovered the bug, tracked as CVE-2023-2868, in its Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliance on May 19 and pushed a patch to all of these products globally the following day.

In a security alert posted on Tuesday, however, the vendor disclosed that the vulnerability was under active exploit long before the patch arrived. The flaw, which affects versions 5.1.3.001 to 9.2.0.006 of the ESG appliance, can and has been abused to run remote commands on targeted equipment, hijack them, and deploy data-stealing spyware on the boxes.

Clearly this is a major embarrassment for the company but it highlights just how hard security is to do correctly, year in and year out.  Consider:

• Barracuda clearly has the security expertise needed to prevent this.
• Barracuda clearly has a significant motivation to prevent this - they've taken some pretty major reputational damage here.
  

But it still happened.  It's happened to other security vendors before, and will happen to security vendors in the future because doing security properly is really, really hard.  The Bad Guys don't have to be perfect every single time - not by a long shot, but anyone playing defense against them sure does.

Pigs Hackers In Space!

This isn't quite the 21st Century I was promised, but this sounds like a very interesting idea:

Assuming the weather and engineering gods cooperate, a US government-funded satellite dubbed Moonlighter will launch at 1212 EDT (1612 UTC) on Sunday, hitching a ride on a SpaceX rocket before being releasing into Earth's orbit.

And in roughly two months, five teams of DEF CON hackers will do their best to successfully remotely infiltrate and hijack the satellite while it's in space. The idea being to try out offensive and defensive techniques and methods on actual in-orbit hardware and software, which we imagine could help improve our space systems.

Each year there is a security conference held in Las Vegas.  The Black Hat Briefings are pretty corporate and button-down, but it's pretty much the high point of the security year.  Black Hat's red headed stepchild is held immediately afterwards: DEFCON is where security folks let down their hair and let their freak flag fly.  In may ways, it's more interesting than Black Hat.

For example, they set up a network where people play "capture the flag", computer security style.  The attendees are also notoriously skeptical of the government, and have a "Spot The Fed" contest each year.

This is a very interesting approach taken by the Fed.Gov in that the visibility and coolness factor of hacking a satellite in orbit will totally overwhelm the natural tendency of the attendees to avoid all things Fed.

Interestingly, Dwight (your go-to guy for obituaries and which coaches have been fired) is also your go-to guy on DEFCON reporting.

Eric Clapton & Johnny Depp tribute to Jeff Beck

Who knew that Captain Jack Sparrow played the axe?  He's the one in the blue hat.

Full line up:
Eric Clapton
Doyle Bramhall II
Gary Clark Jr
Kirk Hammett (with Greeny)
Susan Tedeschi
Derek Trucks
Ronnie Wood
Johnny Depp
Billy Gibbons
John McLaughlin
Robert Randolph
Olivia Safe
Rod Stewart
Imelda May
Joss Stone

Sergei Rachmaninoff - Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

This music has appeared in many, many films from "Somewhere In Time" to "Groundhog Day" to "The Walking Dead".  It should be familiar to most of you.  This is Arthur Rubinstein on the piano.

Joe Bonamassa & Eric Clapton - Further On Up the Road

 Because it's Clapton and Joe B - which means it's awesome.

Unplug your Ring cameras

And maybe your Alexa as well:

America's Federal Trade Commission has made Amazon a case study for every cautionary tale about how sloppily designed internet-of-things devices and associated services represent a risk to privacy – and made the cost of those actions, as alleged, a mere $30.8 million.

The regulator on Wednesday charged, via the US Dept of Justice, two Amazon outfits with various privacy snafus.

The e-tail giant’s Ring home security cam subsidiary was accused of “compromising its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos.”

This report is absolutely damning.  Ring employees accessed thousands of videos - the report goes into detail about one employee looking at "Master Bedroom" camera videos of dozens of "pretty girls".

If you have any hesitation at all about unplugging (especially) internal house cameras, read the whole link.  You'll want to take a shower afterwards.

And Ring cameras in your bedroom?

[blink] [blink] [blink]

The report discusses how Amazon employees listened in on customers' children and retained the recordings in violation of the law.  Good grief.

My recommendation is to ditch all this spyware ASAP.  Ugh.

In which I de-Endorse Donald Trump for President

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I have been at least a luke-warm supporter of Donald Trump for years.  Heck, there are over 200 posts there, mostly talking up  his virtues.  Go, read, if you don't believe me.

But I am no longer comfortable posting about how Donald Trump would make a good President, because I do not any longer think that he would.

