Silicon Valley Redneck

Now, there's a broad statement.

Quoted here:

"I believe that any weapon that can be used to hunt individuals should be banned," announced Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall M. Brackney in the hearing.

So... bows, knives, pointèd sticks?  Bits of string?  Machetes, obviously.  And any combination of socks and coins.  Also lumber and plumbing, and the big brown table down at the police station.

Next thing, the coppers will be boasting of confiscating a rusty spoon.

Hey, kids! Know what day it is?

It's International Blasphemy Day!

And, being as how I'm still in California, here's some blasphemy against the dominant religion.

Politicians are of the same substance as other mortals.

Obama is no god, and Trump is no devil, nor (for those of the minority cult) vice-versa.

Zero-sum economics is inevitably a negative-sum game.

Wealth and money are not the same thing.  The State can print money; it can't print wealth.

Any power that can be abused, will be abused, especially if those who wield it are above the law.

Sunday morning musing

Not that I frequent such establishments myself, but I've been hearing that many mainstream churches have morphed into Sunday-morning social clubs, with a uniform message that all lifestyles and beliefs are equally fine.

No surprise, then, that so many people are turning to other options for their dose of 24/7 religious fervor, hellfire-and-damnation sermons, prescriptions for penitence, and all the rest.

Thing is: the old churches generally had stable doctrines.  Something to do with having written scripture, and teaching kids to read so they could study it.  The new ones?  The doctrines are seldom even explicitly stated, and always subject to change.  Priests and oracles proclaim new Truths several times a day, and these Truths must be accepted uncritically: there must be no examination of them to determine how they square with established doctrine, or how and why doctrine must be revised.

That way lies madness.  And not just ordinary madness, but civilizational madness.  Heinlein's Crazy Years, as Insty says.

Note: this does not come from my ongoing review of the Lensman series, though it does seem to tie in; it looks remarkably like standard Boskonian tactics, especially when Boskonia is considered as a metaphor.  Kandron of Onlo would be proud!

Perhaps the lesser worry obscures the greater?

Article at El Reg about yet another stupid app with hardcoded login credentials so anyone who's got them can log into any instance and steal personal data.  Ho hum.

But what exactly is the app in question?  'Tis STEER, an app for castrating young bulls to keep them docile tracking the mental health of schoolchildren.

Er.

The infallible computer oracle has proclaimed that your son reads too many of the wrong sort of books and is on track to become a mass murderer.  Or he shows an unhealthy interest in chemistry and physics and has been flagged as a future terrorist mastermind.  Or asks too many questions about how computers actually work, and therefore must be a dangerous hacker.

Y'know, maybe it is a castration app.  Or will inevitably become one.  Docility is always the end goal.

Yeah, not much posting this week.

Life's busy, and the weather is hot.  Here are a couple of mobe snaps from this morning.

This chap was hanging out by the trail, and staring at passersby.

Largish poultry searching for bugs or other edibles amid dried grass products, mainly stems.  Someone should write a song on the topic.

Corporate responsibility / accountable capitalism

Fun buzzphrases, no?  Two-word bumper-sticker slogans sound so enlightened, don't they?

Let's try breaking these out into a few more words.

Corporate responsibility:  Corporations shall be obligated to involve themselves in political causes.  Curiously, this slogan is pushed by the same people who so loudly decry the Citizens United ruling.  I guess the corporations will be obligated to support only the approved sort of political causes.

Accountable capitalism:  Private businesses shall be obligated to involve themselves in the daily dealings of the people of the local community.  Which... do you really want the Boss nosing around outside of work?  Funny thing, here: these new responsibilities seem like the sort of thing traditionally associated with churches and other voluntary civic organizations, back before the government took them on and couldn't deliver.  So now they'll be forced onto for-profit businesses, which won't do them well either, but at least the businesses will become unprofitable and go bust, thereby proving that capitalism doesn't work.

Boxes

Accounting for those currently at the house, not in the storage locker, and all sealed up ready to ship, and not already in the POD for the advance shipment.

Numbered and weighed: there are 48 such boxes, totaling 1460 pounds.

Soon, I gotta address the storage locker, where there are mene mene more.

A lot of the ones in storage are heavy - books and such, plus some of the larger tooling.  I already pulled most of the light stuff out of storage.

... No, I didn't get a networked parcel scale.  Might have been a good idea, though: put box on scale, press button, computer records the weight and prints out (using a networked label printer) a label with box number and weight.  But then I'd have to get communication working, and write a script to listen for the "button pressed, here's the weight" message, assign the box number, record the number and weight in a database or maybe a .csv file, and print the label.  Were I planning to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, I'd certainly do something like that.  I'm hoping, though, that this is more of a once-in-three-decades thing.

