Friday, May 24, 2013

The pornography of power

By accident I stumbled across a video of Christopher Hitchens giving a talk about his book Why Orwell Matters (link in the sidebar; highly recommended).  I was struck listening to the part that starts a little after 14 minutes in where Hitchens describes the "pornography of power" - people who exercise power not because of an excuse (for your own good, for society's good, etc), just just because they like it:
We're in power because we like it.  We're in power because we enjoy punishing people.  We're in power because we enjoy owning people.  We enjoy telling them what they can do.   

Somehow it made me think on the current scandals - IRS, investigating journalists, Fast & Furious - and wonder what Hitch would have to say.



Actually, I don't much wonder.

This performance is a delight to watch - Hitchens talks for 90 minutes with no notes.  His death was a huge loss.

Quote of the Day - how health insurance should work

Nothing I could add could possibly improve this:
The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most. Those are the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase. Everything else on the market is a perverse by-product of the employer-based insurance system.

Worst case scenario with a catastrophic-only plan is you end up with $10,000 in debt. That’s a debt load many times smaller than what the Federal government thinks students should take out to get a college degree. We’ll let you borrow $100,000 to get a sociology degree but, we think that $10,000 is an unconscionable amount to pay for medical expenses? So unconscionable that we have to FORCE YOU to buy a plan with more extensive coverage?

Of course, we all know the real reason for this. it’s meant to force healthy young people to subsidize healthcare for older sicker people. Just force them to pay more for insurance than they ought to, and force them to buy more extensive coverage than is rational.
Word.

The incompetence of the MSM

It's one thing to be biased.  It's a very different thing to be so incompetent in your bias that everyone sees you making the sausage:
In the USSR's military, there was the military commander and then there was the 'Morale Officer' which is a kind way of saying Communist Party hack.  The military commander would make decisions and then would have to run them by the Morale Officer first for approval.  That often meant sound military decisions were changed and suborned to stupid party ideology.  

How is what Peters did to Weisman's article any different?  Sound reporting was 'massaged' until it reflected Party Ideology.  There is no way anybody can call that revised article anything but propaganda. 
And by "sees you making the sausage" I mean "has screenshots of the original unbiased reporting and the updated biased reporting side by side.

Newspaper of record, indeed.

I'm reminded of the great scene in the great film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels where the con man Steve Martin is pleading with the French cop that the woman who swore out the complaint against him was jealous because she'd caught him with another woman.  After all, he's French, isn't he?  He can understand that?  The cop's reply is priceless:
To be with another woman, oui, that is French.  To be caught?  That is American.
The Times wasn't just biased here, it was incompetent.

A rant about CAPTCHAs

No, it's not what you're expecting.

Remember the Golden Age of CAPTCHAs?  The years when the CAPTCHA was a word that was somehow mysteriously (and ironically) linked to the contents of the post?  The kind where people would leave comments like this?*
Your rant about Hitler and jazz music reminded me of the time those NAZI bastards surrounded Duke Ellington's train which was taking him from Belgum to Denmark.  Damn racist NAZI bastards.  Bastards bastards bastards!

Word Verification: "Gestapo".  Man, how ironic was that, huh?
How you get either an easy word and a picture of a street number taken by Google's Streetcam-o-matic car,** or an easy word and a squiggle of hieroglyphics worthy of a Pierre Francois Bouchard.  They're taking away all our fun.

* Any resemblance of this comment and a real comment is coincidental.  If this were a real comment, you'd, err, see it in the comments section.

** Now why doesn't the CAPTCHA ever show the dudes who mooned the streetcam?  Asking for what he was doing could have, like 10 or 20 valid answers.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Moments

I'm sitting on the screened in porch, drinking in our current mild-temperature/low humidity weather that will be here for all too short a time.  I'm also drinking a French 75 (cocktailblogging to follow).   The honeysuckle smells delightful.  Instead of music, I have the birds singing in the yard here in Camp Borepatch.  And someone in the neighborhood is practicing "taps", no doubt for the coming Memorial Day weekend.

For a short, delightful instant, it's peaceful.  I dare say that will change soon, but for now it's a welcome respite.
... some moments happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen. laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. waking up to the first snow. being in bed with somebody you love... whether you thank god for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. if you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.
- Frederick Beuchner

The reason that you can't block the signal

You can't block the signal.