The Donald has come out against Ron DeSantis, not that this is surprising - after all, they are opponents for the Republican nomination.  I don't have a problem with that.  What I do have a problem with is the dishonest way that this opposition has come out:

Donald Trump's people attacked Ron DeSantis for (a) not slavishly following The Donald's massively damaging lockdown recommendations and then for (b) being entirely correct in doing so.

Let me be clear: Ron DeSantis saved Florida's economy by ignoring advice from Donald Trump's administration.  I was here.  I saw this.  I had just moved here from The Democratic People's Socialist Republic of Maryland and know people whose lives were destroyed by the Covid lockdowns imposed by a Republican Governor there.  So where are the "Trump War Room" objections to the Covid-19 lockdowns from (Republican) Governor Larry Hogan?

[crickets]

Go ahead.  Amaze me.

[I'm waiting]

Yeah, that's what I thought.  Someone who was all up The Donald's butt is a-OK, but someone who did something positive for his State (even though it went against your flunky's advice) is the Worst Thing Ever.  Quite frankly, I'd have more respect for this if (a) their advice was worth a plug nickel and (b) if your flunkies weren't trying to undermine you at ever step and if (c) you had had a damn clue about (b).

You didn't, and still don't seem to.  Quite frankly, this is the biggest knock against you - you brought your enemies into your inner circle, and you won't recognize allies if they don't kiss your butt.

To The Donald (as if he'd pay attention); We thought you were on our side.  We trusted you.  Like Bluto in Annimal House, wef**ked up.  And now we see that someone who actually earned that trust is in your cross-hairs.  

And so while I think you accomplished a lot in your first term, I don't think you are earning a second one.  Your ego is too big to allow someone actually accomplished to join you in the Oval Office.  And so, adieu.  Good luck, because you're going to need it. 

You are in an election.  You are facing adversity.  Remember that Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.  You are revealing more than you should like.  Stop doing that, or keep losing supporters.

Sorry, you've lost a supporter here.  Don't come calling after the nomination.  You're not Presidential material.

Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga - I've Got You Under My Skin

You have to listen for a while to appreciate Lady Gaga - well, I did, but came around to her as a credible singer of one of the all time great Big Band songs.

An endorsement (sort of from Wolfgang) for Chewy.com

We have used Chewy as our preferred supplier for Wolfgang's food and meds for like, forever.  They've shipped regularly and on time and we've been quite happy with that.

But that's not why we're recommending them.  Here's why:

When we first set up an account there was an option to upload a picture of your pet.  The Queen Of The World uploaded a pic of Wolfgang.  She expected that a little pic of him would be on their website when we ordered stuff for him.  Instead, we got a US Postal mailing that had a hand painted picture of Wolfgang, painted by one of their staff.

But that's not why we're recommending them.  Here's why:

When Wolfgang died, I went to their web site to shut down any auto-ship orders and that sort of thing.  They had a "Delete this pet" option which seemed to be appropriate, which I chose.  The next day I got an email from their support staff that expressed their heartfelt sorrow for what we were going through.  It wasn't an auto-generated email "So sorry for your loss" but a personal email that brought a tear to my eyes.

But that's not why we're recommending them.  Here's why:

Today the doorbell rang.  It was sumd00d dropping off a bouquet of flowers with a card saying that the team at Chewy was so sorry that we had lost Wolfgang.

They didn't have to do any of this (other than ship my orders on time).  My take is that Chewy hires people who love pets, and empowers them to treat their customers like, well, pet lovers.

The Queen Of The World and I were fans before this, but now we're HUGE Chewy fans.  They've treated us, and Wolfgang, above and beyond the call of current e-commerce.  They've treated us like family - better than some of our actual family in fact.

If you have a pet, Chewy.com comes highly, highly recommended from us (yeah, and Wolfgang - he liked the stuff we got there, from his daily food to his medications).  And no, we have no relationship with them other than very, very satisfied customers.

Your reads for today

Divemedic reminds us that not all service deaths were combat deaths. Juvat reminds us that not all service deaths were service members.

Enjoy your day but spare a thought for these heroes.

UPDATE 29 MAY 2023 13:23: Dwight takes a day off from his regular fare of obits and which sports coach got fired, to remind us of combat casualties as well.  Remember their stories.

Cleopatra's handwriting discovered?

