The deer and moose remains, RT said, can fetch a tidy sum on black markets for their alleged medicinal properties and to make furniture.
You need a licence to scavenge them – which Irgit and company did not have so the gang were likely hoping for a quick and painless trip.
They set up camp, cooked some grub, sang Ging Gang Goolie then split up.
The gods were not smiling upon Irgit, it seems, as he soon met a brown bear – one of the largest carnivores second only to its cousin, the polar bear.
Scared, Irgit screamed at the beast, hoping it would scarper. Instead it charged the lad, chomping down on his head and also injuring his hands and stomach.
At this point, chances of survival are drastically waning and yet our heroic antler thief prevailed.
The police report said that as the bear had its teeth locked round his skull, Irgit "managed to bite the bear's tongue off, after which the bear was frightened and ran away".
Woah. Sadly, Our Hero is being prosecuted for collecting antlers without a license.
Once the shortcut is installed and configured, you just have to say, for example, "Hey Siri, I'm getting pulled over." Then the program pauses music you may be playing, turns down the brightness on the iPhone, and turns on "do not disturb" mode.
It also sends a quick text to a predetermined contact to tell them you've been pulled over, and it starts recording using the iPhone's front-facing camera. Once you've stopped recording, it can text or email the video to a different predetermined contact and save it to Dropbox.
There is a ton of good information at that link, and I encourage everyone to click through to read it. I am not a lawyer, so you should bone up on what the recording laws are in your State (some require consent of both parties, although that may or may not apply to Police in a public space).
Oh, and one last thing: do not ever ever ever use your fingerprint (or Face ID) to unlock your phone. The Police cannot force you to give them your PIN, but they sure can swipe your finger or hold the phone up to see your face.
OldAFSarge has today's must read post in which he brings three brave men back from statistics and makes them - for a moment frozen in time - men again. The pictures taken of the moments leading up to these men's death highlight the million tragedies that was the second World War.
Some things are so big that our minds cannot really grasp them, and that conflict is one of them. Rather than stepping backwards so as to better see the entirety of the war, OLDAFSarge zooms in, magnifying the focus until we can see clearly what the mind absolutely can wrap itself around.
Last Saturday when Don and I drove to the air show, he mentioned a Youtube video of an old War Department film on assembling a P-47 in the field. He sent the link to me, and now to you.
The United States had a unique challenge in World War II - it was thousands of miles from the theaters of conflict (we should always have such problems, right?). It was a major logistical challenge to get the tools of war to the front. This is a creative solution for getting fighter planes from factory to airfield overseas: ship it in a big crate and then have a crew assemble it on the spot.
No power tools were involved. After watching this I must confess to having a whole new appreciation for the term "Greatest Generation". Oh, and Don (retired Air Force) points out that the pilots who took the birds on that first flight were pretty tough hombres.
On Saturday at the Mid Atlantic Air Museum I ran across Aaron Elson, who has spent a bunch of time interviewing World War II veterans. He has a blog and has made audio books of the interviews which he sells on his web site. He has a bunch of free downloads there including a 2 hour interview with a veteran from the 82nd Airborne about D-Day.
I know for a fact that a bunch of you will like this stuff. Thanks to Aaron for doing capturing these memories while the vets were still here. He had a bunch of CDs on display on his table, one for each vet he'd interviewed. He pointed to one and said "He's still with us". There were a lot of other CDs.
Yesterday Don and I made the trek to Redding, PA to the Mid Atlantic Air Museum's 29th anniversary WWII weekend. Between wheels on the highway at 0530 and the obligatory BBQ on return there wasn't any time to put up any posts.
My first thought was "how could I have never heard of this before". After all, I lived in Maryland 29 years ago and would have gone to this in a flash. If you're in the Mid Atlantic area then you should put this on your calendar for next year, because it was awesome.
I'll do a quick summary here and then hide the rest (including almost all the pics) under the jump. There are really four things that make this stand out from your typical regional air show:
There were not only a bunch of old warbirds, but there were a bunch of rare old warbirds. They had a B-29, a PBY Catalina, a Japanese Val dive bomber, a Japanese Kate torpedo bomber, and one of the only 2 or 3 flying Zero fighters in the world. All of the planes flew - there were no Hanger Queens here.
