Turns oout, in addition to including a remote killswitch, keylogging and browser-history-stealing features you can’t easily disable, and a lying-ass “privacy mode,” it also sends your encryption keys to Microsoft.
More at The Intercept.
This is very, very bad.
…maybe scrub your mailing list once or twice? I’m happy to get your card, but I don’t need THREE of them.
When using your fisheye, be careful about the placement of your hand on the camera body. Just because your hand is behind the lens doesn’t mean it’s not in the shot.
It’s a near-certainty that the NSA is who compromised Juniper firewalls by inserting a back door. Juniper has discovered and fixed the problem, but the idea that a government agency actively worked to undermine a security product is horrifying yet almost certainly true.
The IETF has approved the use of HTTP 451 to indicate a page that has been blocked for legal reasons.
Ray is happy, I’m sure, wherever he is.
America is too dumb for TV news:
Until recently, the narrative of stories like [Trump’s fantasy of dancing muslims in New Jersey on 9/11] has been predictable. If a candidate said something nuts, or seemingly not true, an army of humorless journalists quickly dug up all the facts, and the candidate ultimately was either vindicated, apologized, or suffered terrible agonies.
Al Gore for instance never really recovered from saying, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” True, he never said he invented the Internet, as is popularly believed, but what he did say was clumsy enough that the line followed him around like an STD for the rest of his (largely unsuccessful) political life.
That dynamic has broken down this election season. Politicians are quickly learning that they can say just about anything and get away with it. Along with vindication, apology and suffering, there now exists a fourth way forward for the politician spewing whoppers: Blame the backlash on media bias and walk away a hero.
[…]
Trump, meanwhile, has been through more of these beefs than one can count, even twice blabbing obvious whoppers in live televised debates. Once he claimed the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to help China, moving Rand Paul to point out that China isn’t in the TPP. Another time he denied that he once called Marco Rubio “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator.” The line was on Trump’s website as he spoke.
In all of these cases, the candidates doubled or tripled down when pestered by reporters and fact-checkers and insisted they’d been victimized by biased media. A great example of how candidates have handled this stuff involved Fiorina.
The former HP chief keeps using a roundly debunked line originally dug up by the Romney campaign, about how 92 percent of the jobs lost under Obama belonged to women. The Romney campaign itself ditched the line because it was wrong even in 2012. When confronted this year, Fiorina simply said, “If the liberal media doesn’t like the data, maybe the liberal media doesn’t like the facts.”
[…]
This is a horrible thing to have to say about one’s own country, but this story makes it official. America is now too dumb for TV news.
It’s our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.
What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.
We are completely doomed.
In the article South Texas elderly couple tired of living on ‘Gay Drive’ loses battle with city to rename street’, the final graf is simply:
It’s unclear whether they were born on “Gay Drive” or if they chose to move there.
The byline is Madalyn Mendoza; she gets a gold star.
I saw this today at Talking Points Memo:
There’s zero chance this is a principled stand by Cheney. Make absolutely no mistake here, and remember that Cheney is a guy who thinks torture, indefinite detention at the will of the state, and invading unrelated countries in response to nonstate terror attacks are all fine and dandy.
No. This is about trying to ice Trump, because now the GOP establishment is well and truly terrified because he keeps not going away. If Trump is the nominee, they’re fucked, because most people won’t vote for this preening fascist blowhard, and the Democratic nominee wins in a walk. If Trump survives long enough in the polls to contemplate a third party run, their base is split and they’re fucked, because without every single angry reactionary white vote, the Democratic nominee wins in a walk.
Here’s the thing, though: This is a bed the GOP made. I’ve been making this point for a while, but the most succinct formulation of it is probably from Wil Wheaton on Twitter:
The GOP’s been laying the foundation for Trump since Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s Welfare Queens. None of this should be a surprise.
If you spend 40 years building your politics on fear and hate of the Other, you shouldn’t be surprised if you eventually get a candidate like Trump that’s willing to say and do horrifying things to please the increasingly agitated core.
(Yes, we’re going backward.)
No. Just no. Longtime readers know I have an affection for series detective works (Jack Reacher, Spenser), so occasionally I audition a new line given that Robert Parker is dead and I read way faster than Lee Child can write.
Deal Breaker was not a successful audition.
What a disappointing mishmash! We grabbed this as an (unabridged) audiobook from the library for our Thanksgiving drive, and holy crap it’s a mess. The plot’s all over the place, and the protagonist — with the hilariously unlikely name Myron Bolitar — is completely Mary-Sue territory. He’s a former Duke basketball star! Who won the NCAA! Twice in four years! And was drafted by the Celtics, only to suffer a career-ending injury in a preseason game!
So he became an FBI agent — during which time he apparently did Big Important things that were Off The Record and SEKRIT — and a lawyer! And a sports agent (because obviously)! And a firetruck! And a millionaire! And a lion tamer!
Ok, I made up those last three, but the rest are true. Really.
Seriously?
