Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
Zzzz. Zzzz. Hmph snort .. wha? It’s July already?
The Carnival of Space will be held next week at Space For Commerce, click here for information on submitting a post.
Wow – guess I’d better get busy and gussy the place up a bit for company.
If you feel like contributing, please do.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
“The vision of Sprague’s three destroyers . . . charging out of the smoke and the rain straight toward the main batteries of Kurita’s battleships and cruisers, can endure as a picture of the way Americans fight when they don’t have superiority. Our schoolchildren should know about that incident, and our enemies should ponder it.'”
Herman Wouk
War and Remembrance
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Six of the 13 teenagers arrested after a boozy party that trashed a Haddonfield home while its residents were away struck plea-bargain deals yesterday that allowed them a year’s probation..
We’re sorry. Really. Cross our hearts, we won’t do that again.
The party house sustained about $18,000 in damage. Youths defecated on a Steinway grand piano, ejaculated onto stuffed animals, and sprayed a urine-filled Super Soaker water gun at upholstered furniture.
In yesterday’s deal, four of the teens pleaded guilty to criminal mischief and two to trespassing.
All escaped detention, unless they get into other trouble with the law or with drugs or alcohol in the next year. If they stay out of trouble, the charges will be dismissed.
Despite the heavy damage, DiCamillo ordered the 10 youths who have pleaded guilty only to pay a combined total of $750, the amount that the victim’s insurance did not cover.
Golly, Judge DiCamillo, that will teach ’em.
DiCamillo told the defendants not to bother the family and to tell their friends.
“Go tell everyone. Leave this family alone,” DiCamillo said. “They’ve been harmed enough.”
I am certain the little darlings are quaking in their boots and will certainly pass the Word that The Man is to be feared and obeyed. ‘Cause you certainly showed them that The Laws are not to be trifled with.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Fred Thompson is on board with John Edward’s ‘Marshall Corps’ program, and expands on the idea
“Here’s how I picture it – after joining, the courageous volunteers would shave their heads, spend a few months receiving combat & weapons training, then be deployed to unstable countries to reach out to those who are at risk of seduction by violent extremism. For maximum effectiveness, this reaching out should be done mostly with bullets, grenades, rockets, and other high-velocity/high-explosive projectiles.”
“I would call this expanded version of Edwards’ ‘Marshall Corps’ the ‘Massively Armed Response to Islamic Nutjob Extremists’ or ‘MARINE’ Corps.”
I will allow that he really didn’t say it but as with so many things posted at IMAO .. he should have.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Via.
I was married on June 13, 1997. My wife is the bestest, sweetest, kindest and most loving person I know and I’m privileged that she’s chosen to share her life with me.
A long time ago in another life when things got difficult or strange we used to say in a mock-ironic way “every day a holiday, every meal a feast”. The past ten years there have been hard times and difficult times and I’ve learned that what we used to say in jest can be true.
Every day a holiday, every meal a feast. I love you, Pasty.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
I’ve been listening to John Kennedy’s Inaugural Address via these guys. It might be the lateness of the hour or my own latent romantic streak but
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
I’ve got chills running up and down my spine. I know that the man had his issues and Camelot is just an after-the-fact deal but . . . I’m jealous.
I want a President like that.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
We’ve all had those days. Driving along, you have an ‘oops’ and then you’re stuck in the mud or on the side of the road in a ditch.
It is just all so much more fun when you do this with your first sergeant watching. Not that I would know from personal experience or anything …
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Kate Brown writes that the Gulag wasn’t really intended to be a series of death camps
What were the Gulag planners thinking? Who would send hungry, unshod people to the Siberian Taiga without supplies, shelter and tools in the midst of a famine in order to build a brave new world? If this wasn’t sheer sadism, but really a utopian project, as Werth, I think rightly, asserts, who could imagine success?
But really, penal reform. A society struggling to find a place for it’s malcontents and others uprooted during the drive to collectivization. To save money on guards and prison staff – it was economics, yo. It just went off the rails, a bit. Stalin meant well, you see.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Buckethead has worked his way around to my home place in his ‘alternative state motto ‘ series.
