Little Texas - What Might Have Been

Sometimes what would be over the top can fit a particular moment.  I would usually write about what the moment meant, but I just did.  The number of moments that might have been, but which were sacrificed, those bear thinking on.



What Might Have Been (Songwriters: Dwayne O'Brien, Porter Howell, Brady Seals)

Sure I think about you now and then
But it's been a long long time
I've got a good life now I've moved on
So when you cross my mind

I try not to think about
What might have been
'Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can't go back again
There's no use giving in
And there's no way to know
What might have been

We could sit and talk about this all night long
And wonder why we didn't last
Yes they might be the best days
We will ever know
But we'll have to leave them in the past

So try not to think about
What might have been
'Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can't go back again
There's no use giving in
And there's no way to know
What might have been

That same old look in your eyes
It's a beautiful night
I'm so tempted to stay
But too much time has gone by
We should just say goodbye
And turn and walk away

And try not to think about
What might have been
'Cause that was then
And we have taken different roads
We can't go back again
There's no use giving in
And there's no way to know
What might have been

No we'll never know
What might have been

Hitting the beach on D-Day meant that you hadn't drowned, your kit and weapons dragging you down under the rolling sea.  Surviving that meant that you had to only deal with German machine guns and mortars and artillery.  That day saw the death of not just thousands of lives, but thousands of dreams.  It's a sad statement on the degraded state of this Republic that it needs a schlocky Country music song to make us think on that.

Four years apart.  Think on that, what that meant to young lovers.   It doesn't sound so sentimental when you think on that.  If you're any damn good at all.

Try not to think about what might have been, if the dead had come home.  Or if they never would have had to go at all.

Remembering Ste. Mère Église

It was early June, 1990, and we were vacationing in Normandy.  We used our base at Bayeaux to go all over the D-Day sites; somewhere I have a picture of us drinking the local hard cider on Utah Beach.  I was thinking that if I had to land somewhere that day, Utah would have been a million times better than Omaha.

Our excursion took us for dinner in Ste. Mère Église, just inland from the beach.  We sat outside at a table on the square, with a view of this:

Image via La Wik

As someone who grew up in the '60s, I knew the story of the paratrooper who landed on the church bell tower, but I had no idea how that had turned out.  Had he survived the experience?  Did he survive the war?

I mentioned to our (very young) waitress that it's not every day you see someone in full combat gear hanging from a church.  She brightened up and we had a chat about all the American veterans who came to the town each year.  I asked about the paratrooper, and if he had lived.  Bien sur, she replied.  Comes back each year to visit.

Alas, that was only partly true.  The paratrooper John Steele did survive the town and the war, but died from cancer in 1969 just short of the 25th anniversary of the invasion.  I was misinformed.

But the town and the area is worth the journey.  And they like Americans there, or at least they did back then.  It's peaceful, and a long time removed from the day that the telegrams started coming in Bedford, Virginia:

On the morning of July 17, a 21-year-old telegraph operator named Elizabeth Teass went to work as usual. The telegraph office was located in Green's Drug Store. She switched on her machine, pressed a key that rang a bell in the hub office at Roanoake, and typed a "Good morning" message.

Back came a message from Roanoake, "We have casualties," and then the machine started printing a telegram. A sequence number, a name and address, and then the sinister words THE SECRETARY OF WAR REGRETS TO INFORM YOU.

Elizabeth had received casualty telegrams before. But this time, when the telegram ended, the machine did not stop. Another message header and then again THE SECRETARY OF WAR REGRETS TO INFORM YOU.

As the teleprinter clacked out telegram after telegram, she sat there in increasing horror, taking the narrow strips that emerged from the machine and glueing them to the message forms.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.  Amen.

Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?

Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day.  Remember the men who waded ashore through machine gun fire to assault the Atlantic Wall.