Oh, it gets better: his best pal is a seemingly milquetoast old-money finance geek (“Windsor Horne Lockwood III,” we are told, with no hint of irony) who is apparently also a former sekrit agent man, only despite being of utterly average build it’s the little guy who’s the scary unbeatable badass and not the six-foot-four former professional athlete. Predictably, too, Lockwood has a questionable moral compass kept in check by his complete loyalty to Bolitar.
It’s also clear that Coben really, really loves Robert Parker’s Spenser novels. Bolitar says things constantly that I’m sure Coben thinks of as clever-like-Spenser (including literary quotes, which is just a bridge too far), but it invariably comes off as badly-executed mimicry. The Spenser analogs keep coming, too: obviously Lockwood is meant to be an adaptation of Spenser’s morally ambiguous pal Hawk, and just as obviously Bolitar’s unfeasibly attractive paramour is patterned on Spenser’s lover Susan.
I get that, if you’re working in detective fiction, it’s gonna be hard to get out from under Parker’s shadow. But it’s totally doable; here, it seems like Coben isn’t even trying (or, worse, it’s a deliberate attempt to capture some of the same readers — not for nothing, I expect, are Bolitar’s reactions to things around sex and women something more suited to someone decades older than Coben himself).
The whole thing is weak sauce, and best avoided. OTOH, it was free (yay libraries!) and helped pass time on I-10, so in that context it wasn’t completely without merit — but those points are kinda like saying a wine “pours well.”
(Yeah, I’m jumping forward.)
Aurora is the tale of a set of interstellar colonists sent from Earth around 500 years from now, bound for the Tau Ceti system. Because this is hard SF set in a near-future real-world, there’s no magic propulsion: they’re cruising along at a pretty good clip — about a tenth of c — but Tau Ceti is 12 light years away. At that pace it’ll still take far more than a human lifetime to reach their destination.
Enter the idea of a generation ship. Generation ships are science fiction “arks” — you load them up with a critical mass of people, resources, animals, soil, etc., and establish a sealed and self-sustaining biosphere in the ship. People are born, live their lives on the ship, have children, grow old, and die, all in transit. The original volunteers will never see the destination, but their descendants might!
It’s an interesting notion, and is by no means unique to Aurora. Check this subset of the Wikipedia article, but you’ve probably seen it before in Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky and episodes of the original Star Trek as well as Voyager. Earth’s wasteful, bloated humans are hanging out on a generation ship in Wall-E, and SyFy’s (pretty awful) Ascension was set on a simulated generation ship that the inhabitants thought was real.
Anyway.
I read this because the notion of a near-future hard-SF interstellar colonization story was interesting to me, especially if it was handled with the same deft hand that Stanley brought to his Mars trilogy twenty years ago. (And regardless of what I say here about Aurora, the Mars books are solid and fascinating.)
Boy howdy was I disappointed.
Candidly, this a bad book. Robinson believes — probably correctly — that the whole idea of a generation ship is inherently and fatally flawed, and that the very idea of dooming subsequent generations to a life lived in space is ethically dodgy at the least. On these points, he’s not wrong. What’s wrong here is that the book is basically a 480-page polemic with only occasional bursts of action or dialog. There is zero character development to speak of, presumably because it would’ve gotten in the way of his Galtian rants about the inevitable collapse of synthetic biospheres or whatever.
Also? Remember those parts in The Martian where Weir goes on at length about the science involved in this-or-that survival project undertaking by Watney? He was dinged for it by some people (not me), and the rightly elided most of it from the film (because films are not books). Robinson goes all in on those sorts of pursuits — about ecology on the starship, about micromanaging the starship during maintenance, and most egregiously for pages and pages and pages (often without paragraph breaks) about the orbital mechanics involved late in the book. What Weir did worked on paper because the book was from Watney’s perspective, and we needed to know his thinking. It fails here for a myriad of reasons, including the overwhelming volume of the repeated technical info dumps, and also the amount of story and development that they shove out. (Seriously: the text is so bloated that you could tell the actual story here in a short magazine article.)
It’s a long, lazy, and fundamentally irritating book. Absolutely skip it.
The first post for Heathen went up fifteen years ago today.How ’bout that?
For additional amusement, consider what the world was like 15 years ago — that’s pre-9/11, pre-W, and during the dot-com boom.
Let’s talk about refugees, because God knows everyone else is.
The collective freakout on the right about the idea that we might, maybe, accept a few thousand displaced women and children (which they are, mostly) is perhaps the most embarrassing and depressing excess of the modern American GOP yet. It is horrifying in its lack of empathy and logical inconsistency. It is terrifying in its xenophobia and appeal to fear as a transparent politial ploy. It is so ridiculous that, if it weren’t for the fact that people will die as a result, it would be goddamn hilarious.
It is also absurdly predictable that it seems the same folks apoplectic about the prospect of gay marriage are just as adamant that the refugees should stay away. These supposed Christians would cherry-pick Old Testament law (as they’re all presumably wearing blended fabrics and enjoying shrimp) to deny legal protections to their gay brothers and sisters while Christ was completely silent on the subject — but now that we have a situation that Jesus preached about repeatedly, they ignore Him (which isn’t entirely surprising; these folks are also typically opposed to social programs designed to aid the needy closer to home).