That's a saying about the Internet, which was designed to be massively decentralized and self-healing when some of the nodes are taken out.  While that idea was originally born of the Mutually Assured (nuclear) Destruction days, it turns out that the designers did their work well.

Another saying is the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.  It's made Open Source possible, destroying old business models and giving rise to a myriad of new in an explosion of creative destruction.  Microsoft crushed Netscape because there was a single entity to attack and drive out of business; they could never do the same to the Apache Foundation or Kernel.Org because both of those are massively decentralized.

And so when we look at how the Fed.Gov made Defense Distributed take down their plans for the 3D Liberator pistol, we grasp in an instant that theirs is an old mind set, similar to the mind set at Honeywell Computers or CBS News.  They don't get it, that the toothpaste is out of the tube and not going back in.

Just how out of the tube is it?  This much:
Now look at that highlighted blue line. Liberator. 1647 seeds. I am not one of them. (I’ve halted that particular torrent.) We’re into this some relatively long time since the original release of the .torrent file onto the internet. The first night I grabbed a copy. More as a political statement than anything else. I wanted to “be heard” stating “this is OUR freedom of speech and we choose to talk to each other in bits and bytes.” as I’ve never seen a “3-D printer” the content is actually useless to me. I expect that is true for most folks. The simple fact was that there were SO many folks with 100% of the file actively seeding it, and with high bandwidth, that I was just not getting any “share” of the upload requests.

Bittorrent has a method of finding the best source for you. It prunes out sites that are far away (topologically) and with low speed. You tend to get the most bits from the sites that are fastest and best connected to you. I was just not “important enough” when compared to big servers in large data centers with massive internet connections. (Many .torrent servers are sited at co-location facilities. Pirate Bay is reputed to be done with a cluster of Virtual Machines such that any Co-Lo site could be shut down and the ‘standby’ servers would detect that, and bring themselves up again in a different legal jurisdiction.) So after a while of watching me get “polled” (a 1 size or 0.1 size momentary ‘upload’) and then be dropped for a ‘better source’, I just turned off that seed. Notice that my “ratio” is zero.

Now the big question is just how many more folks are there “like me”? Discouraged that we were “too small” to matter? Just waiting “For that day” when the number of seeds drops down? Add in the slightly paranoid folks who have a copy and are NOT sharing (since your IP address shows up in the window of the person doing the download and “agencies” can run ongoing downloads to identify the sources… or some of the sources since not everyone connects to all of them…)? I’d guess a couple of orders of magnitude more. Heck, I want to be a seed for it, and it’s just too crowded right now to bother!
There are thousands and thousands of computers that are or could host the design specs.  These computers are dispersed all over the world, and while some could be shut down by friendly governments, some other governments are more than happy to flip the bird to Uncle Sam.

This is a long but very interesting article about the intersection of the programming community, the firearms community, and the pro-freedom (for lack of a better term) community.  My experience is that this is typical in high tech: it may be that 75% of the computer security guys I know have concealed carry licenses.

And quite frankly, that intersection is indispensable to the Fed.Gov itself.  It simply cannot live without these people, unless it wants to scuttle the economy is a doomed attempt to impose a rigid, 19th Century control model on a bunch of people who are smarter and more creative than the folks who inhabit the Civil Service.  And that last isn't an insult, but an observation of the selection process in place in both government and high tech: one selects for people who will follow procedure while the other selects for people itching to shatter the procedures into a million shards and create something a thousand times better.

You might say that high tech selects for people who want to make something insanely great.  People who think different.

Sorry, that's the signal, not the Liberator design torrent.  Nobody at the State Department has the foggiest notion of how to turn that crazy contraption off.  And never will.

(image source)

Well, when the dark night of fascism falls on Europe ...

Maybe it will be ironically funny.


Hipster Hitler brings the snark.

How long until the streets of Europe echo to the tramp of jackboots?

It's a trick question.  It's happening now:
More than 100 members of far-right group the English Defence League gathered near the scene of the suspected terrorist attack last night.
Many were draped in St George’s flags and wore black balaclavas with the EDL logo on.
Riot police holding shields formed a cordon around the area as the EDL members waved flags and chanted 'no surrender to the Muslim scum', ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘England’
"Suspected terrorist attack".  That's some real Journalism®, right there.  And here is what it looked like:






Ah, those reserved Britons.  A bit under-stated, what?  In other parts of Europe the same impulse is a bit more, shall we say, colorful?

