June 28, 2014
As if the Last Post Wasn't Enough of a Downer
Now there is this unspeakable injustice...
"Halb! Ninduhz sdole by doze!"
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100 Years Ago Today: The Beginning of The End
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the heir apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary. He had initially been third in line for the throne and as such had, in his early years, led a somewhat dilettante lifestyle. After a suicide and then typhoid fever placed him in the position of heir he frequently came to violent disagreements with his father(the Emperor Franz Joseph) over what he perceived as needed reforms. While Franz Ferdinand was a bit of an autocrat and a staunch royalist who wanted to consolidate executive power on the throne, he also wanted to establish a basically federal system granting considerable autonomy to the various regions. He also wanted to ensure all ethnicities had equal standing, which was very unpopular in some quarters, particularly the Hungarian half of the empire, which had its own legislature. In essence he wanted to extend in some ways the privileges the Hungarians enjoyed to all regions while simultaneously unifying the country on strictly national matters. Furthermore he wanted to organize a third ceremonial kingdom out of the slavic states with equal prestige as Austria and Hungary to drive home the idea that the Slavs were full citizens. Franz Ferdinand was also one of the few voices in government advocating that the Empire should cultivate good relations with its neighbors and in particular, not poke Serbia any further.
His wife Sophie was a commoner and was not permitted any royal courtesies by imperial decree (another reason there was grief between Archduke and Emperor). However she was accorded the courtesies and privileges due the wife of a general in the imperial army if he was engaged in official military business. Thus, when he went to Sarajevo to inspect a local garrison she accompanied him.
While there they made some goodwill appearances and visited the Sarajevo town hall....
Moments after that picture was taken both were assassinated by the leader of a local chapter of a Serbian secret society called the Black Hands...which despite his melodramatic title was an an angry young loser of a man who lived with his mother.
The assassination removed one of the last voices for conciliation with the Serbs and threw the Emperor into a grief stricken rage.
Russia stepped up to defend their Serbian allies which obliged Germany to step in and honor their treaty with Austria-Hungary, whereupon the Kaiser signed off on a unfortunate plan to preemptively take out France "quickly", lest they decided to open up a second front...which brought the British Empire into the fight. These and other decisions formed a cascade failure of strategic miscalculations amongst the governments of Europe cumulating in a disaster of unimaginable proportions from which the world has still not fully recovered.
The entrance of the Ottoman Empire into the fray and its subsequent collapse precipitated the mess we now call the Middle East. The toll the war took on Russia begat the Soviet Union, international communism and the hundred or more millions that died from that ideology in Russian, China and elsewhere. Germany, broken and humiliated by the conflict rose up under the leadership of a fiend to lash out once more against a world still reeling, not only from the loss of a generation of young men, but from the fact that this unspeakable, and stupid orgy of carnage broke the spirit of the west.
The progress that civilization has made in the last hundred years seems impressive, but it pales between the vast leap that took place between the end of one great war in 1814 and the events of 1914. From the cold war, to the middle east, we've spent the better part of a century putting out fires started or fanned by the First World War...and still they smolder.
We hardly think of this conflict today but its ramifications are still with us. Let us hope the lessons are as well, because while history, as they say, does not exactly repeat, it does rhyme.
The analogies at the link, while worrisome, can be taken too literally. There is of course, little significance to the century mark beyond superstition baed on numerology. If we were using hexadecimal this year it wouldn't even have that, but the artificial significance of a hundred years passing should be taken to reflect upon not only the carnage, but the miscalculations that led to it.
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June 27, 2014
A Refrigerator Moment
This video has been making the rounds lately.
It concerns a Harrier landing on a assault ship without the benefit of the planes nose landing gear.
This is pretty interesting but there is one thing that concerns me.
more...
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June 25, 2014
It's Not Just Mee.Nu
AOL got hit too. My College G-mail account was similarly stuffed. Now, some of this is not messing with E-mail for three days but a good deal of it was pulled pork shoulder.
AOL got hit too. My College G-mail account was similarly stuffed. Now, some of this is not messing with E-mail for three days but a good deal of it was pulled pork shoulder.
