Month: July 2014

Thoughts on the Passing of James Garner

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The Americanization of Emily
I cannot imagine seeing this in a movie today

I’ve had to think about it for a while.

He paid a big part in my childhood, both as Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files, and as Brett Maverick in Maverick. (I’m not that old, it was rerun in Portland, Oregon during my High School years.)

Well, following his death, I read his Wiki, and discovered a number of interesting facts:

  • He got two purple hearts in the Korean war, one for wounds in his butt from friendly fire while diving into a fox hole.
  • While in Korea, he was the the scrounger for his unit, which kind of mirrors a lot of roles that he played, most notably The Americanization of Emily.

I will note that of all the PI shows and police procedurals that I saw growing up, The Rockford Files was the only show that had a pro civil liberties/due process/privacy bent.

There was an episode about prosecutorial abuse of the grand jury process, “So Help Me God”, another about private efforts to create massive server farms to invade people’s privacy, “The House on Willis Avenue,” and law enforcement misconduct was a frequent theme in the show.

My older (hairier) brother always noted that it was rather ironic that The Rockford Files was regularly scheduled for broadcast with Quincy, M.E., which routinely used civil rights and due process as a bogeyman for plot purposes.

In any case, he was always fun to watch.

I have to turn my kids onto Support Your Local Gunfighter, which is IMNSHO the classic Garner movie role.

We Went to Artscape this Today

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One of the oldest open air arts festivals in the nation.

We had a lot of fun looking at various arts and crafts, most notably a glass artist who works I borosilicate (Pyrex™) which rather surprised me, as most glass artists I know work with much lower temperature glass.

There was also music and a wide range of carnival-type foods.!

Finally, there are a fair number of booths of for profit companies, including a Geico booth with a very cross gecko.,

You make a couple of jokes about eating insects, and they take it personally.

Go figure.

Posted via mobile.

Japan Rolls Out Stealth Demonstrator

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It’s called the ATD-X Shinshin:

Japan has rolled out its ATD-X Shinshin fighter technology demonstrator, is considering buying more Lockheed MartinF-35s and will decide within four years whether it will develop its next combat aircraft alone or with a foreign partner.

 When the ATD-X was launched in 2007, Japan’s vision was to progress from its then-current fighter program, a heavily modified F-16, to independent development. Now, with a policy change allowing defense exports, the technology from the demonstrator may end up in aircraft that emerge from foreign production lines as well as from one in Japan.

 The single ATD-X aircraft, about the size of a Saab Gripen, is undergoing ground tests, says the defense ministry’s Technical Research and Development Institute (TRDI), the sponsor of the program. TRDI is due to fly the ATD-X this year, beginning an evaluation program that will run until 2016. The aircraft has been built to demonstrate technologies—including stealth shaping, skin sensors and fly-by-light controls—that the ministry hopes to apply in its next fighter development program (AW&ST Aug. 6, 2007, p. 26).

 Official photographs taken on May 8 show the ATD-X on the apron outside a factory building of airframe builder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) at the Komaki South plant in Nagoya. The airframe underwent static testing last year. The ATD-X will be powered by two 11,000-lb.-thrust IHI XF5-1 -engines.

 U.S. involvement in the program, probably peripheral, appears in TRDI’s budget statement for the fiscal year to March 31, 2014, which lists contracts signed with the U.S. Air Force in support of the program. One item, costing ¥114 million ($1.12 million), is for testing outside Japan. Another, for ¥760 million, is for unspecified training from the U.S. Air Force. Japanese authorities have not mentioned a plan to fly the ATD-X outside Japan. The U.S. clearly has refused to supply stealth technology for the ATD-X, since Japan sent a radar model of the intended design to France in 2005 for evaluation.

Not a surprise on the last bit.

The Pentagon is desperate to sell as many F-35s as possible, to drive down their price, but the basic mathematics of Stealth have been known for over 40 years, when the equations were published in a public Soviet academic journal, so the secret sauce ain’t so secret.