Land forces were well represented as well, with tanks, half tracks, and more Jeeps than you could count. I'd never seen a German StuG III before, and got to not only see it but talk to its owner about where he got it and how he restored it. I'd guess that there was perhaps $10M just in restored army equipment on display, not counting the planes (some of which, like the B-29 and the Zero are basically priceless). There were reenactments of an American assault on a French village held by the Germans, and a Flame Thrower demonstration.
The place was swarming with re-enactors, who loved to answer questions about what they were doing. It was sort of like a World War II themed Renaissance Faire, except at a Ren Faire pretty much everything is made up. Here the emphasis was detail-correct. I learned a bunch of stuff I'd never known before. There were a bunch of female re-enactors (pics below the jump)
A bunch of the visitors dressed in period clothes. We saw a bunch women dressed as Rosie the Riveter although I doubt that real factory workers went to work with cherry red lipstick.
I'll hide the rest of this post under the jump because of all the pictures, but here's one as a teaser:
Photo credit: Borepatch, 2019
The PzKpfw IV was one of only 4 or 5 tanks on offer. Click to embiggen.
There are a lot more pictures and descriptions after the jump.
When I started this blog eleven years ago this month, I mostly relied on Sitemeter to tell me that people were visiting. Sitemeter lost its mind years ago, but Google has been tracking page views here since 2010.
Google reports eight million page views in those 9 years. Thanks to everyone who stops by - this place wouldn't be the same without you.
Miguel has a good summary up, and his co-blogger has some thoughts on the implications/fallout from this. This is the key bit, although it's perhaps a bit of a long shot as to whether it will sink into the general public's American Idol dulled consciousness or not:
A better public understanding of “no duty to protect” leading to more support for armed teachers and concealed carry, i.e., “if they don’t have to protect us, we will have to protect ourselves.”
Telecom fraud is AFAIK the oldest form of computer fraud. I hadn't been blogging even a month when I posted about a fellow who called himself Cap'n Crunch because he used the whistle in the cereal box to steal free long distance service. It seems that the whistle put out a tone at exactly 2600 Hz which happened to be the tone that the phone switches used for signaling commands.
Well, it turns out that telecom fraud is down, because the people who would steal long distance time now use Skype. Of course, phone spam is way up because it's easy for the Bad Guys to fake their caller ID. The industry is working on fixing this but it will take years before it is deployed and nobody is entirely sure how effective it will be.
It was awful. This scene was famously more intense than that from The Longest Day, thirty-six years before.
The VA estimates that around 350 World War II vets pass on to the Final Muster each day. There are three surviving Medal of Honor recipients from that war:
Charles H. Coolidge who held Hill 623 in France. He had the distinction of being personally shot at by a tank main gun five times during those four days.
Frank Currey, a BAR rifleman. At the Battle of the Bulge he used the BAR as well as a bazooka and anti-tank grenades to disable four German tanks and rescue five of his fellow troops. He was also awarded three Purple Hearts during the war.
Herschel Williams, a Marine at Iwo Jima. When the tanks got stalled in front of a series of pill boxes, Williams went forward alone with his flame thrower. He fought off a Japanese bayonet attack with his flame thrower in hand to hand combat. Ooh rah.
I encourage you to click through and read about each of these men whose post war careers were every bit as interesting as their time on the front lines. Williams' TV appearance is particularly interesting.
A common theme that you hear from the vets who were at that Day Of Days was that they cannot stop remembering their buddies who didn't make it back. This was perhaps said most movingly by the late (Silver Star Distinguished Service Cross winner) Maj. Dick Winters, who parachuted into Normandy on that night:
Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.
- Billy Graham
UPDATE 6 JUNE 2019 11:35: Thanks to Aesop for pointing out that Maj. Winters was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, not the Silver Star. Several Silver (and Bronze) Stars were awarded in that Brecourt Manor to men under Winters' command, but he got the DSC.
When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti launched his "Green New Deal LA" plan last month amid cheers from environmentalists, hundreds of jeans-wearing, tattooed union members outside the event chanted “Garcetti’s gotta go” and denounced the move as a betrayal. The Garcetti protest was followed by disputes in the state capital this month over a large buffer zone that would block new oil and gas wells, as well as a massive hydro project near Joshua Tree.