To add to my annoyance the University G-mail account also threw a couple of important E-mails into the spam folder.
If anybody tried to get hold of me via E-mail and has not gotten a reply, I have deleted your correspondence by mistake and am unaware of it.
There don't seem to be a lot of phishing schemes in any of these and spam, especially comment spam can't have a high return, so I'm wondering if some of this Hawaiian bacon festival is actually a sort of 'chaff' to cover something up.
Nah, probably just bots.
...plotting our downfall.
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June 24, 2014
The Duck is Dark
For those who might be wondering, I have received word via text that the reason that Wonderduck has gone silent is that he has has been without internet service for over three days. There is no indication of when it might be back as his provider is, apparently, up to no good.
An actual photo of Wonderduck's internet provider.
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Tablet Questions
I find myself in the market for a tablet/pad/Hand Computer and thus am seeking recommendations from my readership.
Difficulty: Although I am a Mac user I would prefer that said pad bot have a lower case "i" in front of it, though I am not strictly ruling such a possibility out.
On a completely unrelated note, here is Rin Tezuka, on a Llama.
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June 23, 2014
Stuff and Things
Apropos the previous post. My utter contempt for the people involved exceeded the scope of my Thesaurus. I don't think I've ever dropped 'f bombs' in a post before and I certainly do not intend to make a habit of it.
*****************
Frequent commentor Ralph Lauren Polo Shirts makes an interesting observation...
Send cause concoction towards large zip major naff plastic bag. Increase sirloin to successfully tote
Well, it might be an observation.
Of course, given that this faithful commentor has helpfully provide similar insights twenty times this weekend, my first impulse is to violate the promise made in the first paragraph. It occurs to me however, that perhaps what I need is not a bigger thesaurus, but a cypher. It could be that this is a coded message and all that stands between me and a great adventure is deciphering this! What if all of these comments, together form a sort of Rosetta Stone that has the potential to unlock the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript? Solving such a puzzle would have the potential to unlock wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Formidable enemies would seek to suppress that disruptive information, but the potential to bring about a golden age of enlightenment would surely be worth the risk!
Heck, cute girls might talk to me!
If only...I hadn't deleted all those comments....
Once again I have sabotaged myself.
*********************
I may have to check out this show. Not only is this barista into military history, I hear tell she has good trigger discipline too!
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June 22, 2014
One Hopes That There is a Special Concierge Service in Hell To Give These People the Extra Attention They Deserve
Suburban Banshee has an extensive, link-heavy post on the utter monstrousness of Marion Zimmer Bradley, child molester and protector of her child molester husband.
Go read the while thing.
more...
I mentioned this to my friend BOB! last night and he said that he'd heard about a lot of this years ago and had written off the author for that reason. Another friend mentioned yesterday that she'd known about enough of this for years that she had long ago burned Bradley's books.
I, on the other hand, had muddled trough life blissfully ignorant of this.
It's a squalid, foetid affair that involves a couple of truly evil people. That word "evil" gets bandied about a lot, but this is the real deal.
But the reason I'm most angered by this is that the story is actually far worse than the depredations of 2 fiends.
What is REALLY disturbing about this is the fact that elements in the Sci-Fi community had been covering this up since 1963. Oh, they had banned Breen (Bradley's eventual husband) from a con, but no one bothered to call the cops.
This passage from the letter is particularly disturbing...After laying out the fact that Walter Breen is a CHILD MOLESTER, he suggests that Breen be...get this...banned from a con.
I came to this conclusion most reluctantly. I have no axe to grind. And quite apart from my emotional reluctance, I expect some of my friends to get mad at me if I do anything about Walter. Others will be "disappointed" in me because of my "persecution" of Walter, poor innocent Walter who loves and understands children. Also I rather expect some damage in my race for TAFF in 1965.[/quote]
You know, I have something to say to the author of this letter....
Hal 9000, Skynet, and the Krell mind machine, combining their processing power and crunching numbers for a decade could not calculate all the fucks I do not give about your fanboy electioneering. You have, with that paragraph, proven yourself to be a soulless, malignant waste of skin that could be put to vastly better use by burn victims. You know of a child molester and you do not report it to police because you are afraid it will harm your popularity? If ratting out a pederast will endanger ones social standing, then I suggest that it is time to get another peer group. You have no axe to grind? ARE YOU HUMAN?