We are certainly not a Christian nation in any legal sense, but we do seem to enjoy thinking of ourselves as guided by Christian principles, at least in terms of charity — or, at least, that’s what we might say we aspire to. Except we aren’t, really, not when it counts. We are anti-Christian in our treatment of the needy, in our acceptance of those different from us, and in our willingness to choose lengthening our own tables instead of strengthening our doors when our neighbors are in need. “I got mine, you get yours” isn’t a Christian mantra.
Jesus taught very specifically on this subject, and with some frequency. The most famous instance is the parable of the Good Samaritan, taken from the Gospel of Luke (10:29-37):
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[a] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
There are no weasel words here. He is quite clear.
Remember, too, what He says in Matthew 25, which is even more explicit about what He expects of His followers:
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
My point here is not that we should govern our nation according to the words attributed to Jesus because he was divine. We are not and should not be a theocracy. However, we have for pretty much our entire existence as a nation been the place that refugees came. Diaspora after diaspora have found homes and lives here when no such options existed for them in their homelands. They made us a stronger nation, because we are not homogenous. Even our origin story is about refugees — a fact that should be particularly clear this week.
God bless President Bartlett. Sure, he’s not a real President, but what he says above goes to the heart of who we should all want America to be. Reagan famously spoke of us being a “shining city on a hill,” a beacon of freedom and hope for those all over the world — but what sort of beacon can we really be if we’re too terrified to accept those huddled masses yearning to breathe free?
We have always struggled to live up to who we said we wanted to be, even from our beginnings in 1776. But we wrote them down, so we can keep referring to them: the idea that all people are created equal, and that all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is why our doors must remain open. We should be the example state, not the counter-example. We have spent much of the last 14 years in a state of perpetual freakout, but it’s time for that to STOP — not in the least because terrorism isn’t really a danger for Americans (statistically, bees are a bigger problem). By giving in to the baser impulses of fear and xenophobia, we do ISIS’ work for them; let’s not do that. Refuse to be terrorized, least of all by women and children.
I get that this isn’t easy with so many on TV telling you to be afraid. Remember that it’s easy to get people to pay attention to you when you say there’s danger, especially when you pin it on people who are different. Be strong. Be critical. And remember the point of terrorism: it’s right there in the name. Refuse to become the anti-foreigner freakout nation that ISIS wants to goad us into being. Every time a middle-eastern refugee puts down roots in the US, opens a small business, and raises his family here, it’s better than a thousand bombs when it comes to destabilizing and eradicating those jackasses. Every time we prove that we mean it when we say all people are created equal, and that all of us deserve the pursuit of happiness, we prove their worldview is a lie.
The shitstorm in the Middle East today will not get solved without bullets, I fear, but it also cannot be defeated by violence alone. We have to show people a better option. It’s an ideology based on poverty and despair, and my bet is that we can show folks a better path by embracing those in need, taking them to our collective chest, and making them part of our great American experiment.
I’ve said much of this before, in various Facebook comments in the past few weeks, but what really set me thinking this morning is a long piece in the October 26 New Yorker called “Ten Borders.” It’s the story of a young man’s protracted, difficult journey from Syria — which was collapsing around him — to Sweden, where he’s been welcomed as a refugee. What he endured to get there, and the risks he took, are staggering. Seriously, take the time to read it. You were probably born in a country that stayed safe, after all.
There are a few bits I want to share directly, though:
When Ghaith arrived in Sweden, an immigration officer recorded his fingerprints, ran the data through an E.U. database, and confirmed that he had not previously been processed in Europe [Note: this is about the Dublin Regulation]. “You are now under the custody of Sweden,” she told him. “Sweden will take care of you.” Ghaith subsequently attended an orientation session to learn, as he put it, “what Sweden owes to me and what I owe to Sweden.”
[…]
On the bus, Ghaith scrolled through music files on his phone. The Swedish national anthem started up, loud enough to turn heads. “I listen to it each morning,” Ghaith said, proudly.
[…]
An hour later, six more of Ghaith’s friends—all Syrian refugees whom he knew from law school or from Jdeidet Artouz—showed up carrying a grill, a bag of charcoal, and a three-foot hookah. They stripped to their underwear and prepared to go swimming. These were friends for life, Ghaith said, though he otherwise cared little for Syria anymore. Once his wife arrived, they would have children and he would raise them as Swedes. He didn’t care if his kids spoke Arabic. He added, in broken English, “I worship Sweden.”
And, finally:
Around the same time, Austrian authorities found an abandoned poultry truck with seventy-one dead refugees inside. Ghaith said that he couldn’t help but feel lucky: “I made it, while thousands of others didn’t. Some died on the way, some died in Syria. Every day, you hear about people drowning. Just think about how much every Syrian is suffering inside Syria to endure the suffering of this trip.” He paused. “In Greece, someone asked me, ‘Why take the chance?’ I said, ‘In Syria, there’s a hundred-per-cent chance that you’re going to die. If the chance of making it to Europe is even one per cent, then that means there is a one-per-cent chance of your leading an actual life.’”
