Captain Obvious clearly isn't a Poll Watcher

Estonian e-voting system is hackable and shouldn't be used:

Estonia's internet voting system should not be used for the European elections in May because its security vulnerabilities could lead to faked votes or totals, say independent researchers.

...

As one of the highest-profile countries in its adoption of the internet, Estonia intends to use the e-voting system for its European elections in May, and already uses it for national parliamentary and municipal elections. Up to a quarter of votes are cast online in elections.

The attacks could be carried out by nation states that wanted to compromise elections, or a well-funded candidate who hired criminal hackers with the capabilities to alter the vote, the researchers warned.

This is such an astonishingly bad idea that the only explanation is that the Establishment wants this to prevent Tea Party style voter revolts.  While that sounds like it's tin foil hat territory, nobody who put any thought into this would fail to ask "So what about security" as the very first question.

Dang it

Kevin Baker is (mostly) hanging up his blogging boots.

The best way to describe Kevin is as the scholar of the gunblogging world.  This is perhaps the finest example of his work, assembling a complete reference work for the RKBA world.  Enjoy your time off from blogging, Kevin, and thanks for posts like that.

I gotcher "White Priviledge"

Right here, bitch.

Make sure you read all the way to the end.  The last three sentences explain everything.

Judi Dench as Lady MacBeth

This is why she is more properly referred to as Dame* Judi Dench.  Few captured the evil that the character embodied.



He should have told her You shall not pass.  But then there would not have been a play.

* For readers in the Colonies, this is the female equivalent of being knighted by Her Britannic Majesty. As in Sir Ian McKellen:

Good news, Comrades!

The chocolate ration has been increased from 3 ounces to 2.5 ounces!

Shadowstats tracks the inflation and unemployment rates like they used to be, before the Fed.Gov changed them.

I just got back from a Fundraiser

It was quite a success, with perhaps 75 of us in attendance.   The organizers were quite pleased with the event.

By "Fundraiser", of course, I mean "Traffic Court".  I must confess that my respect for the explosive growth of picayune laws that are arbitrarily enforced has gone way, way up.

The end of "Peak Oil"?

A picture is worth a thousand words:

The nature of tight rock oil wells means that each well is limited in how much oil it can produce over its lifetime, but the number of wells that can be drilled and fracked is immense.
The US shale plays have been a bonanza for smaller oil companies. The huge multi-nationals have been late to the game.

Smaller, independent North American oil producers own five times more land in the major U.S. shale plays than Big Oil companies like BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil. Shale reservoirs from South Texas to North Dakota are dominated by names like EOG Resources, Continental Resources and Pioneer Natural Resources. The diverse array of competitors from private equity firms to independent producers has made it tougher for Big Oil to compete. __ http://fuelfix.com/blog/2014/05/07/bp-exec-us-shale-could-be-laboratory-for-bounties-abroad/

Smaller companies are more nimble, and often have the advantage in developing new industries — as long as government interference is kept to a minimum.

The implication is that the only hope for Peak Oil is an alliance of environmentalists, government, and Big Oil to squash the small oil companies driving the petroleum revolution.

Remember nostalgia?

I remember when it was possible to state your opinion without being said to be a jerk.

OK, then.  Duly noted.

Faith Hill - Paris

If you didn't know who she was, there would be no way to tell that this song was on a Country album.  There's not a scrap of country in it, rather, it's a throwback to the great songs from the 50's and 60's.  Sinatra would have killed on this.

The CIA were a bunch of idiots

2cents emails to point out this stunning Cold War idiocy from the Lads in Langly.  Modern Art was a CIA "weapon":

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

...

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

So why is this idiocy (other than the obvious)?  Because it shows that the CIA was playing checkers while the KGB was playing chess:

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Remember, these are the people who thought that the Soviet Union was the third largest economy in the world in 1989, right before the Warsaw Pact collapsed.

So in my book it is entirely plausible that the CIA secretly backed vacuous wastes of wall space like Rothko.  Given what we know about penetration of the Western Intelligence community by the KGB, the only question is whether this program was run by double agents.

All you need to know to understand Afghanistan

Peter gets an email from a friend that traces the history:

Soviets leave and the bandits take over. An all time low. The Crips control one area of town and the Bloods control the other. They tax every one going through.

Every one leaves to be Gastarbeiter.

Some one I know was the only guy left on his block. Kandahar was a ghost-town.

Finally, every one has had a-stinkin-nuff of the bandits and the Taliban take over propelled on a wave of every one who had not left yet.

The Taliban take over, and its like Stalin's Russia: Food & order. But you have to toe the line. His line.

Every one leaves to be Gastarbeiter.

Yup.  We should have gotten out in 2002.  2003 at the latest.

John Hinckley now out of prison

Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin is now out of prison:

John Hinckley, Jr. who shot former President Ronald Reagan in 1981 was found to be insane and has spent majority of his years in a mental facility after conviction.

There had been conflicting views with regard to his conviction. While psychiatric reports listed him as insane, the prosecution still believed he was sane enough in legal terms to serve his sentence in jail.

Hinckley's attorneys have been working for the past 10 years to free him. Finally in December 2013, a recommendation to free him was granted by U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman.

From 10 days per month, Hinckley will now be allowed to leave prison for 17 days per month to stay with his mother in Williamsburg, Virginia. Judge Friedman also issued a 29-point order laying out the conditions of Hinckley's release.

