Obama and the AK-47

"But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals -- that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities."

Barack Obama

This citizen believes an AK-47 belongs in the trunk of my car.  One over the fireplace.  Upstairs in my closet.  F**k a lot of soldiers, why should they get to have all of the fun?

But never mind.

Some will call our Commander-in-Chief clueless about the very basics of the armed forces he has been elected to lead.  Not I.  Some will say he's a dimwit, a tool to his teleprompter, victim of a speechwriter without clue.  A man who lacks curiosity about anything not in his cozy, narrow, cone of light. 

Not me. [1]

I say that it proves is that he's never, ever, seen that classic Clint Eastwood movie 'Heartbreak Ridge'. 

For if he had this line would be seared into his memory:

This is the AK-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it.



[1] Not today, at least.

cmdfu

The internet continues to delight and amaze.

cmdfu

Put this in .bashrc (or aliases.zsh if you swing that way)

cmdfu(){ wget -qO - "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$@/$(echo -n "$@" | openssl base64)/plaintext"; }

And ...

$ cmdfu awk
# commandlinefu.com by David Winterbottom

# Get the IP address
ip -f inet a | awk '/inet / { print $2 }'

# Get the IP address
ip a s eth0 | grep "inet " | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1 -d'/'
(snip)

Whoa.

From.

Nutty Things I Found Out Today

Muhammad's name is written on Mars.
and
Muhammad split the moon apart.  Then put it back together.

Which ... fine. It's nutty, but no nuttier than believing bread and wine turn into Christ's body and blood.

It gets better: guys are going around using state of the art technology to prove that medieval miracles really did happen.

'NASA footage shows ..' 'Pictures from satellites are proof ..'

I'd be more impressed if that crowd could build satellites, or the computers, or moon rockets, or even a 1969 Torino GT convertible.  Instead of depending on other people to do it for them.

All these guys can do is smash things apart that they can't build.  Kinda sad.

Compartmentalize

Springsteen begins to mumble in what the music critic Jody Rosen calls his “flat Dust Bowl Okie accent,” and I can’t make out a word he’s saying. I ask Christie if he understands him.

“You want to know what he’s saying?,” Christie asks. “He’s telling us that rich people like him are fucking over poor people like us in the audience, except that us in the audience aren’t poor, because we can afford to pay 98 bucks to him to see his show. That’s what he’s saying.”

Wait a second, this is Bruce Springsteen we’re talking about, the guy you adore?

“I compartmentalize,” Christie says.

Jersey Boys - The Atlantic

Sex and Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers, Chapter 11, the protagonist is on leave from the war.  He describes a strip of bars, pawn shops, dives, strip joints, tattoo parlors, and book stores outside the base.

Then Our Hero, Rico, narrates ..

If you are able to get past these traps, through having already been bled of all valuta, there are still other places in the city almost as satisfactory.  I mean there are girls there, too. Which are provided free by a grateful populace.  Much like the social center in Vancouver, these are, but even more welcome.

A brothel, by golly, run by the city.  Take a number, soldier, the wait time is 20 minutes.

My mind is in the gutter.  It's the USO that is free.  Sure.

Heinlein was careful, he had a way with prose. 

That ain't no accidental clunker of an ambiguous sentence.

Vote for Gary Johnson because he'll abolish the IRS

Gary Johnson will END the IRS (YouTube)

Gary Johnson 2012 - The Economy and Taxes #2: Cut Taxes

THE U.S. TAX SYSTEM IMPOSES AN ENORMOUS toll on productivity through high marginal rates, absurd complexity, loopholes for the well-connected, and incentives for wasteful decisions. A better, fairer system will be:

• Abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
• Enact the Fair Tax to tax expenditures, rather than income, with a 'prebate' to make spending on basic necessities tax free.
• With the Fair Tax, eliminate business taxes, withholding and other levies that penalize productivity, while creating millions of jobs.
• Suggested Reading: www.FairTax.org

No more IRS?  An entire thugocracy turned out to honest labor?  Getting rid of a friggin' wind anchor on the ship of state?  Sign me up.

Also - Gary Johnson wont have a (*&(^*&^^ kill list.

Tab Clearing

Responsibility and Clicking: Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

Summary of the AWS Service Event in the US East Region

Perl Net::FTP

4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle (emacsrocks.com)

emacsrocks.com

michaelw's Emacs Hackery

Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

File Management with Emacs (dired tutorial)

The Collected Writings of Mencius Moldbug

List of wireless router firmware projects (wikipedia)

The Socialization Of America Is Economically Impossible

Dear Person Seeking a Job: Why I Can't Hire You

Defending Against SWAT Entries (Not What You Think) TL:DR - if the police assault you, it's your own fault. Next column: Defending Against Rapists (Not What You Think).

It's not the heat ...

Hot.  Sultry.  Sweaty.  Humid.  So hot the rabbits ain't gonna run and the dog ain't gonna hunt.  How humid is it?  Don't ask.  August in Texas finally found me up here in Wisconsin in July.

Only good thing about riding a bike to work is that I don't have to climb into a car sealed up and baked in the sun.

Did I mention it's hot outside ...

Master Funnery Sergeant

Who is this? Who the f*** is it?

Not just a phoney-fake Marine but a phoney-fake Marine who got to jump out of airplanes.  And not just a phoney-fake Marine who can parachute but one who got himself a Special Warfare insignia.  And an EOD badge.

And not just a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man but a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man who can't arrange his shooting badges correctly or assemble his cover correctly.

Jesus Christ and Saint Peter in a sidecar.

You know - you just know - this guy is sitting at home after work.  He has no friends.  None, zero, zilch, nada.

I feel sorry for the guy.

Via Terminal Lance

Cloud Go Boom

A storm knocked out amazon's cloud service last night (2012-06-29) [1].  A whole lot of stuff on the internet got whacked.  Especially annoying was Netflix - I wanted to watch a movie, and couldn't, for about five minutes.

It used to be that, for an organization, to experience this kind of disruption you needed your own data center.  You had to pay out big bucks for servers, disk drives, electricity, staff.

Now all you gotta do is pay a lot of money to someone else.  Progress!



Which isn't to say that I'm against the notion of 'cloud'.  For some applications, it makes sense.  For some organizations it's ideal. 

But if you're gonna do it, you gotta recognize that you're outsourcing something real important, that the cloud provider is not nearly as interested in your data as you are.

And sometimes they're going to pull a fumducker and leave you hanging.


[1] I'm sure we're going to find out, in time, that it wasn't something simple like 'ran out of fuel for the generators' but a really-truly cascading error that jumped out of the fourth dimension to whack them hard.  We've all been there.

Ideal Workspace

Ideal: browser - Terminal - emacs [1] [2]

In virtual desktop 2 is email, virtual desktop 3 is for other stuff.

It does not stay this tidy, but this is the ideal.[3]

Your mileage will vary.


[1] Really, aquamacs.
[2] Yes, emacs has a shell.  Several of them.  They're just not as good as iTerm2.
[3] As-of right now.

bizlog.sh

BizManager from GXS is an okay tool for EDI.

