Kentucky Jelly

As an official Kentucky Colonel, Ambassador of Good Will, I feel obligated to highlight products from the Great State of KY.



The Queen Of The World remembers Earl Pitts, Uhmerikun on the radio.  She could always tell who was listening to the show during rush hour because people would be laughing their heads off in the traffic jam.

Hank Williams Jr - All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight

Well, one of my rowdy friends came over last night.  Co-blogger and brother-from-another-mother ASM826 was in town last night and stopped by Castle Borepatch.  The Queen Of The World decreed a Royal Feast (and put out a delicious spread) and ASM826 and I stayed up late.  Deep Thoughts were exchanged (cue Jack Handey).  It was a reminder of the pleasure you get from good friends.

You know there's a Country song about that.  Sadly, neither ASM826 not I are as rowdy as we once were, but it was sure a fun evening.



All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight (Songwriter: Hank Williams, Jr.)

I got ketchup on my blue jeans, I just burnt my hand 
Lord, it's hard to be a bachelor man
I got girls that can cook, I got girls that can clean
I got girls that can do anything in between
I got to get ready, make everything right
Cause all my rowdy friends are comin over tonight 

Do you want a drink, hey, do you want to party
Hey, honey, this is ole Hank, ready to get the thing started
We cooked the pig in the ground, got some beer on ice
And all my rowdy friends are comin over tonight 

Now, my party pad is out in the woods 
It's a long, long way from here to Hollywood
But I got some natural queens out on the floor
And ole Miss Mississippi just walked through the door
Got a little wirlpool just made for ten
And you can jump out and you can jump in
You can do anything that you wanna do
But, uh-uhh, don't you step on my cowboy boots 

Do you want to drink, hey do you want to party
Hey, this is ole Hank, ready to get this summer started
I cooked a pig in the ground, we got some beer on ice
And all my rowdy friends are comin over tonight 

Do you want to drink, hey, do you want to party
Hey, hey, this is rockin, Randall Hank
Ready to get the summer time started
We cooked the pig in the ground
We got some beer on ice
All my rowdy friends are comin over tonight
That's right, come on in

Bootnote: This video is a riot, mostly because of all the people who appeared in it.  George Jones drives his riding mower to the party.  Cheech shows up in a smoke-filled car.  Waylon, Willie, Kris Kristofferson, and George Thorogood all put in appearances.

Joe Bonamassa - I'll Play The Blues For You

Not many play it better, and that says a lot.

No thanks, I think I'll drive

Electronic Voting Machines - unsafe at any speed

The Geek With Guns recounts the recent DEFCON security conference where they had a voting machine hack-a-thon.  The carnage was brutal:

Anonymous ballots are notoriously difficult to secure but it’s obvious that the current crop of electronic voting machines were developed by companies that have no interest whatsoever in even attempting to address that problem. Many of the issues mentioned in the report are what I would call amateur hour mistakes. There is no reason why these machines should have any unprotected ports on them. Moreover, there is no reason why the software running on these machines isn’t up to date. And the machines should certainly be able to verify the code they’re running. If the electronic voting machine developers don’t understand how code signing works, they should contact Apple since the signature of every piece of code that runs on iOS is verified. 

And therein lies the insult to injury. The types of security exploits used to compromise the sample voting machines weren’t new or novel. They were exploits that have been known about and addressed for years. A cynical person might believe that the companies making these voting machines are just trying to make a quick buck off of a government contract and not interested in delivering a quality product. A cynical man might even feel the need to point out that this type of behavior is common because the government seldom holds itself or contractors accountable.

In non-technical language, it''s like they built a house without external security lights or locks on the doors and windows, and had absolutely no idea what they had for furniture so anyone who wanted could come in and take or rearrange things as they like.  Other than that, it's totes secure.

And The Geek With Guns sarcastically predicts the next big "fix" the clueless government guys are likely to propose:

Just put those voting machines in the cloud! Everything is magically fixed when it’s put in the cloud!

