Open Forum
Where you can't be off topic because there IS no topic.
Doug Mataconis
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Monday, September 16, 2019
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19 comments
The floor is yours.
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.
Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid
Johnson’s ‘bonkers’ plan for £15bn bridge derided by engineers
More than once during my years of construction I was asked, “Can you build….?” To which I always answered, “I can build you anything. Can you pay?”
Looks like we’re coming down to a no-deal Brexit. Boris Johnson just returned from his meeting making all sorts of happy noises, while the EU side basically said he was full of it. (The EU doesn’t want to officially say “you lunatics are off your head and we’re throwing you out of the party” but that’s what’s going on.)
The tendency of the Brits to use bluffing as their one and only one strategy has never failed to awe me. You’d think that a habit which had such a lousy historical record would at some point die out but it’s now turned into a knee-jerk reaction: (Brit hears something he doesn’t like to hear, “you’re bluffing!”)
P.S. detailed planning is A Good Idea as well. Too bad the Brits have gotten out of the habit.
@OzarkHillbilly: Walls, bridges, projects that run in the lunatic family.
@grumpy realist: They’re playing Liar’s Poker against themselves.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yeah, I used to do one-off test and measurement stuff for communications networks. One of my stock answers to insane requests was, “Doesn’t require new physics, so maybe. What’s your budget?”
News Item
The New York Times doing moonwalk away from Kavenaugh story as fast as they can. (The notion that it would stand up only occurred to those afflicted with TDS.). Outside the Beltway once again disgraces itself with anything Orange Man Bad float of NYT story. (“A new look at the allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh uncovers some new evidence.” My Arse. )
In other news, angry old man and frequent OTB commenter Michael Reynolds continues to conduct novel experiment. Does bald head look better with tin foil hat??
@Guarneri: Did Russian Oligarchs Co-Sign Kavanaugh Loans?
From Yahoo News:
Exclusive: Russia Carried Out A “Stunning” Breach Of FBI Communications System
“American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
Noted Trump critic and intelligence expert Michael Reynolds noted “this is proof Donald Trump is a traitor and Putin’s puppet. He needs to be held accountable for this intelligence failure.”
However, the Yahoo piece notes:
“These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials.”
Undeterred, Mr Reynolds noted “uh, 2012? Well, the treasonous Mr Trump needs to be held accountable for not preventing these failures of Glorious Pres Obama and Virtuous Secy Clinton.”
I knew an arch-typical country club Republican. I used to poke him a bit trying to understand how a reasonably well educated person could believe what he believed. One of his attitudes was that you couldn’t predict anything. He once got outraged because Ohio made a modest change to a tax rate and estimated the change in revenue. ‘They can’t know that until they collect the taxes!!’ Ties in nicely with George Lakoff’s opinion that conservatives don’t do complex causation. Not that they aren’t able to, but that they default to simple morality.
I was reminded of this by a story in POLITICO Magazine, The Nasty Political Fight Over the First Weather Forecasts. Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who had earlier invited Darwin to accompany him on HMS Beagle to the Galapagos, had advocated for collecting weather data from land stations and ships at sea so that they could, in a term he created, “forecast” the weather. But he had run into
In 1859 a gale drove the Royal Charter onto a rocky shore, killing most of the 500 souls on board. FitzRoy produced a report showing how the gale could have been forecast and the ship warned. The Meteorological Office, under FitzRoy started collecting data the next year and first predicted a gale in 1861. This made FitzRoy a hero to many,
Similar efforts in the U. S. were interrupted by the Civil War, but in 1870 Grant created the National Weather Service. One of the original offices was the Alabama office that got in trouble with Trump.
Most of us can see that Trump is driving the economy onto the rocks, but our conservative friends won’t believe it til they see it.
I see Guarneri is still suffering from Reynolds Derangement Syndrome. I hope a cure is in sight. Is there somewhere that we can donate money in search of a cure for victims like Guarneri?
