François Couperin - Les Barricades Mystérieuses

Image de la Wik

Louis XIV was the world's toughest music critic, famously muttering "Le critic de musique, c'est moi" (well, I'm pretty sure I heard that somewhere).  The Sun King held the most splendid court outside of China, and so demanded the very best in everything.

François Couperin was Court organist, so we know that Le critique de music thought he was pretty darned good.  The rest of France simply called him Couperin le Grand.

We have a ton of his music, since he was given carte blanch to publish whatever he wanted to.  This made him influential all across Europe, and no less than J. S. Bach corresponded with him.  Later generations much admired his work, notably Brahms and Ravel - whose Tombeau de Couperin we have seen here before.

Long time reader and friend Libertyman suggested Couperin some time ago.  Since today is the composer's birthday it seemed fitting.

Riley Green - I Wish Grandpas Never Died

All music genres have a formula.  Rock has rebellion, the Blues has your woman did you wrong (or vice versa), Hip Hop has - well, I'm sure it has something but I couldn't tell you what it is if my life depended on it.  Country has family.

The danger of Country's overt sentimentality is that it strays into the maudlin, becoming a self-parody  Remember the ending of Harry Chapin's "30,000 Pounds Of Bananas"?  How he tried to write a country ending and so he added his Mom because the song already had a truck?  It was funny because it's true.

But when Country is on, it is dead on.  I wrote about this once, a few years after Dad's death and how one song captured her grief - to paraphrase Shakespeare a grief so profound that like the Bay of France it had no bottom.*

And so to today's song, which does the same.  You will have to go read it at American Digest where Gerhard van der Leun writes about the memories triggered by this simple piece of formula that rises above the trope.  The simple becomes deep, aye like the Bay of France which has no bottom.

It made me remember my own Grandpa.  I think he might have liked this song.

Go and read.  This is the finest thing you'll see all day, other than your family.  Oh, and if you don't know the lyrics to Mama Tried, you can find them here.

* In olden times sailors would navigate by, among other techniques, casting a sounding lead - a weight on a long string.  If the weight hit the bottom, you would pull it up counting how much line it took (this is the water depth).  The Bay Of Biscay off of France was notorious for being so deep that the weight would never hit, thus it "had no bottom".

NTSB: Uber pedestrian fatality happened because autopilot software didn't understand that someone might jaywalk

Last year an experimental self-driving car from Uber hit and killed Elaine Hertzberg in Tempe, AZ.  The NTSB has completed its investigation and said that the cause of the crash is that the software did not classify her as a pedestrian because it could not handle the idea that a pedestrian might jaywalk:

Radar in Uber's self-driving vehicle detected pedestrian Elaine Herzberg more than five seconds before the SUV crashed into her, according to a new report from the National Safety Transportation Board. Unfortunately, a series of poor software design decisions prevented the software from taking any action until 0.2 seconds before the deadly crash in Tempe, Arizona.

FURTHER READING: Uber manager in March: “We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles”

Herzberg's death occurred in March 2018, and the NTSB published its initial report on the case in May of that year. That report made clear that badly written software, not failing hardware, was responsible for the crash that killed Herzberg. 

... 

Two things are noteworthy about this sequence of events. First, at no point did the system classify her as a pedestrian. According to the NTSB, that's because "the system design did not include consideration for jaywalking pedestrians." 

Second, the constantly switching classifications prevented Uber's software from accurately computing her trajectory and realizing she was on a collision course with the vehicle. You might think that if a self-driving system sees an object moving into the path of the vehicle, it would put on its brakes even if it wasn't sure what kind of object it was. But that's not how Uber's software worked.

I don't find this even a little hard to believe, but you should click through to read the whole article which is simply horrifying.  Computers are really good at some things (like adding up long columns of figures) and really bad at other things (like identifying random objects in real time).  One thing they are terrible at is "common sense" - they don't have any that the programmer doesn't write into the code.  Things like a pedestrian might cross a road somewhere other than at a crosswalk.

I've said for some time that I'll never ride in one of these things, but now I need to expand that - I don't want any of these on the roads where I might be.

No, we can't just invade Mexico to go after the drug cartels

Well, I mean that we could, but that there is precisely zero chance that we would succeed.

Folks are talking about this and I want to throw my two cents in.  Sure, we would initially blow away the cartel's armored vehicles and heavy weapons, but the initial success would be fleeting.  There are a million reasons for this, but here's a quick summary:

• The cartels would hole up in rough terrain, just like Pancho Villa's forces did in the early 20th century.  Sure, we have helicopters which mitigates the lack of roads but the last two decades in Afghanistan do not give confidence in quick military success in mountainous regions.
• The Pancho Villa expedition in 1916 was called off because the Mexican military intervened to oppose American intervention.  Most Americans don't really realize just how viscerally Mexicans would react to US forces on their soil in numbers.
• Since the cartels have bought off most Mexican politicians ("silver or lead" - take the payoff or a bullet) the last point becomes even more relevant.