Because everyone is hip to the cloud, right?  All the Cool Kids are doing it, so it must be even toteser secure!  Even Hitler knows that!

Kaitlyn & Mady Dever - Caster, Caster

The Queen Of The World and I love the show "Last Man Standing" (insert rant on the ABC rat bastards who canceled it when it was their #2 comedy show).  Kaitlyn Dever plays one of Tim Allen's daughters on the show.  As it turns out, she is a musician and a composer.  Here is one of the songs she did with her (in real life) sister Mady.  It reminds me of maybe a cross between Bonnie Raitt and Natalie Merchant.



The Queen and I shall watch young Miss Dever's career with great interest.

The NFL has screwed itself

Of course they hate the Vikings and Bears in Wisconsin.  But to see hate for the Packers, too?  That's brutal.

Quote of the Day: Crypto Wars edition

Great in-depth analysis on yesterday's story about how some government flunky (once again) is demanding encryption backdoors to catch terrorists and child pornographers:

We activists oppose crypto backdoors not because we lack honor, or because we are criminals, or because we support terrorists and child molesters. It's because we value privacy and government officials who get corrupted by power. It's not that we fear Trump becoming a dictator, it's that we fear bureaucrats at Rosenstein's level becoming drunk on authority -- which Rosenstein demonstrably has. His speech is a long train of corrupt ideas pursuing the same object of despotism -- a despotism we oppose.

Robert Graham (an Internet Security big wig) takes the flunky's speech apart piece by piece and shows it for the dishonest propaganda that it really is.  Highly recommended.

I could have caught that Roadrunner

One of my favorite "WTF" engineering moments is the Atlantropa Project, a proposed draining of the Mediterranean Sea.  A series of dams at Gibraltar and the Dardanelles (and other places) would cut the flow of water into the Mediterranean, and evaporation would do the rest draining the seabed.  It was initially proposed in the 1920s and was discussed into the 1950s before it was abandoned.

The goal was to provide lebensraum for European populations without all of that killing of the ubermensch nastiness that we saw in der tausandjarische Reich.  New land would have been settled and planted, and roads and railroads would connect the new areas with Europe and Africa.  A new era of pan-European pacifism would bind a continent shattered by the War To End All Wars.

The likelihood of the Sahara desert colonizing the new land seems not to have been considered, not the chance of loss of rainfall in the lands bordering the receding sea.  It is a breathlessly reckless example of engineering hubris, best captured in this classic XKCD cartoon:

Simpler times. Today there is a global project to "save the planet" from the horrors of carbon dioxide.  Much more sophisticated than Herr Sörgel and company.  So much more.  And so much less naive on the healing power of pacifism and Big pan-Governmental projects.  I mean, we can see his hubris, can't we?

iPhone iOS 11 - how to turn WiFi and Bluetooth positively, absolutely, and most sincerely off

iPhone users, here's something that Apple is trying to slip by you in iOS 11: turning off Wifi and Bluetooth off doesn't really turn them off:

Apple in iOS 11 decided that when you tap the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth buttons in Control Center, the system now will disconnect you from any devices or networks you are currently on but no longer truly switches Wi-Fi or Bluetooth off. 

This means that even though you thought you switched them off, they remain active for things like AirDrop, AirPlay, Continuity, Hotspot, Location services and devices such as the Apple Watch and Pencil. 

An Apple tech support note says this is so you can continue to use those “important features.”

"Important".  Oooooh kaaaay.  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain selling location-based advertising.

But fear not, there is a way to turn them most sincerely off, even though the iPhone GUI won't tell you how.  The article goes into this in detail, but it boils down to three options:

1. Ask Siri to turn Wifi off.  This one sounds creepy to me, but you know how nasty and suspicious I am about Siri and Alexa.