(Does Guarneri look sort of like a puppy or childhood leukemia victim? If so we could start a Go Fund Me page.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Jealous? You’re like the child who wanted to be a playground bully, but the other children didn’t take you seriously, am I right? So you jump in the five on one fights, right? Never on the one side.
@gVOR08: For some reason your post reminded me of what has been discovered about Rapu Nui, also known as Easter Island and home to the famous statues of giant heads. When Europeans landed on the island they found a people barely above Stone Age technology, barely surviving and obviously not capable of carving such statues much less transporting the huge blocks across the treeless island from where they were quarried. It is only recently that archeologists have determined that a fairly advanced culture existed there when the island was covered with trees. The evidence shows the trees were cut down to provide rollers to move the blocks, causing the loss of a source of food from their fruit, the building materials they provided, the benefits they provided in sheltering birds (another food source) and anchoring soil. At some point I’m sure there were people calling out for the destruction to stop and to shift to a sustainable production, but obviously their equivalent to the modern Republican Party won out, serving as either a life lesson or a road map depending on your perspective.
Nyt:
This Friday, September 20, there will be a unique gathering in Nevada. People will be heading to the Federal government Area 51 base. How many will actually come is guesswork. The officials there are wary. This started off as some sort of gag, but then mushroomed. Hopefully cool heads will take charge and no one will try to get over the fences. Also, it would be great if some of the Air Force people would talk to these people about some of the operations at Area 51. It would be a good time to release long classified documents concerning the Roswell crash, Project Blue Book, the Kecksburg incident, the fly saucers over Washington, D.C. in the 1950’s, Hanger 18 research at Wright-Patterson AFB, and the Montauk, NY project.
Recently there has been an encouraging slow release of secret documents and information from government agencies including NASA and the military. One is the “Tic Tac” incident involving US Navy pilots. More military personnel are coming forward and talking about their experiences. It is time for disclosure and honesty with the American people.
@Teve: “We’ve taken all this poor world can give, and we ain’t put back nothin’.” As I keep noting, what if our role in the ecosystem is that we’re parasites?
@MarkedMan: As a footnote to the Easter Island story, this was the subject of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki. Heyerdahl built a raft in Peru and sailed it to Easter Island to support his theory that the Islanders descended from ancient Peruvians. (IIRC linguistic analysis shows they were Polynesian.) Heyerdahl decided they must have used log rollers to move the statues.
A later anthropologist, using modern approaches, spent an extended period living on the island and getting accepted by the natives. Supposedly at one point he mentioned Heyerdahl and got a laugh from the older natives. He asked why and was told Heyerdahl had spent a lot of time running around the island looking at stuff, but had never bothered to talk to anyone. Their oral tradition had the answer – canoe rails. These were apparently common in Polynesia for moving large dugout canoes. They laid long logs in two parallel lines tied together with cross logs. Looked like a railroad, tracks over ties. Then they greased the rails, lowered the statue down on them, and slid them to the beach. Said they’d have been happy to explain it to Heyerdahl, but he saw them as ignorant savages and never asked.
Worth repeating:
In the 40’s and 50’s when people had only occasional access to cameras capable of photographing a fast moving object, all we got in the UFO photography department was fuzzy and grainy images that, with some imagination, could be alien spaceships.
In the 60’s and 70’s when people started carrying instamatics and similar small and portable cameras, all we got in the UFO photography department was… fuzzy and grainy images.
In the 80’s and 90’s when hobbyist 35mm photography became a thing, to the point where the stereotype of the Japanese tourist had one or more fast acting high resolution film cameras around their necks, all we got in the UFO photography department was… fuzzy and grainy images.
In the 00’s and 10’s when high resolution digital photography became the norm and it reached a point where literally billions of people carried cameras capable of snapping an astoundingly accurate image in mere seconds, all we got in the UFO photography department was… fuzzy and grainy images.
Anyone notice a trend?
@MarkedMan: UFOs are actually swarms of tiny nanobots flying in formation, so they always look like fuzzy blobs?
@MarkedMan: That could be the anti-gravity generator causing distortions in the images.