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Old People Talk

For this week’s guests and the real news join me below.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

There are two problems with history.  The first is a mechanical problem, causation.  There is a Newtonian attraction to start with the Big Bang and Universal Inflation and see everything as logically and inevitably proceeding from there since in our own lives Entropy’s Arrow is writ so large.  The second is a failure of empathy, to see our own situation as so unique and without precedent that hsitory is nothing but a dull, dusty recitation of dates and dead people with no relevence at all.  The fact that these two instincts are contradictory does not prevent people from holding them simultaneously true as a manifestation of our quantum nature where cats are neither/both dead/alive like brain craving Zombies.

There are many ‘Guns of August’ as you can see by scanning our content for the last few days.  This date, the 6th, is notable in terms of the Great War because it marks the next to last formal declaration of war of the initial phase, that of Austria-Hungary against Russia (Japan declares war against Germany August 23rd).  As of 100 years ago today the combatants are-

For the Entente Cordiale: Serbia, Russia, France, Belgium, Britain.  For the Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary.

But at this point we are already almost a thousand years in medias res because to understand the Great War you need to go back to Napoléon and the Congress of Vienna and to grasp the motivations of the British while redrawing the map of Europe you need to start at the Battle of Hastings and take into account their experiences in the Hundred Years War and the Armada.

That’s just the Anglo version, there are other important narratives.

So this is a warning (or a threat, take it how you will) that I’ll be talking about the Great War and not always with much attention to anniversaries because it’s a big, complicated, and messy subject, though the broad outlines and outcomes may not surprise you much (it’s been a whole century after all).

I anticipate at least 3 pieces to bring us up to the Congress of Vienna, one focusing on Western Europe, one on the Ottoman Empire, and one on Russia.  After the Congress I will look at German and Italian unification, the Second Age of Colonialism, and the Industrial Revolution and the Ironclad.  Finally in the run up to the Great War I’ll look at the establishment of the Entente and the retreat of the Otttomans from the Balkans.

And this is all before Princip fires a shot truly heard around the world.

For the most part I’ll be documenting my story based on Wikipedia, not because it’s the best or most insightful, but simply because that by the nature of its anarchic editing process it represents the lowest common denominator of facts we can all agree on.

And they’re not what you think they are if you had a typical Anglo-American education.

An Annual Reminder.

Echo… echo… echo… Pinch hitting for Pedro Borbon… Manny Mota… Mota… Mota…

You may remember my brother the activist.  I keep trying to get him to post, but he’s shy and busy.  He sent me this yesterday and I thought I’d share it with you.

I need to add that he’s a great admirer of James Carville’s political savvy (though not his policies) and one story he likes to tell is how during the height of Monica-gate Carville was on one of the Talking Head shows and made a point about how important it is to stay on message.  Carville then proceeded to demonstrate his gift by working the phrase “Cigarette Lawyer Ken Starr” 27 times into the next 30 seconds.- ek

The date – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 – August 6, 2001 needs to be as well known to Joe and Jane American as September 11, 2001.

Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 PDB

Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct foreign terrorist attacks on the U.S. Bin Ladin implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted] service.

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [deleted] service at the same that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Presidential Daily Briefing: August 6, 2001 – Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

So Vice President Dick, tell me again how the REPUBLICANS WILL KEEP US SAFE?

So Senator McSame, tell me again how invading and occupying IRAQ has helped the U.S. hunt down BIN LADEN?

I’m printing my own bumper stickers filled with images from 9-11 and this text-

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center”- Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor

“All right. You’ve covered your ass now.”- George W. Bush

Super Genius

I’m saving Colbert for the 8th when we can do the Time Warp again, so here’s the plan.  We hold the government ransom for…

659 MILLION DOLLARS!

Right, people you have to tell me these things, okay?  I’ve been frozen for thirty years.  Throw me a frickin’ bone here!  I’m the boss!  Need the info.

For this week’s guests and the real news join me below.

