Dividing Infinity

How To Bank Switch A 2732 EPROM

2011-11-26T12:10:00.000-08:00

This technique was used years ago to make crack roms for the Apple ][ computers. It was a very early example of a "trojan horse" method for allowing a program to start up and then slipping in code, while it was running, which would allow it to be cracked.

The original crack rom was written by The Jerk (Alan) & The Catcher (Steve). Alan showed me how to wire up the EPROMs and I did my best to commercialize it ;).

Once I updated the code I renamed it The Freeze's Crack ROM. It was subsequently distributed by Bootleg via his Bootlegger Magazine.

Additional copies were built by myself and sold at the Advanced Computer Swap meets that started in Orange County (Santa Ana) in 1979. These swap meets ran two or three times a year for many years. In addition to selling crack roms at the swap meet I sold all of my friends unwanted computer stuff and split the proceeds. In many ways this was my start in the business of selling computer parts, something I have continued to do for the last 30 years. Oh yeah, I was 15 when I started selling at the swap meet. Being poor and broke most of the time sucked. Finding ways of making money became an obsession.

The owner of ACP was David Freeman. David and I became friends many years later through our association as owners of computer businesses. In all of these years I have never told him I got my start as a teenager, selling stuff at the computer swap meets that he pioneered in Orange County.

This technique of bank switching might have uses beyond just this narrow application. Additionally it can be used for other EPROM sizes. I will include as much technical information as I can, pictures, diagrams and any miscellany I can recollect.

If anyone still has an original crack rom that I built back then I'd be willing to pay pretty well for it. Thank you.

--- Instructions For How To Bank Switch A 2732 EPROM ---

This is the pinout for a 2732 EPROM. Note the pin numbers and positions.

Above is a short description of what the various pins are for.

The orientation of the socket is critical. If you are holding the socket with the notch facing you, then pin # 1 is on the right side and pin # 24 is on the left. Make sure to count your pins carefully and accordingly.

These are called, or at least we used to call them "machined pin sockets." They are not the sockets with the cheap flat pins but rather the higher quality ones with very strong and solid rounded pins. It's quite difficult to make modifications to the cheaper sockets, therefore I would strongly suggest using these. You can also use a ZIF (zero insertion force) socket.

Next you will need a SPDT (or DPDT?) switch. It looks something like the one above.

Solder the green and black wires to opposite ends of the switch. Solder the white wire to the center pin of the switch.

Next, solder the black wire to pin # 12 (right side furthest from the notch) and solder the green wire to pin # 24 (left side, closest to the notch.)

Then solder the white wire to pin # 21.

Now you need to bridge two pins together. Solder a small wire between pins # 21 and # 18, as shown below:

Clip off pins # 21 and #18 as shown above.

And then...

Plug the EPROM (2732) into the socket. Using a socket prevents damage to the EPROM itself in case you want to reuse / reburn it. A socket is not an actual requirement as these same modifications could be done to the EPROM itself.

If you have any technical questions beyond what is written above, DONT ASK, I probably don't remember. Okay just kidding. Feel free to ask - leave a comment. I made dozens of these some 30 odd years ago.

In one "side" of the EPROM I would usually burn my "The Freeze's F8 ROM" which is a modified F8 ROM that does disassembly with ASCII and binary. Its a great programming tool as it shows you all 8 bit numbers which are addressed in immediate mode - boolean bit mask operations as well as the accumulator & registers.

It's a small modification, but is very helpful when doing assembly programming & debugging. As well as cracking ;)

I think Reactive Micro still sells them, my ROM has also been included in AppleWin. If anyone needs a copy, I can email it to you.

On the other "half" of the 2732 would be the code for the crack rom. The original Jerk & Catcher version is probably floating around out there somewhere. The version I made from theirs is more user friendly.

--- Using The Crack ROM ---

- Boot the system with the switch in position for the normal F8 ROM.
- Once the program is fully loaded, hold down the reset button, and while it is held down, flip the switch. Once the switch if flipped, release the reset button.
- Depending on the version of crack rom (Jerk's/Catcher's or Freeze's) you will either hear a sound or be presented with on screen options. This is where memory utterly fails me. If anyone remembers please post in comments. Thanks!

Apologies in advance for any errors. If any are spotted please be so kind as to leave a comment so I can correct it.

Thanks again to Patrick Asato for breathing new life into old code.

The Pig Sty

2011-11-14T22:57:00.000-08:00

The Pig Sty was a BBS (Bulletin Board System) run by The Head Swine, and subsequently by The City Slicker. It was an 'elite' underground meeting place for hackers of all stripes. It started in the early to mid 1980's and ran for some time afterwards. I was invited to join when I was about 14 or 15 and lost contact with the community in my early 20's after I moved away from Orange County.

In order to join you had to have recommendations from two other members. This kept the authorities out and kept the 'quality' (technical expertise) of the members at a high level.

Mort Goodman, The City Slicker, had access to computer games and video tapes that had not yet been released to the public. He had a massive personal collection as well and freely allowed all of us to copy whatever we wanted. Mort had a copy of the movie Wargames before it hit the movie theaters. Many of the pirated movies still had the editing time codes rolling in the upper right corner. Others were lower quality and were pirated by someone actually setting up a camera inside of a movie theater!

Starting in 1986 (?) several members of The Pig Sty got together and started Pig Hunts. These were scavenger hunts played on a larger scale with the local hacker community as participants.

After the Pig Hunts we would have Pig Fests. Get togethers where all of the Pig Sty BBS members were invited along with guests and Pig Hunt players. The bill for all of this was footed by Mort, The City Slicker. Some fests had up to 100 or so people attending.

Following are a few pictures of dredged up memorabilia that's been sitting in storage for ages.

I was not a founding member of the Pig Sty BBS and the story of it's origins should be told by someone more knowledgable than myself. I hope that happens. Not to oversell the idea that the Pig Sty was ground zero for all things hacking. It wasn't. But it was a unique collection of people who were influential in the hacker community.

Pig-DOS was quite popular, as was the Pig-font that we would burn onto EPROMs. The Pig Sty was well known, even though its membership was limited to around 50 people. The ages ranged from younger members, such as myself, in my mid teens, to the much older, like Mort, in his 50's.

Many of us were programmers, game developers and most older members were actively employed in the computer industry. Bootleg, of The Bootlegger Magazine was a member. He had asked me to write a series of articles for his magazine, which I did. Amazingly I found one of the articles on the internet, after all these years! Somewhere, someone probably has the other articles.

Bill Landreth was a member. Although he was active initially, in later years he rarely logged in. Several other hackers who came to the attention of the FBI were members.

Has anyone out there done FOIA requests with the FBI? I wonder how many of us showed up in their files over the years. Anarchist, Gonif, & um, I forgot the others, but those four were busted by the FBI and certainly had files. We had quite a few scares over the years, anytime the phone company security would call us or we heard of someone we knew getting busted we would hide all of our incriminating computer equipment in the attic. As if the FBI wouldn't look there ;).. Well, thats how kids think and thats what we did.

[More later]

Exactly...

2011-10-16T19:42:00.000-07:00

http://howconservativesdrovemeaway.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-vs-tea-party.html

Seems to me that everyone is upset about pretty much the same thing, but can't agree as to what the cause is. Its odd to blame capitalism because we don't practice capitalism in the US. If we did, then a lot of banks would be.. well, bankrupt. And they should be.

If there is one 'doctrine' that might unify people, it is this: Separation of Powers.

We have separation of church and state. Great idea.

Why don't we have separation of corporations and state? It's polluting the democratic process and warps our system of laws to favor those who are wealthy.

Bill Landreth: The Cracker & Out Of The Inner Circle & Pig Sty

2011-09-26T23:53:00.000-07:00

Bill Landreth, aka The Cracker, was a member of The Pig Sty for a number of years. After his Arpanet hack and subsequent arrest he dropped off many of our radars. I did not know Bill well, except for having met him a handful of times. So it was interesting for The Bishop and The Head Swine to have shared their stories with us. Thank you guys!

I have had this newspaper article from the original Los Angeles Times for many years, talking about Bill and his 'mysterious disappearance.' Was this the period of time Bishop when he disappeared to stay with Mort?

Anyhow here is what I have:

Bill wrote this book about his Arpanet hacking, arrest and general hoopla surrounding his new found fame. Sadly he was affected by some sort of mental disorder, I think schizophrenia. Not sure of his current whereabouts but I hope he is well.

The following news paper article (very awkward to post here so its all cut up.) Was concurrent with events and stories related by The Bishop & The Head Swine below.

Below are the two stories about Bill during this time period that Bishop & Head Swine told us...

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The Bishop said...

[I wrote too much for one comment...with apologies, I'll have to spam Frank's blog with multiple replies...]
For the few who will remember the name, this is "The Bishop". It seems strange to refer to myself as such after more than a couple of decades have passed, but in the context of this post it's the right point of reference...
I think I'm in a pretty good position to clarify some of what was said about The PigSty, having been a member and actively involved in the operation of The Sty while it was owned and operated by Head Swine (Doug) AND when it was owned and operated by The City Slicker (Mort). I left the Sty before it was taken over by The Scorpion (Gerry?). I knew both Doug and Mort well -- Doug hired me as chief programmer for his small software company, and Mort became my godfather when I was baptised (a fact of which I'm very proud...in addition to being a legend and a character, Mort was an incredibly kind, sweet and generous individual -- and one of my very favourite people ever.)
So...the PigSty was created by Head Swine, who also created one of the first variant DOS versions for the Apple ][ (PigDos) as well as the PigFont (shame you can't be reading this in that font). Head Swine operated The Sty out of a closet in his home office in Costa Mesa for several years, including the laugh-a-minute "compu-rodents wreaking havoc by ordering call-waiting for the Sty phone line" (sound familiar, Frank & Jeff?) era. Head Swine was footing the bill for the Sty at this point, as well as updating the Sty software and maintaining the hardware (with occasional involvement from other Sty members, myself included.)
Crilly is correct (hi, Crilly, and greetings to Ta as well!) about Mort sponsoring the Sty get-togethers (aka "PigFests"). "Sponsoring" doesn't really do justice to Mort's involvement -- he planned the events at appropriate places like The Jolly Roger restaurant, made all the arrangements (or had his employees help with arrangements), had programs printed and bound (okay, he did the binding, as he owned a bindery), paid for everything, and even convinced one of his good-natured (and, thankfully, attractive and female) employees to attend several of the events as "Sex Kitten"! (Hi, Windy!) By the way…the “everything” Mort paid for out of his own pocket typically included raffle prizes and awards…he really went all-out. I still have at least one program (PigFest V?), so if Frank or anyone else ever does write a book there’s a bit of source material there (including, I believe, a roster of current Swine.)
I don't recall for certain whether the PigFests began while Doug was actively running the Sty...I believe they did, but if so they certainly continued "under new management" after the Sty transferred from Doug to Mort.