Of interest is that the Japanese also intend to use the Shinshin as a radar target to develop counter-steath techniques.

One function of the ATD-X is to serve as a radar target, supporting development of counter-stealth technology, because, TRDI has said, stealth aircraft are hard to simulate. In 2008, it hoped to use the ATD-X to validate the abilities of the FPS-5 radar, E-767 AWACS and Airboss infra-red turret to detect stealth aircraft. Six years later, it would not be surprising if other sensors have been added to the list.

The aircraft is clearly too small for internal carriage, which could be amelorated with stealthy pylons and pods, bu I don’t expect them to look into this at this stage, since they are doing this on the cheap:

The ATD-X appears to be costing ¥77.1 billion, including airframe and engine development and manufacturing, plus the flight-test program. Engine development cost ¥14.7 billion, basic design of the stealth configuration with thrust-vectoring control ¥13.4 billion and system integration ¥7 billion. TRDI spent ¥2.7 billion researching airframe structure suitable for the skin sensor. Manufacturing and flight testing is budgeted at ¥39.3 billion, but spending of ¥22.5 billion under that heading last year alone suggests that that figure will be exceeded.

Even so, Japan appears to be spending much less than half of the present-day value of what Britain and partners spent on airframe and engine technology demonstrator programs that preceded the Eurofighter Typhoon. Admittedly, those 1980s efforts resulted in full-scale equipment, whereas the ATD-X is probably half as big as the fighter for which it is laying groundwork.

Given that there are about 101 Yen to the dollar, the program looks to run less than $1 billion.

This is a lot more than the Have Blue ran in the 1970s, Wiki says $35 milion, but the ATD-X is far more capable than the Have Blue, and military procurement inflation is insane, in 1978, an F-16 sold for $3 million.

My guess is that tis is more than a hedge against F-35 costs.

They Will Destroy this Man

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The Miami Herald has discovered that a Navy nurse has refused to force feed the Guantanamo detainees:

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

 A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

 “There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

 Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty.

(emphasis mine)

Needless to say, not only is this guy’s career over, you can be sure that the his command, and perhaps JAG Corps will go after him like the US Attorney went after Aaron Swartz, notwithstanding the declarations to the contrary made later in the article.

Guantanamo is an ethical black hole, our own little Abu Ghraib, our own little Gulag, and under those circumstances, they cannot allow people to assert a conscience objection, because would short circuit the cognitive dissonance that allows the facility to function..

Deep Thought

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When I did that post on German soccer snark, I used Google images to look for Rufus from the animated series Kim Possible for my “Worlds hairiest naked mole rat,” snark.

I searched on the words, “naked mole rat kim possible,” because I had forgot the rats name.

Don’t ever, Ever, search on the the words, “naked mole rat kim possible,” on Google images.

**shudder**

Yet Another Reason not to Sext

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According to Edward Snowden NSA employees would pass around intercepted nude photos for their own amusement:

Edward Snowden has revealed that he witnessed “numerous instances” of National Security Agency (NSA) employees passing around nude photos that were intercepted “in the course of their daily work.”

In a 17-minute interview with The Guardian filmed at a Moscow hotel and published on Thursday, the NSA whistleblower addressed numerous points, noting that he could “live with” being sent to the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He also again dismissed any notion that he was a Russian spy or agent—calling those allegations “bullshit.”

If Snowden’s allegations of sexual photo distribution are true, they would be consistent with what the NSA has already reported. In September 2013, in a letter from the NSA’s Inspector General Dr. George Ellard to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the agency outlined a handful of instances during which NSA agents admitted that they had spied on their former love interests. This even spawned a nickname within the agency, LOVEINT—a riff on HUMINT (human intelligence) or SIGINT (signals intelligence).

I think that this qualifies as the least surprising revelation so far.

The same thing would apply to your “hawt” emails.

On the other hand, if you have an urge to expose yourself to the world, you are now in heaven.

For Once, Obama Declines to Split the Baby (Fabulous!)

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After the failure of Congress to pass any LGBT civil rights legislation, Obama has signed an executive order banning it for government contractors.