Can you, as an American, read these words and be proud of how we are comporting ourselves during this crisis? I cannot. I am not. We are being ruled by small, petty, venal jackasses screaming on TV about how giving aid and comfort to victims of ISIS will somehow endanger us. It’s embarrassing and ridiculous. Fuck fear. The last 14 years have been a never-ending stream of fearmongering bullshit, and in the wake of it we have done terrible things that are absolutely anathema to the values we SAY we hold dear. Let’s fix that.
Virtually everyone who will read these words is descended from someone who left their original country and came to the US seeking a better life. That is, in a very literal sense, who we are. It’s what we’re made of. Let’s return to being that. It can only make us better.
Do not let the terrorists change who we are any more than they already have.
But how can I change what politicians are doing? What difference can I possibly make?
Glad you asked. Turns out, governors can’t close their states. Refugees are coming to your state, almost certainly, but will need help integrating and settling in. (If you’re local to me in Houston, this goes double — Houston is historically a popular refugee destination; it’s something that makes our city so awesome.) You can literally be the welcoming, helping hand by calling the folks at Refugee Services of Texas. Odds are, if you’re reading my blog, you’re pretty damn well off compared to folks escaping war with the clothes on their backs, right?
Joining or helping to start a Welcome Team seems like a great place to start. Let’s help them out. (h/t to Autojim for locating this organization.)
(Confidential to the “but terrorists!” crowd: according to stats from CATO quoted by John Scalzi, we’ve accepted 859,629 refugees since 2001. Of those, THREE have been convicted of planning terror attacks, and none actually happened. For perspective, 1 in every 22,541 Americans committed murder in 2014.)
Bill Murray is doing a holiday special on Netflix on December 4. I love this “revival of 1970s-style holiday shows” thing that’s been happening — ISTR that Gaga did a Thanksgiving one a while back, and Colbert did a Christmas one in-character a bit before that.
Make time for this short film about Richard Kiel, better known as the chrome-toothed, 7-foot-2 Jaws from two Bond films.
Oh, good lord:
Republican presidential frontrunner Ben Carson announced on Friday that he has named former federal judge Charles W. Pickering to serve as his Mississippi state chair.
You may recall that Pickering made the news in the previous administration when President Bush tried to appoint him to the Fifth Circuit in 2001. This put him under enough of a microscope that troublesome things he wrote in the 1960s — e.g., a brief on how to amend the state’s anti-miscegenation statute to withstand Constitutional challenge — came to light. Politics ensued, and much was made of a 1994 case that could be turned in such a way to make it look like Pickering was soft on cross-burning (which is not a completely fair representation of the case, but all that’s public record easily read; draw your own conclusions). He got filibustered — probably more because of his pro-life position (and well done Dems for doing so) than his supposed racism — but eventually made it to the bench as a recess appointment until 2004, when he retired.
Anyway: The point here is not that Pickering is a racist. He’s not.
I mean, I’m sure he’s got racist ideas — he’s a 78 year old white guy from rural Mississippi; that’s a cohort not known for its progressive opinions on race — but his resume also includes taking actual personal risk in opposing the Klan (he required FBI protection at one point), so the national picture of him as a guy two steps away from burning crosses himself is egregiously unfair, and that ought to be obvious to anyone who even bothers to read his Wikipedia article (linked supra), or any coverage of his career not written with an axe to grind.
Moreover, my lay understanding of his bench career (aided a little by certain other family lawyers) is that he was broadly respected by folks across the political spectrum, and generally considered to be a better than average judge. Had he been a pro-choice Republican, my guess is there would’ve been no filibuster; because he was a conservative lawyer in the 1960s who wrote some stupid things, though, there was the material there to manufacture outrage and make the filibuster easier to pull off.
However, I don’t have to resort to research to know that Charles Pickering isn’t a firebrand racist, and to therefore draw the reasonable conclusion that of all the nutty things Carson has done, this isn’t one of them.
I know this because I know Charles Pickering personally. Charles is my cousin.
Specifically, he’s my grandfather’s first cousin, though because my great-grandmother was one of many siblings spread over many years, he’s about the same age as my mother. (I think this makes him my first cousin twice removed, but nobody knows what that means.) I’ve been in his house a hundred times, most recently in March after my grandfather’s sister Ruth died and we had a wake of sorts for her there (pics, if you’re curious, here; this one is of him).
Despite what ThinkProgress and other organs have written, Charles Pickering is a decent man. He’s got terrible politics, though, that are filtered through an apparently severely right wing and somewhat fundamentalist lens — which is to say that he’s a GREAT hire for Carson. The baffling thing here, and the thing that’s frankly embarrassing, is that my bright, intelligent cousin has been taken in by the bumbling goofball Carson.
This isn’t new. At the wake I mentioned above, I was seated close enough to him at lunch to hear him extolling Carson’s virtues to one of Ruth’s sons-in-law, an accomplished businessman and French national who, I assume, is with us in the rational world shaking our heads at the freakshow that is the GOP primary. (I’ve never talked politics with Patrick, but my assumption is that he makes me look like a Republican.)