More Perfidy goodness here.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
There is a scene in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean – At World’s End’ where Elizabeth delivers an epic speech;
“You all listen to me! LISTEN! The other ships will still be looking to us, the Black Pearl to lead, and what will they see? Frightened bilgerats aboard a derelict ship? No, they will see free men and freedom! And the enemy will see the flash of our canons and they will hear the ringing of our swords and they will know what we can do! With the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs and the courage in our hearts! Gentlemen, Hoist the Colours”
Note to movie makers – women can deliver epic speech, and do a good job at it. But they cannot do it bellowing like drill instructors; it comes out sounding shrill. Shrill is non-epic. This is effective epic speech and how it should be delivered;
My loving people,
We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.
The movie? Not so bad. It is a long movie and it’s not epic cinema but it’s worth the money.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
The Fifth Carnival of Space is up at ‘Why Homeshool’.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Or
I, for one, welcome our new bithead overlords.
Eric Schmidt said
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’?”
How? Gathering personal data from everywhere. Which is not hard – most of us leave tracks all over the infosphere*, most of it just sitting there. Do you know how to encrypt email? What about using onion routing to mask your IP address? And for the love of God if you use onion routing do you know that some programs leak data to DNS servers to establish the onion route?
If the infosphere were a forest most of us are loud rubes from the city, gawking and tromping all over the place, being loud and scaring off game for a country mile. Bird watchers and fishermen are wincing as we come tromping by, wishing you’d just get back in your Winnebago and go away. It was nice before you showed up and it will be nicer once you leave.
But .. Google. Personal data in the hands of the unscrupulous is double-plus un-good.
After all, here we have a corporation whose executive are not publicly elected, whose activities are not subject to any form of public oversight, and who chose – not reluctantly, but enthusiastically and without the slightest complaint – to comply with censorship in China. To be honest, I’d probably trust the government more with the kind of information that Google wants to amass under the flimsy excuse of helping me find information and services I know how to find perfectly well already, thank you.
As an aside – where you stand on this depends on how you feel about government. Which in turn might depend on how recently you’ve been goosed by it. But I digress.
I don’t want to get too deeply into this but it’s worth noting that while we don’t elect executives in Google neither do we elect the executives in our government. We elect the guys who are in charge who in turn hire the guys who are running things. We elect the CEO. Get a layer or two down and the guys who actually run the government are pretty much just like the guys who run Google.
That’s not where I was going with this.
David Brin speculated that cameras would soon be everywhere, would be networked and capture our public moments. Getting down to the bedrock issue here, we get down to a who watches the watcher problem. We have two ways of living in this future;
* The cops (The Man, John Law) monitor the cameras. Recordings are kept by them, for their use.
or
* There is no Monitor Central. The feed from the cameras is tossed into the ether for anyone to view.
I’m paraphrasing this badly – Brin is a writer and he does a much better job of this. Go read the article if you have not already done so.
Where we’re at is that this is not a deal you can stop. The cameras are coming. Our only choice is to have a society where the cameras are controlled by John Law or by no one at all. It’s that stark.
Here is the problem, and where Brin’s lovely thought experiment fails; cameras are mounted, paid for and installed not by a bunch of grubby hackers but by the Laws. Would your average bureaucrat just hand over data?
I won’t hold my breath.
Where I’m Going With This
You probably saw this coming a mile away. Is the man collecting data on you? If we are tromping through the infosphere like tourists from the city then our tracks in a thousand government databases are fossilized footprints. You’re known about a thousand different ways from Sunday.
Integration of all these databases will happen. Call it empire building or ‘but the people paid for this data they have a right to good data’** or a well-intentioned effort to thwart the pressing crisis of the day … it will be slow and expensive but it will happen.
Google is plowing forward with the same plans – but with a million sources of data that are not controlled by the State. They’re doing it better and faster.
What Google – and a thousand scruffy hackers who want to be the next Google – are up to can be seen not as evil or even bad but an effort to build a public feed of data. Transparent Society Version 2.0.