So it's not a question of whether we'd inflict a lot of damage on the cartels.  Of course we would.  But ultimately we'd leave with our tails between our legs and this would make the situation worse than it is today.

And don't think that we would be safe, north of the Rio Grande.  The size of the drug market is unknown but RAND says that just the US black market for drugs was over $100B in 2010.  Add in the EU, Asia, the Anglosphere, and South America and this is certainly half a trillion dollars a year.  That's a lot of money.  The cartels have used this to purchase heavy weapons and armored vehicles, submarines and airplanes.  But that isn't where the threat ends.

Consider how much computer hacking $50M or so could buy.  We know that the power grid is already compromised - the hope is that it is by nation state actors.  But what if it is Black Hats for hire?  It's entirely plausible that if the cartels face a truly existential threat from the US military that they could take down big parts of our critical cyber infrastructure.  This threat has been pretty clear for a decade; I've been beating this drum for that long, although I've mostly given up by now since it's getting worse not better.  Someone in the cartels will have noticed this.

And so while the idea of "let's go blow the cartels away" sounds good on the surface, it's an enormously bad idea.  We'd be fighting a 3rd generation war while the cartels would escalate to a 4th generation one - and we are entirely unprepared for this.

I'm at an all day meeting, so more thoughts on just how fragile our cyber infrastructure is will have to wait.  But it's not just bad, it's worse than you can possibly imagine.

You want to hurt the cartels, then you dry up the cash flow.  You end the war on drugs, legalize everything, and give the drugs away for free.  They can't compete with free.  Anything short of this and you're just going to get a lot of people killed and end up right back where you started.

Oldest Iwo Jima veteran reports to final muster

Semper fi:

MACOMB, Ill. — The oldest known surviving Marine from the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II has died.

John Moon, of Macomb, passed away earlier this week, Western Illinois University confirmed. He was 103 years old.

Ave atque vale.

Hat tip: The Queen Of The World.

Reproduction firearms

We picked up a flintlock pistol for my pirate costume at Party City, which meant that it was cheap and plastic.  The Queen Of The World thought it looked terrible, and so she went on Amazon and found this:

It is stunningly beautiful - their claim of "Museum Reproduction Quality" is no joke.  The box had a little brochure of some of the items they sell

Lemat pistol:

Broomhandle Mauser:

Thompson (they also have a drum magazine model):

There are a ton more, also including swords and other such.  The workmanship on my pistol is a delight, and it cost around $45 - a lot more than that piece of plastic junk from Party City, but this isn't going to end up in a land fill.  If you like cool old firearms, you'll enjoy their web site.  They even have a blog.

Denix is a small family-owned business that's been around for fifty years, producing a quality product.  If you are a reenactor you can get some kit from them.  If you are putting together a pirate costume, you can get some kit there.  Recommended.

Jan Josef Ignác Brentner - Hymnodia Divina

What's amazing about history is that any of the sources from centuries ago have survived at all.  For most of history, we actually don't have any history at all because the records from the time haven't survived.  Sometimes it's a mystery how some sources have come down to our day.  It's like this with the Czech composer Jan Josef Ignác Brentner.

We don't know a lot about his life, other than he published four collections of his music.  Likely there were not a lot of copies because many that we know existed (because they were mentioned by other people) have not survived.  What's strange is that much of his music has survived in Bolivia.  How it got there any why it wasn't lost there is unknown.

You have to wonder how many other composers we don't know about simply because their works weren't lucky like Brentner's.

One thing that we do know about hi was that today is his birthday, born November 3, 1689.

Environmentalists are stupid

Imagine a country where Environmentalists take over the government.  They institute mandates on using wind and solar power exclusively for the metro in the capital city, and add a carbon tax on all other electrical generation.  To cap things off, they host an international climate conference.  What do you think would happen in this hypothetical scenario?

Well, Chile did all of this, and riots have crippled the country and forced cancelation of the climate conference:

Climate activists and the United Nations are suffering a major black eye this week as protests and riots resulting from high energy prices have erupted in Santiago, Chile.

Chile, which will host a major U.N. climate conference in December, earned praise from climate activists for recently imposing a carbon dioxide tax on conventional energy sources and switching the Santiago Metro system to renewable power. Now, the people of Chile are rising up and firing a shot across the bow of other nations considering similar energy taxes and expensive renewable energy programs.