So...after Doug had been running the Sty for some time and out of his own pocket, he decided to find a new owner and a new home (and a new pocket) for the Sty. Mort stepped up and the Sty moved from Doug's closet in Costa Mesa to Mort's bindery (and later to his second-floor home office/mancave in Orange, if I recall correctly.) Mort operated the Sty for the next several years, and during that time he enlisted a handful of Sty members to make improvements and perform general upkeep on the Sty software & hardware. Those of us who were asked to do so were always happy to help, in part because (a) Mort always did so much for everyone around him that we ALWAYS owed him favours, (b) Mort had a larger collection of software (typically with spiral-bound documentation -- I did mention Mort owned a bindery, right?) and video than you can possibly imagine (who else would have a stack of 7 VHS recorders, running nearly all the time, in their entryway closet?) and (c) Mort was just the kind of guy that, when he asked you to do something for him, you just WANTED to say yes.
At some point (late 80s), Mort asked The Scorpion (ex-husband of Mrs. Frisby – hi Ginny!) to take over operation of The PigSty – I believe Mort continued to pay Sty expenses. To the best of my recollection this happened BEFORE Mort had the accident that kept him in ICU for an extended period of time, but certainly after that accident Mort was no longer in control of The Sty. By the time As The Sty passed into Scorpion's hands, my active involvement lessened and The Sty went in a different direction. I consider the "Head Swine" days to be the purest part of the "elite" PigSty experience, and the "City Slicker" era to be the "Golden Age" of The PigSty.
It’s been interesting and enjoyable to recall and to relate this stuff – this was all part of a small world that was huge to us a long time ago, but I think that for many of us who were active in that world it was a formative part of our lives that endures in many ways. I enjoyed the “Cracked by The Freeze” warez back in the day, but I’m sure I’ve enjoyed taking this little stroll down memory lane at least as much. So, thanks again, Frank (hi, Frank!). :-)
One final story about "just the kind of guy" Mort was…
In 1989, a story about Bill Landreth (The Cracker, author of “Out Of The Inner Circle”) ran in the Los Angeles Times (you can find an archive of this story from the Sydney Morning Herald [4/3/89] via your favourite search engine). The story reported that Landreth was living on the streets in San Diego.
Mort read the story, and without hesitation picked up the phone and called his daughter Danni who lived in San Diego (hi, Danni!). He instructed Danni to go out and find Landreth, which she did. Mort had Danni bring Landreth to Mort’s condo in Orange – effectively terminating Landreth’s homeless status. Mort and his wife Lady Jayne gave Landreth a home, bought him a new wardrobe and got him a job at a local jewelry mart owned by Mort’s friend (and former major-league baseball player) Richie.
After a short stint of domestic calm and gainful employment, Landreth abandoned the job and the home – it seemed he wasn’t ready for a more ordinary life, even under the roof of The City Slicker with shelves and shelves of cracked software just down the hall.
Mort was all about treating people right – and he didn’t feel right about the fact that the exit of Bill Landreth from the jewelry mart had left his friend Richie short one employee. Mort’s solution? He asked me to take over the job, which I did and remained there until I was hired by Apple and relocated to Silicon Valley…did I mention that Mort was the kind of guy to whom you just wanted to say yes when he asked a favour? He was, after all, my Godfather. :-)
-tB-

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Head Swine said...

Most people don't know that while I was at work one day, Bill Landreth (The Cracker) called me and asked if I wanted an email address on this new system he had just hacked called Arpanet. I told him I was leaving on a business trip and would check in when I got back. When I got back, he was in jail.

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"1st Gen Hackers" --> Update & Replies To Comments

2011-09-26T23:33:00.000-07:00

Just noticed all the comments on the 1st Gen Hackers post from last year! Sorry I missed it until just now.

Here is a link to the original story:

http://frank-segler.blogspot.com/2010/09/1st-gen-hackers.html

So.. I figured I would answer the comments in a post.

First, if I made any errors on who ran the Pig Sty and when, please keep in mind that these are VERY old memories. I'm a crusty 45 year old and this stuff happened when I was between 12 and 17 or so. I remember Doug (The Head Swine) well. One particular memory was of him showing us his new BMV and its rocking sound system in front of Mort's (The City Slicker) house.

A common thread that everyone seems to agree on is about Mort. What a true gentleman in every way. He was the top of the hacker pyramid for video tapes, for software, even a movie treatment for one of the Star Wars movies (anyone remember that?). Yet he made time for all of us. Just to chat, talk about our problems, whatever it was. He and Lady Jane were a class act. Their parrot on the other hand...

We do owe a debt to Doug (The Head Swine) as well. Without him we would not have Pig-DOS, The Pig Font and of course the Pig Sty. I'm grateful that he gave me a chance to get on the Pig Sty. From what I recall we needed two sponsors to get on. I think The Jerk was one, and I have no idea who my second sponsor was. Maybe Doug?

Dr. Micro, Ted, was a good friend of mine. We met in PE at Ocean View High School. I showed him how to use hacked phone codes to call for free. It took him a while to realize they were illegal, and the thought of telling him that they were illegal had not even occurred to me. I mean, who pays attention to details like that?!

Alan, The Jerk, lived right in between Ted and I. About 10 houses away from me and then another 4 houses away from Ted.

Fuzil, those animations you made were so awesome. Really ahead of their time. Must have taken unimaginable amount of time for you to create those. Did you end up going in that direction in your work life?

John: Hey are you the guy from Garden Grove who I used to buy acid from? Seriously! You, or that John anyways, used to make trips (physical ones!) to Berkeley to get it wholesale. Thats what he told me anyways.

Crilly: Mort Goodman was in a class by himself. I wish all of us could get together and write up some sort of tribute to him. Things he did for us, how he helped us in so many ways. How generous he was. He treated the world like his own extended family. I know I am not alone in saying this. Without Mort adopting me as his favorite software cracker I doubt I would have become 'famous' in the way it eventually happened. I would guess well over half the wares I cracked came from Mort.

The Bishop: Thanks for setting me straight on the facts and Sty history! I knew the part about The Cracker (Bill Landreth) ending up on the streets (schizophrenia if I recall), but did not know that Mort had tried to help him so much. The only thing I knew is what was in the newspapers at the time.

My brother (The Bum) and I had the entire upstairs room (one very large room) to ourselves. So it was hacker central. We must have entertained half the hackers and pirates in Orange County up there at one time or another. Computer parts, eprom burners, UV erasers, soldering irons, open frame power supplies, IC's and diskettes everywhere!

Our dad was a survivalist and a very much "screw the system" kind of guy. He was also a pilot and flew tourists around frequently. So my brother and I were left to our own devices for up to two weeks at a time - no adult supervision at all! And yes, we very much abused it. He did have a pretty good idea of what we were doing with the hacking, phone phreaking etc.

He let me ditch school pretty much any time I wanted, wrote excuse notes until the principal called him in, and my dad promptly blackmailed him against taking any action for my excessive absences. He told the principal that he would let the news media know about the extensive drug problem that Ocean View had. And yeah, they (we) did.

Well, in due course I was eventually expelled and sent to adult school and then took the GED. It is a bit embarrassing when now as an adult, I have to fill out forms for my kids, or the census and they ask what grade I completed. Errr.. Grade 10. Doh!

My brother, The Bum, on the other hand, graduated from high school and went to USC, the Entrepreneur Program. Not bad for a kid who was on his own at 15 (he and I moved out together when I was 18 and he was 15).

Lots of memories. Thanks again for all of the comments!

The Recantation of Galileo Galilei

2011-09-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity throughout the entire Christian commonwealth, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and by God’s help will in the future believe, all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. But whereas — after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture — I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any solution of these, and for this reason I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me God, and these His Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.

I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633.

---------------

What delightful irony that this was signed at the Convent of Minerva. Minerva, the patron goddess of wisdom.

A decade ago the "Clovis First" meme was all but unalterable. However since about 2005 the weight of evidence has finally overturned this. The Clovis were not the first modern humans in North America. Dates which originally were stubbornly stuck around 11,500 YA are now being push backwards by many thousands of years.

Until very recently the idea that a bacteria was the cause of ulcers was laughable. Today it is science-fact. However to over turn this required a massive effort and an overwhelming amount of evidence to be available in the public domain for well over a decade before the "consensus" gave way.

It took a shockingly long time and enormous effort to dispel the bad science which was the foundation of the MMA - Autism link. The imprimatur of "peer review" took a hit with Lancet publishing junk science.

Mankind has not yet become wiser, we have only gained in knowledge. They are very different things. A gain in knowledge means the total datum has expanded. A gain in wisdom means we are better equipped to exploit our knowledge. Yet our focus is still in gaining raw knowledge and not in wiser ways of using and applying it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/02/journal-editor-resigns-climate-sceptic-paper

Galilio would be very familiar with today's world.

Science Is Settled: The Gore Effect is Real!

2010-12-11T02:58:00.000-08:00

"Heart Attack: Sighting of Al Gore kills off polar bears"

No more need for any additional scientific research on this subject. The "Gore Effect", whereby mother nature causes unusually cool temperatures during any media event where 1) Al Gore is present and 2) He is discussing global warming.

You might say mother nature has a sense of humor. I personally think she is getting back at him because he forced his tongue down her throat in a seedy hotel. She is pissed. Such is her outrage that even the mere hint that he might appear at a global warming conference, such as the UN-IPCC meet in Cancun, causes mother nature to shiver with frigid anger. The "Gore Effect" is real and is happening at nearly any global warming conference that Al Gore has even *thought* of attending. Trust me, the science is settled on this one.

See links at bottom for detailed lists.