Intentioned or not this is an effort to construct a better place to live than the one we’ll get if we do nothing.***
On the one side is that massive data integration by the State – and if you think you’ll see much data from that, you’ll be waiting a long time. On the flip side all the other data, just put out there for people to use. The State’s default mode is to hide everything, Google’s is to put it out there for everyone to use.
I know which society I’d prefer to live in.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
*I use this not in the way that a learned policy wonk would so he can up his fee for a speaking gig but in a mock-ironic sense. In fact assume that all consultant and wonk talk above is used in this sense.
** Hat-tip to Ellen Ullman.
*** Or not.
Daily Brief readers, I thank you for you indulgence. This is not your normal mil-blog deal and if you’re read this far you’re a champ and I appreciate it. That or you are wondering if I have lost my mind and you were reading this in the same sense that some people watch NASCAR i.e. for the car crashes.
Last night was payday and the boys get to pick up a new book. Older Monkey is twelve; he was dithering over two books – a new addition to a young-adult series he’s been reading or this: Dangerous Book For Boys. He opted for the latter and I am quite pleased by his purchase.
Topics in DBFB? Famous Battles. Invisible ink. Latin phrases every boy should know. How to make a trip wire. How to make an electro-magnet. The Declaration of Independence. How to play poker. Girls. Girls?
You may already have noticed that girls are quite different from you. By this, we do not mean the physical differences, more the fact that they remain unimpressed by your mastery of a game involving wizards, or your understanding of Morse code. some will be impressed, of course, but as a general rule, girls do not get quite as excited by the use of urine as a secret ink as boys do.
Which is, sadly, true. I would have avoided a whole lotta marital strife if I’d learned this sooner than I did.
It reads like the Boy Scout Manual would if the editors had gotten their way and included the really good bits as well as the stuff BSA requires. Older Monkey spent an hour this evening making a tripwire using two AA batteries, wire salvaged from two dead fans and a light bulb. Of note is that he started using the directions and then strayed off using his own design. Which doesn’t quite work and led to learning how to troubleshoot electrical circuits and … more fundamentally .. learning troubleshooting techniques and stuff like .. logic.
Highly recommended.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Carnival of Space #4 is up. And there was much rejoicing.
The good folks there were kind enough to link to this entry at The Daily Brief.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
A link to Taylor Dinerman’s article ‘Space solar power: why do we need it and what do we need to get it?‘ at ‘The Space Review‘ was linked to at 3 Quarks Daily.
Which is all kinds of cool and put a little sunshine in my day. 3 Quarks is a blog where S. Abbas Raza writes
my guest authors and editors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating.
I’d gotten the impression over the past month that while the site is interesting, mundane stuff like ‘the future’ was not within their scope. Glad to see that the topic on on Mr. Raza’s radar.
And space solar power itself? That we need it is one of those ‘well duh’ things …
Professor Nocera makes it clear that neither conservation nor wind, nuclear, hydro, or biomass energy sources are going to be able, even when taken together, to fill the demand for energy that any reasonable standard of living will require. China and India alone will need more energy than is produced today by the entire planet. Coal, oil, and gas could provide some of the answer but environmental and security reasons tend to rule out those alternatives. Even if one is skeptical of the whole anthropomorphic global warming theory, there are good reasons to want to minimize the use of oil and natural gas and to tread carefully when it comes to using coal as a primary energy source.
So his solution is to go for solar energy in a big way.
One problem. Solar power is not always convenient to obtain. For another we could really use the ground that would be occupied by solar arrays for other stuff. Houses, yes, but also reclaimed wilderness. Would you rather see a hundred thousand acres of restored prairie or the same space covered by solar collection arrays? Thought so. But only 62 miles away is nearly limitless room and sunshine undiluted by an inconvenient atmosphere.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Mark Steyn on Flight 93’s memorial. The plan now includes – for the sweet love of thorny-headed Jebus – a wetlands. Full of life. Meant to provide reflection and social interaction. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, ducks are now a fitting memorial for our dead.