"Plebnista cultist": a phrase that should exist

... but, apparently, didn't until just now.

If you haven't seen the Trek Classic episode The Omega Glory, shame on you.  Go find it and watch it.  (Yes, it's cheesy.  It's Trek Classic.  Rejoice that it doesn't have a guest appearance by Melvin Belli.)

Anyway!  Er, you've watched the episode at this point, right?  Because spoiler alert.

Anyway, the Yang tribe on a ruined planet has a sacred document called the Ee Plebnista, which only the priests are allowed to see, and they can't actually read it because it's in some old dead language that nobody understands.  But it's sacred.  And then it turns out that Kirk knows the entire document by heart because - I warned you about the spoiler, right? - it's actually the U.S. Constitution!

So, the new phrase.  A plebnista cultist is someone who worships the U.S. Constitution, and invokes its holy name at all opportunities in support of, or opposition to, any policy that's up for discussion, but who has clearly never read it.

They're easily recognized, as they commonly assert that the Constitution requires policies which the text expressly forbids, or that it forbids policies which the text specifically authorizes.  And, strangely enough, the sacred document is always invoked in support of the positions currently being promoted by the plebnista priesthood.

Peculiar logic

If a rich man gets into politics, he's surely motivated solely by money, and can only see his office as an opportunity for graft.

If a career politician becomes rich while in office, he's a dedicated public servant and we mustn't question the fruits of his service.

... And I'm thinking of one of the subplots of The Mote in God's Eye: How do you transport a not-quite-prisoner who can credibly offer a planet as a bribe?  Put him in the custody of an officer who's so fantastically rich already as to be unbribeable.

One of these headlines is not like the others

Headlines regarding the Delta Flight 2353 incident of 18 Sep 2019:

Three out of four in this view, and most of the others, give a particular impression: that the airliner just nearly fell out of the sky all on its own.

Nasty sensationalist Fox, though, has to spoil it with that bit about the cabin pressurization irregularity.  Which, if you read the article, was the reason the pilots made a hasty, but controlled, descent.

The article I saw this morning had plenty about how scary the whole thing was, and nothing about why the plane descended rapidly.  Clicking through on the other three headlines shown in the screenshot above, I find explanations that are complete gibberish, with two of the articles asserting that the rapid descent caused the oxygen masks to deploy.  (The Fox article explains that the masks were manually deployed by the crew - in response, presumably, to the same pressurization problem that led the pilots to head for lower altitude.)

Strange combination of test conditions

Another interesting blancolirio vid, this one addressing (among other things) issues with the Boeing 777x currently in development.

Now, this seems curious: there was a cargo-door failure at 150% of rated wing loading and, simultaneously, 150% of cabin-to-exterior pressure differential.

Which is the sort of thing you'd get with, um.  Aerodynamic overstress from vigorous maneuvering while operating in outer space while maintaining below-sea-level cabin pressure?

Seems just a wee bit unlikely.  Yeah, the door failed, but how did they come to choose this particular combination to test, anyway?

"Drone attack"

Recent sensational news: Houthi rebels in Yemen launch drone attack on Saudi oil facility!

The implication being, of course, that the rebel rabble used teeny tiny toy airplanes, and we should fear hobby-grade model aircraft and those who play with them.

Little detail, though: it seems the attack was carried out using cruise missiles, and not field-expedient ones either.  Iranian-supplied, military-grade cruise missiles, and perhaps the rebel involvement consisted of taking nominal ownership after the missiles were launched from Iran, and then issuing a press release.

The term "drone" seems to have no specific meaning nowadays (especially when ambitious nutters use the term to refer to manned multicopters).  Cruise missiles, though, have a category of their very own, and it's best to keep them in it.

Could there be field-expedient cruise missiles?  Certainly.  [Omitted] years ago, I sketched out a plan for an attack on [omitted] in [omitted] using a bunch of cheap, run-down old light planes equipped with guidance systems and explosive payloads.  An amateur-grade guidance system is accurate enough for hand grenades, if not horseshoes; location of the targets based on readily-available information (at the time) wouldn't have been accurate enough for hand grenades but plenty good enough for a couple of hundred pounds of HE, especially given the size of an [omitted].

Now, mind: this plan assumed that the perpetrator was someone like myself, who does not consider himself expendable, so the quickie-retrofit guidance & control system would have to be fairly sophisticated.  For a typical terrorist group?  The guidance system is a cheap GPS unit and a kid with some very basic pilot training.  Bonus: you get vision-based terminal guidance for free.

Entertainment news

Possibly good news: Return of The Far Side.