2. Set the phone in Airplane mode.  Of course, then it won't work as, you know, a phone.  Nice design decision for your phone, Apple.

3. Go to Settings and turn off WiFi and Bluetooth manually.  This is a real pain, especially something that is supposed to have an "insanely great" user experience.  I guess your convenience must be sacrificed to the Apple bottom line.

Phooey.

Observe your Masters in action

How the left can possibly want to give more power to these folks is beyond me:

Continuing the US government's menacing of strong end-to-end encryption, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told an audience at the US Naval Academy that encryption isn't protected by the American Constitution. 

In short, software writers and other nerds: the math behind modern cryptography is trumped by the Fourth Amendment, and in any case, there has never been an absolute right to privacy. This message came at the end of this wide-ranging speech on Tuesday, which repeated fixations heard in previous speeches.

So the Founding Fathers believed that nobody could keep secrets from the government?  Really?

And the Constitution almost didn't get ratified because of the argument between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, on whether all of the People's rights had to be explicitly enumerated in order to secure them from the Government.  This is actually what the 10th Amendment is for.

But Mr. Big Shot continues:

He called for backdoors in April, and doubled down last week, then saying: “Our society has never had a system where evidence of criminal wrongdoing was totally impervious to detection.”

Because the Government is so good at keeping secrets, right?  Edward Snowden could not be reached for comment.  Neither could Chelsea Manning or the latest Moonbat who stole them blind.  So what's the over/under on how long a government-mandated crypto backdoor would stay secret from Russian Hackers?  10 milliseconds?  And then what do they do - forge incriminating messages from politicians, break into bank accounts, read government email?

Of course, our government would never consider doing anything like that to its own citizens, would it now?  /sarc

Great idea, Skippy.  Let's reduce the public's trust in our institutions even more.  But yeah, it might make Law Enforcement's job a little easier for 6 months.  Good tradeoff.

The Ascent of Man

Seen on Gab.ai.  And post title is deliberately transgressive, to annoy the (smugly but ignorantly) comfortable.

Big changes in password security recommendations

NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and publish reams of security standards.  They have a new one out (NIST SP800-63-3 for you NISTaholics) that changes what people have been told about password security:

1. Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They make passwords harder to remember. They increase errors because artificially complex passwords are harder to type in. And they don't help that much. It's better to allow people to use pass phrases.
2. Stop it with password expiration. That was an old idea for an old way we used computers. Today, don't make people change their passwords unless there's indication of compromise.
3. Let people use password managers. This is how we deal with all the passwords we need.

This is excellent advice, and is what I've been recommending for years and years.  For years the assumption has been based on how Grandpa managed his 8-character passwords.  For years, the assumption has been that users are idiots - an understandable (if generally wrong) view that came out of the IT we hate our users mindset.  And so we had all the stupid rules about how complicated your password has to be* which confused users and increased the antagonism between IT and the user community.  And then the passwords had to change ever 90 days.

Because of the NIST recommendations.

This is a big first step.  Sadly, it is likely to take years before this new guidance sinks in and everyone lets you pick one really good password that you remember and which you never have to change.  But all journeys start with a single step.

(via)

* My favorite password complexity rule is "Password must be a palindrome".  Sneak.

So it's hunting season

This says a lot, actually.

White knuckle Airbus 380 Crosswind landing

This sort of thing is Peter's gig, but he's off at Blogorado so I'll post it.  An Airbus 380 jumbo jet got hit with a massive cross gust just after touchdown at Dusseldorf airport.  The pilot's skill is very impressive.  I wouldn't have liked being on board that aircraft.



Holy cow.

(via)

A politically incorrect Columbus Day post

This is a Columbus Day post I wrote in 2008, but which seems evergreen.

Obligatory Imperialist Post

Because it's Columbus Power-Mad Dead White Dude Day.  Insty posted about Admiral of the Ocean Sea (great book) which gives you a great Columbus overview, but entirely misses the Power-Mad Dead White Dude thing.