Today is also the 72nd anniversary of Midway where the tide was turned in the war in the Pacific.  The torpedo bomber squadrons sacrificed themselves to a man, but that gave the dive bombers unmolested opportunity to rip the heart out of the Imperial Japanese carrier fleet.

It is also the 96th anniversary of the battle of Belleau Wood, one of the costliest days in Marine Corps history, but one where they blunted the German advance towards Paris.  Their spirit was captured precisely by Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, in the quote that makes this post's title.

A bloody day, one filled to overflowing with sacrifice and well worth our remembrance.  Hoist a beer to their memories sometime today.

Protect your email

It's been a year since the Snowden revelations of pervasive NSA monitoring.  The Free Software Foundation is recognizing this anniversary by promoting the use of Open Source email encryption software.  It's an easy step by step set of instructions, and it will annoy the NSA's Eye Of Sauron program, which sounds as close to a Categorical Imperative* as anything I can think of.

* An idea introduced by Immanuel Kant, describing something that is both absolutely required and absolutely justified.

Rory Gallagher - Bullfrog Blues

He was a bit of an odd bird, as the first 45 seconds or so will show.  But he cooks it.

Just how bad is the economy?

Even a Sith Lord Emperor can't keep a job.



Man, those HR Departments are picky ...

J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf

Reviewed with relish:

So for those fascinated by Tolkien the artist, the commentary is sheer delight. It also (and perhaps most importantly) contains some passages of writing in Tolkien's best and most profound style - where his deepest personal concerns come very close to the surface (from pp 349-50):

But the special situation of the English - a people amid the ruins, cut off from their old lands, the lands of the heroes of their ancient songs, and gradually as their knowledge grew feeling themselves to be in the Dark Ages after the departure of the glory of Rome - gave special poignancy to this feeling, and special pictorial vividness to it. 

Both of the passages from Beowulf... are filled with the vision of deserted and ruined halls... "he sees... the hall of feasting, the resting places swept by the wind robbed of laughter - the riders sleep, mighty men gone down into the dark..."

Nobody would have better understood or been better able to play Hrothgar's part than [King] Alfred - who won his mother's praise for... the lays of his northern heroic fathers - and yet felt himself almost alone in the Dark Age, attempting to save from the wreck of time some sparks surviving from the Golden Age, from Rome and the mighty Caesars and builders of that fallen world.

If you're a fan of the Master, RTWT.

The Democrats are using the Constitution as a political football

Yeah, I know - shocking to find politics in Washington D.C.  But the Democrats used to stick up for the First Amendment; now they're trying to gut it:

Last year Senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.) introduced Senate Joint Resolution 19, a proposed amendment to the Constitution.  Describing the amendment as an effort to “advance the fundamental principle of equality for all,” and “to protect the integrity of the legislative and electoral processes,” it would in substance modify the First Amendment.  Specifically, it would give Congress the power “to regulate the raising and spending of money” in federal elections, including by limiting contributions to candidates for federal elections and expenditures by, in support of, or to oppose those candidates. 

Fortunately, there are still a few of the great First Amendment lions left to call this for what it is.



Floyd Abrams worked on the Pentagon Papers case, among many, many others.  This is speaking truth to power.  In fact, this is a time warp, a view across four decades to when the Left were firmly opposed to thought control.  Different times, same voice. 

The breakfast of Champions

Last Kiss keeps delivering.

New Co-Blogger

It's been a long time since I've made any real changes to this blog, other than minor tweaks around the edges.  However, it's seemed a bit stale lately, and it's also suffered from a distinct lack of gunnie content.  And so a change is in order.

I've asked blog friend (and meatspace friend) ASM826 if he would start posting here.  He has kindly accepted, and will do posts here on shooting, and reloading, and maybe some martial arts as well.  Who knows, maybe something on bourbon as well.

This place could use a whiff of cordite from time to time.

It's a bit odd to have a co-blogger, but he and I started blogging at almost exactly the same time, and click on a lot of different levels.  I'm pretty thrilled to have him picking up the slack here.