So the tl;dr here is that:
A. The progressive coverage of this is lazy and reductive about who Charles actually is, which is kind of darkly hilarious — think about it: if indeed my cousin were a lifelong bigot and segregationist, why on EARTH would he be working to put another black man in the White House?
B. How the hell does someone like Carson convince smart people to help him and vote for him? It’s fucking depressing.
C. I am, once again, in the position of being embarrassed by something in Mississippi. Sigh.
I’ve been sitting on this on a while, but holy crap this discussion of Internet security is completely brilliant. Seriously, all nerd-heathen should watch.
The tl;dr, though is that the “internet of things” is stupid, everything sucks and we are doomed forever. But you knew that already.
“Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work.”
He continues:
France is going to endure and I’ll tell you why. If you are in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck. Go ahead, bring your bankrupt ideology. They’ll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Gauloise cigarettes, Camus, camembert, madeleines, macarons, and the fucking croquembouche. You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friend.
Kiernan Shipka shares her memories of her varied middle-sibling co-stars in list form.
I hadn’t noticed, but apparently Bobby Draper was played by eight different actors over the course of the show. (Also surprising: two actresses played Sally, though the other girl was only in the pilot). Some were apparently one-offs, and the last two carried the bulk of the episodes, which is probably why we as viewers didn’t really notice.
Because I was curious, I looked it up. According to IMDB, the character appeared in 74 of the 92 episodes (Sally is in 89). * The last Bobby, Mason Vale Cotton (b. 2002), had the role for 33 of those appearances. * His immediate predecessor, Jared Gilmore (b. 2000), was in 19 episodes.
That leaves 22 episodes where someone other than these two played Bobby.
Two things.
Forty years ago today, on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank with all 29 hands in an early winter gale on Lake Superior. You probably know the song about it.
I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’ll note again for the record that I was shocked to learn in my twenties that this 70s-soft-rock gem was, in the true folk tradition, about a current event, not something that happened in the age of sail. Gordon Lightfoot wrote and recorded the song only a month after the sinking, in December of 1975. To this day, nobody really knows what took her down — the weather was obviously a factor, and could’ve produced a massive wave, but that’s speculation.
There’s a whole host of links available at this MeFi thread that may be worth your time if you, like me, find the whole thing fascinating.
Via FB, I find this blog listing the 25 best southeastern college rock songs from the 1980s, and it is GLORIOUS.
(Shuddup, snake people.)
The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowlege pulls lots of threads together in one place. Worth your time.
A sample:
Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.
There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the fringes. Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations steered clear of such balderdash.
At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. Likewise, he can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum but be confident from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey and that the earth is 6,000 years old.
And he may never have read the Constitution and have no clue about the Commerce Clause, but believe with an angry righteousness that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
Go read the whole thing.
All you have to do is step outside the country.
If Meshal’s tormentors had been foreign officials, he could have sought a remedy under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Yet the majority holds that because of unspecified national security and foreign policy concerns, a United States citizen who was arbitrarily detained, tortured, and threatened with disappearance by United States law enforcement agents in Africa must be denied any remedy whatsoever.
This is awesome. Obviously, you can trade in oil futures, but what happens if you just try to buy a barrel of oil? Tracy Alloway found out.
The point of the exercise was to take part, in some small way, in the severe contango present in the oil market in 2008. Generally speaking, oil purchased for immediate delivery is much less expensive than oil purchased to be delivered at some future date, but in 2008 the differential was huge enough that those with the capacity to move and store large amounts of crude oil could buy, hold, and profit at a meaningful scale.
It took a few years to push the idea to execution, but Alloway did eventually pull it off (though at a smaller scale). The story’s hilarious, but this may be my favorite part:
A true oil storage trade therefore required an early buyer. The usual suspects—think Glencore and Trafigura—wouldn’t dream of touching my puny amount of oil, of course. So I looked farther afield, all the way to my ex-colleagues, who I thought surely still harbored those dreams of owning Black Gold.
Izabella Kaminska, a writer for FT Alphaville and an all-round commodities expert, expressed interest in the contract, then immediately embarked on a due diligence process that would make me rue the whole endeavor.
Unsatisfied with photos of the product, she recruited the services of a professional oil consultant for comfort. The consultant asked for a full inspector’s analysis report and a proof-of-origin certificate. All I had was a FedEx invoice, though I assured them both that I wouldn’t dream of peddling anything but top-shelf sweet crude.
“That [is] all good and well until you learn it’s not Bakken but Kurdish oil, under strict embargo. Well done [for] supporting ISIS,” the consultant replied by e-mail. Adding insult, the consultant informed me that the glass bottle was worth more than the oil inside it, anyway.
When I threatened to sell the oil to a far-friendlier former FT colleague, one without expert knowledge of commodities or the benefit of a sarcastic oil professional, I was accused of taking advantage of less-informed retail investors. Expletives followed.
(Via MeFi.)
