Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Not Fast, But Furious!

Fast and Furious? Fast and Loose is more like it!

The BATFE (it must stand for something like Bozos working to confiscate Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) decided that in order to take guns away from law-abiding regular US citizens, it would help to show that criminals from Mexico could get guns here too.

They set up a system where they let Mexican drug cartels get their hands on tons of guns and ammo with the plan being that when they told us that the Mexican drug lords were threatening us with guns they got here, we'd all say, "Oh please take all our guns away from us so those evil guys South of the border won't be able to get guns ehre and come shoot us," or something like that.

What a bunch of morons! Did they really think the first reaction of Americans (and Texans especially!) would be to disarm in order to be safe from armed thugs? When they're living on the border that the feds refuse to secure, and refuse to let anyone else enforce the laws there either? Are they really that far out of touch with reality? OK, let me retract that last one - they haven't touched reality in years, and we all know that. Still, somehow they figured that their friends in the media would make it look like they were clean, at least at the top, and that we'd all give them yet another pass in their assault on our individual liberty and our responsibility for our own selves - fortunately they were wrong, but it remains to be seen how wrong they've been.

So far they've come up with a few scapegoats to resign and pretend they were like a rogue operation rather than the top-down campaign against the Second Amendment that they are and that only an aggressively ignorant press could conceal from their readers and viewers because only Fox News would cover this and maybe conservative talk radio and after all that kind of stuff only reaches a few people who don't count because they're clearly out of the mainstream since they still think that these United States are better than other countries and they'd rather take care of themselves than to have the UN come in with light blue helmets and take care of them. A couple scapegoats aren't going to cut it when there are memos telling everyone what they're supposed to do and to make sure the guns get to the bad guys and then they lost track of the assault weapons they gave the bad guys in Mexico and some Americans got killed by them - this is going to hit somebody high up the chain sooner or later and the sooner the better before these buffoons at the BATFE manage to dismantle the Second Amendment without anyone really noticing.

All we can hope for is that all these unintended consequences end up backfiring on these clowns who are supposed to know something about law enforcement, firearms, and explosives.
Dopes.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Great Steve Jobs

I waited a while before addressing the frenzy of Jobsophiles who don't know how to carry on without their great leader and purveyor of magical devices, but I can't hold back any more:

Oh great, another second-tier computer company CEO resigns and the news media can't get enough of Lionizing him - and yes, that was an intentional pun; I hope you get it. Jobs couldn't keep his job in the first place at the company that he co-founded, but once he came back and started making magical devices for the rest of us it was Katy bar the door here comes the whole Nebraska front line and they're headed right for IBM which had to sell its personal computer business to some Chinese company in order to not lose money as the PC turned into a commodity apart from Apple or whatever flavor of linux you chose if you're a big enough geek to handle that. Otherwise it's down to what background picture you put on your desktop and if you were dumb enough to buy Vista instead of waiting for Windows 7 which fixed pretty much all the problems in Vista so it's OK to move on from XP.

Anyway, the problem with all the Jobs-o-mania is that they're forgetting that he didn't actually code anything, and he didn't actually design anything, but he did do great presentations at his annual meetings to fire up the developers and the consumers to need the next incremental improvement of the magical device he was pitching at the time.

Don't get me wrong - I hope the guy gets well some day. It just bothers me that when this guy leaves his company it's a much bigger deal than it should be - it's not like the main guy behind Excel is gone, or Linus Torvalds is calling it quits and finding another guy named Roger from up there where he's from to handle the forks and kernels of what once was called linux but now will be called rogix because that would be something major - this is a guy who has good taste in computer boxes and a pretty narrow wardrobe who is still going to be the chairman of the board but everyone in the media seems to think it's the end of the world.

Get a life and a clue, folks. Chumps.

Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Eco-Tourism and Invasive Species

  1. Scandinavia is being overrun by vast numbers of raccoons and raccoon dogs.
  2. German lager yeast is descended from a hybrid of its native ale yeast and a South American strain.
  3. The California town of Paso Robles is being menaced by the world's largest rodent, the capybara.
  4. Australia has been overrun by two non-marsupial mammals - rabbits and camels.
In each case, humans have thought to improve their enjoyment of their local environs by importing creatures or wildlife from a remote area. In each case, nothing but trouble has ensued.
  1. The raccoons were imported to Germany by Hermann Goering for his hunting pleasure, and are now marching through both Denmark and Finland in a pincer-like movement toward Sweden.
  2. The lager yeast created an alternative to ales, making possible such abominations as Coor's Light and Budweiser Select 55.
  3. The capybara has startled horses and stolen their food, frightening children and taunting hunters.
  4. The rabbits and camels have been the source of endless troubles throughout the Outback, displacing native creatures and destroying outbuildings and outhouses respectively.