But it lacks any but the most rudimentary reporting on how much traffic one is sending.

What I need is a breakdown by date/hour of what kind of traffic I'm sending. 

I asked the vendor.  Reply: Have-not-got.  We'll-get-back-to-you. 

Annoying.

Bash to rescue - here.

Run that sucker for a few days, then do this on the output ...

cat *traff*txt | grep as2o | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep as2i | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftps | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftpu | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'
cat *traff*txt | grep ftpd | sort -k3 -k4 | uniq | nawk '!x[$3 $4]++'


And presto: data you can hand to your project manager and say 'this is how much krep the EDI tool handles.'

Things I would like to do with my operating system

... that I should be able to do, [1] but can't.  Maybe I just don't know how.

What: Focus on an application window in Space1 [2].  Input a keystroke,  send it to Space2.

Why: I have a window -  an email, a pdf - it's in the wrong space.  I need to refer to it while I doodle around in another virtual window.  I don't want it here, I want it there.  I want it there now, I don't want to wait while it makes a long trek left or right across three monitors to the next space.

Okay I could restack spaces so they are on top of each other, not side to side.  Still: keystroke, bamspiceweasel, done.


What: From terminal [3], send input to browser.  'Enter' 'Next' or 'Page Down' 'Page Up'.  Slap text into an input box [Enter].

Why: Terminal is where I work. Stuff happens in term.  Twitter.  The company phone book from a shell script.  I edit text there. [4]  The web browser, when I'm working, is a reference.  It contains how-to guides.  Tutorials.  Knowledge base stuff from vendors.

The browser is a television.  I want a remote control.


[1] Linux or OS X need only apply.
[2] Wiki: Spaces (Software)
[3] Do I really need to footnote this?
[4]  I play iTunes from terminal.  It rocks.

S4C Novel of the Month

Zoe's Tale is the best book John Scalzi has written.  Ever.

Wraps up all the loose ends from the Old Man's War series.  And brother, there were a bunch o' them.

It is supposedly a YA novel but ... naw.   It's just good.

Joe Bob sez check it out.

P.S.  I still want a Brain Pal.

A treat for your soul

Just Because ...

Darth Vader Wearing a Kilt on a Unicycle Playing Bagpipes (YouTube)

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Vote for Gary Johnson because he won't have a f*cking kill list

Gary Johnson: I Will End the War in Afghanistan and Bring Our Troops Home Now. Unlike President Pepsi and his challenger Governor Coke, Johnson means it.

And he won't have a f*cking kill list, neither.  Go, sign.  Doesn't mean a damn thing, but it's fun, costs you nothing, and it's a way to protest.

And they've solved the 'innocent bystander' problem that has dogged earlier drone strikes.  If they get blown up, they were bad guys.  Automatically!

There is a bit from Full Metal Jacket where a door gunner is murdering women, children, who were out in a paddy, working.  He yells to Joker "If they run, they're VC.  If they stand still, they're well disciplined VC.  Ha!"

This is now national policy.

If this pleases you, if having a shadowy cabal do evil in your name makes you happy, then by all mean, please: vote this krep-head in for another four years in office.

On the other hand, if this kind of thing makes you sick to your stomach, if it bothers you in the slightest, then you have choices.

Doing nothing about evil is to condone it.


"Hey, hey, BHO, how many kids have you killed today?"

None, they were all bad guys, because, bystanding.

"Oh."

Tab Clearing

How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome.

Uncle Sam pays the bills for companies to privatize space.  As it should be.

The Privatization of Outer Space

Space Exploration: A Closing Window?

The Hardware Startup Movement.  Hardware startups are hard because - capital.  Now .. not so much.  Maybe.

Speaking of Iraq .. Belmont: Friday Follies.  The one sense in which these two videos are alike is that they depict a policy failure. Both record how immense organizations became sidetracked into pursuing in goals which had nothing to do with any rational objective.

Peter Thiel's Rise to Wealth and Libertarian Futurism.

Walking a directory tree with PERL.

NET::FTP : Recursively search FTP directories (was: Net::FTP Problem)

Why, yes, I took a dive into the PERL pond this week.  How did you guess?

Why I use Perl: Reliability.

Modern Perl.

Compiling and running scripts in Emacs.

Free Bach Recordings.

China: The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens ... causing rampant gun ownership.   I am failing to see the problem here.

Of Boobs and Glasses

Welcome to the Future Nauseous

pv - Pipe Viewer

Tab Clearing

Our new Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske: "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them."  Well golly however did we get that idea into our silly heads.


The US Code on GitHub.  320 mb of text.  Maybe we've got a few too many laws.


pv - Pipe Viewer - is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline.


Predictably, Catholics were not amused, and Muslims threatened to kill lots of people.


Hardware Startup Movement

Tally-ho on Dragon

Audio from Mission Control;

"We copy. Tally-ho on Dragon!"

Tally-friggin-ho.  Welcome to the actual space age.

No Coke - Pepsi

Mihm's Charcaol Grill - pretty good food.  They've got this on their menu board

WE DON'T SERVE COKE.  EVER.

Because, the nice lady behind the counter said, when the original owner opened, he choose RC.  The Coke rep told him if he didn't choose Coke he'd go out of business.  That would have been 1958.

A half-century of institutional grudge.  I respect that.

Right-tighty lefty-loosey

When one is lefty-loosing a lug nut one ought to really be darn sure he's lefty-loosing and not righty-tighting.

Because after you sweat those things down with a lot of muscle and some foot action in the bargain it's a bear to lefty-loosey 'em again.

The regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself

It started in California.  Then it just growed.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

The can on the left was bought last year.  Had the other one for a few years.  The new can has a complicated capspout with controls - a switch to lock back when you want to pour, a button to mash make the gas come out.  Release the button and the (for lack of a better word) safety resets.  It is annoying.  It does not feel cheaply made, exactly, but I wonder how long it will last.

Some boating forums have suggested drilling a hole and putting a tire stem in there and using the screw top as the way to close the hole.  Great idea. Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.

Taco Seasoning

Taco Seasoning. 

You know what that is - it's a packet of stuff you buy at the store, toss in the ground beef, and you've got taco meat.

Still buying it at the store?  Cut it out.  Just stop - it takes so little time to make, it's so easy, that I am now embarrassed that I ever bought it from the store.

Here.

1 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper

Mix.  Dump into your ground beef.  Store if needed.   Do I need to tell you 'in an air-tight container'?  Didn't think so.

Taco-friggin-seasoning.   Have a nice day and happy Cinco de Mayo.

Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer

It's a few years after we learn to understand Orcan . . .

Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.

Awesome short story.

Bulk Food - Peter Watts and Laurie Channer

To protect and serve

Cops arrive to help a guy in distress, won't take 'I'm fine, go away' for an answer, shoot his ass dead.  That'll learn him some manners: open the damned door next time, like a good subject.

Later a Grand Jury says 'no problem, dude, free to go'.

"If I knew that there was a man coming to my house with the fixed intention of doing me good, I would run for my life."  ~Thoreau

America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places

Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more complicated than that; America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places. Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries where no one gives a shit about human rights.