Rand has picked up a drone, and in so doing experienced a few “Holy Shit!” moments. Click through, read, and watch. They’re still spendy — the one he grabbed is $700 — but the video footage is just amazing, and it’s a cinch such tech will be half that price in a year or two.
Look, lots of things are shitty, but Spike Lee’s new film Chi-Raq is coming, and it looks kind of amazing. Lee has elected to work with a play this time. Given that the play in question is over two thousand years old, it needed some updates for modern sensibilities, but I think you’ll find the basic argument of Lysistrata pretty easy to grasp whether it’s set in ancient Greece or modern-day Chicago.
As is often the case, Lee has managed to wrangle a hell of a cast: Nick Canon, John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Wesley Snipes, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, and Isiah Whitlock (“Sheeeeeeit“) are just some highlights.
Out December 4.
Because we’re all goddamn hysterical idiots, we let fear of meth drive good cold meds off the shelves, replaced by something many of us — including Chief Heathen — saw as effectively inert. Turns out, we were right:
My mother was visiting this weekend, and I’m pleased to report that Montrose managed to rise above the gentrification enough to produce a delightfully odd moment yesterday: on our way home from brunch, about 4 blocks from home, we passed a buff, shirtless middle-aged dude walking down Taft in the rain holding an enormous green parrot.
Jeffpardy is sort of perfect.
Francis Barry at the New York Times wrote up that recent base-ball contest in language approximating that contemporaneous with the Cubbies’ last win, and it is glorious:
CHICAGO, Oct. 21 — The New York Metropolitans claimed decisive possession of the National League base-ball pennant on enemy turf here at Wrigley Field on Wednesday night, sweeping the Sisyphean Chicago Cubs in four games to earn their ducats to next week’s World Series championship.
The Metropolitans — also known as the “Mets” — sent six safely across the plate before the third inning, mostly as a result of the derring-do of their Bunyanesque first-sacker, Lucas Duda. The mighty Californian smote a home run and a double to tally five of those six runs before the Cubs seemed to comprehend that a game concerning their possible erasure from the 2015 field was well underway.
He continues with play by play:
By game time, ivy-festooned Wrigley was loaded to the gunnels, more than 42,000 strong, their spasms of joy and anticipation such that a detonated stick of dynamite would not have been heard. Fans laughed and cheered like college undergraduates.
But Chicago’s starting twirler, the right-hander Jason Hammel, soon tempered the enthusiasm of the home-towners with his lackluster showing. Curtis Granderson, the pesky right fielder who bats first for the Metropolitans, poked a one-bagger into left field, and so it began.
David Wright, New York’s valiant third baseman who has come back from chronic woes of his broad back, perished on a third twirl, and the multitudes celebrated. Following him was the second baseman Daniel Murphy, whose sudden habit of walloping home runs has earned national attention. He foul-popped, to the loud relief of locals.
Go read the whole thing. It’s fantastic.
They really know how to tailgate.
Faulkner lived there.
Remember when Hollywood fucked up that time, and did two big-budget volcano movies in the same year? Obviously Dante’s Peak was the superior of the two, but everyone who saw it experienced at least some thrill in seeing LA destroyed in the creatively-named Volcano, released only 2 months later.
Then, they did the same thing with earth-ending celestial impacts only a year later, as 1998 gave us both the slightly more plausible Deep Impact in May and the far more obnoxious Armageddon in July.
You see things like this, and you wonder “are they even trying?” I’m pleased to report that the answer is, at least much of the time, “No, not really.” Here’s this year’s PAIR of “fuck it, we’re out of ideas” films:
Exhibit 1:
On the heels of I have no idea what, we have two upcoming films about the two most famous and disturbing psychological experiments. Obviously, The Stanford Prison Experiement is about, well, the Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971. This one’s famous enough it’s even been riffed on in Veronica Mars, and in truth this isn’t even the first feature film to tackle it. (Trailer.)
The other famed experiment is, of course, the eponymous work of Stanley Milgram. The nature of the work (about obedience) was provocative enough that, as with Stanford, the upcoming Experimenter isn’t the first film based on it, but it’s the newest and biggest. Here’s the trailer.
Exhibit 2:
On a lighter (?) note, slasher inversion/dark comedies called Final Girl (trailer) and Final Girls (trailer) will be released soon despite their near-total name collision –something about which we’re sure the studios are SUPER happy.
What’s even MORE hilarious here is that they both star the same actor, a relative newcomer named Alexander Ludwig, whose agent surely knew better.
The films themselves are only superficially similar beyond the obvious trope-inversion aspects. The former is about the eponymous Final Girl (Abigail Breslin) who has been recruited as highly-trained bait to eliminate a cabal of murderous fratboys led by Ludwig. The latter is a (possibly) witty romp through slasher films and involves some teenagers being transported to a 1980s summer camp where, obviously, a slasher awaits (as does the lead’s mother, apparently a scream queen back in the day). This one looks like Wet Hot American Summer meets Cabin in the Woods, whereas the former is more Carrie meets Rambo.
Even so, you’d think someone would’ve adjusted one or both titles, no?