The [Greek Golden Dawn] party’s ambitions go much further, as the move into schools testifies.  Dozens of new Golden Dawn offices in provincial towns stage events designed to attract new supporters. Torch-lit gatherings and talks on Greek history with a fascist slant are popular.  Selected members undergo military-style training at weekends.  Volunteers support a blood bank, only for Greeks.

Nikos Michaloliakos (pictured above), the 55-year-old party leader, surrounds himself with bodyguards in black T-shirts and combat fatigues.  He is greeted with Nazi-style salutes at party meetings. Anti-Semitism is an integral part of its credo.  His claim that Golden Dawn is “nationalist but not Nazi” is thoroughly unconvincing.

Colorful, indeed:


I look on Europe today and see a lot of unfortunate parallels with late 1920s Europe: a political class lacking legitimacy, who are lost in an ocean of minutia while choosing to do nothing about the great issues of the day, elites that flinch from recognizing reality, a mass of the population increasingly desperate and increasingly contemptuous of the "Elites".

The Press, of course, is a junior member of the Political Class.  The news is not news, but slant - click through the links above for their horrified prose, in articles that doesn't mention multiculturalism of the failure of immigrant populations to assimilate - or to want to assimilate.  The U.K. Daily Mail article in particular does not mention the recent revelations that the previous Labour government intentionally ramped up immigration dramatically with the explicit (but not publicly stated) goal of making Britain less British.

Action, reaction.  We've seen this play out before, on the shores of that unhappy continent.  Economies are slowing and school is getting out for the summer.  Temperatures are rising, both literally and figuratively, and we shall see what with the 20 Million unemployed - largely in the hot southern nations.  Europe has been burning for years, and the flames are spreading.  It'll be a hot time in the Old Country tonight.

Meanwhile on these shores, the real unemployment rate is around 12%, but our political class - nearly as lacking in legitimacy as Europe's - fiddles a tune of immigration amnesty as people lose their jobs or see their hours cut in the ramp up to Obamacare's implementation.  The good news is that Europe is further down the road to ruin than we are, but we need to remember that Franklin Roosevelt was America's first fascist President.  It has a different sound on these shores, but the song remains the same.

Time to go long on torches and hobnail boots.

Via Vox, who brings the Kipling.

So how's that gun control working out in England?

Jihadis who beheaded a Royal Army soldier had a gun:
“And then when I went up there was this black guy with a revolver and a kitchen knife, he had what looked like butcher’s tools and he had a little axe, to cut the bones, and two large knives and he said 'move off the body’.
Sure is a good thing there's all that gun control in the UK, because otherwise a soldier might have been able to shoot his attackers before they cut off his head.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The Missus has a pretty nasty stomache bug

And by "pretty nasty" I'll just elide the details, if you don't mind.  But she's up to the toast and seltzer stage, so Excelsior!

Florence Nightengale

That would be me.  The Missus is doing poorly.  Back later.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

$25 plastic gun printed on $2000 printer

Video at the link, of the pistol firing multiple shots.  Here's the quote of the day:
“People think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first shot. I want to dispel that,” says Joe. “This does work, and I want that to be known.”
Interesting article.  The pistol is clearly an advance over the Liberator, but still has some considerable refining needed.  But the price point of the printer isn't any more than what a decent laser printer used to be not so very long ago, and the cost of the plastic is what a case of good beer runs you.

Not stopping the signal.

How hard is it to make a gun?

Not very.  They're made in prisons:



But by all means, feel free to freak out over 3D printed guns.  As the saying goes, the Lord truly loves Stupid People - he made so very many of them.

Global Cooling causes Tornados

It's all sciency and everything.  What, don't you believe in science?

Via 2cents in an email.

The Internet Ice Cream machine is still calming down

Blood pressure not back to normal, and so the ice cream will be late.  But since this is the Internet, here's  acute kitten eating bacon.


Because bacon.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Sure, sure. A "meteor" is what hit the Moon

The explosion was visible from the Earth with the naked eye, and caught on video:



But "meteor"?  Please.  We all know what happened: Obama needs to show that he's tough on foreign policy to get the Benghazi controversy to die down.  He dusted off IMAO's Nuke The Moon strategy:
Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick'n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone's conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren't doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we'll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn't be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we'll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can't we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, "Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald's before they think I don't like them."
Well, it makes as much sense any anything going on lately ....