Go to any Civil War memorial on any New England common, and marvel at how they managed to honor their dead without wetlands and wind chimes.
A hundred years ago they didn’t have people whose sole job was to tell you that your ideas were tasteless or tacky or jingoistic. You wanted a memorial you hired a guy to sculpt a soldier, make sure the names on the bronze were correct and there, done; a memorial for the ages that can move a strong man to quiet tears a hundred years later.
What emotion would wetlands inspire? Nothing that would be fitting for Flight 93. I wonder if that’s what is truly desired.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Via.
A routine moment for the Navy, and for us.
ABOARD USS JOHN C. STENNIS – Cmdr. Muhammad Muzzafar F. Khan relieved Cmdr. Timothy Langdon as commanding officer of Sea Control Squadron (VS) 31 during a ceremony held at sea aboard USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) May 13.
Khan is the first Muslim to take command of an operational aviation squadron in the U.S. Navy.
Not because this is a touchy-feely PC moment – whoop-te-do look at us for promoting an oppressed minority! – but because this kind of stuff happens all the time in the military. It’s only remarkable because he’s the first. And it’s only remarked on because that’s what PR people do.
Here is a guy who had it good in Pakistan; daddy was an airplane pilot and they just don’t give those jobs to anyone. Gave it up when he was 18 to come here and study, then join the Navy. This is what we’re good at doing – co-opting the best and brightest and letting them get as far as they want to.
And the West generally and the United States in particular do this all the time.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Four representatives prove they don’t know how to live like everybody else.
Ryan and three other members of Congress have pledged to live for one week on $21 worth of food, the amount the average food stamp recipient receives in federal assistance. That’s $3 a day or $1 a meal. They started yesterday.
According to the rules of the challenge, the four House members cannot eat anything beside their $21 worth of groceries. That means no food at the many receptions, dinners and fundraisers that fill a lawmaker’s week.
The stunt is to demonstrate that $21 dollars in food stamps doesn’t go as far as it needs to. But the terms of the stunt are self-limiting; Declining a free buffet because it’s not in ‘your’ budget? Can you say “setup an experiment in order to fail”?
“No organic foods, no fresh vegetables, we were looking for the cheapest of everything,” McGovern said. “We got spaghetti and hamburger meat that was high in fat — the fattiest meat on the shelf. I have high cholesterol and always try to get the leanest, but it’s expensive. It’s almost impossible to make healthy choices on a food stamp diet.”
Cry me a river. Food stamps are to supplement the diet, not be the entire enchilada. And for all of that I’ve lived healthy on a budget of $20 a week for food. I didn’t like it but it’s possible. Of course I cheated by eating ‘free’ bagels at work when available but I was aiming for ‘practical’ not ‘prove a point’.
Ryan blogs about here.
The McGoverns blog about the experience here.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
A fine rant, reproduced in full.
30 lightyear away, eh? Let me think. With a working Orion-style drive, assuming a payload, for purposes of rough calculation the mass of, let us say, Skylab or 20000 kg; figure that every ton of fully loaded and fueled spacecraft has a volume of 5 to 10 cubic meters, and ten percent of the fully loaded mass spacecraft mass is structural mass. Now, postulating an exhaust velocity of 30000000 m/s, and assuming this is all fuel, and plugging in the values for the rocket equation …. how many years, assuming equal periods of acceleration and deceleration at both ends, minus the relative motion of the star GJ4356 versus Sol … in terms of time, it should take us … let me get about my slipstick … Aha! here we go. My rough back-of-the-envelope calculations show that, under the assumption that we are working within the confines of modern technology, and assuming no fundamental breakthroughs in engineering, and assuming we advance this project at the same rate as other space exploration projects, it should get to his new planet in roughly about … NEVER because OUR SPACE PROGRAM IS TOTALLY DIS-FUNCTIONAL and WORTHLESS pack of time serving BUREAUCRATS who haven’t done anything but throw robots at the outer planets ever since Apollo 17! Do you know when the last moonshot was?? 1972! That was four years before the first airing of Charles’ Angels, it was so long ago. Aren’t those girls grandmas now? THIRTY FIVE FRELLING YEARS SINCE WE PUT A MAN ON THE MOON !!! That’s almost four decades!!!! Do you know what our forefathers could accomplish in four decades? John Ericsson designed the steam-powered ironclad Monitor in 1862; forty-one years later the Wright Brothers flew the first successful heavier-than-air flying machine; four decades later, in 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the first faster-than-sound jet aircraft. Ack! Gack!! Choking on geek-rage! Where’s my flying car? It’s 2007, for Kal-El’s sake! This is the Future!
