Quote of the Day

The children of these prairies do not grow up expecting that all the bonbons of this world are going to be fed to them with a runcible spoon by pampering destiny. Here you sweat by summer, shiver by winter, and work and pay for everything you get, so that by the time you are an adult, you are spiritually prepared for more hard work. North Dakota life has been meant to make of you a tough fighter, a hard worker.
-- Carroll E. Simcox

Going Hunting

This weekend, Girlie Bear and I will be braving the wilds of Fort Knox in search of the elusive Whitetail Deer.  My goal is to not be making Deer Tag Soup when the season closes.  Posting will be light.

Thoughts on the Day

• I have come to the realization that I loathe artillery simulators.
• Reverse Mozambique - Two to the chest, one to the dangly bits
• Speaking of which, taking a 5.56mm wax bullet to the dangly bits may be nature's way of telling you to slow down.
• Virginia, I don't know if there's a Santa Claus, but there is indeed a Bogeyman.  He shot me twice today.
• The pirate versus ninja debate is over.  I was swaggering around like a pirate, and a couple of guys who would make a ninja proud put a couple through my X ring before I even knew they were there.
• Pro tip:  When you are observing a cease fire, make sure the other side knows about it before standing in a window.
• Unass - Verb - The act of getting out of a place quickly, without thought to where you are going to go or grabbing anything not already connected to your body.  Example:  When the other guys lobbed three flashbangs into the window, I unassed the room and headed outside.
• It's humbling to think that a misunderstanding about what I was going to do today caused so many people to take time out of their days to let me know I was in their thoughts.  Please keep the young men and women who trained with me today in those thoughts.  Very soon, they're going to be in a very bad place, and they could use all the help they can get.

A Clarification

Guys, I'm not getting deployed. I'm just volunteering to be a training aid Jihadi at Fort Knox. Thanks for the thoughts, though.

Sorry about the confusion.

Off to Jihadistan

Y'all play nice while I'm gone, ya hear?

Update - I am, in fact, not being deployed.  I was only doing some volunteer work as an OpFor role player out at Fort Knox.

Thoughts on the Morning News

• Is it just me, or is Hillary Clinton starting to look really tired?  I think her facelift is starting to let go.
• We went over 15 billion dollars in government debt the other day.  At what point do we just say "metric crapton" and leave it at that?
• What a surprise, someone got shot last night, and the picture they have for him is a mug shot.
• Apparently a vampire movie opened at the theaters last night.  The TV showed crowds of people in line to see it at midnight.  Amazingly enough, there wasn't a male face in the crowd. 
• Is it a stereotype if the only person they can get to talk about some tragedy involving a trailer has maybe three teeth?
• If it's mid to late November, and it's getting cold, the weather lady should not be surprised that it's in the 20's outside.
• Using only the commercials, one could come to the conclusion that the only local small businesses left are personal injury lawyers, mattress stores, and hormone replacement clinics.  

Great Minds Think Alike

A commission sponsored by Freedom Works has come out with a government austerity plan that would slash over 9 trillion dollars from the federal budget over the next decade.  They axe entire cabinet departments, get rid of Obamacare, and cut the pay for Congress if the budget is not balanced.

Sounds familiar.  I'll await a call from the commission.

Paging Mr. Ahmadinajad

Iranian President Ahmadinajad, please pick up the white courtesy phone.  The U.S. Air Force has a message for you.

The Air Force is taking possession of some new ordnance, a bunker buster bomb that's 5 times bigger than the next biggest conventional bomb.  It's designed to penetrate facilities that are buried deep underground, with a stated purpose of destroying weapons of mass destruction programs.

Since we're unlikely to bomb North Korea anytime soon, I wonder what this could be for?   Maybe someone in the Air Force is planning on a little urban renewal in Iran, perhaps?

Honestly, destroying Iran's nuclear facilities will do nothing other than to delay their program, assuming that we can locate them with enough accuracy to actually target them with conventional weapons. Maybe it'll be delayed for years, but unless we assist their nuclear scientists and engineers in achieving room temperature, they'll just dig new, deeper tunnels and continue their march to the nuclear club.  It would probably be more fruitful to find ways to find and eliminate their nuclear staff than to bomb the facilities.  New tunnels can be dug in a couple of years.  It takes decades to create new scientists, even if you are importing them from China, Russia, and North Korea.