Now this is interesting: 

A single Greek word, ginesthoi, or "make it so," written at the bottom of a Ptolemaic papyrus may have been written by the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII herself, says Dutch papyrologist Peter van Minnen of the University of Groningen. ... the papyrus text, recycled for use in the construction of a cartonnage mummy case found by a German expedition at Abusir in 1904, appears to be a royal ordinance granting tax exemption to one Publius Canidius, an associate of Mark Antony's who would command his land army during the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. The text reads as follows:

We have granted to Publius Canidius and his heirs the annual exportation of 10,000 artabas [300 tons] of wheat and the annual importation of 5,000 Coan amphoras [ca. 34,500 gallons] of wine without anyone exacting anything in taxes from him or any other expense whatsoever. ... Let it be written to those to whom it may concern, so that knowing it they can act accordingly.
Make it so!

"Written in an upright hand by a court scribe, the document was meant to be an internal note from Cleopatra to a high official charged with notifying other high officials in Alexandria," says van Minnen. "The personal nature of the communication is evident in the lack of any formal introduction of Cleopatra herself (she is not even mentioned by name) and the absence of a title after the name of the official to whom it was addressed (the name cannot be read)." The manuscript is not one of the copies received by the other officials, as there is no forwarding note attached to it and because it was executed in multiple hands. The text of the ordinance was written first, Cleopatra's written approval second, and the date of the document's receipt in Alexandria third.

If this was actually signed by her, this may be the first royal ancient handwriting ever discovered.

John Williams - Hymn for the Fallen

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day for reflection on those who gave everything they had and everything they would ever be for something larger than them.  That something is us, and the world is filled with the graves of the fallen, and will likely see new ones until the World is remade.

A lot of people seem to think that Memorial Day is "thank a veteran" Day.  I guess that could work, but only if you were at a cemetery.  The roots of Memorial Day go deep, all the way back to the American War of Southern Independence*, where "Decoration Day" was reserved to take flowers to the graves of the Fallen.  Late May was chosen because flowers would be in bloom in every corner of the Republic.

Nowadays it's the long weekend that starts the summer season.  Trips to the lake, grilling out, and cold beer push the original meaning aside.  Few take flowers to the graves anymore, which is a damn shame.  The Fallen deserve a day of remembrance.

This weekend, we are called to reflect on these fallen.  Art at its best is there to help lead the way.  Classical music used to offer many selections for solemn days like this before it was degraded like all modern art.  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.  This is a tour of those graves.  Sadly, many Americans have not been to any of these places.

The Fallen remain forever 20 years old.  Remember them tomorrow as you fire up your grill.  I don't think they - or the boys from Gettysburg or Fredericksburg or Cold Harbor or Pearl Harbor or Normandy or a thousand other hallowed grounds -  would begrudge you your family enjoyment.  But remember them.

That's what Memorial Day is about.

* It is vulgarly called the "Civil War".  It wasn't.  The South didn't want to take over the North, it wanted to leave it.

 

Night 1 of my Grand Daughter's beauty pageant

Earlier this month I posted that #1 Grand Daughter was in the Miss USA Teen Rhode Island pageant.  Well tonight was the first night.

Wowzer.  She gets her good looks from her Mom, who gets them from The Queen Of The World.  No mystery there.

Dang, my son-in-law the Chief really needs a shotgun.  Longtime reader LindaG suggested that this song might be appropriate:

So help me out, Rhode Island readers - where's a good gun store up there?  I'd ask for a local gun store but c'mon - everything is local in Rhody.  OldAFSarge, I expect you're my go-to guy up there.

(Help us, Obi-Wan OldAFSarge.  You're our only hope!)

The Statler Brothers - More Than a Name on a Wall

This is Memorial Day weekend.  It's not "have a nice barbecue" weekend, although that would be a fine thing to do and nobody would blame you for it.  It's also not "thank a veteran" weekend, although nobody would blame you for that, either.  But that day is in November, not May.

This weekend is to remember those who never made it home from war.  So raise a cold one in toast to them at your barbecue.  As the Statler Brothers put it so well, they're not just names on a wall.

More Than A Name On A Wall (Songwriters: Jimmy Fortune, John Rimel)

I saw her from a distance, as she walked up to the wall
In her hand she held some flowers, as her tears began to fall
She took out pen and paper as to trace her mem'ries
She looked up to heaven, and the words she said were these

She said, "Lord my boy was special, and he meant so much to me
And Oh, I'd love to see him just one more time you see
All I have are the mem'ries and the moments to recall
So Lord could you tell him he's more than a name on the wall"

She said, "He really missed the family, being home on Christmas day
And he died for God and country in a place so far away
I remember just a little boy, playing war since he was three
And Lord this time I know, he's not coming home to me"

She said, "Lord my boy was special, and he meant so much to me
And Oh, I'd love to see him but I know it just can't be
So I thank you for my mem'ries and the moments to recall
But Lord could you tell him he's more than a name on the wall
Lord could you tell him he's more than a name on the wall"

Dining on the Titanic

I do like this guy's vlogs.  These recipes sound yummy - even the one from 3rd class.  I'd eat that.