This article from reliably-lefty Politico looks like a warning to the Democratic party, that their labor union supporters are seeing red, not green:
Brian D’Arcy, business manager of the powerhouse International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Los Angeles, says that Garcetti’s move is just the latest on the environmental front that’s pushing his members toward the GOP — and into the arms of Trump, who effectively wooed blue-collar Rust Belt workers on his way to a 2016 presidential win.
“I’m getting hate mail and blowback from our workers, saying the Democratic Party is doing nothing for us,’’ D’Arcy says, sitting surrounded by his union members in a hall in Los Angeles as they prepared to protest on the streets. Asked if members might gravitate toward Trump, D’Arcy sighed and said, “It’s already happening.”
The article has a whole lot of unions and environmentalists are all singing Kum Bay Ya, but it rings a little hollow with unions taking to the streets to protest Democratic politicians:
Robbie Hunter, president of the state Building and Construction Trades Council — which represents more than 400,000 workers — says that dozens of his members plan a major “Blue Collar Revolution” demonstration Saturday morning at the California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco, which will be attended by 14 of the Democratic presidential contenders and 5,000 delegates and guests.
As I've said it's unlikely (although possible) that Trump can win 49 States in next year's election. However, winning 400,000 union and moderate Democrat votes in California takes him a long way down that path.
Right now I can imagine that there's a certain satisfaction in the Trump 2020 campaign, as the Democratic party is fracturing at the seams. But it's not over until it's over.
In last month’s blog post, Microsoft's Margosis wrote:
There’s no question that the state of password security is problematic and has been for a long time. When humans pick their own passwords, too often they are easy to guess or predict. When humans are assigned or forced to create passwords that are hard to remember, too often they’ll write them down where others can see them. When humans are forced to change their passwords, too often they’ll make a small and predictable alteration to their existing passwords and/or forget their new passwords. When passwords or their corresponding hashes are stolen, it can be difficult at best to detect or restrict their unauthorized use.
...
He added:
Periodic password expiration is a defense only against the probability that a password (or hash) will be stolen during its validity interval and will be used by an unauthorized entity. If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it. And if you have evidence that a password has been stolen, you would presumably act immediately rather than wait for expiration to fix the problem.
Anything that gets users out of having to choose new passwords every 60 days is a big win for everyone's security - as long as password updates are required if you think that the password has been compromised. Long passwords (more than 11 characters) that are easy to remember are best, like the passphrase that I posted about in the first link above (only longer than that one, which was posted back in the days of 8 character passwords).
Now that we're seeing some of the Big Boys taking this approach, maybe we'll see more sane password rules coming around.
The Kiwi.Gov, with great fanfare, recently banned semi-automatic firearms. Some kook shot up a mosque, and so it was decided that all gun owners must pay. So how many of the now illegal firearms have been handed in to the Kiwi.Police?
The New Zealand Herald goes to great lengths to explain that this is only temporary, for real you guys. Oooooh kaaaaay.
Pay no attention to the under 5% compliance rate on AR bans in New York and Connecticut. It's totes different in New Zealand. I mean, people bought all those guns so that they could have the pleasure of turning them over to Officer Plod. Srlsy.
Can anyone please explain to me why half the world thinks that Americans are drooling idiots and that they're ever so much more clever than we are? It sure doesn't look like it from where I sit.
This is a short film about the French liner SS Normandie, sailing from Le Havre to New York back in 1939.
I'm struck by how well dressed even people of modest means were. Thirty years later saw long hair and love beads, and now the typical fashion that you encounter is stomach churning.
It was a different - and much more elegant - day.
Bootnote: When the Queen Of The World was a little girl, she sailed from England to America on the SS United States. But she's pretty elegant.
There's quite a good list at (of all places) Wikipedia. It seems reasonably complete and surprisingly free of the sort of politicized bias so often on display at La Wik. It's also very well organized, with separate sections for those who question the accuracy of the IPCC climate projections, those arguing that the current warming is a fundamentally natural process, those who think that the causes of the warming are unknown, and those who think that warming will have few negative consequences.
There is a list of deceased scientists as well - long time readers will remember Hal Lewis and his spectacular resignation letter to the president of the American Physical Society.
This is a quite interesting list, and potentially useful as well. The argument that most scientists support the "consensus view" is not only wrong, it's dumb. It's essentially saying "my scientist is red hot, your scientist ain't doodly-squat".