Neal Stephenson 'Cryptonomicon'

Shocked, shocked I am . . .

The Administration's top man for Terrorism: We're thought about the drone strike thing and the shit-can-the-due-process-thing.  Much to our surprise, everything we've been doing is cool.

Paul Krugman: Shoveling money onto the fire hasn't worked yet.  We need to shovel more in.  Also, I have a new book out.

Elizabeth Warren furiously paints herself as a prole, is actually the 1%.  Also she's indian Native American.  Oh wait, she's a prole in her heart, where it counts.  She feels your pain.

Validate executable exists in shell

Like this!

#! /bin/bash
command_validate() {
command -v ${1} >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo " WARNING: I require ${1} but it's not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }
}
command_validate passwd
exit 0


Is that cool, or what?

Via the always helpful stackoverflow.

Door knob

A thing I knew before today but never really thought about:

At a cost of $3.00 each, it is cheaper to buy a used door knob from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore than to pay a guy to re-key a lock for which you have lost the key.

Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me.

I'm doing up thing at work that features a little shell scripting, a lot of Kermit: glue to do a thing with free tools that the big expensive EDI application can't do for itself.

After hours of gazing at complete but scattered kermit docs, examples, source code, I was able to very carefully type the meat of my script.

rename /replace:{{}{\%6-\%7}{^}} \m(filename) \%4

This is the watershed.  It's all downhill from here.

Now the shell script can iterate over a text file, pass variables to the kermit script which contains that painfully wrought line above.

kermitget.sh ftp.blah.com user password destination store prefix date-time

And all kinds of crazy Turing-stuff will happen. 

A three-line function will call a 20-line Kermit script, process hundreds of customer names, thousands of files.  Data flies into EDI which sends it to JDE which turns into orders, requests.  Things get built, shipped.  We make money.

Stuff happens.

"Meaningful Work or Death. Any other form of existence doesn’t interest me."

Instructions on Friday the Thirteenth - Max Wolf Valerio

Instructions on Friday the Thirteenth   -   Max Wolf Valerio

Fall asleep with your contacts on

dream of forests lit up with light bulbs

And the thirteenth floor

        disappears –                  an elevator floats inside the liquid tower 

                  wake up again           and again            under     

                        scrolling stars – 

 

And there is a Catskill eagle . . .

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

~Bruce Lee

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

~Moby Dick

You got your programming in my systems administration

You've got Puppet.  You got your emacs.  This is how to make them play nice together.

Get puppet-mode.el here.

Edit .emacs like so

(when
(load
(expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/puppet/puppet-mode.el"))
(package-initialize))

(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.pp$" . puppet-mode) auto-mode-alist))


And voy-la - .pp files are now pretty and tab correctly automagically.

Fuck .... fuck ... fuck .. fuck fuckfuck!

RT @tjic: RT @anthropocon: Look kids! A real live SPACESHIP. You'll be able to go watch it rot in a MUSEUM. #Inspiration

I did not love Shuttle.  Too big.  Too expensive.  Too government.  Too design-by-committee.  Not enough mission.  Too much 'we have a space station to justify the Space Truck that justifies the space station'.

Those wings ... those stupid wings.

And now it's all gone and we're paying a platoon of bureaucrats astronauts to train to ride to space in another country's ships in fucking Soviet designed rockets.

I am an optimist.  I believe what will come next, SpaceX or Blue Origin or whatever, will be better, will be the start of the real space age.  Spaceships and industry and bases and people in the high frontier forever and ever amen.

I do, I do, I do.

But I did love the idea of her.  An actual space-ship.  American-friggin-made.  Up like a rocket, glides home like a prayer.  Manned missions to space, an expression of the best of what we are as a civilization.

I'll miss that gorgeous complicated expensive beautiful fragile flying machine. 

You'll never see her like again.


See also here.

Vobis non me dux

We need a little more of this:

... better yet, give him the real reason: "Well, I need a magazine with thirty-three rounds in it because f&#$ you, Ed." Seriously, where does he get off thinking how many "bullets" are in my magazines is any business of his? Vobis non me dux, Ed; you ain't the boss of me.

Don't Tread On Me.  Vobis non me dux.  Same thing, different verse

Cereal

I said "I'm going to Wal-Mart - anyone need anything?"

"Cereal," said the children.

"Hmm.  I bet I could make cereal .."

"No!" the littlest one cried.  "Food poisoning!  We'll never eat cereal again!"

Drama queen.  He ate one piece of bread from my first batch.  It was not good.  I've gotten better since.

How hard could it be ...

The goal is to make the dough extremely thin with areas of near transparency. You may notice that you are in effect making one huge bran flake at this point.

Seems to meet my standard for manufacturing at home: cheap, easy, quick, repeatable.  And you only need to add raisins to produce the acme of breakfast cereals.

The only solution is to do more of the same that has not worked in the past

[Obama] added, “I personally, and my administration’s position, is that legalization is not the answer.” Drug operations could come to “dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint,” he said, and “could be just as corrupting if not more corrupting then the status quo.”

Obama Says Legalization Is Not the Answer on Drugs

When you automate crap you get very fast crap

I was pointed to 'The Venus Project' as The Way Things Will Be in the Post Scarcity world.

The model aims to incorporate sustainable cities and values, energy efficiency, collective farms, natural resource management and advanced automation into a global socio-economic system based on social cooperation and scientific methodology.

Communism with robots would still be as shitty as old-fashioned industrial-age Communism.

Meanwhile, over here in reality Gerrib notes that the actual present is a post-scarcity world.

Breaking Fast

Well that Lenten Fast went by pretty quickly.


Credit for the idea - in hindsight - goes to Travis, who is the only person I know of who has given up 'blogging' for Lent.  He did it first. Or 'did it first in my limited circle of acquaintances.


Some people died, things happened.  Without a lot of blogs to read I had
no idea that they died, who they were, why I should care.  So I
didn't.  That was nice.


Facebook can go f* themselves.  Nothing personal, I just don't feel a burning desire to re-mire myself in that slough of suck.  Except that my daughter insists on posting pictures of my grandson there.  If I didn't get to see him practically every day I'd have no idea what he looks like.


Still making Bread, at home.  I've gotten better at it.  First I had to stop trying to cowboy the thing and follow the work instructions to the letter.  Then I learned what you can cowboy, and what has to be done just so.

The recipe work instructions?  Go here, google 'bread'. 


The older kids made a shantytown at school, to learn what it was like to be in the Bonus Army. They skipped the tear gas part which takes away half the fun.  Also they weren't very good shanties, what with being _inside_ and all.  If I were in charge I'd have them build something big and important, more representative of that era, something you had to work at.  Hoover Dam.  World War II.


"Glance at the sun.
See the moon and the stars.
Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greenings.
Now,
Think."

Hildegard of Bingen

Lent

For Lent it is traditional to give up a luxury as a form of penitence.

Adios  ...

• Blogging
• Twitter
• Facebook

That's what ... a week, two?