When presidents lie to make a war

DD Guttenplan, The Guardian

Saturday 2 August 2014 05.00 EDT

Once there was a president who warned the world about conduct his government would not tolerate. And when this “red line” was crossed, or seemed to be, he took the US to war. Though this might sound like America’s involvement in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Belgrade, or Libya, and what may yet become a wider war in Syria, this story began 50 years ago, on 4 August 1964.

That was when Lyndon Johnson interrupted TV broadcasts shortly before midnight to announce that two US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin had come under fire in international waters, and that in response to what the president described as this “unprovoked” attack, “air action is now in execution” against “facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations”.

The Americans launched 64 bombing sorties, destroying an oil depot, a coal mine and a significant portion of the North Vietnamese navy. Three days later, both houses of Congress passed a joint resolution authorising “the president, as commander-in-chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the US and to prevent further aggression”. Within three years the US would have 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. Even today, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution remains the template for presidential war-making.

That 4 August, Daniel Ellsberg was starting work at the Pentagon. A young mathematician who had served as a captain in the marines, then gone on to graduate study at Harvard and a job as a civilian analyst for the Rand Corporation, where he had helped shape America’s response to the Cuban missile crisis, Ellsberg was among the first to receive the classified “flash” signal from the USS Turner Joy, the battleship that claimed to be under attack.

Transcript

Transcript

Like Barack Obama, Lyndon Johnson was a president who felt “the fierce urgency of now” to address the glaring inequalities of American society. Just a month earlier, with Martin Luther King Jr standing at his side he had signed the civil rights act, ending racial segregation. And as the Pulitzer prizewinning historian Frederik Logevall told me, “Johnson apparently said in the spring of ’64, ‘I don’t think we can win in Vietnam and I don’t think we can get out.’ You can have all the military power in the world, but if you can’t win the thing politically then you’re not going to succeed.”

Reading headlines from Syria, or watching the news from Iraq – where an army which had been trained and equipped at enormous expense simply laid down their weapons and ran away, abandoning territory that had cost British and American troops their lives -it has been impossible to resist the sensation, in the words of the great Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, that this was “deja vu all over again”. Listening to Obama and David Cameron respond to the debacle in Iraq, I kept hearing echoes of President Kennedy declaring in September 1963: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there.”

Thanks to Edward Snowden and the Guardian we know a great deal more about how Britain and America view the world – and their own citizens – than was even suspected in 1964. But we still may have to wait decades to find out what George Bush said to Tony Blair about Iraq, or what Obama told David Cameron about Syria. We can, however, finally tell the full story of what happened – and didn’t – in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Wars, Lies and Audiotape

Other than the fact that the Turner Joy wasn’t a ‘battleship’ except in the broadest sense of a ship that goes into battle (Forrest Sherman-class destroyer) pretty much dead on.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – Santayana

(note: So I found this little gem in this piece-)

Thomas Friedman has no soul: The New York Times’ quasi-journalistic Wall-E does it again

Richard (R.J.) Eskow, Salon

Monday, Aug 4, 2014 04:45 PM EST

After our last disquisition on Tom Friedman we thought we were through with him for good. But the violations of decency have become too great, or our spirit has grown too weak. Whatever the cause, a soul cries out at last:  In the name of all that is decent and holy, will this man never stop?

The latest outrage is a column about Madagascar titled “Maybe in America,” and it goes beyond parody – and even beyond that entertaining automated Tom Friedman column generator someone created a while back – to give us a distillate of Friedman in his purest form.

Friedman has usurped the column generator’s role. In the globalized and digitized world he celebrates, he seems to have finally outsourced himself.

Yes- random Bucksbaum!  Ersatz but virtually indistinguishable from the real thing!

Check it out.

New Rules

Not by Mr. Bucksbaum, nor published in Izvestia

August 4, 2014

Imagine if industrial giants sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our higher education crisis.

With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about higher education, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Uruguay, the authoritarian crackdown in Syria and the still-unstable democratic transition in Honduras. But the higher education problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Republicans seem to think that higher education can just be ignored. Democratic politicians like Harry Reid, on the other hand, seem to think that shrill rhetoric will substitute for a solution.