The surprising bit is that despite entreaties from the religion-as-an-excuse-to-be-a-bigot crowd, the executive order does not grant a religious exemption:

President Obama, resisting calls from several prominent faith leaders, will not include a new exemption for religiously affiliated government contractors when he issues an executive order Monday barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the White House said Friday.

Obama announced last month that he would sign such an order after concluding that Congress was not going to act on a broader measure prohibiting discrimination based on sexual discrimination or gender identity by companies.

Since then, faith leaders have urged him to include an exemption for government contractors with a religious affiliation, such as some social service agencies.

White House officials said Friday that the new executive order would not include such an exception. But Obama will preserve an exemption put in place by former president George W. Bush that allows religiously affiliated contractors to favor employees of a certain religion in making hiring decisions.

Gay rights organizations have criticized that earlier exemption, and they celebrated news Friday that Obama would not be broadening it.

“With the strokes of a pen, the president will have a very real and immediate impact on the lives of millions of LGBT people across the country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.

I think that one of the consequences of the Hobby Lobby decision is the understanding that accommodation of the Talibaptist crowd is a losing proposition.

I’ve thought this for a while.

People who use religion as a, “Veil under which anger can be legitimatized,” to are a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

Best Soccer Hooliganism Ever!!!1!!! – Stellar Parthenon

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It was at the World Cup, when the US team played the German team:

As Germany basks in its World Cup victory, it’s easy to forget that one of the most telling geopolitical moments of the tournament came during the Germany-U.S. game. As American fans chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”, the Germans countered with, “N-S-A! N-S-A! N-S-A!”

The author tries to make the bigger point about America’s role in the world, that our allies are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of the indispensable America.

While I agree that this is true, particularly with regard to the next generation coming online, this is not my takeaway on this story.

My takeaway is that Germans must be the cleverest soccer rowdies in the world, though I will acknowledge that, “cleverest soccer rowdy,” is a lot like, “world’s hairiest naked mole rat.”

And Back in the Middle East, We Have a Captain Renault Moment………

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is shocked to find 20 rockets in one of their schools in Gaza:

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is investigating the discovery of 20 rockets hidden in one of its vacant schools in the Gaza Strip. The UNRWA condemned the incident as a “flagrant violation” of international law, adding that the rockets had been removed and that the relevant parties had been informed.

Israel regularly accuses Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza of using civilian installations to store and rockets, including during the current conflict, which began on 8 July.

I find the protestations of UNRWA to ring hollow.

While I understand that the agency needs to maintain good a relationship with the authorities in Gaza in order to effectively provide services, this sort of behavior has been the rule, not the exception, with UNRWA for nearly 70 years.

Meanwhile, Some Good News on the IP Front

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The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle has been claiming that, even though most of the Sherlock Holmes stories are out of copyright, a few are old enough to fall under the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions,* so the whole character falls under copyright.

The appellate court ruled against them and now the Supreme Court has denied cert, effectively ending the case in favor of the public domain:

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan refused on Thursday afternoon to block a federal appeals court ruling against continued copyright protection for fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, for any stories about him that have entered the public domain. Kagan acted without even asking for a response from an author who is preparing a new Holmes anthology, and she gave no explanation for her denial of a stay.

The nickel tour of the original case is here:

The estate has been attempting to block a California lawyer and Holmes fancier, Leslie S. Klinger, from publishing a new book about the two characters unless he is willing to get a license from the estate and pay a fee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the estate’s copyright claim, calling it “quixotic.” The new filing at the Court, including the Seventh Circuit’s ruling as an appendix, has been docketed as 14A47, and can be read here.

 ………

 Doyle has been dead for eighty-four years, but because of extensions of copyright terms, ten of his fifty-six short stories continue to be protected from copying. All of the short stories and four novels were published between 1887 and 1927, but all of the collection except ten short stories have entered into the public domain as copyrights expired.