This one from 2nd class sounds yummy.  You'd pay big bucks for this at a good French restaurant.  At one point in my life I had a big cookbook on sauces, and I'd be shocked if it hadn't had a recipe for Sauce Lyonaise.  But ten courses at dinner?  Oof.

Yeah, I'd eat that, too.

Of course, the best was reserved for 1st class.  Oddly, this seems awfully fussy.  I don't think I'd want to make it.  I don't mind Chartreusse and I like peaches, but it seems, well, fussy.  Sort of like Edwardian First Class ...

Like I said, I like this guys videos and I'm not the only one.  Has has almost 2 million subscribers.  Check him out - he has more Titanic recipes including crew mess and cocktails.

Huh. So a steel helmet gives better protection than a kevlar one?

Who knew?

Lots of good helmet info at that link.

Rest in Peace, Sled Driver

Major Brian Shul, combat pilot and SR-71 driver dead at 75.  As always, Dwight is your go-to guy for obits.  Rest in peace, Major.

We've seen him here before - actually 13 years back.  Reposting for his sendoff.

(Originally posted 9 April 2010)

Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.

OK, you win the who's the coolest kid around contest:

One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. 'Ninety knots,' ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. 'One-twenty on the ground,' was the reply. To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was 'Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,' ATC responded. The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of Walter's mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice, Walter startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ' Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.' We did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.

The SR-71 Blackbird, designed by the same Kelly Johnson who designed the P-38 and U-2, was shot at 4000 times. It outran the missile each time. When the final aircraft was decommissioned by the Air Force, and was given to the Smithsonian Institution, they flew it from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. In an hour.

Man, that's one cool bird.

Ugh

I'd say that I have a bad springtime cold, but this is Florida and it's full on summer.

Bah. 

Oh bother

It seems that people have been trying to use ChatGPT to translate Linear-A, but there are just too few texts to allow translation.

Oh, well.  I've thought for some time that they would just be ancient Minoan shopping lists, anyway. 

Harry James - Beyond The Sea

Charles Tennant's song La Mer is tied with Edith Piaf's La Vie En Rose for the (worldwide) best selling popular song in french history.  Some of this is due to the English translation and Harry James' wildly popular version here.  Marion Morgan's voice is liquid gold.

Deepfake penmanship

People have been talking about "Deepfake" pictures and video for years now - artificially created media based on publicly available source media that shows something entirely made up.  ChatGPT adds the ability for AI to write documents on arbitrary subjects.

The problem for people passing these off is that the fonts used to print them don't look handwritten.  They're too perfect, to regular.  Real people have subtle variations in their handwriting so you can catch this sort of thing out.

Until now:

Like other machines, this starts with asking ChatGPT to write an essay based on the assignment prompt. That generates a chunk of text, which would normally be stylized with a script-style font and then output as g-code for a pen plotter. But instead, Devadeth created custom software that records examples of the user's own handwriting. The software then uses that as a font, with small random variations, to create a document image that looks like it was actually handwritten.

It uses a pen plotter to write the document, so it could be written in a spiral notebook.  The future is stupid, and entirely untrustworthy.

(via) 

Dad Joke CCLXII

Why are frogs always so happy? 

They eat whatever bugs them.

Russian hacker cyber attacks Kremlin and lands in the Gulag

Quite frankly, I'm not sure what he was thinking:

A Russian IT worker accused of participating in pro-Ukraine denial of service attacks against Russian government websites has been sentenced to three years in a penal colony and ordered to pay 800,000 rubles (about $10,000). 

According to the state-owned TASS news agency, a Russian regional court handed down the sentence against Yevgeny Kotikov, who is said to have supported Kyiv during Russia's invasion of Ukraine. To this end he and others DDoSed government websites including those belonging to the Russian president and the country's Ministry of Defense, we're told.

[blink] [blink]

Solid plan, tovarich.

Chaos has descended

Unexpectedly we have two grand kids and two grand dogs for the day.  Blogging will be sparse.

UPDATE 21 MAY 2023 14:38: How do you stop a 13 year old from fighting with his 10 year old sister?  Ask the Romans: divicis et imperio.  Divide and conquer.  He and I took the dogs for a walk and things are quiet now.