"Swipeless" credit cards getting charged even if you don't "swipe" them

"Swipeless" credit cards use a new technology called Near Field Communications - sort of like a super short range WiFi.  Just wave your card near the reader and the charge gets made.  "Near the reader" is supposed to be "within a couple inches".

Well, it looks like the range is longer than anyone thought:
Analysis High-street socks'n'frocks chain Marks and Spencer is accused of quietly taking money from shoppers' contactless bank cards at the tills.

The accusations come from Radio 4's Money Box listeners, who called in to report that M&S had billed cards in purses and handbags over the air, unbeknownst to customers who had intended to pay for stuff another way.

It seems the money was unexpectedly taken from bank cards that can do pay-by-wave with compatible tills using Near Field Communications (NFC). One simply has to wave the card near the machine - within a few centimetres - for the transaction to take place over the air by radio wave.

But customers complained this was happening over a much greater distance with the tills that M&S recently installed in its UK stores.
Marks & Spencer to their credit have not just reimbursed customers who complained, but actively dug through their database to identify double charges that hadn't been reported, and reimbursed those.  So well done, M&S.

But this whole situation gives me the willies.  Click through for the rest of El Reg's article, which is important stuff if you have one of these Satan's Spawn.

No matter how crummy your day was

You didn't go through this:



How we find such soldiers, I can't fathom.  The Republic is still in good hands, at least in this way.

(via)

Grrrr

You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family.

Even when they're insufferable @#$ #&^% $*^@%^& &$#@^*^ $#%^&@# p****s.

Err, excuse me.  I think I need to do more cocktail blogging.  Is it Friday yet?

Sunday, May 19, 2013

You're a good ol' dog, Sergeant Rex

I was at Barnes and Noble and (as is my wont) stopped to look at their bargain book shelves.  A picture brought be up short: a picture of a German Shepherd Dog sitting on a tank.  That's Sergeant Rex.

As you can imagine, I grabbed a copy.  After all, who doesn't like German Shepherds, or tanks, or Marines?  This is a trifecta of win, even without the markdown price.  That's just icing on the cake.

Rex is a Explosive Ordnance Detection dog, and his story is written by CPL Mike Dowlin (with Damien Lewis as co-author).  The story is that of handler and Working Dog, and their adventures in the combat zone that was Fallujah in the spring and summer of 2004.  "Hot" didn't just describe the weather then.

Rex was the first Combat Dog (Devil Dog, indeed: oohrah!) in the US Military since Vietnam.  All that had once been known about military dog handling had been forgotten, and had to be rediscovered.  For example, the M-16 was too big a weapon, and would bounce off of Rex's head when Dowlin and Rex were running towards the objective.  There was learning that went on the whole time of deployment.

The Marines, as you'd imagine, loved having and EOD Dog.  They were taking it left and right from IEDs, and so Rex was seen not as a mascot, but as a comrade.  Well, a bit of mascot, anyway:
Rex gets his front feet up on the sandbagged guardhouse, and barks furiously at anything suspicious.  The marines love it, and the love Rex - just as people do everywhere I've taken him.  He's such a good-looking dog that the marines have nicknamed him "Sexy Rexy".
But it's all fun and games until the RPGs fly:
This second RPG blows me off my perch, and Rex with me, the massive blast wave punching us into the earth.  I must've blacked out for a second, for I came to with Rex on his feet, eyes white with fear and searching wildly in the smoke and dust to find me.  Then he's on top of me, madly licking at my face.  If Rex could talk, I know what he'd be yelling right now: Wake up! Get up! Show me you're alive!
 Highly, highly recommended.  If you pass this up at the Barnes and Noble discount shelf, then you and I can't be friends anymore.  Sorry, that's just the way it is.

As a postscript that is not in the book, one of Rex's subsequent handlers got custody of him after Rex was done with his service:
By the time Rex turned eleven, Megan had enlisted the help of the public and Senator Charles Schumer to push through the adoption papers.  After supposedly being diagnosed with facial palsy, a disease that causes the left side of his face to be droopy and numb, Rex was retired and adopted by Megan on April 6 of this year.  She noted, "I had not seen Rex in three or four years, and as soon as I took the leash, we just picked up where we left off.  It seemed like no time had passed between us."