 The Doyle estate, though, is pressing a quite unusual copyright theory. It contends that, since Doyle continued to develop the characters of Holmes and Watson throughout all of the stories, the characters themselves cannot be copied even for what Doyle wrote about them in the works that are now part of the public domain and thus ordinarily would be fair game for use by others.

It’s nice that cockamamie IP theories are no longer getting judicial deference.

*I mean that literally. Disney has been vociferous in lobbying for copyright extensions to ensure that the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, remain out of the public domain.

A Bit of Analysis on the Probable Shoot Down in the Ukraine

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Putin’s Flight Route from Sao Paulo to Moscow, and MS-12 MH17’s Route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur


Buk Missile Launcher


50 Km Radius about Snizhe (Red) where Launcher was Reported, and the crash site in Grabovo (Hrabove) (Blue)

Click for Popup Slide Show

What we know right now is that the Malaysian Airlines Flight 12 crashed in the Ukraine, and that it was very likely shot down by a medium of heavy surface to air missile (SAM).  (The aircraft was at about 10,000m, well above the range of light SAMs and AAA)

RT (obvious caveats apply) is noting that Putin’s presidential transport crossed paths with the airliner not that long before the shoot-down: (See map)

“I can say that Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft – 15:44 Moscow time,” a source told the news agency on condition of anonymity.

I don’t know what exactly happened and why, but I’m inclined that the regular Russian military would not be pointing anything into the air bigger than a water pistol until Putin’s plane was on the ground.

I’ve checked a couple of sources online, and it appears that timing is as close as RT describes.

I think that RT is implying that  it was the part of an attempted assassination against Putin, but I am calling BS on that.

Furthermore, I plotted a great circle route from Sao Paulo to Moscow (below, attached), which would appear to indicate that the Putin’s aircraft and aircraft would have come close to MH17’s flight path.

Given the timing, it is hard to imagine that anyone in the Russian military was allowed to point anything skyward more potent than a water pistol.

Ukrainian sources are alleging that a Buk missile launcher was used to shoot down the aircraft, and it should be noted that the Ukrainian rebels did capture some of these systems:

Ukrainian official said Thursday that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down near Snizhe today, a town close to the Ukrainian-Russian border. The plane was carrying 295 people and crashed early evening, local time.

 No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but immediate reports say that the airplane was grounded by a Buk surface-to-air missile system. The Buk, developed by the Soviet Union in 1979, has remained widely in use throughout the former Soviet states, including Ukraine.

 General Philip Breedlove, the commander of the U.S. European Command, said that Moscow has been supplying Ukrainian separatists with anti-aircraft weaponry, and has held training sessions along the eastern Ukrainian border, teaching rebels how to operate the systems.

 Direct supply of the Buk from Moscow to rebels would be a major escalation in the ongoing conflict. However, on June 29, Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, reported that pro-Russian separatists took a Buk system under their control. The report does not specify whether or not this was theft from the Russian or Ukrainian militaries, only that the rebels had seized control of the weapons system. An AP report, dated yesterday, noted that, “A launcher similar to the Buk missile system was seen by Associated Press journalists near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne, which is held by pro-Russia rebels, earlier Thursday.”

As I noted the Buk fires the SA-11 (30km range) or the SA-17 (50km range).

The crash location is given as Grabovo (Hrabove), though, given the physics of the situation, the impact point could be anywhere from 10 to 100 km east northeast of that.  (See map)

Assuming that it was a missile, my opinion  is that the rebels are the most likely perps, followed by the Ukrainian armed forces or irregulars, with the Russian military a distant third.

I would also note that while it does appear that the rebels captured the missiles from the Ukrainian military, I cannot see them being able to operate the system without extensive training by Russian military of the FSB.

Oh Crap

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Israel has begun ground operations against Gaza:

Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday night and naval gunboats pounded targets in the south as Israel began a ground invasion after 10 days of aerial bombardment failed to stop Palestinian militants from showering Israeli cities with rockets.

Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.

As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.

The only agenda that will be served by this is Bibi Netanyahu’s electoral ambitions.

Linkage

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How to Roll Cable: (Should work with garden hose too)

H/T Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the vid.