Certifiably stupid news: Remake of The Princess Bride.

On the list of things I don't grok:

Getting all bent out of shape because someone, somewhere, may be praying for divine intervention on your behalf.

In a good way, I mean.  Intending to help.  Not calling down a plague on you and your descendants, sticking pins in a voodoo doll, praying that you be promptly whisked off to the netherworld for an eternity of torment, and that.  Rather, entreating that some supernatural entity should, say, divert a hurricane into the open ocean, comfort you in a time of distress, or help you resolve your personal problems.

Look, if you believe that this intercessory prayer stuff works, that's one thing.  But it seems that those who object most strongly also vehemently deny the efficacy of prayer.  So, why be so upset that some strangers are wasting a little of their time in rituals that have no effect on you?

Or am I missing something here?  Like, the ones getting angry are neither the ones doing the praying nor the ones prayed for, but unrelated third parties with nothing better to do?

Ill-considered spam domain

"What to Expect From a Great Assisted Living Community?" asked the title.  The body of the message offered no answer, at least with remote content blocked, and I wasn't about to unblock it.

The apparent From: address was: CaringforaParent@bataan.us.

Which, er... for some elderly folks, that might carry unpleasant connotations, no?

There is no subject so specialized...

Someone's gone and written a whole book on semicolons.

Which, now that I'm aware of it, I've put on my "read someday" list.  Meanwhile, it's been Nationally Reviewed, that being how it came to my attention, so I'll comment on a few things in Joseph Epstein's review.

I don’t believe I used my first semicolon until the age of 24 or so

One or both of us must be atypical; I believe I started using semicolons in elementary school.  (Nowadays, as a C programmer, I give the old ';' key quite the workout.)

Rules turn out to be Cecelia Watson’s bête noire. In the middle of her book she questions the authority of The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, H. W. Fowler, and others, writing that “it’s fair to ask why we consider these books authoritative, and if there might not be some better way to assess our writing rather than through their dicta.”

Thing is: you really need to learn the rules before you start breaking them; this is yet another fine example of Chesterton's Fence.  Develop proficiency in Standard English, and you can then develop a personal style which is simultaneously intelligible, informative, and idiosyncratic.  (Yes, folks, it is eminently possible to write technical reports in a style which will clearly convey the necessary information, hold the reader's attention, and ensure that the author is noticed by higher-ups.)

As for rules, some are more valuable than others. Take that most school-marmish among them, that of never ending a sentence with a preposition.

I consider the rule against splitting infinitives worse, as it it's rooted in the idea that English should follow Latin grammar.  In Latin, infinitives simply cannot be split; in English, splitting an infinitive is sometimes the most concise way to express the intended concept, and the recommended alternatives often exhibit the dual disadvantages of being clunky and of not actually meaning the same thing.

In writing as in just about everything else, while at it, what the hell, you may as well get it right.

True enough, keeping in mind that the English language allows considerable flexibility with regard to "getting it right", particularly where style is concerned.  (Note use of programmer punctuation there, as opposed to stylebook punctuation.  I'm still not fully consistent about that.)

... And, yeah, I really should review the stylebooks every few years, so as to keep from drifting too far from the norm.  Not this month, though; they're packed, along with most of the other books.

Top story of the minute!

Trump claims modern light bulbs make him look orange!

The Washington Post (motto: "The Republic dies at midnight!") investigates!

... Really?  Aren't there more substantive things to fact-check?  Like most of the stuff that passes for "news" nowadays?

Meanwhile, I claim cameras make me look Belgian.

Directory object is noninformative

Spotted at Stanford Shopping Center:

I can't help noticing that, while a portion of the mall is reflected upon the glossy surface of this big black monolith, actual directory functionality is somewhat lacking.

Perhaps if I hit it with a bone I would attain enlightenment.

"... a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield"

Says β₀, in reference to his gun-confiscation plan.

Which I guess means he's planning to come after, e.g., Brown Bess muskets.  Which were very definitely designed to kill people on a battlefield.  And which, we may assume, the authors of the Bill of Rights never anticipated.  We may, that is, assume this if we're utterly ignorant of history, which appears to be the general state of affairs in modern politics.

P. J. "No Relation" O'Rourke once asked: Would You Kill Your Mother To Pave I-95?  An eternally relevant question is: How many of your own countrymen are you prepared to kill to enforce your preferences?

Half their remedies cured you dead -- Most of their teaching was quite untrue

How can anyone do a bit like this, on Tudor medicine, without reference to Kipling?

(Winding down from an entirely unproductive day.  Maybe I need to snort a homeopathic preparation of rusty railroad spike.)