Last night, I noticed my bike’s saddle was broken. It probably got cracked in a paceline pile-up on a ride back in late August, but didn’t actually fail until my ride Sunday or last night. Either way, its supports are totally broken on one side, so it’s unusable for the Ride to the River this weekend.
Well, hell.
So I load up my bike to take it over to West End, and noticed the first bit of good luck today: my MS150 fundraising gift certificate finally showed up. I figured it for (part of) a new helmet, but under the circumstances it seemed clear I was about to turn it into a saddle instead and put off the helmet upgrade.
At the shop, my day improved again when they told me “We’ll just warranty that saddle. Go get another one of the wall.” Yeah, the saddle that came on my bike when I bought it LAST OCTOBER. Score one for using a local shop for sure.
While they installed the new saddle, I looked at helmets. I picked one that cost a little more than the gift cert covered, happy to supplement with cash to get a nicer lid. Well, never mind that; West End took the GC as full payment even though it only covered 75% of the cost. Score #2!
I rolled out of the shop having spent no actual cash, and headed to lunch at Hubcap. Ricky was there, and was excited to tell me all about the goings-on for his Galveston place. If you’ve run into him before, you know his excitement is contagious, so that was super fun. It got even MORE fun when my order mysteriously appeared on my table (vs. the window) well before I had any right to expect it. My suspicions were confirmed when they called the next number, which was still 7 tickets lower than the one I was holding.
My working theory is that I must’ve done something right I don’t remember doing.
Ask not for whom the marmot screams. The marmot screams for you.
The FBI has a long post-9/11 history of ginning up plots to foil; the pattern is generally “find an inept loner who may have said something weird online, and then entice him to take part in a ‘plot'”. The issue is, of course, that (a) the aforementioned loner is typically the only non-cop involved; and (b) in the absence of the fabricated plot, it’s exceedingly unlikely that these inept doofuses would have ever become involved in any domestic terror efforts at all.
But, hey, the Feds get headlines, and people get promoted, and in the absence of real plots people might start to wonder why we spend so much money on security, so it keeps happening. (As has been previously noted, if you’re in security, the absence of existential threats is itself an existential threat.)
Well, now we have something even worse. Turns out, that Chinese professor at Temple they arrested was never actually doing anything wrong, and the FBI could have known this from day one had they bothered to check their own evidence.
Temple University physics professor Xiaoxing Xi made headlines back in May, when he was indicted for allegedly sharing “sensitive” information with colleagues in China about a piece of laboratory equipment used in his superconductivity research. Xi maintained his innocence from the start. On Friday, he was vindicated: the U.S. Justice Department dropped the charges against him, with a vague statement about new information coming to light.
This “new information” came in the form of several sworn affidavits from leading scientists confirming that schematics Xi sent to Chinese scientists had nothing to do with the proprietary device. Apparently nobody involved in the investigation thought to run their case past knowledgeable scientific experts before bursting into Xi’s suburban home with guns drawn, ransacking his house, and leading him off in handcuffs in front of his wife and daughter.
I mean, come ON people! If you’re going to drag a man’s name through the mud, you have an obligation to be RIGHT.
Apparently, if you are both drunk and Scottish, it is unlikely you will be able to say “Purple burglar alarm.”
This:
is the graph of my cycling miles per week over time, as supplied by Strava.
I dislike the long, barren spot in the middle, but I love the trendline happening on the right. (I will also note how hacked off I am about the empty week there, in which every single ride that week was either rained out or logistically impossible. Grrrr.)
Oh, and 115.5 miles last week.
By now you’ve seen the #IStandWithAhmed hashtags, and know the basic story of a gifted young 14-year-old in Irving who made a clock to take to school and show his engineering teacher. (By the way, the presence of the phrase “engineering teacher” should tip you off that this is a relatively well-to-do part of Dallas.)
Some other teacher saw it, and decided that anything with a circuitboard and wires and a display must be a bomb, and so sent him to the principal’s office, despite Ahmed’s apparently incredulous and constant assertions that it was a clock.
The principal — some fuckwit named Dan Cummings, who should be hounded from education forever if there’s any justice in the world — could have taken one look at the electronics hobby project and realized the English teacher was an idiot, but instead decided that, he, too, needed to board the Racist Jackhole Express and involve the Irving police department.
If we lived in a world where calling the police is always a good idea, we might have hoped for at least one of THEM to realize what idiots the MacArthur teacher and principal were. In that world, Officer NotAnAsshole would have laughed in Danny’s face and sent Ahmed back to class.
This is, of course, not the world we live in. So OF COURSE the cops immediately arrested young Ahmed on one count of Making While Brown and one count of Being Smarter Than Us. And then frogmarched him off campus in handcuffs, I shit you not. Ahmed was eventually booked, fingerprinted, taken to juvenile detention, and suspended for three days, despite not actually having committed any legitimate infraction at all.
The cops, for their part, did eventually state that there would be no charges, which sounds magnanimous unless you’ve been paying attention at all. Expect a giant fucking lawsuit, but the real shame is that pitiful-excuse-for-educator Dan Cummings will pay no price, nor will the English teacher, nor will the just-doin’-my-job cops involved.