This was 1963. How many children were raped because no one on this mailing list had the spine to call the cops? (ed: at least 22) Why in the hell didn't SOMEONE call the authorities? Is it because as a member of fandom you'd been bullied and didn't want to cast judgements? If so you deserved every wedgie you got and more...far more. This was not being a beatnik, or some other alternate lifestyle, this was children, and this was a hell of a lot more children who suffered agony and terror because not ONE person in this circle of fen had sufficient ethical grounding to call the police.
The Kitty Genovese story was utter bunk, but this is as real as it gets.
You know what's almost as disturbing than that?
This.
No news here, just a couple of glowing testimonials...well, the only people covering this are the French and the Italians.
Someone from Google must be an MZB fan.
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Wait...That's not a Megaphone
It's 100 KiloTons of 'splody!
The tiny Mk 4 reentry vehicle containing the tinier W-76 warhead weighs only 368 pounds allowing up to 14 to be carried on a Trident missile, though treaty restrictions limit them to considerably less than that. The joint U.S./UK W-76 is the most common warhead in the American and British nuclear stockpiles and one of the two oldest in the US arsenal. Rather than replacing these elderly warheads, the rather questionable decision has been made to refurbish them. This is the warhead that caused the stir some years ago when it was belatedly discovered that the U.S. had lost the knowledge of how to produce a crucial component of the bomb.
While 368 pounds is a bit too heavy for a backpack or suitcase nuke, the impressively small size of this terrible weapon, along with its comparatively moderate weight, mean that a weapon comparable to this (far from state of the art) device could fit into any number of vehicles, steamer trunks or porta-johns.
Fortunately nothing could get past our border security, so rest easy and enjoy the summer!
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June 18, 2014
Home the Conquering Heroes
Battered but unbowed, SY Seascape sits quietly at a local shipyard's marina awaiting repairs. Mom and Dad are exhausted but in good spirits. Their sometimes harrowing trip covered 5000 nautical miles via the intercostal waterway, Atlantic ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and a grove of cattails in the Great Dismal Swamp.
They were vey pleased with the performance of the boat, though, they did note one quirk that initially caused them some dismay. The boat is not what Americans generally think of as a motorsailer. That is, when being operated bare pole in a heavy sea, she will roll almost onto her beam ends with great enthusiasm. Once they got the whole "sailing" thing down this was no longer an issue. It is an exceptionally strong boat and withstood being driven aground by the waterspout with hardly a scratch. Most of the mechanical issues were of the sort one encounters on any shakedown, though as anticipated, the engine repairs (replacing the head gasket) will be a shipyard job. I'll help him haul the boat next week.
Hurricane season starts next week, so any further attempts will have to wait until November at least.
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June 14, 2014
An IT Question for Pixy (and any other IT professionals) UPDATED
In 1973 revelations that 18 and a half minutes of a recording on a reel-to-reel tape recorder had been erased dealt the death blow to an already struggling administration. In 2014 the revelation about the loss of every single E-mail pertinent to the investigations into the IRS political targeting of American citizens is being described as 'just one of those things'.
Pixy, as an IT professional, does the total credulity expressed by so many regards this data loss indicate that the powers that be actually have proof of the existence of a population of Magical Malevolent Data Eating Bunyips whose grazing range extends throughout the tubes of the internet?
I'm thinking that this hypothesis is the only way to square that circle.
Also: Assuming they are out there, can we coax these beasts into feeding instead on anything involving Air Jordan Snakeskins and their Dadaist proponents?
UPDATE: I mean seriously, ruling out bunyip involvement would have such implications as to open a can of yowies.
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Paraskevidekatriaphobia...Missed
I had intended to do two posts yesterday including one on the silly Friday the Thirteenth nonsense. Unfortunately my Friday involved, getting off work late, having my car stuck in the shop (where it remains over the weekend), a letter from the VA telling me I owe them 1800 dollars, an attack of sinusitis and a power failure.