But the Democratic party of Harry Reid is not the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt. FDR wouldn’t refuse to budge, he’d break ranks with members of his own party because he’d understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of higher education.

It’s good to see the talks between the president and congress getting off to a solid start, but we know there will be plenty of partisan fireworks before any deal is cut. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about higher education. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend less: and not just spend less, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of human capital that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax cuts as well, but as they say, “Ya gotta get down to brass tacks.”

Second, I’d tell them to look at Sweden, which all but solved its higher education crisis over the past decade. When I visited Sweden in 2002, Mwambe, the cabbie who drove me from the airport, couldn’t stop telling me about how he had to take a second job because of the high cost of higher education. I caught up with Mwambe in Stockholm last year. Thanks to Sweden’s reformed approach toward higher education, Mwambe has enough money in his pocket to finally be able to afford a soccer ball for his kids.

That’s all it takes. Don’t expect to see any solutions as long as industry captains insist on playing a high-stakes game of ping pong with one another. America has to become a first world country again.

Iron Empires and Iron Fists in Australia

Not by Mr. Bucksbaum, nor published in Izvestia

August 4, 2014

What has been going on in Australia is unbelievable, and it has been on my mind ever since it began. It is impossible not to be tantalized by the potential of these events to change the course of Australia’s history. What’s important, however, is that we focus on what this means to the people. The media seems too caught up in spinning the facts to pay attention to how their people are doing. Just call it missing the battle for the bullets.

When thinking about the recent problems, it’s important to remember three things: One, people don’t behave like computer programs, so attempts to treat them as such are a waste of time. Computer programs never suddenly blow themselves up. Two, Australia has spent decades as a dictatorship closed to the world, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, freedom is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If ethnic conflict is Australia’s curtain rod, then freedom is certainly its flowerpot.

When I was in Australia last August, I was amazed by the variety of the local cuisine, and that tells me two things. It tells me that the citizens of Australia have no shortage of potential entrepreneurs, and that is a good beginning to grow from. Second, it tells me that people in Australia are just like people anywhere else on this flat earth of ours.

So what should we do about the chaos in Australia? Well, it’s easier to start with what we should not do. We should not let seemingly endless frustrations cause the people of Australia to doubt their chance at progress. Beyond that, we need to be careful to nurture the fragile foundations of peace. The opportunity is there, but I worry that the path to stability is so narrow that Australia will have to move down it very slowly. And of course Canberra needs to come to terms with its own history.

Speaking with a small business entrepreneur from the large Suni community here, I asked her if there was any message that she wanted me to carry back home with me. She pondered for a second, and then smiled and said, respre austee, which is a local saying that means roughly, “A sly rabbit will have three openings to its den.”

I don’t know what Australia will be like a few years from now, but I do know that it will probably look very different from the country we see now, even if it remains true to its basic cultural heritage. I know this because, through all the disorder, the people still haven’t lost sight of their dreams.

Are you ready for some Throwball?

Giants 17 – 13 over Bills in Hall of Fame Game.

A used $2 bill?!

For this week’s guests and the real news join me below.

Hello again-

I don’t spend all my time serenely listening to long hair music outside in the sun or even the moonlight, vast vistas of land scenically stretched before my gaze as the wind whispers my flowing locks and I stride purposefully toward my destiny.

In fact mostly I’m locked up in a dusty dungeon of my own making, tangled by wires and the past, bound like Sisyphus by chronic deceitfulness and pride to keep the tides of entropy at bay.  Oh sure, it’s fun for the first thousand years or so, but then it kinda gets… old.

Thank goodness for excitement, even of the bad kind.  At least it’s a change.

My excitement was that on Friday I had a power surge.  Inexplicable, random.  Took out the common circuit I share with most of my office floor AND the separate one my air conditioning is on, didn’t touch the rest of the house (I can tell because of the clocks).