A small sampling of "Gore Effect" happenings:

Melbourne temps plummet in anticipation of Gore's visit – July 9, 2009
'Gore Effect': Driving snow froze the hopes of organizers of "the biggest global warming protest in history" in Washington – March 4, 2009
'Out With A Shiver: Global Warming Protest Frozen Out by Massive Snowfall' – Fox News - March 2, 2009
Pelosi Snowed-Out of Global Warming Rally – March 2, 2009
'Largest public protest of global warming' ever in USA faces DC March snowstorm! – March 1, 2009
Gore Effect Strikes Again: Global warming conference in Buffalo at -6 degrees – Buffalo News – February 5, 2009
Sen.Inhofe: "The 'Gore Effect' proves Mother Nature has a sense of humor" - Jan. 27, 2009
GORE HEARING ON WARMING MAY BE PUT ON ICE - Mon Jan 26 2009
Obama Talks Global Warming to Shivering Crowd - January 17, 2009
Will Mainstream Media Report Inauguration Day 'Gore Effect?' - January 17, 2009
Global Warming Horror Flick Put on Ice Due to Cold Temps? – January 8, 2009
The 'Gore Effect': Gore speaks in Italy during 'rare' cold and snow – Dec. 16, 2008
Climate protest cancelled 'due to rain and cold' – Nov. 23, 2008
Brrr. - Obama to global warming demonstrators: 'This is probably not the weather to hold up those signs...it's a little chilly today' - October 28, 2008
First October snow since 1922 blankets London as global warming bill debated – October 2008
No Joke! Cyclists 'braved freezing cold temps' to promote global warming awareness in New York - October 22, 2008
Gore delivers environmental message at Harvard - ...with near 125-year record breaking low temps – October 2008
Global warming protest in Maryland frosted with snow – January 2008
Global Warming Vote on Snowy Day in Washington - Senate committee debates expensive climate change bill snow blanket D.C. – December 2007
Global warming activists urged to focus on Earth Day rallies and ignore snow as it 'piles up outside our windows' – April 17, 2007
Global warming rally in the snow – April 2007
Snow won't dampen global-warming rallies – April 2007
NOT AGAIN! DC 'Snow Advisory' Issued on Day of Congressional Global Warming Hearing – March 2007
Global Warming Awareness Walk Braves Snow Storm – March 2007
HOUSE HEARING ON 'WARMING OF THE PLANET' CANCELED AFTER
SNOW/ICE STORM – February 2007

Gore decries 'global warming' in bitterly cold NYC – December 2006

And of course, Cancun... Where they are experiencing temperatures not seen in over 100 years.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gore_Effect
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15931.html
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/1869/Climate-Depot-Factsheet-on-the-Gore-Effect-Phenomenon

UN Is A Disease Vector

2010-12-07T18:34:00.000-08:00

Killjoy stories of the day...

UN Spreads Cholera In Haiti:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11943902

Story Breaks, UN Denies It:
http://www.salon.com/wires/health/2010/10/29/D9J5IHBG1_cb_haiti_disease_outbreak/index.html

UN Peacekeeper Kills Protester (Guy didn't like the cholera gift)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11761941
(UN also blames elections for the protesting lol)

Researchers Link Cholera to Nepalese Peacekeepers & Nepal Strain:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11943902
(UN still deny's it)

So lets see, they brought AIDS to many of world's countries, including Cambodia and Vietnam which I saw firsthand. They send sexual predators to Africa. Now they bring Cholera. Great. At what point does the massive financial waste and mismanagement get called out?

UN continues to blow millions and billions on hotel bills for useless conferences that do nothing, go nowhere and would invite a world wide economic "Jonestown" if actually passed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11897262

UN Says "We are running out of time" for the billionth time. Except we are not. They are the ones running out of time to pull this scam off on us. So sad, too bad its getting way colder. Sucks that they blew the science project of the century, along with all our money. Now we gotta do it all over again to find out what is really happening. A sudden cold snap doesn't mean much in geologic time, just as a sudden warming spell. The difference, is that not one single computer model in the universe predicted this. What does that mean? You still can't predict the future with computers. Doh!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11939768

Pearl Harbor Day

2010-12-07T00:38:00.000-08:00

Google has a tradition of celebrating important days by doing something ~~stupid~~ "different" with their logo. Like turning it into a game of Pac-man on the day that the video game was released many years ago.

Google today; on Pearl Harbor Day:

So what about Bing?

For one second lets forget that Microsoft is a brutal rapacious unethical competitor that uses questionable means to gain and maintain dominance, and at least thank them for remembering those who died in service to our nation.

Pearl Harbor was almost as bad as 9/11 with 2,400 American servicemen killed. The one thing you can always count on with Bing is that they celebrate our national holidays and they always have amazing photographs along with links where you can learn things you probably did not know.

NYT:ClimateGate No! Wikileaks Yes!

2010-11-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

When ClimateGate hit the world like a storm, throwing cold water on a rich pity party by global elites, The New York Times stated that:

"The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here."

And thus the NYT missed the most significant scandal of the year and did their best to hide the entire issue of faked science, rigged reporting and insider scheming.

But now that we have WikiLeaks with 250,000 documents, which contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye" AND were "acquired illegally" they suddenly have a change of heart.

So what is their new reason for posting illegally acquired, private information?

Says The New York Times:

"The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."

But wait a second. ClimateGate was actually a WHISTLEBLOWER! The documents in question had already been requested and illegally withheld in a Freedom Of Information request! So not only were they NOT illegally required, it was fully legal to release them. Which is why they probably know who leaked it - after investigating for over a year - but will NEVER, EVER prosecute. This individual is legally protected!

In the case of Wikileaks, they were indeed illegally obtained. Bradley Manning is sitting in jail, facing very serious charges for betraying his nation. The New York Times as well as Wikileaks are also guilty of betrayal and treason.

If the US Government wasn't so pathetically weak (or if this had been done to Israel and the Mossad was in charge), the last thing going through Julian Assange's mind as he faced his assassin would have been a half powder load .22 from a Beretta 70.

Russia doesn't mess around with it's traitors. Everyone knows that Russia assassinates them, does it publicly and in other countries (not that I'd approve of killing of dissidents or reporters as Russia is doing en masse.) They also suffer NO blowback from the diplomatic community. In other words, assassination in the interests of one's country is the standard modus operandi - except for The United States. We just get accused of it all the time.

"All the news thats fit to print, as long as it fits our 'progressive' agenda."

Pathetic.

P.C. In Oregon Can Kill

2010-11-29T22:04:00.000-08:00

According to this article in the Washington Examiner, the city of Portland Oregon refused to cooperate with an anti-terrorism FBI task force because of political correctness.

In what can only be described as 'inevitable', this turns out to be the very same task force that saved Portland from a massacre at the hands of a disturbed Somali youth.

According to the FBI affidavit, the undercover agents asked whether he worried that law enforcement would stop him. "In Portland?" Mohamud replied. "Not really. They don't see it as a place where anything will happen. People say, you know, why, anybody want to do something in Portland, you know, it's on the west coast, it's in Oregon, and Oregon's, you know, nobody ever thinks about it."

The reason they originally decided to decline cooperation was because of their disenchantment with the Bush presidency. In a completely asinine turnaround, and only AFTER the terrorist incident, they now say they are willing to change their position because Obama is the president.

What was left unsaid and unreported is that Obama has not deviated one iota from Bush 43's policies. If anything Obama has ramped up the war on terror, enlarged the state even further, expanded the fronts to include Yemen and approved the extra-judicial killings of American citizens. In Pakistan the rules of engagement have been loosened far beyond anything Bush had allowed.

I suppose that because Obama says nice things that people want to hear he gets Nobel prizes and mayors of cities to change their minds about cooperating with the FBI to protect their citizens. Do they even care that what Obama says and what he does are diametric opposites? Or is it still don't ask, don't tell?

Cast of Culpable City Characters

"Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety," said city commissioner Randy Leonard.

(So what about now? How's that perception of safety going Randy? Is it better to feel safer or be safer?)

"What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland's leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren't violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs."

(Looks like Mr. Political Correctness got owned. So lets break this down: Tommy boy gets all pissy because the FBI won't give him a top-secret clearance. He pretends to be all concerned that the FBI, the most politically correct of all the intel services, is going to be used to 'profile' people. But in fact, profiling works. Why do you think professional profilers are called "Profilers" - Duh! They also happen to have an impressive track record.)

Current Portland mayor Sam Adams "...stressed that he has much more faith in the Obama administration and the leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s office now than he did in 2005."

(Okay so Oregonian lives are worth less during the Bush admin and more now that Obama is prez? I don't get it. Same legal system, same FBI agents, probably the same judges as a few years ago. So what exactly is different IN OREGON from 2005 to 2010? Its not like the case is going to Guantanamo or being tried in DC. He is being tried in Oregon Federal Court. So are both mayors and the city council saying they do not trust their fellow Oregonians who work for the Federal Judicial system and the FBI?)

I wonder if any one of these tools is going to thank the FBI for saving the lives of perhaps dozens of innocent Oregonians. Sorry if I just don't buy excuses like what the FBI was attempting to do was only a 'perception of safety.' Nor do I accept that they essentially refused to cooperate with the FBI over political differences. The law is the law. The FBI follows the law. If they don't there are whistleblower statutes which would have protected any of the policemen involved. This was pure politics, ego and power trips and it was played with peoples lives.

It should also be noted that in this case, as well as the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, it was their fathers who turned them in. Both fathers were religious muslims who wanted nothing to do with violent jihad. When you really look at these cases they are more often than not, solved by informants. Muslim informants. Sadly, with the billions and billions of dollars we spend on intel agencies, its old fashioned human morality and the desire to save innocent lives that cracks most of these cases. In this case the kid was indoctrinated in hate over the internet.

Due Process?!

2010-11-29T19:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/technology/27torrent.html

The notice below has popped up on a number of websites after ICE shut them down without notice or due process.

Okay so we have already established in previous posts that "ruling by fiat" has nothing to do with crappy European cars. That it is a core element of dictatorship. And that ruling by fiat has arrived in America.

That said, we have yet another action by the Federal government to rule by fiat. Throwing away any concept of due process, ICE, you know the Immigration Customs Enforcement agency, has simply shut down sites it suspects of being involved in peer to peer trading. Presumably of the illegal type, but there are several problems with this scenario.

1) There was no 'due process' before they shut the sites down. That is the opposite of what our system of laws guarantees, which is innocent until proven guilty. In this case and too many others, its guilty until you prove your innocence, leaving an enormous burden on an individual going up against limitless resources of an oppressive government.

2) ICE has a primary focus on borders, drugs and real criminal activity. File sharing is not a criminal activity anywhere near importation of heroin. Why is ICE diverting resources from their primary function to help Hollywood in their fight against pirates?

3) In the past this battle against the software pirates was fought in court. Which is the proper venue. The cost of the battle was borne by its principal litigants, who were the primary beneficiaries. In other words, the large music and movie industry. I might point out that they are hardly lacking in resources to fight their own battles. Having ICE do it for them, without due process, is unheard of and a clear departure of past practices. An expansion of their mandate.

4) Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So lets see, are these data bits immigrants? Did they pass through customs? No. The proper agency would have been the FBI. So why in the world did ICE do this? Was the FBI too expensive to bribe by Hollywood corporate interests? ICE was cheaper? I hope someday we find the truth. Because their involvement in a 100% domestic case is utterly mystifying. My guess is that the FBI would have followed procedure. I have my own issues with the FBI, someday I'll write up a post on personal experience with them. Anyhow - ICE is the wrong agency.