Forty days?

Aw man: this penitence stuff is hard.

Phone book and newLISP

Work has a web-based phone book but ... it's web-based.  Gotta load up the page, enter the last name, hit 'go' ... all for a four-digit number.

Had a bash script for years; wget, grep-fu and voila. Good problem-space to try out new language on, like newLISP.

Doesn't spit back the actual data, yet, but getting this done up after a man-hour of study-time tickles me.

(print "Last name?")

(set 'lastname (read-line))

(println "Looking for " lastname)

(set 'phone (parse (read-file "/Users/bdunbar/foo/phone/phone.cfm") {\W} 0))

(set 'loc (find lastname phone 0))
(if loc
(println "Found name " (phone loc) " in directory.")
(println "Found nothing. Do you have the right spelling?"))

(println "finished.")


Something I did not know this morning

One can write functions in DOS batch.

Cool: I learned something useful.  DOS batch files are still around, making one better is a worth a few minutes of study time.

Sad: I've been noodling around a DOS prompt since 1989.  That same year I got real intimate and familiar with the best NOS of that era - Banyan Vines.

Banyan Vines and StreetTalk are in the rubbish bin.  Microsoft Friggin' DOS is still around.

Where is the justice, I say.

Agile PLM - BEA-090402 - BEA-000386 - Authentication for user superadmin denied

Encountered a problem with Agile PLM where the database user credentials were invalid, but the error returned referenced the WebLogic Server (WLS) superadmin credentials.

This caused us (me!) to look in the wrong area for troubleshooting for several hours, and needless downtime of a systemthat, while not production, was critical for training efforts for a new process to go live several days later.

Hopefully by putting this data here it might show up in google it will save someone else some grief.

• Agile PLM 9301
• WebLogic Server 10.3
• Solaris 10

Startup uses WLS encrypted boot.properties for the WLS credentials.  While this is not how the system is setup by Agile install binary, changing this around is a) trivial and b) common sense. 

Parking login credentials in a bash script variable is asking for trouble.

I do not believe this has anything to do with the problem.  But certain people (coughOraclecough) were confused on this point.

Symptoms

On startup of WLS Node Manager fails with this error message.

<Critical> <Security> <BEA-090402> <Authentication denied:
Boot identity not valid; The user name and/or password from the boot identity file (boot.properties)
is not valid. The boot identity may have been changed since the boot identity file was created.
Please edit and update the boot identity file with the proper values of username and password.
The first time the updated boot identity file is used to start the server, these new values are encrypted.>

This is, needless to say, alarming.

In an effort to simplify things, do some fault isolation, one might change the startup scripts to restore the WLS superadmin credentials and is rewarded with this error message.


<Critical>
<WebLogicServer> <BEA-000386> <Server subsystem failed. Reason: weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException:
Authentication for user superadmin denied
weblogic.security.SecurityInitializationException: Authentication for user superadmin denied
        at weblogic.security.service.CommonSecurityServiceManagerDelegateImpl.doBootAuthorization(Unknown Source)
        at weblogic.security.service.CommonSecurityServiceManagerDelegateImpl.initialize(Unknown Source)
        at weblogic.security.service.SecurityServiceManager.initialize(Unknown Source)
        at weblogic.security.SecurityService.start(SecurityService.java:141)
        at weblogic.t3.srvr.SubsystemRequest.run(SubsystemRequest.java:64)
        Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace>

<Error> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000383> <A critical service failed. The server will shut itself down>

One can even remove the shell variables from the startup script, and will be prompted to manually input the credentials.  Which will fail with the above error message.

The problem was NOT with the WLS superadmin credentials.  I know this because we can look in the database for those.  While they are encrypted, after a while one learns that the encrypted value AE43938383AKKH23566 eq 'tartan' [1].


What Happened

We have different credentials for the Agile database user in our five different environments.

The day prior, we had refreshed our Training environment with a copy of the Production database.  To do this we used the cloning facility provided by NetApp.

The database came up 'ok', but when the application supplied database credentials on startup ... it failed.

Which one could expect.  The passwords are different.

What one doesn't expect is that the error returned does not reference an actual database account, but WLS superadmin credentials, which are still valid: authentication for user superadmin denied.

As soon as the DBA applied the Training environment credentials to the database, I was able to start the Node Manager and Managed Hosts.

Sha-zam!


So What?

Based on my experience, by comments from the Oracle SE, I believe that any Agile PLM version 9.3 [2] database account that is locked out, has invalid credentials, will experience the same problem: that is they will have an error that indicates the WLS superadmin credentials are wrong, when they are not.

This seems to not be common knowledge with the Agile support team at Oracle, or if it is it's not something the support engineer assigned to the case knew about.  And when he closed the case he was real quick to not make a KB out of the problem because it was, he said, specific to the way we implemented Agile PLM.

Which seems wrong but whatever. [3]

If this happens to you, hopefully you will find this document, not have to waste hours and hours of time fixing your problem.


[1] Not the real password.
[2] At least this version.  The way to bet is all versions that use WLS.
[3] Ref.

Making soap from components - costs - reasons why

Travis

I'm interested by your soap ideas.  Can you break this down a bit? How much does "washing soda" cost?  Am I saving 50 cents a week, or $9 ?  How much time does it take to make the mix?  If I can earn $20+/hr, tax-free, by doing these things, I might.  ...but if I'm going to earn $3/hr, and have to story more items under my sink (which is already crammed), then I'm not interested.

Cost
The Store Bought Stuff [1] : $21.99 for 80 loads (.27 cents per load)
Semi-Home Made [2] : $6.67 for 43 loads (.15 cents per load)

Recipe
One Fels-Naptha bar, grated
One cup borax
One cup washing soda

Mix well.  Use 1 tbs per load, double if heavily soiled.

Takes me five minutes for a batch.

One doesn't have to go out of their way to acquire the ingredients.  I found everything at Walmart, in the mop and soap aisle.

Commentary
Spending five minutes every six weeks to make up a new batch to save five dollars.

This is a no-brianer.  It's a few bucks.  Pick up a box of Tide, call it a day.  What are you, some kind of freak?

Yet ... it's half (rounding up) the cost per load.  Half.

Yet ... five minutes of labor every six weeks is nothing.  I spend more time than that blowing my nose, woolgathering, thinking dark thoughts about the government.  Five minutes at the kitchen table is lost in the noise of everyday life. 

Mr. Bluntobject wrote on the same subject

I suspect that the big payoff of making your own dish soap is the making your own part, giving the finger to the world of prepackaged overpriced convenience. Which, now that I spell it out, is pretty persuasive.

Yeah!

In the end, this is why I make my own washing-machine soap:

• Being thrifty is it's own reward. 
• Pennies make dollars. 
• Proverbs 6:6-8.

[1] All prices from Amazon, 2012-02-11
Tide Ultra High Efficiency Original Scent Powder
80 Loads
$21.99

Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
55 oz.
$9.175

Fels-Naptha Laundry Bar
5.5 oz.
$3.99

Twenty Mule Borax
76 oz.
 $12.92

[2] Really, I'm not eschewing modern prepackaged convenience in favor of brewing my own soap from atomic components.  I'm just making my own from the same ingredients that P&G does. Got no time to mine borax.