Lasted like 2 seconds and at the end everything re-booted except my main computer which gave me the totally redundant message, “Hey, you had a power surge” and then went into an electronic funk.

I must admit I was kind of sanguine about it, I have 3 surge protectors before the motherboard and I’ve survived Hurricanes and Transformer explosions (those are fun, there’s a big bang and then power goes down for a day as the guys in the Hazmat clean up the PCBs before they replace the unit), and the computer behaved as Windows computers typically do when you’ve corrupted the virtual memory swap file- it re-boots once or twice and then goes chug-chug-chug as it attempts to repair the damage.

So you wait and you wait but I’m very impatient and after a couple of hours I hit the reset button and try a few technician’s tricks to no avail.

Now let me brag on my departed and defunct system, Asus M4A88T-V Evo/USB3, 6 Core Athlon II 3.7 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, 3x 2 Tb Seagates- each with a bootable OS installed.

Normally to cure a corrupted Swap File you boot to a good OS, run a chkdsk to fix up the crosslinks (almost always the problem) and then you unconfuse things (chug-chug-chug).  In this case NONE of my bootable partitions umm… booted.

Ok, time for strong Juju.  So I turn everthing off except for a brand new, never been touched hard drive, memory, motherboard, and CPU (all of which test fine in the BIOS), and my genuine non-evaluation copy of Windows 7, and proceed to attempt a fresh install which has the additional benefit of being a strong hardware test.

Pfft.

Well, that’s about enough frustration for one day so I called up TMC and got her to cover.  Thank you.

Today the goal has been to get functional again.  I’m fortunate enough to have generous patrons and I’m in possesion of an HP 6475b laptop.  The notable features of this particular platform are that it has a 2.5 Ghz AMD Dual Core, 16 Gb RAM, and (absolutely critical for a laptop as far as I’m concerned) a PCI card slot and a USB 3.0 port.  It has a usable (if crappy) keyboard and 15″ display and an intolerable touchpad (hate ’em).

Of course I’ve pimped it out.  Maxed the memory for starters.  Had a dual USB 3.0 PCI card so now I have 4 ports base and 2 are hooked up to 4 port hubs for 10 total (for now).  My USB 2.0 port is for my real wireless keyboard and mouse.

I struggled a bit with the display which is a miserable 1320×768 (only 1280×1024 is acceptable) but while my old Princton VF723 is still clunking along, it’s pretty old and washed out.  My Vizio TV is a mere 720p but my BenQ GW2250 main monitor is 1920×1080.  The problem with both the latter solutions is that the HP only has a DisplayPort and VGA out and VGA is inferior to the DVI (BenQ) and HDMI (Vizio) channels.  So I bought some cables.

Frankly, my intended purpose was to use the laptop for traveling emergency communications and as a video server for Netflix and it was in this primitive condition I had left it.

Whoa, emergency!  And I am as stranded in my own office as I would be in any Starbucks.

The first step is to robust the software so my Bookmarks and Passwords and Cookies are all restored and the next to fish the wires so that all the parts connect up and as you can see there are many pieces that move.

The final step is to try an salvage the data on my impressive 6 Terabytes to a 500 Gb Drive.

Hmm… NSA capabilities without the ambition.

The truth is you can write a whole lot without filling up a floppy.  I’m not parading this in front of you to incite envy, to me it’s the most normal business in the world because each repair starts with a backup of the system in the state that it’s in before you screw it up any more than it already is.  I have a tool (2 actually) called a ‘Universal Drive Adapter’ that allows me to take just about any drive, plug it into any computer with a USB port and rip the contents onto another drive.  The reason to have 2 is so you don’t overflow your host machine.  You record directly to a target drive using your host as an intermediary.

Easy peasy.