So where is the ACLU in this picture? If they do not step up and vigorously defend these individuals and fight this government intrusion on our rights as American citizens living under a Constitution and a set of laws, then I will have forever and finally have lost any and all respect I once had for the organization. The ACLU, America Civil Liberties Union, once had a beneficial role to play in American society. However they do not fight for the rights of the unborn, they do not (often) fight for rights of anyone politically opposed to their leftist agenda. Often it seems their goal is just to make America look bad and evil. They give terrorists rights, but seem quite unconcerned for the rights of their potential victims. I can understand and accept that fighting for unpopular causes often helps our nation when passions are inflamed, once cooler heads prevail, the preservation of our civil liberties can be seen as a noble goal. Indeed it is. The ACLU has checked out and no one who truly cares about the goal of a better America is there.

I could understand ICE's action in this if they were tasked with this as one of their agency priorities. But its not. They need to worry about customs and immigration. They seem to be doing a real shitty job on both of those issues as we have 12 million illegal immigrants in the country and drugs are available to anyone who wants them, and at historically low prices. So yes, they have failed in their goal, despite the pretty pictures of a few drug seizures. However doing the bidding of corporate interests at the expense of taxpayers is out of bounds.

Did you know that US Customs hired tens of thousands of additional inspectors? Guess what they are going after? If you guessed terrorism, you are wrong. If you guessed drugs, you are wrong. Surely you did not guess that all of these new inspectors are going after patents and copyright infringement, but that is the correct answer. Again, they are fighting what ought to be referred to civil court in a high handed manner. Like ICE, you are guilty until you can prove your innocence, the exact opposite of what has been a long standing pillar of our system of governance. Precisely because it is so difficult to prove your innocence, once presumed guilty.

Final thought: The over-reach by Federal agencies under the Obama administration is stunning. The EPA trying to control CO2 is just one more of hundreds of cases where they are stretching the bounds of their mandates and interpreting them in extraordinary ways to be all encompassing.

Honest Scientist!

2010-11-24T16:12:00.000-08:00

Nobel Prize winner working for the UN gives some straight answers about CO2. The fact that CO2 rises often hundreds of years AFTER warming trends occur is something that has been known for some time. But its refreshing to hear it being stated clearly, without 'believers' trying to tell us that CO2 is the primary driver. Yes, CO2 is a factor, but listening to Al Gore or any of the alarmists you would think it the only factor. And its not.

From: Canada Free Press

Dr. Lucka Kajfež Bogataj

Another Top International Scientist Jumps off Global Warming ‘Titanic’
By John O'Sullivan Monday, November 22, 2010

A top East European climatologist, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with UN global warming colleagues, jumps a sinking ship as ocean data signals a cooler climate.Dr. Lucka Kajfež Bogataj left cold clear water between herself and her former UN shipmates by declaring that rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide probably don’t cause global temperatures to rise. The news scuppers hope for a change in fortune for the beleagured UN climate agency.Their doomed ‘ship,’ the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been sailing on an ill wind ever since it was struck by that Climategate‘torpedo’ last year. The Slovenian climate professor made the chilling announcement last month in an obscure foreign language journal that has only now been translated into English. The lambast came in the publicationDelo Polet (18/11/2010), translated into English as, “Inconvenient Truth.” Inside Bogataj publishes a paper entitled, “The more we know, the better.

Rises in Levels of Carbon Dioxide follow Rises in Temperatures
Buried in an otherwise drab study on paleo - and proxy methods, Dr. Bogataj admitted to what skeptics have long been saying and what the ice core proxy data shows: that rises in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) are proven to mostly, if not always, occur AFTER rises in temperature.The eminent Slovenian expert is also key climate change adviser to her nation’s president, Danilo Turk. Bogataj’s article, translated into English by her countryman, Miso Alkalaj, makes a startling admission:“A detailed comparison of temperature data and the quantity of carbon dioxide captured in the ice shows, that sometimes it warmed up first and then the concentration of carbon dioxide increased, and sometimes vice versa, but on average the temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.

More Women Bailing from Doomed Global Warming ‘Titanic’
With science being thus clearly defenestrated it’s the women who are now leading the men in fleeing the sinking ship. As that rotten IPCC hulk steers towards its ignominous fate well known American climatologist, Dr. Judith Curry was the first female professor jostling for the lifeboats last month accusing the IPCC of “corruption” according toNature magazine.Bitter New Political Reality in Cold ClimateAnd another ‘iceberg’ seems set to further wreck the baleful boat in the form of a blockbuster new book. Our friendly Slovenia/English translator, Mi≈°o Alkalaj, reveals he is one of an international team of 21 co-authors of the world’s first full-volume scientific debunk of the greenhouse gas theory titled ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory,’ launched later this week. He says Bogataj is bailing out of the IPCC to help rebuild her status as a credible government paleoclimatologist before the warmist cult is drowned in fast-freezing political waters. Mi≈°o writes:

“She is still regarded as an eminent scientist (inter alia, she is the adviser to the president), so she has a lot to lose if she were to persist on the IPCC Titanic for too long. She’s a political survivor, so next she’ll pretend that she always knew! “
Ahoy! Beware More Icebergs in Colder OceansConcluding the nautical metaphor comes Argo*, the official world sea temperatures record (as much as 80% of the earth’s heat is held in the oceans). It seems our oceans are getting very cold according a survey from the world’s top 50 international laboratories—so perhaps we may see more icebergs forming to snare that rudderless IPCC ship?[Image]*Argo is an international collaboration of over 3,000 buoys installed throughout the word’s oceans whereby 50 scientific institutions in 26 different countries share crucial sea temperature data.

References:Dr. Bogataj, K. L., ‘The more we know, the better,’ (18/11/2010), Delo PoletLemonick, M. D., ‘Climate heretic: Judith Curry turns on her colleagues,’ (November 1, 2010), Nature.com, (accessed online: November 22, 2010)

UFOs? Doh!

2010-11-23T02:28:00.000-08:00

Came across this photo and while trying to see if it was real or not found out the actual facts. Just goes to show, no matter how convincing something may appear, additional facts can turn your perception completely upside down.

As an interesting note, here is a list of media that utterly failed to do any sort of actual checking that your lonely blogger did. I found out it was fake after about 20 minutes. Here is our media fail list:

The Huffington Post
Tech Blog
The Vancouver Sun
Examiner

And among these titans of the blogosphere (cough-cough), these guys blew it too:

Paranormal Daily News
Paranoid News

Lets take a look at the picture that got everyone so wound up...

It sure looks convincing. Looking at the shadow and the angle of the other shadows you can tell its quite some distance from the ground. There appears to be a structure of some sort, a car on the road and a two lane highway. Triangulate a guesstimate between those three, with say the shadow of the structure (assuming 1 story), to be about 8 feet, the lane width around 12 feet (USA standard, Europe probably close to that), and the car perhaps 12 to 14 feet in length and you can probably say that this "UFO" is a good 50 to 60 feet across. The "dome" on the top perhaps 5 feet. That it is airborne seems a foregone conclusion right? Otherwise the shadow would be a solid oval instead of a figure 8 with dimples on the sides in the lengthwise middle.

A few minutes of research had me laughing that so many people were fooled. Worse, the answer was on the internet. Anyone could have looked it up.

Here is another angle...

55.735057, 9.563656

Google Street View Link Here:

There is no doubt or question that this is the same object shown in the Google Maps picture. First is the double lane highway. Next is the field and the trees right at the point where they appear in the overhead picture. Finally there is the white shack that appears as a small white dot at the lower right corner of the "UFO" in the overhead picture. It is a small dot because much of it is obfuscated by the water tower.

This water tower is in The Netherlands. Why do their water towers look so much different than the ones we are used to? Well, the higher the water source, the greater the water pressure, the further it can be piped by gravity alone. The Netherlands is quite flat, and while there may be water towers that look like this in say Kansas, the only ones I've seen would be in the western states and they tend to be on top of hills.

This goes to show two things.

1) Things are not always as they appear, no matter how convincing the initial evidence. We always need to be open to new data and new interpretations. Case in point: After I saw Al Gore's "an inconvenient truth" I went out and purchased 5 additional copies and passed them around. I bought it 100%. Only later, because of my interest in science and my extensive reading did I find out that there were some pretty major holes in current theory. A perfect example of how people shut down anything that does not fit with their current view of the world is Arnold Schwarzennegar's incredible quote from a recent environmental meeting. He stated:

"Last year we had a tremendous setback because some of the science and some of the numbers were manipulated and that is very damaging because it gives the other side a way in," Schwarzenegger told his summit this week.

Why did he have to say "because it gives the 'other side' a way in." ??
This proves his inherent bias against accepting anything new on the subject. To him, and unfortunately other "greens" its an article of absolute faith and we can't have the 'other side' upsetting our theology can we. That he views it as two sides clashing is sad. It ought to be viewed as a singular quest for the truth, because science ought not involve ideology.
Yet science pushes forward and we are learning new information - a torrent really. Much, if not most, overturning what were said to be "settled." Except in science, nothing is settled. And you must expect that at any moment all that you know can be overturned by a single new factor. A nice parallel with the above picture.
So Arnold has been singing castrati on every other issue. He finally gets some brass balls on one subject no one in California will push back on and he goes for broke. Making himself look like even more of an tool that he already is. He ought to talk to Spain, who found out too late, that green jobs cost more than two lost jobs each. Pushing anything that requires government subsidy is idiotic.

2) The other thing we learned is that the media is lazy. They no longer report news. They no longer do investigative journalism. And that really sucks. Its their duty, as the 'fourth estate' to act as a check on those in power. Their utter failure and complicity in hiding and pretending like Climate Gate never happened is proof again that agenda trumps truth. And yeah, that sucks too.

How is it that I found the truth on these pictures after 20 minutes with google and all sorts of media just went with the story. No one bothered to try to locate it with Google Maps, no one tried to find the GPS coordinates and no one tried to see if there were other pictures around those coordinates.

Just because you saw it on TV, doesn't mean its true. I don't think there is one single unbiased media outlet left on the planet.

Fail: ObamaCare

2010-11-22T11:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/opinion-health-reforms-promises-keep-faltering/19726678

This is a really thoughtful article about the current status of healthcare reform. It is quite obviously unpopular and in fact has proven (so far) to be an abysmal failure. But its effects have barely been felt. Starting with the new year and going forward we will see a blow by blow dribble of new facts, about the law that "needed to be passed so we could see what was in it", none of which will be positive.