As a public service, here's something that you should read if you really want to make a liberal's head explode like the fembots in Austin Powers. Or understand why the world's economy is the way it is.  The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes. The title is intentionally taken from Adam Smith, but Landes focuses less on describing economics per se, and more on the constraints that a society puts on their economy.

It traces the history of economic development over the last 1000 years, and asks some very politically incorrect questions:

• Why did China, the world's richest and most powerful country in 1000 AD not only lose her lead, but lose it so badly that it was dismembered by the European (and later resurgent Japanese) powers?
• Why did India, fabulously wealthy and populous, not conquor the west, rather than vice-versa?
• Why did England, an undeveloped backwater as late as 1500 AD, ultimately lead the Industrial Revolution and become the world's most powerful country?
• What explains the vast differences in economic development between the USA and Canada, and other New World countries? After all, in 1700, Mexico's GDP per capita was $450, not far short of the colonies' $490 (1985 dollars). In 1989, Mexico's GDP per capita was $3,500, vs. $18,300 for the USA.

No, it wasn't "western imperialism" by dead white dudes. Landes' politically incorrect thesis is that society counts, and some societies foster faster economic growth than others. He uses many, many examples.

The quote for this [2008] election season, if we're smart enough to listen, is about the post-Cold War economies:

Among the heaviest losers in this period of record-breaking economic growth and technological advance were the countries of the Communist Socialist bloc: the Soviet Union at the bottom of the barrel, Romania and North Korea almost as bad, and a range of satellite victims and emulators struggling to rise above the mess. Best off were probably Czechoslovkia and Hungary, with East Germany (the DDR) and Poland trailing behind. The striking feature of these command economies was the contradiction between system and pretensions on the one hand, performance on the other. The logic was impeccable: experts would plan, zealots would compete in zeal, technology would tame nature, labor would make free, the benefits would accrue to all. From each according to their ability; to each according to his deserts; and eventually, to each according to his needs.

The dream appealed to the victims and critics of capitalism, admittedly a most imperfect system - but as it turned out, far better than the alternatives. Hence the Marxist economies long enjoyed a willful credulous favor among radicals, liberals, and progressives in the advanced industrial nations;

You'll hate this if you think that economics a la John Kerry and Barack Obama is the shizzle flippity floppity floop.

Contradiction between pretension and performance: nice phrase, that. For an example, see Patrick, Deval. For extra credit, compare and contrast Obama, Barack.

Dang, I think I must have just got my Hate Speech on, right there.

The day I fell for her

Three years ago today, The Queen Of The World and I were on a motorcycle trip to the beach. We'd only been dating a few weeks, and she was fun (and pretty as a picture), so off we went.

It ended in an accident. The bike went down fast, and hard. I broke a lot of bones and was in the ICU for days. Fortunately the fall didn't hurt her badly.

But I was the lucky one, because over the next few days I saw what an extraordinary woman she was. She arranged a rental car and trailer, got the bike loaded, and got the (very drugged up on pain killers) Borepatch home. And then took care of me for the weeks it took me to heal.

She could have run from a suddenly high maintenance (and often grumpy and rarely much fun) Borepatch. She didn't.

It was an unusual experience for me to be wrapped up in unconditional love and care. A nice experience. REALLY nice.

Unconditional, even when I was stubborn and dumb, like trying to get back in the saddle before I was capable, like trying to drive the manual shift Jeep with my arm in a sling. To this day I've never seen her as angry. She knew I would hurt myself, which I did. In her mind I was under her care, and I was messing myself up because of hard headedness. She hated to see me hurt myself.

And so I realized that I hadn't fallen three feet that day, I'd fallen hopelessly in love with an extraordinary woman. Sure she was fun (and pretty as a picture), but she also was fiercely loyal and had a spine of tempered steel. I didn't stand a chance, and quite frankly would have had to have been the biggest fool on earth to let her get away.