If Architects designed buildings the way that programmers write software, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization

Peter finds a real humdinger of a security post: why is software security so broken?

Libpurple was written by people who wanted their open source chat client to talk to every kind of instant messaging system in the world, and didn’t give a shit about security or encryption. Security people who have examined the code have said there are so many possible ways to exploit libpurple there is probably no point in patching it. It needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch. These aren’t bugs that let someone read your encrypted messages, they are bugs that let someone take over your whole computer, see everything you type or read and probably watch you pick your nose on your webcam.

This lovely tool, OTR, sits on top of libpurple on most systems that use it. Let me make something clear, because even some geeks don’t get this: it doesn’t matter how good your encryption is if your attacker can just read your data off the screen with you, and I promise they can. They may or may not know how to yet, but they can. There are a hundred libpurples on your computer: little pieces of software written on a budget with unrealistic deadlines by people who didn’t know or didn’t care about keeping the rest of your system secure.

My only criticism of this post is that it isn't terrifyingly pessimistic enough.  If you boot it, they will come.  Remember, you're reading this from a computer screen right now.

Software secure is wretched.  Sometimes it's wretched because nobody cares.  Sometimes it's wretched because, well, because you recompiled a program for a 64 bit architecture (rather than a 32 bit one) and without changing a line of code now everyone can pwnz0r you*.  It's a little known fact that Nazi Germany fell because of a failure of cyber security.



But back to the post that Peter pointed us towards.  This is absolutely correct:

Security and privacy experts harangue the public about metadata and networked sharing, but keeping track of these things is about as natural as doing blood panels on yourself every morning, and about as easy. The risks on a societal level from giving up our privacy are terrible. Yet the consequences of not doing so on an individual basis are immediately crippling. The whole thing is a shitty battle of attrition between what we all want for ourselves and our families and the ways we need community to survive as humans — a Mexican stand off monetized by corporations and monitored by governments.

Even classified networks get hacked.  I'm still the #1 Google result for "How to hack a classified network"**.  If the Defense Department - with all their skilled security d00ds and financial resources - if they can't keep themselves safe, then what chance do you have?

The answer, of course, is slim to none.  And Slim just left town.

I've worked in this technology space since 1985.  Quite frankly, I'm not sure what to tell you to help yourselves out.  I wish I had a better answer, other than "never do anything consequential on the 'Net".  And that absolutely, positively means never bank online.  Or vote online.  Of have a car with a computer in it.  Or a "smart" gun.

Riddle me this, Security Man: what do you get when you cross a car with a computer?  Answer: a computer.  Go read the post that Peter points us to.  Re-read it until the hair on the back of your neck stands up, and a shiver runs up your spine.  At that point, you will understand the situation precisely.

If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.

- Sun Tsu

Good morning.  ;-)

* I'm actually pretty proud of this post, which is from when I'd only been blogging a couple months but already a distinctly Borepatchian style had emerged.

** Another pretty good security post from the early days of this blog.

Nina Simone - Sinnerman

She kills on the piano, too.

15 things you didn't know about Caddyshack

Via Chris Lynch, this is pretty interesting.  For example:

13. The owners of the country club were not happy about the explosions on the golf course.

The climactic scene of Murray’s gopher-killing plastic explosives knocking in Danny’s putt to win the un-friendly wager between Al Czervik (Dangerfield) and Judge Smails (Knight) were real pyrotechnics set aflame at Rolling Hills. To pull off the effect, an artificial green was rigged with several incendiary packs and put into place between two fairways.

This was news to the owners of the country club, who had made it clear to filmmakers that the outrageous climax couldn't be shot anywhere near their golf course. To get them to “comply,” producer Jon Peters invited them out for a swanky lunch away from the country club to “thank them for letting the film use the location.” Ramis then had the special effects crew blow up the fake green while they were away. The fireball from the explosion was so large that a pilot landing a plane at nearby Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport radioed in to air traffic control that he thought he might have witnessed a crash. 