We already know that the raccoon invasion of Europe was engineered by the Nazis, but when will the worlds' governments admit that they're using these animal importations to create these ecological disasters? the very disasters from which they claim the need, power, and right to protect us?
While we don't yet have the solid evidence we'd like, it seems obvious that they want us ever more dependent on official animal services. We'll report back here when more information is available.

Posted by Listener 43

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Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Slowly I CERN ... Step By Step ... Inch By Inch ...

  1. Scientists at the LHC at CERN have been playing games with their colleagues regarding the likely energy levels of the Higgs boson.
  2. At the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, these same scientists are now saying their results are less statistically significant than they first thought - a statistical quirk is how they describe the data that led to their initial reports.
  3. By doubling the amount of data used, they've moved from 2.8 to 2 sigma significance.
  4. Despite this decrease in certitude, they're claiming that this loss of certitude is actually giving them a better chance of finding the so called "God particle" in the near future.
Once again, it would appear that the scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider are playing "Hide the Boson" with their colleagues / competitors. It seems quite clear that the only reason to publish these reports is to send other teams off on wild boson chases in the wrong energy ranges yet again.
We can only hope that the other research teams will stop taking the bait and recognize a red herring when they see one.

Posted by Procrustes 17

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Won't Someone Think Of The Families?!

How often do we hear that the family is the basic unit of society? That all political parties and all politicians are in favor of family values? More times than I can shake a ten foot pole at I can tell you; and usually it makes me suspect that whatever else is in the statements of those politicians is being sugar-coated so we don't notice the rat poison that's really being delivered like a judo chop to the solar plexus of our country.
And I'm right about that.

Imagine my surprise, then, when congress recently came out against families! Of course, they're portraying it as being concerned for children (won't someone think of the children?!) as a smoke screen, but it's awfully easy to see through it.
  • Because there are kids from poor families, we give them free food at school.
  • Kids who get free food at school have the stigma of getting free food at school, while the other kids have to bring or pay for their own.
  • We must erase the stigma of being poor, so no one will worry about being poor any more, so let's just give every kid free food - at least in Detroit, apparently.
  • This makes the job of the schools that much easier, too. After all, it's much easier to feed kids than to educate them, so the teachers' unions should be happy.
  • Now that poverty is no longer stigmatized, we won't have to worry about people looking for jobs to get out of that situation.
  • That means we don't have to create extra jobs, and that the unemployment rate will drop dramatically as hardly anyone will be trying to get a job!
  • It also means that kids won't have to worry about whether they have meals with their families, since their family won't have any food - they'll just eat with their indoctrinators teachers at the training facility school every day.
  • This will make it easier for them, when they're parents, as they won't feel guilty that they aren't providing food for their families, since that's not their responsibility anyway.
Brilliant!
If you're a moron; and I'm not.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

IPv6 May Not Be Necessary

You may remember my warning about the unexpected uses that IPv6 will be put to by the governments of the world in tracking the activities and locations of regular citizens. In one of those, "Oh great, it's worse than I even thought and I thought I was already as cynical as I needed to be" moments, I've found out about the latest attempted outrage by the oldsters and petty tin-horn two-bit tyrants and Big Brother wannabes in our congress regarding our use of the internet and tracking us in cyberspace and meatspace at the same time and it makes me so mad I could spit nails at a UFC guy just to get the satisfaction of taking some action.

Apparently they're not content to just let the Echelon program sniff our packets and record whatever it can find since that's not necessarily going to get everything there is so they have a new internet snooping bill waiting action in the US congress that would require all our ISPs to keep a record of everything we do online including all the encrypted stuff that we all thought was private like our credit card numbers and names and addresses and passwords and IDs and even the temporary IP addresses we're assigned in this IPv4 world of dynamic addresses unless you pay the extra bucks for a static address.
 
