Okay (she says rubbing hands and getting down to work). I may not be capable of brilliance at the moment. But hyperlinks? Those I can manage.
- xkcd on Skynet.
- Between the feds and utility companies who you gonna believe on the dangers of solar storms?
- Mac the Knife reminds me that my Neighbor from Hell could be a whole lot worse.
- Seriously? We need another spy agency???
- Interesting: Ron Paul and the Lucifer Effect. (Tip o’ hat to PT.)
- So … how much ground do you intend to stand?
And for the guys in the audience (with H/T to JS), here’s what’s known as a Texas Tan Line:
If only congresscritters could become so self-aware.
“The Sky is Falling…(give us more power).” I forget; when can we expect the alien invasion that will require a one-world-government?
The DailyAnarchist story sort of parallels my feelings toward Ron Paul. I refuse to vote; even if Dr. Paul did get elected, the bureaucracy runs the government so nothing substantive could change. Still, it would be fun…
Yep, there’s nothing like a semi-relevant photo of a beautiful girl to keep us guys coming back.
now i know why the say ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ … very grrr 🙂
With the passage Senate bill 1813; “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act”. Having passed the senate with no debate and being fast tracked for passage in the House with no debate we will all be a lot less free very shortly. Unless having every new car fitted with a “mandatory event data recorder” ie GPS plus hard drive able to read not only where you go, how fast you were going, etc but also things like how much your car weighs and what time of day you drive. How long it is parked etc… then add to that bill the ability to remote access this “black box” and the add on clause about revoking peoples passpots if they are even accussed of owing over $50,000 to the IRS…
This is scary stuff and it will become law this year…
I’m betting heavily that it takes men longer to find the tan line than it takes women.
The “Who you gunna believe” link leads to important concerns. The truth regarding the seriousness of the next two-years’-worth of solar storms deserves to be widely discussed. This could eclipse Y2K in seriousness. Altervatives, options and contingency plans are dependent on the truth coming out.
That nasty neighbor seems to have wasted a lot of his energy on trying to torment other people. At least your bad neighbor doesn’t spend his time plotting about how to make you miserable, he just lives his life (and by doing that makes you unhappy). This guy was a prisoner of his own obsession. It makes me wonder if he’s not relieved tat he can now take a break.
What’s up with those pansified Brits nowadays? Someone shoulda done a Tony Soprano style beatdown on his ass way earlier. Goofball “initiated” the problem with his aggressive behavior the way I see it.
As to the photo: Unless she’s left-handed the pistol is on the wrong side. But whatever, just sayin’.
I’m getting a little tired of the “new Carrington Event” panic-mongering. First, a major solar storm can occur _any_ _freaking_ _time_, although they’re more likely during a solar max. But Carrington class events are _rare_. We haven’t seen one since… the Carrington event. Duh.
Since such eruptions are more likely during the solar max, let’s scoot over to SWPC for a minute. Start with the sunspot number chart. See that high peak (smoothed at 120)? That’s the peak for solar cycle 23. The _previous_ peak. Now move your finger across to where the red prediction line for cycle 24 begins. Cycle 24 is the curremnt cycle, where we are now. Note that the _prediction_ is for a peak of @90; 30 points _lower_ — just 75% — than the last cycle that somehow failed to deliver Carrington catastrophe. Now look a little lower at that blue line again; that’s the smoothed _actual_ _observed_ number. Funny thing; the actual observations are running significantly lower than the prediction (which itself was already expected to be a very low “max”).
But sunspot number isn’t everything by any means. So scroll down and look at radio flux and Ap. Hmm… Low flux prediction, with even lower actual observations. Deja vu. And Ap is running around historic _lows_. Granted, there’s an awful lot about the sun we _do_ _not_ understand (look up the contortions and unobserved particle oscillations the solar types are having to invent to explain why they don’t see the predicted neutrino count, and think on _epicycles_), but all in all, those charts are not the picture of a sun that is guaran-damned-teed to destroy civilization next year. (And a lot of real scientists looking at the real data are starting to think we’re entering a multi-decadal period of extremely low activity, activity low enough to chill the planet just a little.)
Now, about that grid. Yes, it is vulnerable to a Carrington class event. But not as vulnerable as it once was because utility companies around the world have been upgrading and hardening transformers and other vulnerable elements for _years_. They been doing it because, while expensive, it’s cheaper than replacing all the destroyed gear at once without power. It’s been in the best money-grubbing interest of the evil, greedy capitalistic power companies to protect their system, and that’s what they’ve been doing while government bureaucrats and scientists sat around with their thumbs up each other’s butts.