The others are as good.

Your home Internet router: the second circle of Security Hell

It's why we can't have nice things on the 'Net:

This unpatchable hell is a problem with many fathers, from recalcitrant vendors to customers wary of -- or hostile to -- change. But with the number and diversity of connected endpoints expected to skyrocket in the next decade, radical measures are fast becoming necessary to ensure that today's "smart" devices and embedded systems don't haunt us for years down the line.

Trouble close to home

The problem of unsupported or undersupported devices hits close to home for millions of broadband users in the United States and Europe. Broadband routers humming away peacefully in attics and home offices have become the latest targets of sophisticated cyber criminal groups.

A string of incidents in recent months have underscored the vulnerability of this population of loosely managed and configured devices. In March, the security consultancy Team Cymru warned that hackers had compromised some 300,000 small- and home-office broadband routers made by firms D-Link, Micronet, Tenda, and TP-Link, among others.

This is a real problem.  As desktop security has improved over the last decade (and improved it has, despite being spotty at best), the Bad Guys have looked for easier targets.  A home router is a natural target, for several reasons:

1. There is typically very little (or no) effort put into security by the manufacturer.  Security work costs money, and that raises the price in a market where profit margins are wafer thin,
2. ISPs are notorious for having terrible technical support, because good tech support costs money and a support call can easily burn through an entire month's revenue from that customer.  Support personnel who understand security raise this cost, and very possibly increase the number of calls. 
3. "If it's working don't screw with it" is everyone's preferred approach - the manufacturer, the ISP, and the subscriber.

The Bad Guys love this - it's a target rich environment that is institutionally resistant to security improvement.

So what do you do?  Probably the only thing that you can do is to assume that the Internet router is already compromised.  Get your own router and put it between your home network and the router your ISP sent you.  Disable WiFi in the ISP router, and use your own.  Run an Open Source OS on the router (these projects will almost always be more responsive to security issues than the manufacturers).

Oh, and read this post from way back.

Baby burned by cops gets worse

The baby burned by a flash bang grenade in a 2:00 AM no knock raid raid by the Habersham County Sherrif's department is getting worse, and surgery has been postponed:

“We believe they were criminally negligent because of the children,” Mawuli Mel Davis said.“This isn’t police work. This is cowboys.”

Davis and others held a midday vigil for the child, Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, outside Grady Memorial Hospital Monday. Worsening health postponed surgery to repair the deep chest wound caused when a flash-bang grenade landed on thew child’s pillow in the play-pen where he was sleeping. He also suffered severe burns on his head and face.

Meanwhile, the Governor's office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have gotten involved:

Gov. Nathan Deal said Monday he’s awaiting an investigation of the botched drug raid in Habersham County that left a child on life support to determine if any executive action or state legislation is needed.

“Any time you have bad facts like this one, it does give you cause for concern,” Deal said. “It’s one of those things that require a thorough investigation … to know what if anything we can learn from it.”

Habersham County District Attorney Brian Rickman said he is investigating whether any officers violated the law when they used a controversial “no-knock warrant” for a raid on on Cordelia house Wednesday.

A criminal finding would require officers to have acted recklessly or illegally but he said he expected the raid will prompt an investigation into no-knock warrants and tactics, Rickman said.

Translation: everyone in the area is fixin' to throw the Habersham County Sheriff under the bus.  Can't blame them, really; the baby has a 50/50 chance of surviving.

Meanwhile, the District Attorney categorically denied the Sheriff's earlier statement that the DA had said nothing untoward had happened:

I had a very interesting conversation with Mountain Circuit District Attorney Brian Rickman on today’s show, starting with his take on this statement from Sheriff Joey Terrell:

Terrell said both the district attorney and Georgia Bureau of Investigation have said there was no wrongdoing on the SRT’s part.