On the other hand, while yesterday was the only such quirk of the gregorian calendar this year, there will be no less than three opportunities to post on Paraskevidekatriaphobia next year. Also, today has involved leveraging last nights power failure into about 13 hours of sleep, so things are definitely looking up.....embedded video notwithstanding.
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June 12, 2014
Let's Take a Moment to See What is Happening in the World
more...
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June 10, 2014
OH WOW
There is a bit of political news from my home state that is worthy of comment.
Oh NO! Not NOW! Not politics! I just submitted a techno-yaoi manuscript to Bantam and now I'm gonna get frickking blacklisted!
You should have tried Baen, but fear not! We put the politics below the fold.
more...
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June 09, 2014
Ahhh Vocabulary....
Tonight, due to a certain series of events, I found myself looking up the word "Therian". After some initial confusion I found that which I was looking for...and yet did not need to know.
This in turn caused me to ponder the additional befuddlement that might result if any of them find themselves 'connected' to a platypus.
Pondering such ponderables is not particularly productivel. Thus, we'll try to atone by posting this bit of art for Ubu, who has pointed out some information that looks to be worthwhile indeed.
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So...What's On ?
more...
I'm suffering from acute fogeyism.
Most of the best anime shows I've watched recently have been recommendations. Now, I sit and look at the current and approaching line-up and see a vast wasteland, but there must be something that doesn't suck.
So what's good in the world of anime?
As "Good" is highly subjective, here are the shows that I've most enjoyed over the years.
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June 07, 2014
The Great Escape
Bernard Jordan, 89 a veteran of the Normandy landings 70 years ago had intended to pay respects to his fallen comrades by attending the 70th anniversary memorial service yesterday. However, June 5th found him confined to a nursing home and forbidden to attend the ceremony.
In the finest traditions of the British Royal Navy, Bernard Jordan eluded his captors, escaped from his facility and successfully evaded the local constabulary who were called in to assist in his recapture. He then made his way discreetly to the coast where her was able to slip onto a channel ferry, land in France and make his way to join his comrades.
Along the way, to further demoralize the enemy, he stopped for this picture.
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June 06, 2014
70 Years Later
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June 05, 2014
Neat!
Where DOES Don find these wonderful little gems?
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June 04, 2014
We are now Able to Announce an Increase From 340 to 50
It's that new math!
No we're not talking about the chocolate ration. We're talking about the B-61 nuclear bomb. This is a fearsome weapon having a yield that can be varied between the equivalent of 300 tons and 340 kilotons of TNT.
Having first been tested in 1966, the B-61 one of the only two atomic bombs the US possesses and is, by a wide margin, the oldest atomic weapon in the U.S. arsenal. As such these weapons are in need of refurbishment or replacement. The current administration scrapped plans for the reliable replacement warhead on the grounds that developing a new weapon was not in the spirit of nuclear disarmament. However, the aged B-61 (the design of which actually began in 1960) was becoming a concern for reliability (and safety) reasons so something had to be done.
The result was the B-61-12, an program to refurbish and upgrade the bombs. This has caused some consternation on the left as the addition of a GPS guidance package to the bomb, which gives it an accuracy equivalent to the most modern 'smart' conventional warheads is considered by many to be adding a new capability and a possible treaty violation. Given that the "new capability" is simply a greatly increased probability of hitting its target this does not seem to be a particularly meritorious argument.
However, as part of the upgrade, the maximum yield of the weapons is being reduced to 50 kilotons, a tad over one seventh the current value.
Now 50 kilotons is a terrifying thing. For perspective, see what a 21 kiloton blast detonated 90 feet below the surface of the water can do.
For scale, that black stain on the lower right of the cauliflower of death is BB33, USS Arkansas...the only US battleship to fly.
Still, you're reducing the yield to a tad over one seventh of it's current yield. The rationale may be that the weapon's accuracy would allow in some situations a lower yield setting to be used, thus reducing the blast area to obliterate a target and, in the unfortunate scenario where a ground burst is necessary, reducing fallout significantly. That is all well and good, but...