Satellites are another matter. You can harden them to some extent, but there’s only so much you can do before the bird is too freaking heavy to toss into orbit. But… at the best of times, Earth orbit isn’t a particularly hospitable place: Micrometeroids, decades of launch debris, other dead sats. EM and particle radiation. Vacuum.
On top of that, you have Murphy class events where your bird goes nuts and starts transmitting signals that jam its neighbors, or school bus-sized sats that just go dark and won’t talk to you or deliver the expected planetary telemetry (do a couple of web searches; and sorry Claire, but “zombie satellite” is a good place to start, blame the media).
So anyone who puts a satellite in orbit without _expecting_ it to fail catastrophically eventually is a damned fool who shouldn’t be in charge of a ring toss booth, much less space launches.
So, please, please, please, won’t everyone stop fixating on this Carrington Event crap? Plan, don’t panic.
[I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.]
I just saw something I didn’t notice before: left or right, the handle should pointing toward the center of her back.
Something must have distracted me.
No one in Britain is going to shiite about anyone acting out, even if they are dangerous. Political Correctness in Britain makes the US looks like a Man Camp full of loggers. I have a very liberal lawyer friend who lives and works in North London and she sees it as some kind of Liberal Hell on earth. She recently bought a pit bull as a “pet” and she’s not hoping for docility, just a little protection when she’s out for a walk. Sad place.
LOL — RickB, Ken K — Comments like yours could happen only on a blog full of libertarians and free-market anarchists. Or really dedicated gunfolk. I absolutely love it.
Carl-Bear. Wow. Thank you for all that. That was a comment above and beyond the call of commenting. Very well worth the read.
One addendum: I see I forgot to paste the SWPC link so you could see the charts I spoke of: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/
I work in the electric utility industry and I find the notion that FERC has “experts” laugh-out-loud funny. What FERC has is bought and paid for academics who tout the party line and operate in almost complete isolation from the real world. I’ve been in the industry a long time and in the last 10 years…..in the face of supposed “deregulation”…. the FERC has become increasingly intrusive, and via their proxy, NERC, imposed a regulatory burden in the name of “reliability,” that is not only costly and onerous, but stunningly stupid and counterproductive.
Their “reliability” regulations are so idiotic that they measure compliance and success not by how reliable your system is, but by how comprehensively you document your compliance with the regulations. IOW, a company that is 99.999% reliable but hasn’t done all the right paperwork will be punished, but a company that is 80% reliable and has all the right paperwork will pass an audit with flying colors.
I’ve gone from spending just about no time “complying” with idiotic government regulations to spending about 20% of my time merely trying to feed their regulatory bureaucracy. My small company has had to hire someone full time just to keep track of the submission requirements. I am personally responsible for some 173 separate items of compliance out of about 1500 required for my company. A whole new organization was created just to conduct audits.
I don’t know what will happen in a solar storm, but I am not inclined to believe anything spouted by FERC or the Federal Government. These are the liars who have been hyping the completely imaginary threat to the grid from internet hackers. So I suspect that the government claims are hype, and behind them lie some political and economic motivations.
…….”The truth regarding the seriousness of the next two-years’-worth of solar storms deserves to be widely discussed. This could eclipse Y2K in seriousness”
I got a hearty guffaw out of that. I’m still chuckling. I hope you were kidding. A hangnail easily eclipses the seriousness of Y2K, the largest non-event in human history.
The picture would be much better if she carried apendix.
12bitphoto — Sad and ominous, but always good to have word from somebody within the industry.
What you say about “reliability” being more about paperwork than actual dependability of actual systems is true in so many places.
Search on community emergency preparedness and you’ll discover that it has less to do with real preparations or preparedness education and more to do with attending conventions and knowing the tricks for getting grant money. When I was in corporate communications, my mega-biggest client proudly touted its shelves upon shelves of “best practices” documentation — and it was clear that the documentation meant far more than any actual practices. (Not to mention that carving today’s “best practices” in stone may prevent tomorrow’s potential better practices from ever developing.) Different details, same mentality, same result.
Guess I can’t cry, “The end is near!” But the end is inevitable; systems will collapse under the weight of bureaucracy that’ll resemble the garbage pile in Idiocracy.
I read about the ‘black boxes’ business a couple days ago – a couple things crossed my mind.
First – if one is driving a somewhat modern vehicle – chances are good that it already has some sort of event recorder.