Three years later we're coming up on our second wedding anniversary. That was sure a lucky fall, one that opened my eyes to the amazing woman who was right in front of me.

The Power of Words - A Brigid Guest Post

"TELL ME, WHAT IS HAPPINESS?" - Iain M. Banks Use of Weapons (prologue)

On the road or with a long weekend, I usually stop in a bookstore if there is one around. So many books. The bargain books are usually entertaining in and of themselves, leaving you wondering what prompted some people to pen such thoughts to paper. I could think of a few titles for books that would instantly be in the bargain bin (and you can probably add a few titles of your own).

Living Life Bacon Free!
Harry Potter Meets the Groovy Ghoulies
My Little Ponies - Financial Freedom through Track Bets
The Kardashian Guide to Quantum Mechanics
Bouncing Betty and the Bucket of Moonshine - A Nancy Drew Mystery
Get Off My Leg!! - A Beginners Guide to Dog Training

But good books, have been part of my life since early childhood. For my long time readers, I've written before of my love for books and why. I was lucky to have two parents who exposed us to books and music and the outdoors. Learning and discovery were elemental to them and reading and words became a quiet necessity of my life. Charlotte's Web, The Wind in the Willows, A Child's Garden of Verse, and my all time favorite, Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Books were my portal to comfort, during those inevitable awkward moments of growing up, a way of immersing myself in the world of an author. As a child, books helped me grow, stretching my mind even further. And through books and written words came friendships. I'd talk about what I read with my classmates, telling snippets of stories and passing around dog eared copies of Asimov and Heinlein and Niven and Herbert. We'd gather over our lunches, laughing about a recent share, Philip Dicks -Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. We'd sit until a teacher made us go back to class, voices raised in excitement for the vast reaches out there, limitless possibilities that, on the cusp of adulthood, we believe existed.


With that, the world opened up to me. I started recording it, in small notebooks of paper, ink drawings, loose photos, added onto their pages, a scrapbook of my life, recorded for eternity with nothing more than an old Mont Blanc pen and a camera.

I remember my first visit as an author to a large Chicago book club where I was asked to join as a guest speaker.  I walked into a room of ladies and gentlemen that acted like I was a celebrity apparently, their library had all of my books.  I felt like a kid playing grown up. I'm not famous, I'm just someone that loves words.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.— Guy de Maupassant

"Soul laid bare." The sense of vulnerability in those three words is beyond reach. From these recorded pages have come my own story, tales of the possibilities of life, my soul laid out for many of you to read. Opening up something within me that made some of you take your own pen and craft your own story. I believe in the magic hidden in people and things, and these notebooks, these words bring them out into the light.

But writing, as in reading, for me is not just intellectual but embracive. I love the way the spine of a book or notebook feels in the crook of my fingers. The book an aesthetic charm of endless possibilities. The smooth, hard end boards snug on either side of the pages sewn together, their edges flush and perfect. The smell of ink, the texture of a page as my fingers gently turns it. Between 1850 and the late 1980s, books were printed on acidic paper. Conservators can't keep up with the costly restoration. Soon, millions of books in thousands of libraries the world over will be lost when their pages disintegrate into dust. Already I mourn for the loss of something that we have no control over, that of the written word.

I love blank notebooks. To me, it's hard to think of anything that represents the clean slate of opportunities more than a pristine, empty notebook. Smythson’s of Bond Street has bound ones with thin, blue, delicate paper that looks like the air mail paper my parents wrote to one another on during the War. The paper is so thin, the ink bleeds through, yet with the ink comes pleasure. The smell of the ink as well as the as the scent of paper itself, is need as defined as the capturing of a personal experience. Experiences in danger of being lost in an errant click of a mouse. In today's evolution of the tools of our expression, we've lost the very things we can hold on to. Things that can still gather dust and be passed on, to a child, to a lover, to history. So I particularly like the Smythson's ones, the way my handwriting looks on the thin paper, words scrolled from a fountain pen, dense with weight, meaning something, to me anyway, even if two hundred years from now, the paper, and the one I wrote the words for, are only dust and starlight.