It's not just Obama

Fox is reporting on a new poll that finds that a full 56% of Americans have no confidence in the President. 48% of Americans disapprove of the President's job performance, while only 42% approve.  The numbers for Congress are even more drastic, with 80% disapproving of Congress's job performance.

So how did we get to this point where a majority of Americans dislike at least two out of three branches of government?  The way I see it, it's taken decades of mismanagement, greed, and incompetence to destroy the relationship between the electorate and the elected.  Cronyism, revolving doors into the lobbying industry, and just plain stupidity have made a lot of people so cynical that they just choose to not participate.

For me, it's been watching over a decade of manipulation of numbers, torturing of the truth, and bending of stated principals by members of both parties that have driven me into the "vote them out, vote them all out" camp.  I've always said that Americans crave leadership, not management. It's been a very long time since the last statesman was replaced by a politician.

So where do we go from here?  Next year, the President, the Vice-President, all of the members of the cabinet, all of the members of the House of Representatives, and 1/3 of the Senators are up for contract renewal, and to be honest, I think we should outsource all of them.  I'm sure that a wholesale firing of the entire elected portion of the Executive branch and over half of the Legislative branch would cause a few good people to be swept out along with the dirtbags, but I honestly don't know how to separate the sheep from the goats.  My hunch is that we are more likely to have a net gain in intelligence with a complete crop of new people than we are to by replacing the current field of weeds in ones and two's.

So I say again:  Vote them out.  Vote them all out.  If you can't hold your nose and vote for the candidate from the opposing party, vote third party.  Take time to educate your fellow citizens about the iniquity of Congress and the President.  Encourage them to do their own research and to decide whether or not we can trust the people who put us in the ditch to get us out.

Next year, just vote "No Mas".

No Fooling?

Energy Secretary Chu testified yesterday that although he did his best to make sure that Solyndra was a rock solid company, he doesn't expect to see much of the half a billion dollars he loaned to the company.  Apparently, it's more important that the speculators who invested in the solar smoke-and-mirrors company deserve to get more of their money back before the taxpayers.  He also denied that political considerations made a difference in his decision.  I haven't seen pictures or film of his testimony, but the image I have in my mind is him testifying while wearing a Solyndra tee shirt and drinking coffee from an "I Heart Democratic Donors" coffee mug.

You know, it's sad that I'm not surprised by this kind of thing anymore. Both parties have been handing out money like they didn't earn it for decades.  Wait a minute, never mind, they in fact did not earn it.  Anyway, the business plan for a lot of companies seems to be:

Step 1:  Give some money to politicians
Step 2:  Get a metric ton of money from politicians
Step 3:  Profit!
Step 4:  Golden Parachute!

Now y'all excuse me while I go try to figure out how I'm going to afford to pay the new taxes it's going to take to pay off the debt we went into in order to give money to Solyndra and every other snake-oil salesman who could squawk "Green Energy" for the past few years.

A Hint

To all hoplophobes everywhere:

This is a rifle:

These are umbrellas:

Please learn to tell the difference.  It's annoying to read about how the SWAT team is called out because someone thought it might rain.

Movie Review: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Continuing my habit of watching movies a year after they're released, the other night we watched The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  This was a fun movie to watch, but not one that I plan on watching over and over.  Since it's a modern Disney movie, it's OK for Girlie Bear or Boo to watch with us without the adults being bored/irritated out of their skulls.  It has the normal story arc of "boy meets girl, girl thinks boy's a cute dork, boy impresses girl, girl thinks he might be more than a cute dork, girl gets kidnapped by ancient evil, boy saves girl, boy and girl go on to face an even more ancient and more evil entity together, cut to black".  How many times have we seen that one?

Basically, Nicolas Cage plays himself, which in this case happens to be a centuries old wizard who has made a hobby out of locking evil wizards into new layers of a matrioshka doll.  Jay Baruchel plays the same character he played so successfully in "How to Train Your Dragon", but this time he's a college nerd who also happens to be an unknown wizard who has all of the powers of Merlin.

Taking a cue from George Lucas and his fabled midiclorians explanation for why the Jedi Knights are so badass, Cage's character explains that wizards are just normal people who can use 100% of their brains, unlike the rest of us who only use 10%. This ability gives wizards the power to see matter and energy for what they really are and take advantage of that knowledge to manipulate it for good and evil.  Look for an annoying CGI character to show up in the inevitable sequel.