I don't understand this

One can make washing machine soap: Borax, washing soda, Fels-Naptha bar.

One can make dish-washer soap: Borax, washing soda, sea salt, unsweetened lemonade flavor Kool-Aid.

One can buy a bread machine for $75 bucks - and then make loaves of bread @ .16 cents per.

So why the heck do people continue to buy washing machine soap, dish-washer soap, and bread at the grocery?

Poodle - it's what's for dinner

Him: There's an eagle outside! In the tree!

You mean a hawk?

Him (eye roll): I know what an eagle looks like. White head, orange beak. In. Our. Tree.  I need the binoculars.  (exit)

He's twelve. Knows his birds o' prey.

Sat there looking huge and national symbolish for a while.

Flapped away at a sedate mosey, when, I guess, it was clear none of the smaller dogs would be outside for dinner.

Ain't gonna happen

So check this out. 

The same Roman Catholics that voted Barack Obama into office, had no problem with a dude who was all about murdering babies ...

... are now going to vote for the other guy because some legislation require Catholic hospitals to provide health insurance covering contraception to employees.

I got this ocean-front property for sale in Arizona - from the front porch you can see the sea.

The Ethicist says the darndest things

Shorter Ethicist

Peter: It is ethical to narc out a guy to thugs with guns?

Ethicist: Better to live on your knees than to die on your feet.  Do what you must to help your fellows see the light!

Fighting for what is yours?  Doing the right thing?  Passé .

The smart, the ethical, the right, thing to do is to help thems with guns in their bad deeds. 

Do it for the team, Bobby.

A thing I did not know this morning

The baculum (also penis bone, penile bone or os penis) is a bone found in the penis of most mammals. It is absent in humans, but present in other primates, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee.

Baculum

Tab Clearing

What is a Sin?

Speak No Bush   I’m no longer willing to support non-conservative, unconstitutional, financially unsustainable domestic or foreign policy agendas simply because of their Republican origins.

The real third-party threat: Gary Johnson   Johnson's positions on the issues bear much resemblance to the positions of Ron Paul. Major differences include balancing the budget immediately rather than waiting until 2015, opposition to ending the Federal Reserve System, support for a military alliance with Israel, and belief in global warming.

SSH Tricks

A Simple Lisp Webapp for beginners

Spores  One of the unresolved mysteries surrounding September 11 are what have come to be called the 2001 Anthrax attacks.

Ghandhi & Terrorism: Tackling the “Mad Idea”

Colonization of the Moon

View 711 Thursday, February 02, 2012 

I note that I haven’t said anything about what the government ought to do to help the Middle Class.  Sorry.

The answer, of course, is not much. Mostly, get out of
the way. Get out of the way of development of cheap energy. Stop making
it expensive to hire people and complicated to impossible to fire them.
Repeal a lot of regulations. It’s really not all that complicated.

Better elite better mass

The Great Divorce - David Brooks

There are two tribes in our society now - productive and non-productive.  It's not fair.  So the solution is to ...

. . . but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

Jamming a pack of Morlocks into a herd of Eloi in a DMV-like program of picking up garbage on the highway isn't going to teach anyone anything. 

Except, maybe, how to skate, shirk, and avoid doing anything productive while looking efficient.

Tab Clearing

How a long-dead activist’s ideas influenced Barack Obama

Abstruse Goose: Other People's Code

An Open Letter to Catholics on Behalf of Ron Paul

The Conversation With a Florida Tea Partier That Should Scare Every Republican

Not Obama's Most Empathetic Moment

Dial 911 if this column makes you spit blood    Tepid. Lukewarm. Disappointing. Not what should be happening four years into a recession (oh, right, that’s supposed to be over) after the Federal Reserve has used all its tricks and our elected officials have bankrupted the country.  But it gets worse.

Organizations Versus Getting Shit Done

Well what _about_ Gary Johnson?

A cousin of mine sent me an email last night about Gary Johnson. I hadn't heard of the guy, but I checked out his website.

Says he was a governor and wants to cut spending, legalize marijuana and legalize gay marriage. Fine by me, I guess. Never really gave that stuff much thought. I keep my head down and put food on the table, maybe hunt a little and take my wife out for dinner once in a while.

Johnson was a handyman? That's cool. Successful businessman? Even better. Never raised taxes and they called him "Governor Veto." Whoa, this guy climbed Mount Everest and built his own house! Now, that's awesome. Sounds like my kind of guy: Tough, independent and minds his own business.

I might send this email to a few friends. I know this one who was all ticked one day. He was like, "They're all a bunch of crooks."

He might like this Gary Johnson fella. Seems like a regular joe to me. Except for the Everest thing.

Hey, what about Gary Johnson?

Newt Gingrich makes it difficult

I've written off the GOP candidates for President.  What they promise to bring is big(ger) government, expanding bureaucracy, endless war in the third world ... well the guy in the White House now is doing a bang-up job of that, already.  Why trade horses in mid-stream, I say.

But Newt went and made it real difficult.  Promised a moon base by 2020.  Said we'd do it by using private industry, offering prizes.

"Whereas the Congress has determined that an American owned Lunar Colony is in the national interest, the first American owned company that shall place 31 American on the surface of the Moon and keep them there alive and well for a period of three years and one day shall be paid a prize of $7 billion dollars."

View 372 July 25 - 21, 2005

Which would get 'er done, if it can be done. 

A moon base, infrastructure to deliver things there, a solid foundation to an actual space age, getting some of our eggs out of this basket.

Oh, elbow room, elbow room.
Got to, got to get us some elbow room.
It's the moon or bust,
In God we trust.
There's a new land up there!

Elbow Room - Schoolhouse Rock

Now how am I supposed to NOT vote for this guy?

Not that I have any actual worries on this score.  The GOP will come to their senses, nominate Romney.  Who will a) promptly loose to the Current Occupant or b) Win the election and then continue the program currently in progress.

Did you kill anyone?

If there’s one thing that can be said about the experience that is joining the Marines, it’s that your friends back home won’t understand a damn bit of it. For every life-altering experience  you may have, good and bad, your friends back home will ... be the same way they were when you left them. Your friends will be doing the same things–going to school, not going to school, working, while you’ll be barraged with culture shock and do things that none of them will ... ever have to worry about.

You’ll meet new people, see new things–new worlds even; and they won’t even begin to understand it. Going home will never be the same again, and being home for too long finds you in the precarious position of wishing you were gone again. The very idea of home becomes a distant memory, because it’s never the same as it was. It’s not that home has changed, ... it’s remained largely the same.

What’s really changed is you ... and you’ll never be the same again. But hey, that’s okay. Regular people live regular lives, and you’ve lived anything but. What’s really important is that you try your best not to alienate everyone at home, and if you need help with it, don’t be afraid to seek it. Your friends and family will never understand, but they can try if you give them a chance.