Environmentalists are stupid because they refuse to recognize that their upper middle class programs are a big, regressive tax on poorer people.  Poorer people have caught on to the fact that they're getting screwed so that upper class people (who generally look down on them) can feel better about themselves.

And so a million people have taken to the streets.  Nineteen are dead - victims of environmentalism.  They're unlikely to be the only ones.

Remember, these idiots think that they're smarter (and nicer) than you and me.  Morons.

Anne Murray - Snowbird

Today the local Harley Owners Group cleaned up trash along one of the county roads as part of the "Adopt-a-Highway" program.  We got a lot - 14 big bags in half a mile or so - which is a sad indictment of the local drivers.

But it was 33° at 8:00 this morning.  Two days ago it was 70°.  Winter is coming.

Who better to sing about winter than a Canadian, eh?  And who better to represent Canadian country music than Anne Murray - who I was somewhat astonished to find that I haven't posted even once in eleven years of country music blogging.  I mean, she has four Grammys.  Probably the reason was that she was as much pop as country (one of the Grammys was in the pop category).  But she has more Gold and Platinum albums than you can shake a snow shovel at, and this was her very first hit way back in 1970.

And did I mention that it was cold this morning, and that winter is coming?  Probably already there up in Spring Hill, Nova Scotia where she hails from.  Brrrr.



Snowbird (Songwriter: Gene MacLellan)

Beneath this snowy mantle cold and clean
The unborn grass lies waiting
For its coat to turn to green
The snowbird sings the song he always sings
And speaks to me of flowers
That will bloom again in spring

When I was young
My heart was young then, too
Anything that it would tell me
That's the thing that I would do
But now I feel such emptiness within
For the thing that I want most in life's
The thing that I can't win

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you 

The breeze along the river seems to say
That he'll only break my heart again
Should I decide to stay
So, little snowbird
Take me with you when you go
To that land of gentle breezes
Where the peaceful waters flow

Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
Where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know that I would
Fly away with you

Yeah, if I could I know that I would
Fly away with you

Quote of the Day: In which I agree with a Democratic Candidate edition

Tulsi Gabbard has a bunch of policy proposals that I don't agree with, but I am 100% with her on this:

I'm running for president to undo Mrs. Clinton's failed legacy. From Iraq to Libya to Syria, her record is replete with foreign-policy catastrophes. It's a primary reason why I resigned as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders. Mrs. Clinton and the powerful media and political network she built up over decades have never forgiven this slight.... Those who are indebted to the war machine and the overreaching intelligence agencies, as well as their cheerleaders in the media, are determined to take me down because they know they can't control me. I'm directly challenging their power.... Democratic candidates adhere to [Hillary Clinton's] doctrine of acting as the world's police, using the tools of war to overthrow governments we don't like, wasting taxpayer dollars, costing American lives, causing suffering and destruction abroad, and undermining America's security.... Only when we recognize the failings of the past -- embodied by Mrs. Clinton and her minions in the media -- can we move forward to a future of peace, dignity, transparency and aloha.

Yup.

Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters

Got to love the '80s big hair.

Civil War approaches - in Britain

The English have a well deserved reputation for politeness.  "Keep Calm and Carry On", "Stiff Upper Lip" and all that.  But the shenanigans around Brexit - where the people voted to leave the EU three years ago, only to see Parliament repeatedly stall and rope-a-dope the result - seems to have the population seeing red:

Violence against MPs is a 'price worth paying' to get the Brexit result they want, say a majority of both Leavers and Remainers in a 'genuinely shocking' survey.

The study, based on polling by YouGov, found 71% of Leavers in England, 60% in Scotland and 70% in Wales believed violence towards MPs was a 'price worth paying' for Brexit.

Among Remainers, 58% in England, 53% in Scotland and 56% in Wales considered violence towards MPs was a 'price worth paying' for Britain to stay in the EU. 

Perhaps this is the reason that Parliament agreed to an election in December, two months before the newly extended Brexit deadline?

Professor Wyn Jones said: 'It's not often that one finds oneself shaken by research findings, but in this case it's hard to not be genuinely shocked - not only by the fact that so many think that violence is a likely consequence of Brexit, but that so many on either side of the Brexit divide seem to think that such events might be "worth it" in order to secure their preferred outcome.

'Given that we appear to be on the brink of another general election in which further polarisation could be a deliberate campaign strategy for some parties, these findings should give all of us pause for thought and underline the importance of responsible and measured debate.'

Alas, Prof. Jones, that ship has fair sailed.  Is it even possible to have "responsible and measured debate" when the democratic institutions have repeatedly scorned the people's stated (and voted) preference?  If Parliament can continue to reject the election result, then why should the people not assemble with pitchforks, torches, and generous quantities of tar and feathers?