This included the terms about Hinckley's travel, volunteer work, Internet use, strolls within the subdivision, medication and therapy. Hinckley can now roam around unsupervised as long as he avoids government centers and has a GPS-enabled mobile phone with him all the time.

There is no question that he was nuttier than a fruitcake, back in the day.  It also seems that 30 years of treatment has managed to stabilize his condition.  It seems that he has a girlfriend now, a fellow patient at the facility they both occupied for years.

There's a message here worth thinking on.

Photobombing: X-Ray edition

Someone explain to this dude what ionizing radiation does to nerve cells ...

I smell photoshop ...

Things get screwed up when you remove the profit motive

Duh.  The UK Labour party wants to renationalize the rail transport system.  Anyone with two brain cells to rub together sees how this will play out once the "greedy profit" is gone:

If this were true, then Amtrak, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, and pre-priviatization BritRail would all have generated plenty of revenues to fund their operations and maintenance. But they didn’t and don’t; instead, they require huge subsidies and even then offer poor service due to unfunded maintenance backlogs.


Profits serve the important purpose of giving people and companies incentives to provide the services that consumers want. In contrast, when government run things, the needs of consumers are soon obscured by demands from public employee unions, manufacturers, and other suppliers to the government agency. The mission of providing transportation is soon replaced by such multiple missions as providing jobs, boosting economic development, and protecting the environment. The result is that profitable operations become money-losing operations and the needs of consumers are forgotten as unions and suppliers capture most of the revenue.

The left hates profit, but doesn't realize (or perhaps want to realize) that profit more than anything is a signal on what customers want.  Eliminate profit by putting the government in charge and the signal will shift to what politicians want.  Always.  The Antiplanner concludes his post with why that fails:

But politicians are more concerned about getting elected today than the negative impacts of their policies tomorrow.

No wonder lefties don't want to think about this.

In Soviet Russia, Television watches you!

Who didn't see this coming?

Smart tellies with built-in microphones and storage can be turned into bugging devices by malware and used to record conversations, security experts at NCC Group said. And they demonstrated exactly that just down the road from the Infosec Europe conference, held in London.

"Installing the bugging software requires physical access to the device, which is how we did it, or by installing a malicious app," said Felix Ingram, principal consultant at NCC Group.
"Malicious apps could be downloaded from the manufacturer’s app store. The TV does have the option for auto-updating, so releasing a legitimate app, then releasing a malicious update, is another attack vector."

In other words, Ingram's research shows smart TVs can be abused in much the same way that dodgy apps on Android software stores hijack smartphones and tablets.

In the NCC demo, the internal storage of a smart TV was used to hold 30 seconds of audio, but a far longer buffer could be set up.

And so it seems that Smart TVs have all of the security (ahem) capabilities of Android:

In 2013 Android grew to a very large number: 87%. This was its share of the global smartphone market. It also grew to an even larger one: 97%. This was Android’s share of global mobile malware.

So go ahead and pay an extra hundred bucks (or two) for a "Smart" TV whose security was designed by incompetents.  Actually, that likely does not describe the true situation: security wasn't an after thought, it wasn't thought of at all.

NCC are pretty sharp guys - I've dealt with them several times and have been impressed.

#IgnoreObamasHashTags

The Silicon Graybeard looks at the whole hashtag fiasco and brings down the hammer of logic:

Just like the Moms Demanding Disarmament, demanding someone else do something, and then going back to your coffee (or wine) isn't accomplishing anything, it's demanding someone else accomplish something.  It's something lazy people do to make themselves feel better.  

Somehow I really doubt that Boko Haram, the girls' kidnappers, are really influenced by American social media.  In the vile, violent, disgusting world of Jihadists who want the world to be just like it was 1200 years ago, Boko Haram stands out as the scumbags of all scumbags.

And what do the "Elites" do?  They pay attention to what is trending on Twitter.  What does Boco Haram do?  Sells the girls into slavery.

If there were a clearer explanation of how much attention we - and the World - should pay to Barack Obama's State Department, I haven't heard it.

In Spring, a young man's thoughts softly turn to ...

A proper ale.  Wells Bombadier, recommended for those who are not satisfied by Miller Light.

A mother's work is never done

Especially around these kids.

The perfect gift for Mother's Day

Assuming you have a rather strange Mom ...

A T-shirt as a reminder of all the powdered, colored, sweetened drinks she used to make for you.

Leopold Mozart - Toy Symphony

Mozart Pere, via Der Wik

Traditional familial themes are de regeur for Mother's Day, but are surprisingly hard to find in Classical Music.  Perhaps art has always been hostile to traditional themes, even when it was patronized bu aristocrats.  That would be a depressing thought indeed, especially for Mother's Day.

Fortunately, we have a Mozart piece to restore our hope (as embodied in the concept of motherhood) for future generations.  It's not from the Mozart, nor from his mother (of whom I know precisely nothing), but it is from his father.  And it's playful - written for symphony accompanied by toys, ratchet, nightingale, and cuckoo.  Somehow, this made me think on all mothers who found themselves dealing with toddlers all day and hoping for some sort of adult diversion.  And of me watching all that. 

A very happy Mother's Day wish to all mothers, and to everyone who had a mother.  Here's a performance that covers you and your children both.
May the day remind you of the silly but unforgettable moments your shared those many years ago.  And if you are lucky enough to be experiencing those days today, then I envy you.  May the day be a delight, and a source of memories for years to come.