Terminal Lance #175 "Back Home"

Tab Clearing

Aaron Sorkin Is Ready to Masturbate All Over Your HBO With The Newsroom  I can't think of a more Sisyphean mission than to try and restore America's faith in the media with a fucking TV show. Yes, reporters used to be depicted as good guys in pop culture, and that's because pop culture back then was naive and stupid.

The Mastering Emacs Reading Guide

The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources 

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking  I'm not staring vacantly into space, I'm working. Most of the time.

Why the Future Never Gets the SF Right - Michael Flynn  ... anyone who thinks the main basic function of SF is to commit journalism on the future will be perennially disappointed.

Air Force’s Top Brain Wants a ‘Social Radar’ to ‘See Into Hearts and Minds’

The Harvard Classics - in handy digital form.

Wikipedia protest is 'foolish', says Twitter boss

The Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man

The Rise of the Praetorian Class

Newsweek: Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?  The article is okay. The cover makes it clear that nothing would give the editors of Newsweek greater joy than to drop their collective knees and give the President (D) a right good sucking.

The Cambered Hand Push Up.

Schlep Blindness.

Ideas: Mormon Candidates, Gay Marriage, and Polygamy.

I had no idea judges could order grown men and babies to be executed.   Funny ol' world.

Grandchild Update

A year old, and he's getting sly.

Crawls into the kitchen. Reaches for the dog's dish: nothing better than dog food.  Remembers that Mom is in the other room.

Sits up all innocent-like, cranks his head around to check his six. Mom is not paying attention.

Situation: excellent. On to the dog dish!

Better to be the doer than the doee

Mr. Pournelle says it pretty well, about the jarheads who pi*ssed all over dead enemy fighters . . .

... some things are pretty clear. First, they allowed a comrade to tape this, and he put it up on a social medium, and it got loose. Is anyone here astonished? Which says several things about these particular Marines.

First, they won their battle. It’s them that’s doing the urinating, not being urinated on. Urinating on the enemy is a practice of war from at least 3,000 years ago, and probably a lot longer. It’s better to be the guy letting fly than the recipient. When you send young men into combat and they win this is what happens.

Second, none of these guys is ready for promotion to any kind of command NCO level. They may be good as combat leaders and may not – they did win this fight, after all – but they don’t think through enough. This hands the Taliban a bit of a propaganda device, but then we have plenty of tapes the Taliban made about themselves.

Third, this is a Marine matter, and if it were left to me I’d leave it to the Company Commander. That’s what company grade officers are for. There will be howls from the media, of course. It’s a free country. Of course it’s free because we have troopers like these.

And fourth, if nobody else wants them, in the extremely unlikely event that they post me to a combat command over there, I’ll take them. They look like good troops to me.

But because it went viral and because of a lot of reasons it's going to go a lot higher than the company commander and I'll wager whoever is the highest ranking Marine in the group is going to get an other than honorable out of this sorry sad mess.

Sucks but there it is.

This is ...

the oddest and most interesting thing I've seen all week.

BaCon - A free Basic to C converter for Unix-based systems.

That it's written in Bash or Kornshell stopped me for a minute - but only because I'm used to thinking of bash as a tool I use to interact with a computer and not a programming language.

Come to think of it, I think of it this way even when I'm writing and using bash scripts.  Which is, hey, programming.  How about that.

Which is interesting because it's been real obvious for a few years now that the job of 'systems administrator' is changing from 'babysit a server' to 'write code that babysits a server'.

Times change.  Be nimble or find yourself on welfare. 

Think I'll setup BaCon and see how much BASIC I don't remember.

vi is an editor . . .

 "vi is an editor with two modes: one which destroys your input and the other which beeps at you."

~ From Someone in Twitter

A commie, I figure.

I couldn't take it. Before Ron Paul began to speak I went out for a gallon of Padre Kino red and an IV drip. I thought it might hold me over until I figured out how to become an aardvark

After all, Ron Paul is tiresomely predictable. He would say hateful anti-American things. You know, we should get out of damn fool wars, pick the military leech off the back of the republic, dismantle an empire that bankrupts the US, and end our perpetual state of martial priapism against Iran. Completely uneletable. A commie, I figure.

Fred on Ron Paul

Update on the consumer front

Homemade washing machine soap: check.

Using the bread-machine to make our daily bread: check.

New shelves for basement and pantry made from cinder-blocks and pine board: check.  And the basement smells fresh-cut lumber, like a basement should.

Homemade English Muffins: check.

I'm especially happy with the muffins!  A little time-intensive what with the frying in on the griddle step but darn tasty.

And why?  Not because I'm infatuated with 19th century Romantic notions of self-reliance but because I'm cheap.  Have you priced the cost of friggin' English Muffins at the store?  Contrast that with the cost of ingredients times whatever your hourly wage is and the answer is a no-brainer.


I'm not sure where this self-reliant stuff ends - perhaps with forty acres, hyrdo-power, a lot of weaponry and a sign reading

'Ring Bell, Wait, Advance With Your Hands Up, Stay On The Path, Avoid Mines.'

Probably not.  But it would beat the alternative.

Tab Clearing

The Long, Long Depression.  It ain't over yet, Sunshine.

rc - a shell.  Reimplementation of the Plan 9 shell.

Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans.  This is one doodle that can't wont' be un-did.

Blogger client for Emacs.  Emacs seems to be capable of doing everything except baking bread.  And I would not be surprised if someone, somewhere, has some lines in .emacs that allow one to do just that.

Fred Reed: Advice to a Generic Candidate

ShiftIt - Managing windows size and position in OSX  90% of the time the windows position of this or that is fine.  The rest of the time, not so much.

Mark Steyn: Puncture the cocoon of denial

I Have Seen the Future of Retail. Automated checkouts, no cashiers. Sure, someday. Not soon.

BATS - Bash Automated Testing System. Hmm-hmm!

Jonathan Kay: What Ron Paul is good for

Gary Johnson Goes Full Libertarian: "I am excited. I am liberated. And I am committed to shaking the system as it has never been shaken before."

In Defense of Bourgeois Civilization

So ... You've been indefinitely detained!  An information sheet for U.S. citizens from your United States Government.

For Christmas, Your Government Will Explain Why It's Legal to Kill You. Ha! Just kidding! It won't tell you that. That's classified!

As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost.

Good Dogey

There is nothing quite as nice as sleeping in a warm bed on a cold night with a good woman and a large warm dog.

Where was the kaboom?

This is the clutch from my daughter's car that blew up in the middle of Iowa last summer.

That much shrapnel I would have expected a kaboom.

Gary Johnson Discusses Seeking Libertarian Nomination

SIEGEL: ... why isn't it equally true to say that Republican primary voters in this cycle show no interest whatever in somebody who is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, hence you had little traction in Iowa and New Hampshire?

JOHNSON: You know, I would argue that I'm speaking on behalf of the majority of Republicans but wasn't really ever given a chance on stage. And that had to do more with being excluded from polls that determined who got in the debates. And when I was, I polled equally with those on stage.

Speaking with a broad brush, I think that people consider themselves fiscally conservative and socially liberal. And I think the Libertarian Party certainly stands for that broad brush.