Tonight I sit alone and quiet, my husband working late, the dog asleep on the couch. I have a book, Iain M. Banks Use of Weapons. Once again, Banks takes us to The Culture, his galaxy-spanning civilization of humans, computer Minds, asteroid-sized Ships (some of the names he picks for his ships are worth the read in and of themselves) and annihilating weapons. Ah yes, weapons. Written in interwoven chapters, it is made up of two alternating narrative streams - one indicated by Arabic numerals and the other by Roman ones.

The stories are one of The Culture and one of a world not yet contacted by The Culture. The pre-contact world is the home of four children, a brother, two sisters and another boy, hidden from others. Of the two stories, one moves forward chronologically, while the other moves in the opposite direction; yet both are about the central, tragic character, Cheradinine Zakalwe. Zakalwe is a rogue, a military genius, an assassin, a sad case and an utterly sympathetic character all at the same time. A mercenary shaped by his experiences as the perfect soldier, he's taken, refined and utilised by the supposedly benign and pacific Culture for their nastier dirty tricks operations. The moral ambiguity and ethical contradictions of this are not lost on Zakalwe himself or on his Culture handler, the "Special Circumstances" operative Diziet Sma.

Gloriously grotesque, sharply observed, bleakly satirical and written with a revelation so perfect that you will only ask yourself how you didn't see it sooner. Anything, Banks is telling us, anything at all can be a weapon, and the failure of restraint in the use of weapons dooms us all. It's not the easiest book to get your mind around, some minds will find the interwoven stories confusing (but if you are reading this blog, you are not likely to be one of those). I can promise you this, after reading it you will never look at a small chair, especially a small chair painted white, in quite the same way.

I don't read a lot of "popular" fiction. I would rather be nibbled to death by ducks than read one of the Fifty Shades of Grey series. I tend to read a lot of non fiction, of history. I like reading about long ago. I know more about my own life when I know more about the past. It's a sense of perspective; of days full of people that killed, tortured, struggled and suffered, agonizing for things that were of the utmost importance to them; working and living for reasons that may be well the same as ours. Now they've been gone some 500 years and all that is left to us is the essence and quintessence of their lives. To me history is more than a story, more than a book, it's the life, the heart and soul of ages long ago. It's the ultimate myth and inevitably ambiguous, but I do believe, like Lord Bolingbroke said, "History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning." History not read is like ammo not used, someone once said, and without reading, for myself at least, the past is silence and the future is haze.
So for these many reasons, I hate being stuck somewhere with no book, no notebook or a laptop in which to record my thoughts Let the weather play God with my itinerary, let them send me to Elbonia. I've been stuck in places where my luggage did not arrive at the same time I did, and the only written word I could find in English was a ferry schedule for the River Styx. I don't care where I am, I simply need something to read and something to write in. Words in reserve, a buttress against the whims and dubiety of travel, of growing up, of life itself.

I intended to read more tonight but there is a new little notebook on the side table, I removed the film cover, the crackling sound awakened something in me. I stroked the oilskin cover for the first time, my future turning before me as I snapped open the elastic band to flip through the pristine pages, dreams waiting to burst out onto them. The pages were too perfect, it's almost hard to make the first mark upon the clean, fresh landscape. But then, with the thought of a face, of a hand at the small of my back, I began; splaying the words on lasting paper before they are lost in the ether. Words that are bequeathed to the page before they were forgotten, words that though not spoken, will take a corporeal shape in my heart whenever I close my eyes, even as they themselves, slumber between the closed cover that is their hiding place. - Brigid

Congratulations to ASM826 and Mrs. ASM826

On the birth of their first grandchild!

I'm sure there's a story about this