This whole charade is being touted as the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," but there's no question that it's really an all-encompassing internet snooping bill. It's like they think that since DARPA was part of starting the internet that they own everything we do using it even without bothering to get court orders to do what amounts to wiretaps on everyone all the time no matter what we're doing or where we are. It's stunning that it cleared a committee vote so it's time to gear up a protest to your representative - if you have one, since so many of them seem to be more interested in representing themselves as re-electable than in representing their constituents - and let them know that maintaining electronic logs of everything that everyone in the country is doing all the time is not only unreasonable and un-Constitutional, but it makes for being un-electable too. As the music and movie industries are finally beginning to realize, it's not good marketing to treat all of your customers as thieves, and the congress needs to find out that it's not a good idea to treat all your constituents as criminals either since we're the ones who vote them in and out and they don't have any right to force companies like Comcast and AT&T and even Google to collect and maintain all this private and probably sensitive information when there aren't many companies or government agencies that don't get hacked like the BART system was to expose their customers' data all over the web for everyone else to see and I don't know very many people who want everything they do online to be published by hackers so that their Moms can find out that they were shopping for a gift on Amazon that they haven't gotten yet, let alone even more sensitives stuff than that.

We need to fight this one so we have some kind of precedent before IPv6 shows up with the black helicopters.


Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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Friday, August 12, 2011

CERN's LHC Wants Your CPU Cycles

CERN is at it again.
  1. CERN has updated their LHC@home program to LHC@home 2.0
  2. This is a program designed to let the scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider use the computers of regular people to do their work.
  3. This 2.0 version is designed to run particle collision simulations on "volunteer" computers in their quest to find the Higgs boson (aka God Particle)
  4. CERN already pointed other researchers away from particular energy ranges in order to reserve those for their own investigation.

Once again, CERN has tipped its hand regarding the Higgs boson. It's clear that they have no regard for the ethical conduct of science, as they have repeatedly attempted to throw their colleagues off the track by dropping red herrings in the midst of their releases. Now they're busy using the computers of unsuspecting volunteers to further outpace their colleagues.
In order to do the distributed processing entailed by LHC@home 2.0, they've gotten those volunteers to allow the installation of "simulation" software on their computers, thus granting CERN - and its European Union rulers - access to the contents of those machines. It remains to be seen just what tracking capabilities are included in that software, as well as just how deeply the scientists and bureaucrats at CERN are willing to probe.
I'll report here as I uncover more information, but suffice it to say that I'm concerned - very concerned.

Posted by Procrustes 17

Update:
CERN seems to be having a problem, or they're blowing another smoke-screen. Their system gives a message blaming a "ROGUE" system or systems for keeping new users from signing up for the program. It may be nothing more than a ploy to make it look more popular than it is, or it may be the result of poor programming resulting in an overload of data being "returned" to them from the computers they've already compromised through their software.

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Thursday, August 11, 2011

Nematodes, DNA, and UV Radiation

  1. A team of Cambridge University scientists has altered the DNA of a nematode worm, formerly of the species Caenorhabditis elegans.
  2. They have forced this new worm sub-species to incorporate an unnatural, 21st amino acid into its proteins, expanding the palette from the 20 found in actual living creatures.
  3. When irradiated with Ultra-Violet Radiation, the unnatural amino acid causes these modified nematodes to glow a bright cherry red.
Given this discovery and the recent revelation that human DNA has been enhanced as well, it is imperative that the government and scientists reveal to us the purpose of these experiments.
Will the law enforcement branches of government admit that they'll be able to track ex-convicts through Ultra-Violet Radiation? Will they guarantee that only convicted felons will be treated with this procedure? What other colors will these scientists add to the palette of the classifiers? With fluorescent green and cherry red already available, what is next?
We'll report back here when more information is available.


Posted by Listener 43

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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Think of the Children!

Planned Parenthood is celebrating the inclusion of birth control in all 0bamacare plans with a dance video featuring a package of birth control pills cavorting in Bollywood style for some bizarre reason. If you ask me, the producers of Slumdog Millionaire should sue the crap out of them for doing such a rotten ripoff of their movie.

The whole idea seems to be, at least according to Nancy Pelosi, that whenever people have children it costs the government money, so by paying for the pills to stop kids from being born we'll all save money and not have so much medical spending coming out of our tax coffers in the future. Somehow the "logic" escapes me.