My prediction: Healthcare costs are going to skyrocket. Employers will not be able to afford them, especially in a poor economy, benefits will have to be changed, employees might need to contribute more and many, many businesses across our nation will be forced to switch insurance companies in an effort to lower costs.

Reading (in the above article) that several insurance companies have dropped coverage for children was very chilling. The new rules state that children must be covered until age 26. Right now it expires when they turn 18. Its well and good and noble to insure kids until they are of working age, it seems to make sense. Insure them until they are ready to get their own job and presumably their own insurance, thereby ensuring some degree of continuity. Laudable goal.

But by forcing it as a mandate the government has only succeeded in defeating itself. There is a cost to adding 8 additional years of insurance for children. And that is not a small cost. So of course premiums need to go up. Add costs, you add to price. Duh. There is no way we can stop coverage for employees children. It would be unconscionable. So we will have to ante up at a particularly difficult time. We are not unique in finding ourselves in this position.

Even more absurd is the waiver list. Take a look at who Obama is giving special treatment to:

	Applicant	Application Received	Plan Effective Date	Number of Enrollees	Application Completed by Applicant	Waiver Approved
1	Protocol Marketing Group	10/4/2010	1/1/2011	454	10/25/2010	11/1/2010
2	Sasnak	9/29/2010	1/1/2011	813	9/29/2010	11/1/2010
3	Star Tek	10/1/2010	1/1/2011	1,423	10/26/2010	11/1/2010
4	Adventist Care Centers	10/1/2010	1/1/2011	725	10/26/2010	10/29/2010
5	B.E.S.T of NY	10/7/2010	1/1/2011	1,200	10/27/2010	10/29/2010
6	Boskovich Farms, Inc	10/8/2010	1/1/2011	165	10/28/2010	10/29/2010
7	Gallegos Corp	9/29/2010	1/1/2011	86	10/28/2010	10/29/2010
8	Jeffords Steel and Engineering	10/4/2010	1/1/2011	112	10/28/2010	10/29/2010
9	O.K. Industries	10/4/2010	1/1/2011	1,238	10/28/2010	10/29/2010
10	Service Employees Benefit Fund	10/12/2010	11/1/2010	1,297	10/29/2010	10/29/2010
11	Sun Pacific Farming Coop	10/6/2010	12/1/2010	1,109	10/6/2010	10/29/2010
12	UFCW Allied Trade Health & Welfare Trust	10/5/2010	1-Dec	68	10/25/2010	10/29/2010
13	HCR Manor Care	10/5/2010	1/1/2011	2,666	10/26/2010	10/28/2010
14	IBEW No.915	9/28/2010	1/1/2011	930	10/15/2010	10/28/2010
15	Integra BMS for Culp, Inc.	10/4/2010	1/1/2011	34	10/25/2010	10/28/2010
16	New England Health Care Employees Welfare Fund	9/27/2010	1/1/2011	7,454	10/26/2010	10/28/2010
17	Aegis Security Insurance Company	10/6/2010	11/1/2010	67	10/25/2010	10/26/2010
18	Alliance One Tobacco	9/30/2010	1/1/2011	138	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
19	Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund	9/29/2010	1/1/2011	2	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
20	Assurant Health (2nd Application)	9/29/2010	1/1/2011	19,024	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
21	Captain Elliot's Party Boats	10/12/2010	11/1/2010	10	10/25/2010	10/26/2010
22	Carlson Restaurants	9/22/2010	1/1/2011	3,381	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
23	CH Guenther & Son	9/24/2010	1/1/2011	300	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
24	CKM Industries dba Miller Environmental	10/5/2010	11/1/2010	34	10/25/2010	10/26/2010
25	Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Health and Welfare Plan	10/14/2010	10/1/2010	4,500	10/18/2010	10/26/2010
26	Darden Restaurants	9/30/2010	1/1/2011	34,000	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
27	Duarte Nursery	9/23/2010	1/1/2011	283	10/19/2010	10/26/2010
28	Employees Security Fund	9/29/2010	1/1/2011	22	9/29/2010	10/26/2010
29	Florida Trowel Trades	9/27/2010	1/1/2011	297	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
30	Ingles Markets	9/30/2010	1/1/2011	917	10/25/2010	10/26/2010
31	Meijer	10/1/2010	1/1/2011	4,873	10/1/2010	10/26/2010
32	O'Reilly Auto Parts	9/23/2010	1/1/2011	9,722	9/23/2010	10/26/2010
33	Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund	9/30/2010	1/1/2011	534	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
34	Sun Belt	9/28/2010	10/1/2010	114	10/20/2010	10/26/2010
35	UFCW Local 227	10/12/2010	11/1/2010	1,125	10/12/2010	10/26/2010
36	Uncle Julio's	9/30/2010	11/1/2010	115	10/25/2010	10/26/2010
37	United Group	9/24/2010	1/1/2011	177	10/19/2010	10/26/2010
38	US Imaging	10/11/2010	11/1/2010	148	10/25/2010	10/26/2010
39	Vino Farms	10/8/2010	11/1/2010	152	10/21/2010	10/26/2010
40	Advanta Staff, Inc.	9/20/2010	9/1/2011	52	9/20/2010	10/21/2010
41	Agricare	9/23/2010	11/1/2010	437	9/23/2010	10/21/2010
42	Alaska Seafood	9/23/2010	1/1/2010	262	10/15/2010	10/21/2010
43	American Fidelity	9/22/2010	10/23/2010	9,358	10/14/2010	10/21/2010
44	Convergys	9/20/2010	1/1/2011	1,400	9/20/2010	10/21/2010
45	Darensberries	9/28/2010	10/1/2010	1,450	9/28/2010	10/21/2010
46	Gowan Company	9/23/2010	1/1/2011	225	9/27/2010	10/21/2010
47	Greystar	9/23/2010	1/1/2011	1,747	10/13/2010	10/21/2010
48	Macayo Restaurants	9/22/2010	12/1/2010	46	10/18/2010	10/21/2010
49	Periodical Services	9/27/2010	1/1/2011	464	9/27/2010	10/21/2010
50	UniFirst	9/23/2010	9/1/2011	2,659	10/14/2010	10/21/2010
51	Universal Forest Products	9/23/2011	5/1/2010	1,738	10/19/2010	10/21/2010
52	UFCW Maximus Local 455	10/4/2010	1/1/2011	59	10/18/2010	10/18/2010
53	American Habilitation Services, Inc.	9/22/2010	1/1/2011	400	10/12/2010	10/14/2010
54	GuideStone Financial Resources	9/21/2010	1/1/2011	354	9/21/2010	10/14/2010
55	Local 25 SEIU	9/29/2010	10/1/2010	31,000	10/7/2010	10/14/2010
56	MAUSER Corp.	9/21/2010	1/1/2011	47	9/24/2010	10/14/2010
57	Preferred Care, Inc.	9/15/2010	1/1/2011	918	9/15/2010	10/14/2010
58	Ruby Tuesday	10/8/2010	1/1/2011	3,219	10/8/2010	10/14/2010
59	The Dixie Group, Inc.	8/27/2010	6/19/2010	269	10/12/2010	10/14/2010
60	UFCW Local 1262	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	5,390	9/20/2010	10/14/2010
61	Whelan Security Company	9/23/2010	1/1/2011	287	10/12/2010	10/14/2010
62	AMF Bowling Worldwide	9/14/2010	1/1/2011	295	10/7/2010	10/12/2010
63	Assisted Living Concepts	9/17/2010	1/1/2011	1,174	9/17/2010	10/12/2010
64	Case & Associates	9/17/2010	1/1/2011	87	9/17/2010	10/12/2010
65	GPM Investments	9/17/2010	1/1/2011	275	9/17/2010	10/12/2010
66	Grace Living Centers	9/14/2010	10/1/2010	534	9/14/2010	10/12/2010
67	Mountaire Corporation	9/17/2010	1/1/2011	2,074	9/17/2010	10/12/2010
68	Swift Spinning	9/16/2010	1/1/2011	240	9/16/2010	10/12/2010
69	Belmont Village	9/10/2010	1/1/2011	785	10/4/2010	10/8/2010
70	Caliber Services	9/13/2010	1/1/2011	606	9/13/2010	10/8/2010
71	Cracker Barrel	9/9/2010	1/1/2011	16,823	9/17/2010	10/8/2010
72	DISH Network	9/13/2010	3/1/2011	3,597	9/23/2010	10/8/2010
73	Groendyke Transport, Inc	9/2/2010	1/1/2011	1,322	9/2/2010	10/8/2010
74	Pocono Medical Center	9/24/2010	1/1/2011	3,298	9/24/2010	10/8/2010
75	Regis Corporation	9/10/2010	3/1/2011	3,617	10/1/2010	10/8/2010
76	The Pictsweet Co.	9/13/2010	1/1/2010	694	9/13/2010	10/8/2010
77	Diversified Interiors	9/28/2010	10/1/2010	300	9/28/2010	10/1/2010
78	Local 802 Musicians Health Fund	9/29/2010	10/1/2010	1,801	9/29/2010	10/1/2010
79	MCS Life Insurance Company	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	6,635	9/23/2010	10/1/2010
80	The Buccaneer	9/22/2010	10/1/2010	125	9/28/2010	10/1/2010
81	CIGNA	9/17/2010	9/26/2010	265,000	9/30/2010	9/30/2010
82	Greater Metropolitan Hotel	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	1,200	9/24/2010	9/30/2010
83	Local 17 Hospitality Benefit Fund	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	881	9/24/2010	9/30/2010
84	GS-ILA	9/15/2010	10/1/2010	298	9/15/2010	9/28/2010
85	Allied	9/13/2010	10/1/2010	127	9/13/2010	9/27/2010
86	Harden Healthcare	9/9/2010	1/1/2011	874	9/29/2010	9/27/2010
87	Health and Welfare Benefit System	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	41	9/16/2010	9/27/2010
88	Health Connector	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	3,544	9/24/2010	9/27/2010
89	I.U.P.A.T	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	875	9/23/2010	9/27/2010
90	Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc.	9/22/2010	10/1/2010	326	9/22/2010	9/27/2010
91	Transport Workers	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	107	9/23/2010	9/27/2010
92	UFT Welfare Fund	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	351,000	9/27/2010	9/27/2010
93	Aegis	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	162	9/21/2010	9/24/2010
94	Aetna	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	209,423	9/16/2010	9/24/2010
95	Allflex	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	34	9/22/2010	9/24/2010
96	Baptist Retirement	9/10/2010	10/1/2010	127	9/17/2010	9/24/2010
97	BCS Insurance	9/13/2010	9/24/2010	115,000	9/22/2010	9/24/2010
98	Cryogenic	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	19	9/20/2010	9/24/2010
99	Fowler Packing Co.	9/8/2010	10/1/2010	39	9/17/2010	9/24/2010
100	Guy C. Lee Mfg.	9/15/2010	10/1/2010	312	9/15/2010	9/24/2010
101	HealthPort	9/17/2010	10/1/2010	608	9/17/2010	9/24/2010
102	Jack in the Box	9/17/2010	10/1/2010	1,130	9/21/2010	9/24/2010
103	Maritime Association	9/17/2010	10/1/2010	500	9/21/2010	9/24/2010
104	Maverick County	9/21/2010	10/1/2010	1	9/23/2010	9/24/2010
105	Metro Paving Fund	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	550	9/20/2010	9/24/2010
106	PMPS-ILA	9/19/2010	10/1/2010	15	9/23/2010	9/24/2010
107	PS-ILA	9/19/2010	10/1/2010	8	9/23/2010	9/24/2010
108	QK/DRD (Denny's)	9/16/2010	10/1/2010	65	9/22/2010	9/24/2010
109	Reliance Standard	9/14/2010	10/1/2010	varies	9/14/2010	9/24/2010
110	Tri-Pak	9/20/2010	10/1/2010	26	9/20/2010	9/24/2010
111	UABT	9/17/2010	10/1/2010	17,347	9/17/2010	9/24/2010
	total			1,175,411