Unfortunately, dogs do not receive veteran benefits, so Megan would have had to pay for all of Rex's vet bills.  However, she told American Thinker that guardian angels by the names of Mindy and Randy Levine, the Yankees president, came forward, paying for her trip to pick up Rex in California, as well as paying for all of the veterinary bills, both current and future.  She plans on taking Rex to the best vets in New York, where she resides, to get a second opinion about his condition.  Meanwhile, Rex is adjusting well to his new environment, living with his special person and her two other dogs -- Patriot, a Chocolate lab, and Rocky, a Shiba Inu.

It is very obvious in speaking to Megan that she and Rex have a unique bond.  "I love Rex.  We almost died together.  He helped me get through the hardest time in my life. In his last few years he can relax, play with his toys, and we are together."
This is probably the first feeling of approbation I've ever felt for Sen. Schumer, or for the owners of the New York Yankees.  But it was well done.  Well done, indeed.

You know, this is why we misunderstand song lyrics

I must say, though, that he's the only one.

How often can you say both a Frenchman and a German are right about something?

2cents* emails to point out this delightful bit of shadenfreude:

A war of words has broken out in Europe between Francois Hollande's socialist party in France and the Christian Democrats led by Angela Merkel in Germany. The split between the two nations has become so bitter that some papers are suggesting the allies may be "heading for divorce."

The spat began last week when the French socialists leaked a draft of a party policy paper which attacked the "selfish intransigence of Mrs Merkel." The 21 page paper argued that England and Germany were responsible for the problems in Europe and were pushing right-wing politics of "deregulation, deindustrialisation and disintegration."
Perhaps the most strident quote from the socialist paper reads "The [EU] community project is now scarred by an alliance of convenience between the Thatcherite accents of the current British prime minister – who sees Europe only as à la carte and about rebates – and the selfish intransigence of Chancellor Merkel who thinks of nothing else but the savings of depositors in Germany, the trade balance recorded in Berlin and her electoral future."
...
In response to the French criticism, German Vice-Chancellor Phillip Rösler leaked German reports which gave a scathing assessment of the French economy. One report titled "France: Europe’s biggest problem child" criticized Hollande for not doing enough to reform French structural problems. Another report described France as having the "highest tax and social security burden in the euro zone" paired with the "second lowest annual working time."
Get the popcorn.  This is what happens when you run out of other people's money.  How do you say "shadenfreude" en francais?  I think that it's "salles boches".

* Not sure why he didn't post this himself, it's extra tasty!  I even stole the post title from his email.

Nellie Melba - 1926 Farewell Performance from London's Royal Opera House

Nellie Melba was born on this day in 1861, and became the most famous soprano in the world in her day.  She was the first Australian to establish world wide fame in classical music; her start was (perhaps unsurprisingly) not in the United States, but rather in Australia and especially Europe.  Her stage name "Melba" was a tip of the hat to her native Melbourne (her Christian name was Helen Porter Mitchell).

Today she is best known for the desert created for her by the greatest chef of the day, Auguste Escoffier.  Peach Melba involves peaches and vanilla ice cream, covered with a raspberry coulis.  Interestingly, Escoffier created several other dishes for her.

Her fame was perhaps due to the fact that she had perfect pitch.  She became wildly successful and quite wealthy, recording a large number of the new fangled gramophone records.  Her reputation was such that at this farewell performance, King George V and Queen Mary attended.


Friday, May 17, 2013

Two words

Sidecar.

Damn, it's good. I'll do some cocktailblogging later, but if all y'all will forgive me, it's been a long week.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

It's a great day (for me to whoop somebody's ass)

Bah.  It's one of those days (and weeks).


End the War on Drugs


I mean, you can find it on every street corner.

Quote of the Day - Stupid Party edition

Ann Althouse wonders why the GOP wasn't aggressive on the scandals during the election, back when it would have done them some good:
Obama's prime target was the Tea Party (which had crushed him in the 2010 midterms), and the establishment Republicans were at odds with the Tea Party movement. I'm not saying I believe this, but sober reflection tells us we need to redraw the line between paranoia and vigilance. The theory is that establishment Republicans appreciated the suppression of the Tea Party.
Plausible.