...except in a few very specific, oddball scenarios, if we are forced to use these terrible weapons, collateral damage damage is not going to be a concern.
Nukes are for deterrence.
That means that if we, God forbid, have to use these dreadful devices, we're going to come at whoever pushed us that far like the bastard children of an affair between Andrew Jackson, William T. Sherman and Curtis Lemay. The reason to have these weapons is the implication that we will UTTERLY DESTROY any country that attacked us with nukes or comparable weapons. To that end reducing the yield does not seem wise. It removes an option for greater power if needed and in doing so increases the likelihood that some blinkered individual will conclude that they can "take the hit" and absorb our retaliatory strike.
On the face of it, that's crazy, but if one (for instance) has expressed the opinion that Mao was a man to be admired and that the 'Great Leap Forward' and Cultural Revelation' were noble endeavors...then one might be the sort of psychopath who sees China's billion or so people as "spares". The rather large reduction in yield per bomb might well reinforce that dubious notion.
Now there may be a technical reason for the reduced yield. If the guidance package displaces, say, a tritium tank and 50KT is all they can manage then the increased accuracy is probably a good trade off. But unnecessarily reducing the yield of our weapons so dramatically, when we are already substantially reducing the numbers of our weapons seems imprudent at best.
So...one might wonder "What about the other nukes?"
Well, here's what's left.
B-61: Has already been mentioned. The most common nuclear bomb in the arsenal and second most common nuke in the US Inventory. Also used (with US controlled activation keys) by Germany, Italy and Turkey.
B-83: Designed 20 years after the B-61 it is a very advanced free-fall atomic bomb and has every available safety feature. It is also variable yield 20KT to 1.2 MEGAtons. (1200 kilotons) . By far the most powerful weapon remaining in the arsenal after the scrapping of the B-53s in 2011 . The last US atomic weapon fully tested to full yield. It is neither a reliability nor a safety concern. About 650 were manufactured most of which are still in storage.
W-76: a US/UK SLBM warhead with a yield of 100KT. By far the most common warhead in the US arsenal. Publicly available documents indicate that there have always been some concerns regards this aging weapons reliability. It is currently the subject of a refurbishment program which made the alarming discovery that the technique for making an important component of this weapon had been lost. Reportedly a work around has been developed after 9 years of intense research..It is hoped to have these 30+year old warheads refurbished by 2018. Though doubts about the basic design's reliability may remain.
W-78: The surviving Minuteman 3 missiles were designed to carry three of these 300 KT weapons apiece. There are concerns about its safety and age thus it is being rapidly phased out in favor of 1 W-87 for every 3 W-78s.
W-80: 150 KT This is the warhead on the Air-Force's cruise missiles. It was also used on the nuclear version of the Navy's Tomahawk, which has since been retired.
W-87: 300 KT Originally built for the Peacekeeper missile which could cary 10 apiece, the treaty mandated retirement of those 50 missiles freed up about 500 of these and they are being distributed amongst the 450 surviving Minuteman 3 missiles. This cuts the number of ICBM warheads by a third but improves safety and reliability of the warheads. There was an upgrade proposal to raise its yield to 475KT but this does not seem to have been done.
W-88: Thought to be, in many ways, a much more advanced design than the Air-Force's W-87, this roughly 475KT warhead is the preferred warhead for the Trident 2 SLBM which can cary 14 of them. However, the Trident is limited by treaty to 8. This weapon is considered to be by far the most advanced US nuclear warhead, more than quadrupling the yield of the similarly sized W-76. This weapon was to replace all of those older warheads but production was shut down at only 400 after the EPA/FBI raid on the Rocky Flats production facility in 1989. Although it was intended to restart production in the early 90s it was not resumed...in the US.
However, in 1995 the FBI discovered that China had obtained plans for the W88, and this diagram, which apparently contained all sorts of confidential details appeared in the NYT.
No new nukes have been made in the US since the end of the Cold War. The deterrent is aging and shrinking.
It seems inadvisable to shrink it more than necessary...especially when the Russians and Chinese are modernizing and in the case of the Chinese, expanding and brandishing theirs.
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