If kids grow up to have jobs and pay taxes, they should be a net plus, even to the government. If that's not how it works, then that means that each person in the nation is costing our leaders more money than he or she is worth, so by that logic we ought to just all drop dead in order to save the country.
It seems to me that even the knuckleheads in DC should be able to figure out that with the Ponzi scheme they like to call Social Security, we need more workers all the time to pump the SS taxes into the system for the retired folks who are drawing it out.
If we're not going to have kids of our own any more, are they planning on importing a bunch of Mexicans to pay the taxes for us? Don't they know that a bunch of that money gets sent back to Mexico to keep that economy alive and functioning (such as it is)?

You say unintended consequences. I say morons.

I'm right.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

Monday, August 8, 2011

The FBI Wants Your Kids' Vitals

First off, what the hell is wrong with that Doe family, anyway? They're always getting lost or killed or arrested - just like the kids on this sample from the FBI.




















When I saw that the FBI has finally come up with an app to help parents find their missing children, I thought, "What could go wrong here? The FBI is a trustworthy, helpful, friendly ...." Then I slapped myself.

Sure, there's probably a good reason to keep some basic information on your kids in your phone, just in case, but aren't you worried that the FBI will be collecting all this data and keeping it for future reference?

Oh, don't worry about that - they say they're not collecting anything until you send it to them.
Sure, and Santa doesn't check his list twice either.

What's the dead giveaway? They didn't bother to password protect the app. If you're dumb enough to put sensitive personal data about your kids in a wide-open app on your phone that Steve Jobs tracks daily, as does every hacker in the world, including the ones working for the FBI, then maybe you're dumb enough that you're going to lose your kids at the park and you'll need this app anyway, but I'm guessing that's not going to happen, and it's just another way the FBI is filling their databases with not-really-voluntary data that they can reasonably claim they have some reason to think about collecting in case some of these kids get kidnapped, since that's automatically a federal case.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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Occam and Lunatics


  1. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth in its rotation - the same side always faces the Earth.
  2. The near side the Moon is relatively low and flat.
  3. The far side of the Moon is high and mountainous, with a thicker crust and far more impact craters.
  4. Therefore, there must have been another, smaller moon at some time which crashed into the Moon we know and love, causing the differences in the two faces.
This is the line of "reasoning" behind a recent hypothesis presented in Nature magazine. It seems apparent that Nature has lost much of its former luster, moving from testable hypotheses to SyFy scenarios in its pages. Clearly there's been no thought given to the idea that the side facing out might be hit more by meteors and asteroids. Bodies passing between the Earth and the Moon stand a good chance of being attracted to the much larger of the two - the Earth - and bypassing the smaller.

Have none of today's hypothesticians (I find it hard to call them theorists) ever heard of Occam's Razor? There is no reason to add a new moon to the system, when all data has already been explained in a simpler way. Once again, it seems we have supposed scientists creating scenarios in order to garner attention and - they would hope - funding for further research.

Posted by Procrustes 17

Parsing Kerry


  "And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.
  "It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?" - Senator John Kerry

This is an interesting one. In fact, without examining its premises, one might be tempted to agree with the Senator.
The need for a good parsing comes in in the highlighted portion above. After all:

  • Everyone knew the Copernican system was not factual.
  • Everyone knew the germ theory of disease was not factual.
  • Everyone knew the way to get out of debt would be to borrow more money.
  • Everyone knew there would be a default on US government debt without a deal by 2nd August.
  • Everyone knows that S&P downgraded US debt because they're stupid and evil, not because there's any possibility of a default ever happening in the US.
Even more troubling - depending on one's locale:


Posted by Pygmalion 56

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Nazca Lines and Antimatter

  1. A team of scientists has found abundant antimatter in the Van Allen radiation belt using the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics satellite.
  2. This trapped stream of anti-protons is associated with the South Atlantic Anomaly.
  3. It's thought there's enough energy available there to power spacecraft in the future.

Clearly it would be a fairly simple matter to focus a beam of anti-protons with a magnetic lens from geosynchronous orbit. With that setup, the famous Nazca Lines might easily have been drawn in a single afternoon of recreational doodling.
When will Lima release the radiation signatures of these lines? The world is still waiting. We'll report back here when more information becomes available.