NPR: Johnson Discusses Seeking Libertarian Nomination

Dream

It was The Future, part 'Meet the Robinsons', part 'Sleeper', and I was there because I'd been dead, and now wasn't.  Don't ask me how: it involved MRE-size and color pouches with dehydrated person inside.

And it was cool and gee-whiz and flying cars but it was all ashes in my mouth because She wasn't there and I was really sad and when given the choice of 'stay' or 'go' I choose the latter.

Comment of the Day - Gary Johnson Edition

I don’t have a good explanation for why they spent so much time and energy excluding (Gary Johnson) from the debates — since they clearly believe that most of what he stands for (small government, lower taxes, reduced regulation, drug decriminalization, etc.) is anathema to their voters anyway. The GOP braintrust understand that American voters want a bigger nanny state, more borrowing, more spending, and more military adventures abroad.

Nicholas at Quotulatiousness

Oh, wow, we're going to be profound now

Speaking of the security arrangements of the nation-state ...

"The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements," Ng says, "and Mr. Lee understands this."  Oh, wow, we're going to be profound now. Ng is suddenly talking just like the old white men on the TV pundit powwows, which Y.T.'s mother watches obsessively.

From Snow Crash, duh.  No, I'm not re-reading it, I'm listening to it.  This audiobook is, like, the best of that breed, not so much re-reading the words but getting a new take on an old friend.

X is the least we can do for our men and women in uniform and their families who sacrifice so much

Hey, what else can the government do to stratify society, to make it clear there are serfs and their betters?

Members of the military on official travel, and their families, would move through airport security quicker next year under legislation sent to the president on Tuesday.

Bingo!

Troops could go to the front of the line, or a separate line could be created.

Being a soldier don't pay much, you loose some civil rights, and you gotta listen to cranky sergeants, and your family will live in places like Fayetteville and Oceanside and Jacksonville.  Oh and in this new and shining era of the Coke and Pepsi [1] party and never-ending war you're going to get shot at and blown up on a regular basis in far-off places for reasons that have tenuous and dubious [2] connections to national security.[3]

So I guess the very least that we can do is send them to front of the line of grey dab lines.  Give them some bennies that don't cost nothing and anyway the taxpayers are good for it, don't-you-care-about-the-troops and aren't-you-patriotic?

Worked for the Party in the USSR, nu?  And if it further stratifies society, puts the serfs in their place, that's just gravy, man.


[1] My wookie-suit is on order.
[2] At best.
[3]  Sucks, but USMC stands for You Signed the Motherf*in Contract.

Crapsack World

The universe of Snow Crash is described thusly; [1]

Crapsack World: Society is in serious decline, and everyone seems determined to ignore that and act like nothing's happened.

Example ...

His black Oldsmobile is a fucking bullseye in a place like this. It's the worst thing he has ever seen, Compton. Lepers roasting dogs on spits over tubs of flaming kerosene. Street people pushing wheelbarrows piled high with dripping clots of million- and billion-dollar bills that they have raked up out of storm sewers. Road kills -- enormous road kills -- road kills so big that they could only be human beings, smeared out into chunky swaths a block long. Burning roadblocks across major avenues. No franchises anywhere. The Oldsmobile keeps popping. Jason can't think of what it is until he realizes that people are shooting at him. Good thing he let his uncle talk him into springing for full armor! When he figures that one out, he actually gets psyched. This is the real thing, man! He's driving around in his Olds and the bastards are shooting at him, and it just don't matter!

It's societal collapse all the way down while everything disarranges [2] .. sounds like a lot of suck, all-righty. And the characters sure 'nuff act like it's just a thing, you know?

Thing is ... if you wrote our present as a novel [3] the reader would think we are in serious decline and everyone seems determined to ignore that and act like nothing's happened.

We're a frigging category on TV Tropes.

[1] Warning: TV Tropes & Idioms is a Pit of Time-Suck. You Have Been Warned.

[2] It is possible that the background of Snow Crash is the disarranged past from The Diamond Age. In which case it's not all despair: The Diamond Age 'verse is an okay place to live, if you're a member of a Tribe.

[3] War in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, krep-heads running for President, Congress in a Red Queen's race to see who can sh*t on the Constitution the mostest, etc.

It's Dead Jim

Congress just voted  [1] to shit-can the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution, the First is under attack in some kind of internet bill that nobody with a brain is in favor of.

At the rate we're shredding that grand ol' bitch by this time next year I'll have a squad of Marines bunking in my spare bedroom.


[1] Which act appears to me to break the oath [2] each member took on assuming office.

[2] I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same ...

Body Modesty

I was in the hospital a few days ago, for a few hours.  Ran into something a little weird.

When I first got there I was not feeling so hot.  I imagine hunters might recognize the look on my face from when they walk up to a still breathing lung-shot deer: a sort of mute look of pain and horror and omg-omg-do-something-oh-this hurts.  A look that says 'A bullet in the brain is the only humane thing to do.  Where is my 1911?.'

It got better in a big hurry.  Pain medication is a wonderful thing.

Oh and when I first read this I was like maybe some of you and went 'ha-ha that is so cute but it's just funny not real or anything'.  I now know that Allie [1] has nailed the pain management chart.  I'm going to print that f*cker off and show it to the friendly [2] PA at the doctor's office.  This .. this is a pain management chart and you should pay Allie a whole bunch of money for the rights to reprint it.

Anyway. Pain and I didn't care what happened as long as it didn't involve riding in a car over bumps [3].  Or sudden movement.  Or movement.  Breathing hurt.  Then I was blissed out on Dilod-oc-whatever and I noticed that I no longer gave a rip.  The sun was out and I was quite happy with the blanket the nurse gave me [4] and all was all right with the world.  Drew Carey was on 'The Price is Right' [5] and even that was okay.

And while they did this thing and that thing, between the pain and the bliss I understood that I no longer had a speck of body modesty.  We're in the hospital, man.  You guys see these sick sacks of meat all the time so it's like slabs of meat at the butcher shop.  Do whatever you need.

Well, that was my opinion.  The nurses, the CT tech, and everybody else was all weird about it and insisted I tie up the flaps of my hospital johnny and made sure even when they were scanning and handling my intimate parts they did so with a sheet covering up the naughty bits and reassuring me (the guy who didn't give a rip) that my modesty was clearly being respected.

Me, Mr. Modesty, had no issues.  Guys who see all kinds of bodies day in and day out, did. 

That's weird, man.

Or maybe the dipla-dodunk stuff is still chasing around my body.

[1] Oh, look at me,  first-naming the funny lady.  It's just handier than 'Allie that funny chick who draws some good stuff at Hyperbole and a Half'.
[2] No, she really is awesome.
[3] I reckon there are seventy-thousand bumps in the two miles between the clinic and the hospital.  The city should get right on that.  Or maybe a hovercraft ambulance for guys with kidney stones - that would make for a smoother ride.
[4] They have a special heating cabinet for blankets.  I need one of those.
[5] That man does not look right with a Drew Carey head perched on a body conspicuously lacking the Drew Carey gut.  He looks like a bad photo shop.