If You Can’t Make School Vouchers Work in Sweden, You Can’t Make it Work Anywhere

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It turns out that Milton Friedman education reform, much like all of his real word ideas, has turned out to be a huge clusterf%$#:

Every three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and languages. Across all subjects, America ranked squarely in the middle of the pack when the tests were first given in 2000, and its position hardly budged over the next dozen years.

 The angst over U.S. student performance—and its implications for the American workforce of the near future—is inevitably accompanied by calls for education reform: greater accountability, more innovation. Just as inevitable are the suggestions for how more accountability and innovation could be realized: more charter schools, more choice, less bureaucratic oversight.

 Advocates for choice-based solutions should take a look at what’s happened to schools in Sweden, where parents and educators would be thrilled to trade their country’s steep drop in PISA scores over the past 10 years for America’s middling but consistent results. What’s caused the recent crisis in Swedish education? Researchers and policy analysts are increasingly pointing the finger at many of the choice-oriented reforms that are being championed as the way forward for American schools. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that adding more accountability and discipline to American schools would be a bad thing, it does hint at the many headaches that can come from trying to do so by aggressively introducing marketlike competition to education.

 ………

 But Swedish school reforms did incorporate the essential features of the voucher system advocated by Friedman. The hope was that schools would have clear financial incentives to provide a better education and could be more responsive to customer (i.e., parental) needs and wants when freed from the burden imposed by a centralized bureaucracy. And the Swedish market for education was open to all, meaning any entrepreneur, whether motivated by religious beliefs, social concern, or the almighty dollar, could launch a school as long as he could maintain its accreditation and attract “paying” customers.

 For a while, at least if media accounts of the reforms are any indication, things looked like they were going pretty well. Voucher school students consistently outperformed their counterparts at government schools; in 2008, the London Telegraph described the reforms’ impact as “tremendous.” The number of private schools increased tenfold in less than a decade, with a majority run as for-profits.

 But in the wake of the country’s nose dive in the PISA rankings, there’s widespread recognition that something’s wrong with Swedish schooling. As part of ongoing efforts to determine the root cause, the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (the equivalent of the U.S. federal government’s Department of Education) called for a regrading of a subset of standardized tests administered during 2010 and 2011. In total, nearly 50,000 students at all grade levels from more than 700 schools had their tests in English, Swedish, science, and math re-evaluated.

BTW, Friedman’s ideas were implemented for about a year at the beginning of the brutally totalitarian rule of Augusto Pinochet with the assistance of his acolytes, the “Chicago Boys”.

After less than a decade, these “reforms” collapsed under the pressure of incompetence and corruption:

After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile’s public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet’s Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalise several of the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)

If you hear Milton Friedman’s name invoked in support of an idea, be very, very afraid.*

*Full disclosure, I do agree with Milton Friedman that Marijuana should be legalized.†
†More full disclosure: I know Milton Friedman’s son, David Friedman, though our discussions have entirely dealt with medieval history.

I’m Guessing that Obama Has a Sad Right Now

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Because the UN Human Rights Commissioner has said that Edward Snowden should not be prosecuted:

The United Nations’s top human rights official has suggested that the United States should abandon its efforts to prosecute Edward Snowden, saying his revelations of massive state surveillance had been in the public interest.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, credited Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor, with starting a global debate that has led to calls for the curtailing of state powers to snoop on citizens online and store their data.

“Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected: we need them,” Pillay told a news conference.

“I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation,” she said. “We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information.”

The United States has filed espionage charges against Snowden, charging him with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person.

Pillay declined to say whether President Barack Obama should pardon Snowden, saying he had not yet been convicted. “As a former judge I know that if he is facing judicial proceedings we should wait for that outcome,” she said. But she added that Snowden should be seen as a human rights defender.

Considering the fact that Obama’s war on whistle-blowers makes Richard Nixon look like Julian Assange, I rather imagine that Obama is on the phone telling UN Ambassador Samantha Powers to go postal on Ms. Pillay.