Popehat really nails it down here, where he begins
American lives are controlled by the thuggishly mediocre. The best measure of their control is this: when called out on their mediocre thuggery, they can comfortably double down.
Ahmed Mohamed, a bright and curious ninth-grader in Irving, Texas, learned that to his regret this week.
Double down is, of course, exactly what the thuggishly mediocre shitheels at Irving ISD have done, in a letter circulated to parents that emphasizes how heroic they were in having a nerdy freshman arrested for the crime of “making shit”.
Popehat continues:
My mother was a school administrator, and there are many decent and concerned school administrators. **But to be blunt, school administrators were generally not the kid who built his or her own clock at 14. (Cops were generally the kid who beat up the kid who built the clock.) ** (Emphasis added.)
Fuck those people.
Fortunately, a positive aspect of our world in 2015 is that the condemnation of this jackassery in Irving has been swift, broad, and nearly instantaneous, and includes high-profile participants from MIT, JPL, the Mythbusters, and a dude who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania. I hope the global shaming continues. I’d like to see someone with both a brain and a spine replace Cummings at Ahmed’s high school, but that seems like way too much to hope for. What we will get, I expect, is pro bono legal help in their inevitable suit, plus no end of scholarship and other offers from folks with similar backgrounds (either nerdy, foreign, or both) who want to help this kid out. So there’s that. And, in the absence of seeing Dan Cummings and his ilk forever consigned to pushing a broom in a Dallas reform school, it’s probably all we can really hope for.
There’s more here, and at BoingBoing.
Reflecting on terrorism post-9/11: So, are we batting 1,000, or was the threat overblown in the first place?
Hint: Nobody bats 1.000.
Being moved when sleeping perpendicular to the approved Plane Of Sleep in the bed, thereby crowding both humans and, sometimes, the other cat.
Construction noises across the street, including but not limited to hammering (manual or nailgun); power tools; large equipment back-up beeps; large equipment in general; loud music.
Awareness of, but not sight of, neighborhood cats just outside the front door. (Cats visible in the backyard are unremarkable.)
Rain. Which is weird, because she lives in Houston, but her formative years were drought years.
The absence of Mrs Heathen beginning at about 5pm each day.
Being alone in a part of the house where there are no people, unless that room is the bedroom.
Being with people in the wrong part of the house.
Not being in your lap, sometimes.
Being in your lap, sometimes.
Having her nails trimmed.
The other cat having her nails trimmed.
Disapproval in all cases is registered verbally, and, in some cases (e.g. #10), with vigorous squirming. Violence is never on the menu.
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall built a boat with his 8-year-old son despite having no previous woodworking experience.
It looks awesome.
Several new sets!
Note: the elephant wasn’t actually at Public Services. Justin is really strict about that.
“Is Willie or Waylon in the pool?“
People are really burying the lede on this. Clearly it’s awesome that one raccoon is distressed by the other’s aquatic adventurism, but it’s even MORE awesome that these people apparently have two raccoons named “Willie” and “Waylon.”
Duh.
There is, apparently, at least one way to skin a watermelon.
People have been yammering about “The Internet of Things” for a long time now, probably dating back to the 1990s and Java and the idea of a fridge (e.g.) smart enough to know when you run out of milk. It’s a neat idea, but even moderately sophisticated software people see the problem immediately:
Every time you connect a device to the net and give it information, you’re trusting that manufacturer not to be stupid. If we can’t even trust phone and computer makers that implicitly, then why the hell do you think we ought to be trusting car makers or appliance vendors?
Look, information security is hard. There’s no goddamn reason you ought to trust your refrigerator with your Gmail password. There’s no reason to need a “smart” TV at all. Don’t buy a car with a wifi adapter, and be circumspect about turning on Bluetooth for anything but phone integration. That neat shit your friend can do with his Tesla? Yeah, it’s cool, but do you REALL think Detroit can do the same shit with the same level of execution? Christ, they can’t even make switches that don’t fail. Don’t ask them to do SOFTWARE.
Don’t connect shit to the Internet that doesn’t need to be connected to the Internet. You do not need to watch Netflix on your toaster. Trust me. I know things.
Even if you’re only mildly technical, this short piece on network security is worth your time.
This guy did something pretty great:
So instead of feeding my cat, I hide these balls around the house…
This all started after I read an explanation of why cats go about repeatedly exploring the same areas: it’s partly to establish and survey their territory, but they’re also practicing ‘mobile’ hunting: moving about, being curious, and poking their noses around in the hopes of upsetting potential prey and finding a meal.
So what if my cat, while out on patrol, actually found its prey? Surely this would bring him one step closer towards a more fulfilled and self-actualized indoor kitty existence.
I imagined hiding little bowls of food around the house… then I imagined me actually refilling these bowls. Then I imagined having to move them around to different hiding spots, spilling, forgetting, and every so often, perhaps only after following a trail of ants, finding one undiscovered and rancid. Hmmm, maybe there’s a way to hide something else, a way to hide something other than food, a way to make something not-food = food…
Click through. It’s brilliant.