That said – as this stuff becomes more prevalent – the faster people will learn to modify and adapt that same tech. I haven’t taken the time to search it out – but I’m pretty confident that someone’s already tinkering with the mechanics of these machines and coming up with alternate ways they can be used and abused. Getting the hardware to test with is easy – I doubt anyone at a you-pull-it wrecking yard would give it a second thought when one puts the hardware on the counter. Sure – that’ll probably be regulated too – someday… Then there’s the likelihood of remote access to the hardware – imagine the mischief…
Imagine the mischief, indeed! A group from Rutgers demonstrated how a car’s control system could be hacked and controlled by someone outside the car. Complete control of the engine and brakes was obtained by hacking into the car’s computer controls using the tire pressure sensors. The cars instruments could be made to display erroneous information or complete nonsense. The brakes could be applied individually to cause loss of control and the throttle could be set to any setting desired. Combine those 2 tidbits and imagine the mischief.
It has also been demonstrated how an individual car could be recognized and tracked using the tire pressure sensors and some inexpensive sensors installed on the roadside. I imagine that will be coming soon to an interstate near you.
Paranoid yet?
Woody: that was the plot to a Doctor Who episode not too long ago, a GPS that took over the car and murdered people.
Claire, love the pic, but, when were you in Texas?
ok, it didn’t take my grin at the end of that last statement. So here it is….GRIN
Hi Claire
Don’t know how else to reach you. The next installment in Nando’s ads. Watch the following in order.
1. http://www.channel24.co.za/TV/News/Santam-spoofs-Nandos-for-spoofing-Santam-20120424
2. http://www.channel24.co.za/TV/News/Nandos-vs-Santam-Food-for-a-year-20120425
Stryder — No worries. I got the GRIN. Or more likely, hysterical, rolling on the floor laughter. My backside didn’t look like hers even when I was 15. In fact, her backside probably doesn’t look like hers; I suspect Photoshop did more than add the gun. 🙂
wrm — Those are fun! And they even ended up making some kids happy; who could ask for more?
So … is Nando’s food as good as its ads? Non South Africans may have little chance to find out for ourselves.
Photoshopping aside (let’s pretend it’s not! LOL) what idiot would spray tan over a gun? No need to add extra cleaning work….
@Naturegirl: not to mention the fact that the gun somehow hovered there on its own, otherwise there’s be a tanline from the holster.
*there’d be. I need to stop typing in the dark while on sleepy meds.
Good point, Ellendra….& I highly doubt the suit would be able to hold it in place (*sarcasm)….
Claire,
On the NfH story, did I miss the final chapter of your NfH tale?
I had my own NfH. The police arrived at my house on my NfH’s 1st unfounded complaint as the movers were unloading my things from the truck. I hadn’t been on the property for an hour. It was the cops, not the seller, who let me know she forced the last people (the seller) to move with hundreds of calls, spitting fights over the fence, etc.
While I tried once, in 15 years, I have never conversed with this woman without law enforcement, lawyers or judges being present.
I just ignored her, plus it was ok getting to know all my public officials as a sympathy deserving homeowner.
I found the lengths she went to to get my attention amusing.
Until the snowy day she went after my 7 year old kid getting off the schoolbus, targeting my kid on my driveway with her SUV.
Against everything I believe, stand for, and taught my children, I finally used gov’t officials to end it. Since I pay property taxes (some of the highest in the country) I figured it was time to get something for my tax dollars.
I found that my Nfh was illegally claiming a property tax exemption, the tax assessor charged her back taxes, penalties and interest over $65k. A shed was built in the property setback, zoning violation was another $10k in lawyers, variances, etc. Her vehicle was registered at a po box address. This brought a visit from the FBI, seems using a false address on a gov’t doc is a violation of the Patriot Act. And my 7 yo pressed charges of assault by auto, harrassment, etc and won in court.
In my 1st 5 years, I had over 300 visits by public officials. Never, not even once, did an official ever find anything improper or issue me any warining , citation, summons. etc.
Since I stood up, knock on wood not a single official visit. Yeah, the zoning officer or cops may come by, but its usually just to say hello or have lunch by the pond.
I don’t advocate it, but it works.
just waiting — Oy vey! Yours truly is the NfH. Beside her, my guy looks like Gandhi and St. Francis all rolled into one. I don’t know how you stood it.
And no, no end of the story with my NfH yet. Since his pre-Lenten burst of five (or was it six?) parties, he’s been relatively quiet — just playing music in his apartment. I have some self-defense tools now, but it’s possible (crossing fingers) that the several visits he had from the cops just before Lent may have finally gotten through to him. We’ll see …
Nothing he’s ever done could get me to call code enforcers & taxers. But I see why you were driven to it.
Given the choice between McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Steers and Nandos, I prefer Nandos. But that’s because it comes in mild medium hot and hold on to your hat, and I like hot.