Look at #21. Captain Elliots Party Boats? With 10 employees? WTF?! You know a law is effed when its so poorly written that you need to create after-the-fact "oops lists." Which this in fact is. Why should just these people get exclusions? Why not everyone? And if it were everyone, why pass the law in the first place? This is discrimination sanctioned by our government. And its wrong.

Here is a great checklist from the above linked article. Lets take a look at the HealthCare Reform Checklist:

So my answer is that we already know that the unchecked items will all be checked off with resounding 'No's in due course. It will not cut the number of uninsured anywhere near 32 million. In 2019, a lot of people are going to have to eat their words, or, if not, healthcare is going to have to be so severely rationed we will end up like Canada or England where the quality of care is abysmal, people wait for months and months for care and are regularly turned down and rejected for better more expensive (and more effective) drugs.

There is also no possibility this can reduce the deficit or cut Medicare spending. How is that even remotely possible? Adding millions of people, and lower cost? Someone doesn't know elementary math in DC. The only way they can lower the overall cost of the Medicare program is by slashing rates paid to doctors, which is both politically and economically impossible at the moment. Or by rationing, which we were all promised would NOT happen. Do you recall the controversy over the "death panels" that Sarah Palin was talking about. Well, she was right, even if she was being a bit overly dramatic about it. That's what rationing leads to, ultimately though neither initially nor obviously, death.

To give you but one small example. I have the beginnings of an ulcer. I need to take stomach medicine before each meal to prevent it from getting worse. The insurance company only authorized for 2 pills per day (what they think I just eat twice a day? ARG!). Yet because of my strict diet (due to chronic pancreatitis) I eat 4 small meals per day exactly 6 hours apart. I have to pay cash for the extra two pills per day. But most people, or many, cannot afford to pay extra. That leads to deteriorating health which, yes, can ultimately in some extreme cases result in death. That is what rationing does. You need X, but its too expensive so they only approve Y. That applies to procedures, medicines, treatment, the whole gambit.

The final option in cost cutting for medicare is cutting waste. Something the government was always failed at. So no... Don't expect this monster to die easily.

The only answer is full repeal of a bad law. A law so complex we don't even know whats in it. It had to get passed before we could find out what it was about. And, as I said, we are continuing to find out whats in it. The slow dribble of bad news is just beginning.

One other part of this law which never should have seen the light of day is the requirement that businesses file a 1099 for any transaction over $600 dollars. The amount of effort and paperwork, delays etc involved cannot be understated. So in addition to trying to survive in a very poor economy, struggling to find solutions to next years massive increase in health care costs, small businesses across the country also have to deal with a major paperwork headache.

Its so wrong in so many ways. And again, no one knows what the full impact will be of this new rule. How will it affect businesses? I guess that's another "we have to pass it to find out" deal.

If Republicans do not succeed in repealing this Healthcare law 100% they will have lost the trust of the American people (well, damn it, at least mine.) Trying to repeal parts will not work. Only going back to the drawing board and attacking this problem piecemeal, one small bit at a time, will work. If politicians tell you they want to pass a "comprehensive" bill, expect similar nonsense to burden us yet again.

Massive and complex bills suck.

Stuxnet Authors!

2010-11-21T01:56:00.000-08:00

Attn: Stuxnet Authors...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/world/middleeast/20stuxnet.html?_r=1

The Stuxnet virus appears to be the work of a team of very accomplished programmers. At this point it is overly obvious that either American or Israeli intelligence designed the virus specifically to target the Iranian nuclear facilities. Probably Bushehr and possibly others.

It's a frightening thought to consider that this virus might have gotten loose and found its way into other industrial controls and caused real damage to innocents. On the other hand, purpose-written code which does not self-modify is highly unlikely (read: near impossible) to replicate itself into an unintended target. So while reports of its existence show it has gone outside of Iran, nowhere (yet anyways), have we heard of it causing any damage, except for its intended target. Where it did indeed cause damage as that is how it was found. Complaints by the customer (Iran) to its supplier (Russia).

Now that this virus has been found out and publicized its unlikely that the same type of attack will work again. So I have a suggestion for the writers of the virus:

Use the undocumented instruction set, which exists in every CPU, to write your next virus!

About ~~a million years~~ 30 years ago I was working on debugging a program I had written in 6502 assembler. Debugging often involves the tedious process of stepping through your code, instruction by instruction and watching the status of your registers, indexes, accumulator and flags. When I noticed that a supposedly non-operational opcode had changed some of the flags I decided to explore that a bit more. Thats how I happened to come across what I call the undocumented command set. In reality these commands exist almost as if they were dei ex machina, or more coherently, as a byproduct of the lithographic process which created the integrated circuits on the CPU.

Some of these undocumented commands are direct replacements for documented commands. However that's rare. In most cases they were fractionally equivalent to other commands, or performed more than one command, typically in part. Here is what I mean. The opcode for an Immediate AND instruction is $25h. It operates on all bits. However using one of the undocumented commands you could get a different result. I found one instruction (not $25h) which just did the Immediate AND for the lowermost 3 bits. Also logical shift operators which only did a shift on a lower half or upper half byte. The rest of the bytes, when used as opcodes generally do something. By the time I was done, I had documented dozens of 'opcodes' that were supposed to do nothing, but in fact did do something. You would never know this unless you were specifically in the monitor, in step/debug mode, and watching real carefully.

It is entirely possible, however programmatically challenging, to write effective code, using the undocumented command set within a CPU. Yes, you have to pick carefully, but would also be able to intersperse your code with actual known instructions. Any observer looking at it, or reverse compiling it would not know what was done, unless they took the time to painstakingly document the hidden commands, which is highly improbable. Its too far out of the box.

Better (or worse), is if you combine this technique with another one which is normally a programming no-no. Something called self-modifying code. A program that rewrites itself as it is being executed. If this is done using the hidden command set it will utterly baffle any investigator. Anyone looking at this will assume it is either garbage, data or random noise. Anything but code.

The downside is that every different CPU design, step number or generation uses a different lithographic mask to 'write' the design onto the wafer, or dice. Because the hidden commands are a direct byproduct of the exact lithography (not to be confused with microcode inside the CPU), the virus needs to be written as an application specific program. Meaning it would never work in the real world. The delivery system can be run in the real world. But the viral load can only be delivered and rendered operational in the EXACT environment it was intended for, such as Siemens microcontrollers.

Because these viral loads, written in assembler, are so small, it would not be difficult to write a multiplicity of separate load packages and run a 'pre-load' program to determine the exact CPU environment it is to be launched in.

Remember: Even though hackers might not follow the law of the land at all times, there is such a thing as morality. And it is immoral and unethical to ~~write and~~ launch viruses. Karma can be a bitch. (I know her, she is...)

Al-Qaeda

2010-11-20T11:43:00.000-08:00

A recent headline blared that we had lost the war against Al-Qaeda because the TSA was pat searching nuns and 3 year old girls. While I think that is pretty stupid of the TSA I also would take exception with the headline. Both the USA AND Al-Qaeda have lost. Immensely.

Al-Qaeda has lost any chance of their purported agenda happening, that of having the United States leave what they consider to be their holy lands, or the Arabian Peninsula. At this point that is very unlikely. We are set to have a permanent presence in Iraq. Our presence in Yemen is growing and we have many fixed bases in the various Emirates. The unstated goal I would presume, supported by most of the gulf leadership, is the encirclement of Iran. Iran is considered a mortal enemy to most of the Arabic states in the region. Part of it is the Sunni vs. Shiite schism, and part of it is pure geopolitics.

Al-Qaeda would have been far better off learning from Ghandi and his example. Even in very recent history the United States has left both Puerto Rico (Vieques) and The Philippines (Subic Bay). Both cases because of demonstrations (peaceful) and political pressure. I recall quite vividly being at Subic Bay at the invitation of Richard Gordon, the outspoken mayor of Oolongapo (at that time). We were invited to tour the entirely deserted base, to dine at the empty officers club in the hopes that we would invest and move our cable manufacturing company onto the base. I could not get over how much infrastructure the US taxpayer must have invested in this base and to give it up over internal Philippines politics was astounding. A deepwater port. An international runway. Military housing for perhaps tens of thousands of people. And building after building. The base was enormous. The hour long driving tour probably did not even cover a fraction of the base. It did have its own McDonalds and of course the ever popular PX. All deserted. And done by the will of the Philippine people (no actually it was the Byzantine and perpetually self-defeating ways of the Philippine government but thats another story altogether.) In short, Philippine said no, United States said okay, and we left.

This same process is playing itself out around the globe, with mixed results. But it seems quite clear that the United States will bow to the will of the people and government. Political pressure works precisely because the United States is an open society and a democracy. That we will eventually leave Okinawa in Japan is a foregone conclusion. Its just a matter of when.

So the lesson here is that Al-Qaeda, if their singular goal was truly to get the United States to leave their holy land, they could certainly have achieved that goal without the use of violence. The examples of non-violent success abound. Not just the United States, but many other countries as well. Had they taken the time to understand the true dynamics of their cause they would have understood that it was not vis-a-vis the United States, but in fact with their own government of Saudi Arabia. Even though it is a tribal dictatorship, Bin Laden was not without influence. Additionally he could certainly have invested his family money into getting the message out through the media of what his ideas were.