Of course, I speak as a filthy Colonial, whose forebears long ago decided what the proper response to taxation without representation was.  Oh, and saying "But you do have representation, only not in Brexit" is weak (and since it's England, likely warm, too) beer.

Oliver Cromwell's statue stands outside the Halls of Parliament.  He ran roughshod over that body, during a divided time in England's past.  Many died, before sanity returned to the land.  We shall see if the British people - and their elected representatives - have an appetite for a repeat.

Cool Halloween costume, bro

LOL

Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party

Time to get ready for Halloween with some 1980s music.



Sure miss Rodney Dangerfield, though.

Most of what you're taught about the Civil War is wrong

I've been saying this for a while now, but Brock Townsend has another (great) example.

The best Halloween mask ever

pic.twitter.com/WrSVQBPvsT

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 29, 2019

But, but, but - he was an Islamic Scholar

Err, one that burns captives alive.  But don't ask the Washington Post, because they want this news to die in the Darkness ...

Good Dog.  Do you have a bone to chew?

Nina Simone - I put a spell on you

Get ready for an enchanting Halloween with Nina Simone.

Samsung Galaxy 10 fingerprint unlock is hopelessly broken

It's not just Google's Pixel 4 biometric system that's a security nightmare:

Samsung is reportedly rolling out fixes for a glitch that allowed anyone to dupe its Galaxy S10 fingerprint authentication sensor.

Samsung has reportedly started rolling out a software patch for the Galaxy S10 and Note10, addressing glitches in both phone models that allow the bypass of their built-in fingerprint authentication sensors.

The problem for Android users is that you don't get the security updates from the phone manufacturer, you get them from your telephone carrier.  This means that even though a fix is available from Samsung, it likely will get delayed as the carrier reviews and authorizes the fix.

Note: Apple iPhone users do NOT have this problem - security fixes come directly from Apple.

So just how bad is this fingerprint problem?  Banks are removing the Samsung mobile banking app from Google Play:

A security vulnerability that allows anyone to unlock a Samsung Galaxy S10 protected with a fingerprint has convinced banks that it’s time to enforce new protection rules, at least for this particular model. 

As a result, some banks removed their mobile banking apps for Samsung Galaxy S10, while others released updates to disable fingerprint support when apps are installed on this Samsung smartphone.

Banks do not mess round with security.  This is pretty embarrassing to Samsung, and exposes a pretty big weakness in the Android ecosystem (delayed security patch availability).

If you have a Samsung Galaxy 10 you should disable the fingerprint reader right now.  Oh, and don't use the facial recognition to unlock the phone either.

Top UK Gov't Scientist: NASA may have faked climate data

The guy is retired, which you'd pretty much have to be in order to blow the whistle on this sort of thing:

Retired Principal Scientific Officer (PSO) for the British Government exposes “discrepancies” in NASA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) which serve to make recent temperatures seem warmer.

The “mistakes” point to possible fraud intended to give scientific credence to tax-raising UK and US climate policies.

Nothing new to long time readers, of course.  But this is a very high level disclosure from inside what is frequently referred to as the "scientific consensus".

Our insider source reveals that global land temperature anomalies estimated as high as 1.23°C today were actually occurring routinely as far back as 1934. These temperatures were only surpassed again in 2015.

Persuaded by the raw data he examined, the former top UK government expert is adamant there is nothing abnormal about recent global temperatures.

Remember all those temperature records set in the 1930s heat waves that still haven't been surpassed:

You want to see a real heat wave?  Look at July 1936.  ElevenStates set high temperature records that stand to this day.  That Wikipedia page is a little shifty on this, trying to hide the decline in record temperatures.  You'll see an asterisk next to South Dakota, which the Wiki page says means Also on earlier date or dates in that state.  So what was that earlier date for South Dakota?  July 1936.

Oh, and three more States set high temperature records the next month, August 1936.  That makes 14 out of the 50 States suffered record high temperatures in the summer of 1936.  That's almost 30% of the States.

A suspicious sort of person might wonder whether the scientific evidence for global warming was so strong if all this manipulation, misdirection, and hiding the decline is such standard operating procedure.  And I've been posting for a decade on how the sausage is made:

You read in the press about how much the temperature has risen in the last 100 years. There's an interesting story in the data, but the press doesn't know it.

The data has two components: the raw measurements themselves, and a set of adjustments.

Adjustments are made for a bunch of reasons: time of observation adjustments (you didn't take a reading at exactly the same time each day), environmental changes, weather station site relocations, urbanization, etc.

An interesting question is how much of the 20th century's temperature change is due to adjustments? As it turns out, the answer is all of it.

They keep moving the shells around, but keep your eye on the one covering the marble.