And it’s not about money either.  I seldom spend more than $200 for any particular part and most are in the $50 to $100 range.  My base laptop (a fine machine and worth every penny) was about $500.  Add $100 for the RAM.  The keyboard and mouse $25.  The monitor $120.  I mention the keyboard and monitor first because, outside of the software, those are the most critical components to your computing experience.  I paid a premium on the computer for the PCI card slot which are getting rare nowdays as are Optical Drives, the card itself was $50.  The USB 3.0 Hubs were $40 a piece, the drive adapters the same.  I have 368 Gb of 3.0 Flash Drives, all under $100.  My 2 Tb Hard Drives?  $100 per.  I have 2x 1 Tbs that are $70 each.  My departed Motherboard?  The one I’m so proud of?  $150 with CPU + $100 for RAM.

You can see why I mourn.  I’m convinced it is toasted and it’s about the most expensive part of my setup.

But change is good, I’ve been putting off moving to 7 as long as I could keep XP-64 creeping along and a quick survey of motherboards (which have not evolved much in the last 3 years) seems to indicate I can re-use most of my parts (that work) and indeed ultimately build a system with twice the speed, twice the memory, and a whopping 32 Tb of drive. and in the mean time I can try and convince myself that my little blind slab with it’s rat’s nest of “enhancements” is good enough for now and has the additional virtue of being more “portable” than my 30″x20″x6″ box.

Next week I shall attempt to sing in tune and on tempo, but for now you get Obligatories, News, and Blogs, and late at that because while I pretend I have a magic wand that erases the limitations of space-time it’s actually a back scratcher and I do like my naps when I can get them.

Darth Vader has better approval rating than 2016 US presidential candidates

Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian

Thursday 24 July 2014 03.43 EDT

He may have overseen the destruction of the peaceful planet of Alderaan, but Darth Vader is still more popular than Hillary Clinton – and indeed all of the prospective candidates for the 2016 American presidential election.

FiveThirtyEight, the site run by esteemed statistician Nate Silver, polled nearly 1200 people as to the favourability of various Star Wars characters. The likes of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia triggered popularity that politicians can only dream of, with up to 93% of respondents approving of them, but Darth Vader managed an impressive 58% approval rating – thus proving that with enough statesmanlike authority and public-speaking skills, anyone can sway an electorate.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog then crunched the numbers against the approval ratings of upcoming presidential candidates and other politicians, and it’s not particularly flattering reading. Barack Obama can take heart from the fact that at least he’s not as unpopular as Jar Jar Binks, but is outdone by Emperor Palpatine, a man determined to let the forces of evil govern entire galaxies. Hillary Clinton will be similarly disappointed to learn than her 19% approval rating puts her on a par with amoral bounty hunter Boba Fett – but then again she doesn’t have a cool jetpack.

Darth Vader is polling higher than all potential 2016 presidential candidates

By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post

July 23, 2014

On the other hand, with a net favorability of -8, Jar Jar is considerably more popular than the U.S. Congress, which currently enjoys a net favorability rating of -65. In fact, the last time congressional net favorability was above that was February 2005. Incidentally this was just before the release date of “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” which marked Jar Jar’s last appearance on the big screen.

…

None of the 2016 hopefuls is polling higher than Darth Vader. You’ll recall that Vader chopped off his son’s arm and blew up an entire planet, but evidently in the eyes of the American public these are minor sins compared to Benghazi, Bridgegate and Gov. Rick Perry’s hipster glasses. These numbers suggest that if “Star Wars” were real and Darth Vader decided to enter the 2016 presidential race, he’d be the immediate front-runner.

Meanwhile President Obama is polling just two favorability points below Emperor Palpatine, Lord of the Sith. Make of that what you will.

Remember, Emperor Palpatine is “the actual personification of evil in the galaxy.”

As for comparing the results of two polls about different subjects?  Social researchers do it all the time.  You need to have large enough samples and the sample universes must be comparable, but other than that statisticly relevant observations can be drawn to a reasonable degree of certitude.  Just be careful that you don’t mistake correlation for causation.  The reason Ice Cream consumption and Shark attacks are related is that they both increase in the Summer.

This… is news

This… is more news

For next week’s guests and the real news join me below.