Hell, if the guy were smart he would have started up lobbying operations in the United States and have gotten support over here. We all know that money was not a barrier. Before 9/11, before the first WTC bombing, before the USS Cole, before he declared war on America, it might have been possible to convince the average American that their cause had merit. I think we would have understood that for religious reasons Saudis did not want foreign troops on their land. Just like we understand non-believers in Islam are not welcome in Mecca or Medina, their holy cities. We get that. Americans grow up in a culture of immigrants.

We make special exceptions for Amish. For American Indians. America has a long tradition of accepting the fact that peoples beliefs often force them to do or act or think in ways that are different from the mainstream. I know that if I go into a Buddhist temple that I need to take off my shoes and wear long pants. There is nothing in the American character that would prevent us from understanding that Muslims would not want us on what they consider to be their holy land. Especially a military force.

All that said, I honestly do not think Osama Bin Laden was actually trying to get us to leave the Arabian Peninsula or Saudi Arabia proper. No, I think the truth probably lies deeper than that. He was supported by the CIA during our battle with the Russians in Afghanistan. While history records that it was our stinger ground to air missiles that tipped the balance of power in that conflict, they thought it was their god who helped them to win. History will repeat itself in this war too. The Taliban and Al Qaeda think Allah is on their side. In fact they are losing militarily because of a single weapons system, in a replay of the Russian experience but with the tables turned. Our drones are the single most powerful element in this new battle. Our heavy footprint and battle restrictions are the cause of casualties. Too many people on the ground, too many rules of engagement which are strictly political in nature. If we were to leave a token force at the best bases and just take to the skies with a major increase in drones I think we could effect what I would consider a "military solution." Because you can never defeat ideas with force, the best the military can offer us is to contain the enemy while the political side of things works itself out.

That we can achieve this containment with low cost drones, operated from the United States, is a good example of our technological prowess and adaptability. Militaries rarely adapt and change the way the US does. If you look at the history of European warfare, before WW I, it required utter defeat before the other side would change and innovate militarily. Whereas the United States military is generations ahead of our nearest rival. Even a generation ahead of our own domestic sciences (such as adaptive optics, discovered twice, first by a military researcher and then again in the private sector for astronomy.)

On the other side of the ledger, looking at the United States, I suggest that we have lost as well. We have been amazingly successful in preventing follow on attacks within the United States (mostly luck unfortunately), however we have lost freedoms to laws such as the Patriot Act. If this law (set of laws) were truly needed perhaps a time limit should have been set, annually, or every few years, requiring congress to renew the law. Once the threat has passed, allow the laws to expire. Otherwise our hard won liberties are slowly and deliberately are done away with.

Look at the history of RICO, which like the Patriot Act, was passed specifically to target a threat which was serious at that time, and much less serious now. That of the Mafia. RICO allowed the government to go after organizations in a more coordinated manner. But now RICO is commonly used in non-Mafia cases and one has to question the wisdom of this. Taking away liberties during a time of distress may sometimes be called for. But leaving them in place after the threat has passed or become minimized is wrong. RICO should have expired. Or not been allowed to target non organized crime cases. Same with the Patriot Act and other laws passed during crises. Requiring another branch of government to mediate the others is the way our system functions. Checks and balances. Open ended laws which tread on our freedoms run counter to everything our nation stands for.

We have lost other freedoms in highly visible ways as well. Just consider the fiasco with the TSA and searches. Instead of innocent until proven guilty, air travelers are guilty until proven innocent. Thats un-American.

When you look at our economy as a whole, enormous sums have been spent to make us more secure. That this same money could have been spent on other more productive uses is unquestioned. Not to mention the direct costs of the wars.

The world has paid a heavy price

Final thought: None of us possesses the intel that is available to those in power. They get inputs from sources and methods we will never have. We employ hundreds of thousands of people in the various intelligence agencies to build a picture of geo-political reality that most closely matches the truth (we hope). But this product is for the President and certain members of Congress. Beyond a limited circle, the rest of us have a highly distorted view of the world. We live in an echo chamber where crumbs of that true reality filter down through various means, but mostly deliberate leaks, even those which 'appear' to harm us are usually deliberate. Take the example of the 'leak' that we can triangulate missiles onto cell phone signals. I would suspect that was our governments attempt to force to ground a number of militants, requiring them to make physical contact and thus exposing themselves to greater danger. So much of what we babble about is just mindless. Myself included. Have a nice day :)

AGW Propaganda

2010-11-18T22:46:00.000-08:00

Get ready for the propaganda parade coming your way!

This article, from a "Warmist" publication (The Guardian), refutes several key points of "settled" science in regards to the Amazon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/11/climate-change-forests-water-amazon

Interesting quote under the photo:

"Although the study says the Amazon can adapt to a warmer world, it still faces an extreme threat from deforestation."

This one sentence shows how they are trying to slowly alter the narrative. Its basically saying, ok, so global warming isn't the problem we thought, but there is still DANGER."

In this case, I happen to agree. Deforestation is bad. I'd much rather our lumber come from forest farms than rainforest. If this is the start of a back to basics environmentalist movement, then I'm all for it. I do care about the environment, passionately. What bothers me to no end is the junk and politicized science that has become a religion among many. Based on the unfounded principals of scarcity of resources, which is utter bullshit and eugenics, which is alive and well living under the banner of "family planning and women's rights" this gang of elites is at it again. The scariest element or faction pushing global warming would be the Communists. No joke, despite the world witnessing its epic failure, some people will never be convinced that communism can never work. Find me one single democratic communist country anywhere in the world. You cant! Communism = police state / dictatorships.

I'm currently working my way through thousands of pages of PDF files from The Club of Rome. This was one of many earlier attempts to corral the worlds elites to get together and "plan" for mankind's future. Except they forgot to get approval from the other inhabitants of planet earth. Reading through this stuff it is amazing how inaccurate their assumptions were back in 1970 around when this particular group started. That they are around today, despite an abysmal track record shows how hungry these people are to maintain their power and relevance as well as their intellectual bankruptcy. When one trick doesn't work, they try others. Global warming as a control strategy has fallen apart. So they are searching for alternatives.

At some point I think it likely that we will return the a general warming trend, as has been the case since the ending of the last ice age some 14,000 years ago. These poor believers in the warmist agenda are going to have whiplash trying to perform the mental gymnastics required of them to switch narratives so frequently. Warming!! No, now its cooling! Whoops, back to warming!

So taking the above into account, it makes this paragraph from the story sound as absurd as it appears... The prediction from England's Met Office (Meteorology):

"Last year, researchers at the Met Office Hadley Centre reported that a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best-case scenario, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought in the next century, while a 4C rise would kill 85%."

So I wonder what the Met Office says now? Because clearly the Amazon will NOT die off, even with a few degrees rise in temperature, according to this new study.

Just so you know, all of these scare scenarios are done with computer modeling, or projections. And for the umpteenth time, I will reiterate, you cannot model the real world with computers in a predictive manner. It just does not work. (Refer to Black Swan, reality, chaos, complexity etc.)

Its a case of politics getting the better of science. Scare scenarios play well with the media and they love to promote it because it gets viewers and click throughs.

I would rather think that its the giant ball of nuclear fusion which is consuming 99% of all mass in our solar system, in the sky above us during the day, is the source of long (and some short) term climate changes. We are aware of the Milankovitch cycles, a 40,000 year cycle of solar change. How many other cycles are we unaware off? What gives rise to El Nino and La Nina? What causes the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)? What causes the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (ADO)? What triggers El Nino or La Nina? We just do not know! All of these are non-linear, perhaps interlocking phenomena. The ones I list are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are in fact too many such weather, ocean, atmospheric observations such as the above to list.

In my mind, the sun must be the key factor. It overwhelms all other factors by exponential sums. Indeed, the sun is the cause of annual swings in temperature of up to 100 degrees in some areas. It is called "summer" and "winter." How does 1 degree per 100 years compare to that? Simple. Its called "noise." In other words, data which represents no true 'information.'

The singular most critical error the Warmists made was to try to shut down scientific debate by claiming the science was settled. And then to fall into a regular regime of churning out scare stories and things which will be bad due to global warming.

Here is a list of what they say will be caused by Global Warming.

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

Again, had real science progressed and been allowed its own working space, without massive interference from the media and politicians, all of whom have agendas, we might actually be somewhere with understanding our climate better. Instead inputs from the sun were suppressed. Things like the UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect were relegated is so minor as to be not even a variable in climate models. Worse, when called out on it, the Warmists responded by colluding and conspiring to hide any deficiencies. In real science, all of the numbers are open for inspection. That way you get to the truth faster, even if in the process some people are embarrassed.

One of the more disgusting attempts to move the debate about global warming away from science has been the efforts to link it to some sort of 'mental defect' in people who 'deny' climate change. This article (link below) is very instructive of the sort of personal attacks used.

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/12/17/global-warming-a-tough-sell-for-the-human-psyche.html

Read the linked article. Especially page 2 where it gets VERY scary very fast. I defy you to find one single actual scientific fact, other than the 2 references to polling data in the entire article. It is 100% subjective opinion. Citing a taxi driver? I mean come on! Why is this scary? Because these are the people in control of the media, policy and our futures! In this case I think we can safely say "The last refuge of the Warmists is to say the rest of us are crazy (and they are not)."

What deflates the "everyone who doesn't believe in global warming is crazy" theory (or as they would say it, fact, not theory because their psychological science is settled), is the point that when you go back in time several years, more and more people used to believe it! I used to. I shit a brick when I saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." I had read his book, Earth In The Balance when I was much younger and believed that too. Why not? Al Gore was (at that time) a reputable source of information. His movie won awards and accolades. Sadly, much of it was utterly false. And as time goes on, brick by brick, their wall of disinformation is being taken down.

The saddest part and that which will have the longest lasting damage is to the credibility of science and the scientific process itself. In the case of Global Warming we truly did have a conspiracy. We truly did have junk science. But not all science is run like this. Indeed, even among Climatologists I would have to imagine the majority were hardworking and honest. But by the time it got to the top level, the conclusions were foregone. What happens next time? Science has cried wolf and has been called out. If belief in science is eroded we all suffer. And yes, it requires belief because no one is mentally equipped to verify all we are told. We must believe that what we are told is accurate. Anything which erodes the basic honesty of the scientific process is anathema to the functioning of the process itself.

The phrase "better luck next time" just doesn't seem up to task.

Good Job Obama!

2010-11-13T06:32:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704756804575608944154277532.html

For once I am finally really happy about something Obama is doing. The link above is to a Wall Street Journal article about the Debt Reduction Commission that Obama set up.

Despite it being comprised of both Democrats and Republicans, their suggestions are surprisingly honest.