Thin Ice

Jenny: Gresham's purse.

Incidentally, see that head? The stylized image of Liberty in a Phrygian cap? That used to be the norm - almost all of our early coinage featured stylized images of Liberty in one pose or another. It wasn't until the first part of the 20th century that we actually started putting dead presidents on our money.

Now personally, I think once the images of real people start going on your coins, your republic is on thin ice.

Jenny uses coins.  I benchmark the names slapped on our capital ships.

Our first capital ships?

United States.  Constellation.  Constitution.  Congress.  President.  Chesapeake.

Now?  In chronological order ...

Enterprise.  Nimitz.  Eisenhower.  Vinson.  Roosevelt.  Lincoln.  Washington.  Stennis.  Truman.  Reagan.  Bush.  Ford.  Kennedy.

Eleven politicians, an admiral, and a noun.

Republic's on thin ice, brother.

Tab Clearing

At What Point?  Now that Congress has repealed the Fifth Amendment, can you please join me in recognizing that this country is on a rocket-sled to totalitarianism?

"Shut Up.  You Don't Get a Lawyer!": The Defense Authorization Act Guts Civil Liberties. (YouTube).

Enemies of the Constitution (video).

Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial.

Ceding Liberty to Terror: Senate Votes Against Due-Process Rights.

The Senate Punted on Terror Law Detainees—and That's a Good Thing.

Can Congress Steal Your Constitutional Freedoms?

This deserves a long essay, a rant, something.  Perhaps later.  The bastards keep shredding the Constitution, people just don't give a damn, and I am just too tired to be outraged.


The Rodney Dangerfield of Politics: Gary Johnson, His Message and Evolving.  Perhaps, we have uncovered why Gary Johnson just can't get respect. When it comes to his pragmatic libertarianism, he believes people should evolve with the facts. But, when it comes to the activists that control his party, they just don't believe in evolution -- ever.


Herman Cain, Fugitive Slave, by L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise.  Cain, however, did not find himself jettisoned from the American electoral process because of his opinions on policy, his past association with the Evil Menace of Fast Food, or even because of the naughty things he was accused of having done with women by three specimens of highly questionable believability and a million braying jackasses of the government-approved news-generating industry. Cain got the boot because—well, let me tell you a story ...


Man tells 12 News He Has Signed 80 petitions To Recall Governor Walker (YouTube).


Org-Mode: Your Life in Plain Text. Org-mode is for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, doing project planning, and authoring with a fast and effective plain-text system.


How 'The West' Beat 'The Rest' With Six 'Killer Apps'. Historians have long struggled to explain how the West became the preeminent political and economic force in the modern world, and why so many people aspire to emulate the lifestyles, fashions and popular culture of America and Western Europe.

Shoot em all let the judge sort it out

... cops in Cobb County, Ga. — one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. — now have an amphibious tank.

The picture shows an LVTP-7, with Marines and gear hanging out all over it.  It's not a tank.  But is amphibious.

I could not see what the cops would do with a 30-ton amphibious vehicle that seats 25 combat loaded troops.

Even for cops who are buying all kinds of military hardware that seemed excessive.

I googled.  The reality is the cops in Cobb County, Georgia have acquired themselves an LAV-25.

Which is a 12-ton amphibious vehicle, crew of three, sports a 25mm chain gun, two 7.62 machine guns. 

The coax gun, of course, is for those times on the mean streets when a 25 mm bullet is just a leetle bit overkill.

See?  That's all kinds of better.


Cross posted to The Daily Brief

Re: 2012 National Defense Authorization Act

Email to Senator Ron Johnson (R) of Wisconsin.

Sir,

You recently voted 'nay' on Senator Feinstein's amendment to the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.  Long story short, in your considered opinion it is fine and dandy for the government to hold a citizen in custody without a trial.

To say I am disappointed is an understatement.  Shocked, dismayed, upset, angry, are close to the mark, but fail to adequately express my feelings.

My vote for you in the last election was the last one in your favor I will ever cast. 

I'd sooner send a brain-damaged beagle to represent Wisconsin than the likes of you.

Brian Dunbar
Neenah, Wisconsin

I then asked her what was she so afraid of

From B&S

I made a traffic stop on an elderly lady the other day for speeding on U.S. 166 Eastbound at Mile Marker 73 just East of Sedan , KS . I asked for her driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. The lady took out the required information and handed it to me.

In with the cards I was somewhat surprised (due to her advanced age) to see she had a conceal carry permit. I looked at her and ask if she had a weapon in her possession at this time.

She responded that she indeed had a .45 automatic in her glove box. Something—-body language, or the way she said it—-made me want to ask if she had any other firearms. She did admit to also havin a 9mm Glock in her center console. Now I had to ask one more time if that was all. She responded once again that she did have just one more, a .38 special in her purse. I then asked her what was she so afraid of.

She looked me right in the eye and said, “Not a f***ing thing!”

I have seen the USSR and it is the future

In which Andy Stern confuses a mythical free-market fundamentalist economic model with the actual way things are in the United States, then writes about it in the Wall Street Journal.

He also comes back from China, deeply confused, proclaiming that it's the future.

While we debate, Team China rolls on. Our delegation witnessed China's people-oriented development in Chongqing,

Hang on there, Sparky.

It's a real good bet that Stern does not speak Chinese.  Did anyone in his delegation speak Chinese?  I bet, no.  Did he get away from the guided tour, talk to actual people away from the government minders?  I bet, no.

Stern didn't really see China, he saw what the Chinese government [1] wanted him to see.  In terms of actually knowing what is going on he's dumber, now, than before he left for his trip.  It's like he opened a big hole in his head and replaced some of his brains with sawdust.

[1] The government and the people are one and the same to a degree that is really hard for someone raised in the West to get.  It's - not to put a fine point on it - alien.  I, personally, blame Communism.

The only Western counterpart to this I can think of is working for a Big Company.  You toil there, your input in your group is valued, or not: you're a cog.  You have no choice in the company's direction, it's plans, it's goals.  Having an opinion is encouraged, officially, sometimes, and there are official channels for that, but woe to you if you actually dissent: you'll be fired quicker than you can say 'Jack Robinson'.

From the outside, you don't see a separation between 'IBM' and 'IBM people': it's all just IBM.

It's interesting that Stern is advocating that this kind of government is better than that representational democracy jazz.

The Gun

Sometimes .. only the gun can stand between Good and Evil. (video)

The General is speaking in English.  Brandishing an M-16ish rifle.  Go, Team Anglosphere.

I don't see a big holophobe thing in the audience, like some commentators at the link.  I got the same 'ooh now that is different' thing from a crowd of jarheads in an office with an M249.[1] 

It's not the gun, but 'place where there is not normally a big-ass gun' and 'gun'.

If he'd dragged in a drill press the same thrill would have run through the audience.

[1] The fun part was putting a machine-gun on my desk on it's tripod (feed tray up, of course) after the training was over. 

What's that for?  Customer Service.