I couldn’t say it better myself.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Murdoc had a bit about an upgrade package to the Army’s M1A2 tanks.
“The guys can’t wait,” said Capt. David Centeno, assistant product manager of the TUSK program. “They need this stuff. Every time I go [to Iraq] they ask, ‘When will we get it?’”
Well gee, I thought, the guys at the sharp end have to wait for the Army to get around to adding equipment like a second mount for an M2? Or a T.V. camera on the back for the driver? Were I the C.O. (and this might be a good reason why I’m not) I’d have my mechanics whip out a welding rig and go to town.
Seems like the Marines have more initiative than the Army.
The Seabees of 30th Naval Construction Regiment (NCR) provided the 2nd Marine Tank Battalion with an armor upgrade May 1 to help keep the gunners safe during their operations in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq.
On a tank crew, the loader feeds ammunition into the machine gun and is often exposed to small arms fire from opposing forces. To stay safe, the loader has to close to the tankís access hatch. But if he does that, he can no longer do his job.
“ì[The new armor] lets us leave the hatch open,” said Marine Staff Sgt. Ceasare Williams, of the 2nd Marine Tank Battalion. “This allows the loader to stay in the fight.”
“It will also help [protect us against] IED (Improvised Explosive Device) shrapnel,” added Marine Sgt. Brad Nevitt, also of the 2nd Marine Tank Battalion, as he referred to IED often placed in the road by insurgent forces.
Semper Fi. And the Seabees rock.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Fascinating animated short from Colby Buzzell’s story “Men in Black”. It is graphic – not so much what is shown but implied.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
MC Hammer – he has a blog of course – has been hired on to a panel of expert by Technorati. Is he an expert on startups and marketing and Web 2.0ish things?
Well, he did squander 33 million dollars. One could say that is enough to qualify him.
Word.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Carnival of Space – Week 2 is up. And look – The Daily Brief was mentioned.
At The Daily Brief Brian Dunbar responds to an Apollo Lunar Surface Journal article. Brian points out that we are in danger of losing knowledge regarding the moon from the guys who DID go to the moon. It is amazing to think these men will be pushing 100 years old when we finally get around to going back.
Respectfully Submitted,
Brian Dunbar
*that one’s for you, Timmer.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Reminder from Henry Cate
I am feeling better and plan to put together the second Carnival of Space this Thursday. Entries are due Wednesday evening, at 6:00 PM PST. Go here for instructions on how to send in your submission.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 through 1972. The Journal is intended as a resource for anyone wanting to know what happened during the missions and why. It includes a corrected transcript of all recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Houston. The Journal also contains extensive, interwoven commentary by the Editor and by ten of the twelve moonwalking astronauts.
Interesting? Heck yes. Important? Quite.
By the time anyone else walks on the moon anybody who was involved is going to be pushing their century mark or dead, and long retired certainly. They won’t be around to tell us about the hard lessons learned – we damned well better write as much of it down while we can.
Ask anyone who gets and does something for a living – be it welding or flying airplanes or leading a patrol in Juwayba – book learning is all well and good but learning from people that have learned the hard way is vital.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
So .. what’s new with working dogs and the modern military?
I wonder if the spotter gets any trigger time …
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
I’m certain that a small but significant portion of the viewing audience will a) get this and b) smile.
You want me to name ..
But I found it amusing.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.