Speaking of CGI, the effects in this were pretty good, actually.  The Disney crew was able to put in the effects pretty seamlessly without them becoming the story.

So, overall, this movie was worth the bandwidth to stream it and the two bags of popcorn we made to enjoy it with.  I'd give it 3 stars out of five.  It's an enjoyable romp, but it's not going to change your life by watching it.

Psychological or Just Not Stupid?

Over at Time, Justin Frank opines that the reason that a lot of Republicans have failed to support the candidacy of Mitt Romney is psychological in nature.  You see, we rubes can't take the complexity of someone like Romney who can change his mind about issues instead of staying true to core values.  We yearn for someone simpler, read stupider, who will emulate our anti-intellectual political leanings.  We fear that which is hard to think about and is different from us, and let me tell you, brothers and sisters, Romney is different from us, or at least me. 

I'm not talking about his wealth or religious beliefs.  So long as he gained his money honestly, or at least legally, I don't care.  As for his religion, so long as he doesn't try to make me follow his beliefs, and those beliefs don't harm anyone but Mitt, then I also don't care.

Listen up sparky, I don't like Romney because of a couple of things:  Romneycare and gun rights. 

Every swinging Richard in the Obama administration has admitted that Obamacare is based at least in part on Romney's similar program in Massachusetts.  Romney was at the helm when that commonwealth decided it was OK to force everyone to get health insurance and to make sure that everyone gets their yearly proctological exam on the public tab.  Basically, us proles can't be trusted to make our own decisions about our lives, so Uncle Mitty made those decisions for us.

Next comes gun rights.  Go ask Weer'd and JayG about how they feel about the gun laws in Massachusetts.  At least with Obama we have the devil we know and the Republican party won't feel an obligation to close ranks around a Romney administration effort to curtail my rights.

And if Romney has such a low opinion of my right to keep and bear arms, how low on his priority list is not infringing my rights to speech, press, religion, a fair trial, and all of the other things we have fought both for and over since the 1700's?

I want a thinker in the White House.  I want someone who understands the responsibilities of the office and the limits on its power.  I want someone who's actually held a job and knows what it's like to have to work for a living.  I want someone who respects my rights and the rights of every other citizen.

And from what I've seen, Romney's not that guy.

So, Dr. Frank, please take your condescending drivel somewhere else and try to figure out the psychology of an ideology that believes that citizens shouldn't be allowed to make their own decisions about healthcare, self-defense, or whatever else makes people feel all bad-squishy inside.  I'll be here in fly-over country preparing to vote against Romney in the primaries and looking at 3rd party candidates if he should get the nomination.

They're Back

The Atomic Nerds took a hit earlier this week, or rather, their hosting company did.  Stingray describes it in the way that only he can:

Then, one fine Saturday morning, Jihadi Joe killed those magic elves, so they couldn’t sort things to make sure the right info got to the right people, and all that particular machine’s elves knew how to offer up is Peace & Love & Stonings & Hijacking and yi-yi-yi music. People wanted their obscure WWI pistol information, and other people wanted their over-long scientific analysis of pop phenomenon and pointless profanity but there were no elves that knew where that douchecocking information lived anymore!

 Glad to see they're back, and I'm looking forward to reading my periodic reminders that I'm rarely the smartest guy in the room.  

Pretty Neat

Scientists in Washington have announced that the use of an online video game has advanced the science behind anti-AIDS drugs.  The game, Foldit, encouraged game players to find the best way to fold proteins in a virus, and scientists have been able to use the solutions to the puzzles to increase their understanding of the structure and work of viruses.

Crowd-sourcing research is nothing new.  The BOINC focuses on bio-medical and mathematical research.  Basically, a problem is broken down into small bits, and PC's around the world spend their idle time going through the data and sort the wheat from the chaff to allow for more efficient use of dedicated computing resources.

But this is the first time I've heard of actual human interaction being used to do something like this.  Imagine the uses.  It could be used to find solutions to problems that are now done primarily by experts in their field.  Need a new human-usable traffic plan for your city?  Create a driving game that gives points for getting from point A to point B quickest without driving on the sidewalk.  Need to find and bomb the living crap out of some countries nuclear weapons program?  Create a video game that gets hundreds of thousands of people to go through every possible way to do it until you find the best way.  Bonus points if you give the players realistic simulations of military and intelligence units to fight with.

Hopefully, this method is used again.  I might give up my personal moratorium on playing video games to contribute.