“I’ve talked to the D.A., I’ve talked to the GBI,” Terrell said. “I’ve given them the whole information and they say there’s nothing else we can do. There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to look at. Given the information given, GBI’s SWAT team would have done the exact same thing – they’d have used the exact same scenario to enter the house.”

Uh…no. DA Rickman told me on the air today he never said anything like that to the sheriff. According to Rickman, he had a brief conversation with Terrell, had been given virtually none of the facts and was awaiting all the details before making any judgments. And he unequivocally denied ever giving the Habersham County cops a clean bill of health.

That last link is from talk radio host Michael Graham's blog, now in Atlanta* on News Radio 106.7 FM from 8:30 to Noon.  I listened to him in Boston, and he's very smart and very funny.  I'll tune in when I can, and program 106.7 into my car radio.  Graham asks some questions that need answers:

Say what you want about Barney Fife, but he never got anyone killed.

So what agency in Georgia is going to answer the REAL questions?

1. Why a “no-knock” warrant on a low-rent meth dealer well-known to the cops?
2. Why bust in at 2AM? What’s wrong with 2pm?
3. Why throw incendiary devices into a home when the perp isn’t even there? Did the cops have ANY intelligence before acting?
4. Why throw a flashbang into a bedroom? Into a crib? Did the cops not know a family was in the house? Did the cops have any ACCURATE intelligence before acting?
5. Why was the “no-knock” warrant issued in the first place? What did the cops tell the judge? Or is the judge a “Let’s Roll!” type, too?

Once again, the goal isn’t to turn these cops into criminals. It’s to hold them accountable for their actions, policies and consequences.  Nobody needs to be prosecuted, but someone definitely needs to be fired.

The answer to all those questions is the same: because it's fun to dress up like Navy SEALs and form a stick.  Or maybe the Sheriff's department just read blogs.  But I disagree that nobody should go to jail.  Prison is designed not only as a punishment, but to set an example that will deter other fascist scum.

In this country we find it useful from time to time to hang an Admiral to encourage the others.

* Hat tip to Bob for pointing this out to me.

This is why you don't give the government more power

Because you end up with a bunch of dumb-ass laws enforced by, well, by Melba.



All the Cool Kids watch Graham Norton, because he does stuff like this.

Facebook listens to you

OK, then:

A new opt-in audio recognition program listens to what mobile users are hearing — via TV, radio, etc. — and suggests a status update when it recognizes the sound.

...

Facebook could use the data to recognize a TV show, for example, in order to deliver related ads on the social platform. On the flipside, Facebook could offer that data to TV partners that want to deliver targeted ads in real time based on when users on Facebook are watching.

What could possibly go wrong?  Even a marketing rag considers the downside:

Still, there's also the possibility that the idea that Facebook is listening in could creep out a significant number of users.

Gee, ya think?  I'm not even a user (can't remember the last time I logged in to Facebook) and I'm totally creeped out:

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

But fear not, Citizen.  Facebook doesn't share data with the NSA.  Oh, wait:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

...

In the document, the NSA hails the Prism program as "one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA".

It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the Prism program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.

Wonder if they'd want to know if you listened in to "right wing hate" talk radio, or maybe "domestic terrorist" Squirrel Report?  I don't.

But it's awesome how it's free, isn't it?

You know, I'm reminded why I can't remember the last time I logged into Facebook.

It's a civil right

Disabled Americans for Firearms Rights.

The only word that describes those who would disarm someone in a wheelchair is, well, evil.  I'm afraid that I'm terribly unimpressed with the Left's conceit that they are nicer and more moral than others - especially us.  Au contraire.

Seven guns in one

An advert from when I was 6 or 7.



The past is another country, foreign in its strangeness.  This is from the same era:



This is what we talked about at school.  Try that these days ...

I hadn't realized that the NSA was interstellar

They're monitoring the galaxy:

To keep us safe from Galactic terrorists, no doubt.