Posted by Listener 43

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Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Colonel and the Generals


  1. KFC is ceasing operations in the island nation of Fiji.
  2. KFC's claim is that the military government has stopped their importing of ingredients for its famous herbs and spices coating.
  3. The government disputes that characterization, claiming it is waiting for "veterinary certification" of KFC's imports.
  4. Elvis Silvestrini, of Fiji's biosecurity authority was quoted as saying, "We have been waiting for the veterinary certificate since early May [2011]. When this is provided, we'll be able to release the cartons."
Apparently, A. Person, the Colonel's relatively new Chief Chicken Officer has fallen down on the job. It seems clear from this series of facts and counter-facts that the Fiji government hasn't capitulated to the demands of KFC that they be allowed to import their standard vat-grown proteins. It is clear that no veterinary certification would be needed - nor valid - for herbs, spices, and the like; this must refer to the animal-like portion of the KFC product.

Neither the government of Fiji nor KFC has given any information regarding just how much of the vat-grown chicken-equivalent is being held up in the importation proceedings. We'll report back here when more information is available.


Posted by Listener 43

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Semantics, Not Science


  1. Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her team claim to have evidence of other universes.
  2. A multi-verse setup is posited by some cosmologists in order to get around questions like "Why are things the way they are instead of some other way?" In a multi-verse, they can simply assert that things are that way in some other universe.
  3. Dr Peiris and team are using background microwave radiation as evidence that they've found another universe.

Ignoring the questions of whether we might be in one universe among many, and whether these folks have actually interpreted their data correctly, the real question is this:
What do you mean we have radiation - and therefor information - coming here from another universe? If we are connected enough to communicate, what sense does it make to call it another universe? Clearly just not touching isn't adequate, or Earth and Mars would be separate universes - in fact, why not New York and London? They don't touch, but they can communicate, just as in these supposed trans-multi-verse broadcasts.

Frankly it sickens me to see purported scientists simply redefining terms in order to garner attention, publication, and funding. Frankly, I'd like to see a cosmologist come up with some experiments to test their hypotheses, if they want to be considered scientists rather than philosophical observers.

Posted by Procrustes 17


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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The US Navy: Channeling Andre Norton

Recently there have been revelations of how the US military, and the Navy in particular, are using trained animals as part of their portfolio of weapons and "personnel."
The US Navy Marine Mammal Program has trained dolphins and sea lions to aid in mine detection as well as perimeter defense against enemy swimmers. These animals can be deployed by air to spots around the world in short order, and can also serve while being based on a ship.In fact, they've served from Alaska to Hawaii to Iraq, and are now serving in home ports, protecting nuclear submarines.

Reading the reports of these animal seamen, I was taken back to some of the first science fiction I ever read. My 7th grade science teacher got me to read The Beast Master, by Andre Norton (not to be confused with the similarly-named movie, The Beastmaster, which is shown on the Turner networks on a weekly basis)

Clearly the Navy has not been forthcoming regarding the special psionic devices they're using in the training and control of these animals. It may be a generation before non-military personnel are allowed access to this technology, as it typical of DARPA projects.  Still, it's quite gratifying to know that the US military is finally catching up to the science fiction of 1959.

Posted by Procrustes 17

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Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Radiation and Crop Circles


  1. Professor Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon has released a study of crop circles wherein he admits that the creators of crop-circles are not going to give up their secrets easily.
  2. Taylor admires the technology behind this global phenomenon.
  3. One research team has reproduced damage inflicted on crops by using a handheld magnetron.
  4. This microwave technique could explain the speed, efficiency, and incredible detail of the creation of crop circles, Taylor says.

It should come as no surprise that most media outlets are ignoring the main thrust of this information. We now have evidence that crop circles are being created using radiation - not ropes and boards as has been portrayed in commercials and popular entertainments.  This radiation seems eerily similar to that emitted by the tubes used in microwave ovens - or in masers, the predecessor of the laser!

Why won't Washington release the data on the radiation exposure of crop circle investigators? Are they at risk? Just how much risk?
When will the radiation data from crop circles be reported regularly?
Further, why won't Lima release the data on residual radiation from the Nazca lines?
We'll report back here when more information becomes available.

Posted by Listener 43

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