It would lower overall taxes, but eliminate things which would effectively be like tax increases. Its a share the pain approach. But we really have no more choices at this point other than share the pain approaches.

If we allow narrow interest groups, like the AARP who is gonna fight this like crazy, or home builders groups who will fight the interest deduction on homes, to kill this bill, then we have placed our futures in the hands of people who aren't actually interested in our collective futures, just their own greedy, needy groups future - singular.

From what I have seen its a real good approach. I lose the interest deduction on my home. Thats gonna be painful. But I sure as hell don't mind sharing the pain as long as it helps the nation as a whole.

I'm also glad Obama didn't have a knee-jerk reaction like Pelosi and some republicans had, which was to just shoot it down out of hand. Obama said that the door should be left open to consider proposals like this. That is somewhat tepid support for it, but its support nonetheless.

Between the choices of what is idealistic, realistic and ideological, realistic at a minimum ought to win out. This is what I mean:

It would be idealistic to assume that we can cut and shut down entire branches of the Federal Behemoth which is killing us slowly. Like BIA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, whose mandate has long since passed, whose utter incompetence has lost billions and who just doesn't need to exist. Too many divisions of government are like this.

Too many have overstepped their mandates in the drive to increase personal fiefdoms, say such as the FDA, FCC, HUD, DOE, EPA or um, all of them. It is also idealistic to think that we can solve our deficit problems by reducing spending only. Yes, it can be done, but it would take more time and require an unprecedented amount of cooperation. Both sides would have to give. A lot. And its likely never to happen.

The realistic is probably somewhere around what is being proposed. Around 75% is spending cuts and 25% in increased revenues (taxes). It the choice is between what ought to be done and what can be done, I would still choose what can be done. The alternative is we are headed for fiscal hell. I.e. PIGS status. Civil unrest, although I must say that Americans tend to be more civil than their european counterparts. We demonstrate as is our right, but its pretty rare to see Americans burning cars in the streets, shutting down roads like the French or Greeks. (Unless its a G8 meeting in which case the trouble was imported... from Europe.)

And the final path, that of the ideologue, which can equally be right or left, is basically where we are today. Total gridlock because all of the parties interested in getting something done are the crooks who buy their own laws through lobbying. Getting things done for the general welfare is just not being paid for. No dough, no go.

Lets just hope we can keep all parties involved honest and on the straight and narrow. But for today, I'm pretty happy about what Obama has said. Let hope he doesn't disappoint.

Balance of History

2010-11-12T13:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A957O20101110?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29

Or click here if the above link don't work.

/sarc

In the article above, Amnesty International, is advocating for prosecuting Bush 43 for water boarding 3 terrorists. In his book, Bush claims to have said not just yes, but "hell yes" when asked if the US Govt should go Jack Bauer on the terrorists, who had critical information about impending attacks.

So there isn't a lot of love for Bush 43, he got us into a few wars, which are also driving us broke, he increased the size of the federal government, something odd for a 'conservative' to do and he designed the $12 trillion bailouts - oh wait, that Was Obama, or Bush 44 as he is want to be known.

Well okay, but I say take it one step further. Logically, if Amnesty International is seeking redress for actions taken in the past, ones that have provably saved lives, then it ought to be incumbent upon Amnesty International to also be the ones to "balance the scales" in their entirety.

So what do I mean?

I mean that if Bush had not gone the torture route and gotten the information, that people in London and elsewhere would have died. So if they are going after Bush, because that decision was wrong, in order to be 100% internally consistent with their train of logic, they must estimate the number of civilians who would have died, and where. Then they need to do a death lottery and pick people at random from those cities or planes or whatever the investigation determines, and put them to death. Oh and don't forget about the ones who need to be maimed, de-limbed, and left with deep psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

To me that would then "balance the scales", and would be logically consistent with their position. After all, seeking to nullify an action has consequences. That those consequences ought to be carried out is something that might have slipped Amnesty Internationals mind. Nevertheless, logic dictates that it must be so.

I just hope I'm not one that gets the call. Yikes.

PS: Amnesty, when you do your death dealing computer modeling, can you weight it towards people who fly more and people who live in big cities (psst, thats YOU New York, and I hear London calling!). Yeah, thanks.

A+ Report on AGW

2010-11-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/11/is-the-western-climate-establishment-corrupt-how-many-excuses-does-it-take/

Please take the time to read through this 11 page summary of the current state of Climate Science. It is singularly the best, most comprehensive and inclusive summary I have ever read on the full range of games being played to make it look like we have man made climate change.

Sadly at this point all anyone can do is point out the mistakes, intentional deceit and outright lying by the community of "Climate Scientists." Which as the author of the report points out, are 100% employed by the government.

I thought Climate Gate was the final nail in the coffin. But because the Mainstream Media completely ignored it and simply reported it as a hacker break in (it wasn't, it was a brave whistleblower), and the in power Elites just pretended like it never happened, the battle is still being fought.

Think about it for a moment. Is any other branch of science being run this way? Where scientific data is not shared, where programming code is not open for review? For science to be honest it must be hotly debated. Academic rivalry is a good thing! In the fields of Cosmology and Nuclear Physics, two of my favorites, every current theory is spoken of in conditional terms. Everyone knows that a final integrated model, or Theory of Everything, could be earth shattering in that it has the potential to undo everything we currently accept as true. A true scientist labors forward with that understanding and expectation, with their sole goal being to uncover truth.

So at this point all we can do is go back to square 1. Because we don't know if humans are causing disruption. At some point real science needs to start happening. Unbiased, non-political science. They worry about CO2. I don't, it gets reabsorbed very quickly and stimulates plant growth. Remember the Gaia theory where earth itself is a self regulating, positive feedback loop which tends to even out disruptions. Well thats basically what happens with CO2. I would worry about NF3 (along with other industrial effluents), which is being released into the atmosphere at a rate 400% greater than expected. Its an entirely man made chemical which does not break down naturally. All those lovely flat panel screens we use, chips in computers and SOLAR PANELS are causing massive amounts of this chemical to leak. Worse, all of these electronics cannot be disposed of in a normal fashion because there are toxic chemicals inside. In the near future a warning will come with solar panels that they should not be handled by pregnant women. Then the warning will be do not touch if cell is broken. And so on. Studies which required a FOI request to come to light are being undertaken by the government on the effects of these chemicals on the thinning of the walls of cells. Somehow I suspect thinner cell walls will not be good for our health.

Anyhow - its a good read. The scales are tipping in favor of "Climate Realists" and against the "Warmists."

Isn't it bizarre that the battle for minds has even invaded the very language used to describe things. It was Global Warming to scare people, until the globe stopped warming from 2000 to 2010. Somewhere in the middle there, say around 2006, they started calling it "Climate Change", no doubt because their true science results were freaking them out (as clearly shown by the climate gate emails) and they had to keep the gravy train going, just in case we hit a cooling patch.

Now there has been another name change. Its official, and remember, the first places you see this phrase are the ones on the front lines of the propaganda war! Their goal is to pull the wool over your eyes. They exist in the media, government and academia. They exist in NGOs, non-profits of all types, especially bad are places like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace etc. Always keep that in mind when you see this phrase.

"Global Climate Disruption"

So with that phrase, no doubt crafted by a cunning linguist ;), or I should say meme-ologist perhaps, it encompasses both warming and cooling and with the appended 'disruption', can be used as a handy label for ANY sort of weather or climate driven event.

Anthropogenic Global Warming I believe to be a fraud. Global warming is a fact of science. It has been warming since around 1700. Interestingly, we have yet to exceed the highest temperatures experienced during the Medieval Warming Period.

This is an awesome interactive map that puts to shame anyone doubting all of the emerging research which debunks the Warmists.

http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html

Again, click through to this URL and see for yourself:

http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html

At almost every place on the entire planet it was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today. So why all the hysteria? I mean we are exiting an ice age from around 14,000 years ago. So yeah, its gonna get warmer. Egypt used to be a tropical paradise and now its not. Its a bummer but deal with it!

Talk about making mountains out of mole hills.

The latest scam being pulled on us is the extinctions we are causing to myriad species because of our bad bad behavior. Well why wasn't there a massive extinction event in 1250, right in the middle of the MWP? How did coral survive worldwide? Why didn't the planets entire ecosystem shatter?

Oh, whoops, its dynamic and adapts, as it has through countless ice ages. What causes mass extinctions is typically not climate, but things like comets, extended volcanism and large scale natural catastrophe. With climate, plants and animals migrate, as these changes take hundreds of years. Certainly there are probably some climate related extinctions, but none recently (as in last few thousand years).

If memory serves me correctly the last extinction event was of North American Mega Fauna - like wooly mammoths, sabertooth tigers and the like. The science is still out on what caused them to become extinct. It is interesting to note that the extinction of NA Mega-Fauna came AFTER the end of the most recent ice age.

Theories range from predation to supernovas within 50 light years.

Anyhow, I continue to be surprised by the power of the mass media to delay the day of reckoning. Even perhaps denying a day of reckoning by slowly changing the narrative, staying a step ahead of what information people are force fed. So the feces has yet to match coordinates with the fan and as more and more real science inevitably bubbles up, typically from adjacent fields, or retired climatologists, we will see this whole AGM, CO2 thing debunked. Only to be replaced by a new bogeyman, designed to keep us little people scared and looking to a large central government for the answers.

Did you know they are already in the middle of negotiations on how much money is to be transferred from rich nations to poor nations to help them make their economies green? Said another way, we are going to send money to China (probably who will be the largest recipient of such funds simply due to their large current pollution output and size of economy. Gambia, Laos, and other poor countries will get a pittance as their economies are simply not developed. But hey, a billion here and a billion there mean something in countries like that. Even more outrageous is that the United States is being sued, many lawsuits in fact, by a number of 3rd world countries for the damage we have already done to their natural ecosystems, for the fact that we are causing giant storms and other global weather phenomena due to our oversized contribution to global warming. Note that after world war 2, the USA had nearly 50% of the worlds productive capacity. Its down to around 25% now, perhaps less since Im not up on the most recent statistics.

So your tax dollars, which are scarce as it is are going to funding the American Empire, which none of our allies appreciates. Dont you think its time we left Japan, Germany and Korea? Bring our boys home and get them to work rebuilding infrastructure under the Army Corps of Engineers? They get a great marketable skill when they leave plus America gets to employ them on the massive infrastructure projects we really need. Technology is a multiplier for force projection. And we have it in spades. I'm itching to write up an article for reforming our military and the future of our military, but thats for another day.

Just know that the Elites (Al Gore, Soros, Prince Charles and the whole upper class of asshats, including much of the United States political establishment) have a lot of plans for your money, that don't include any benefits to you. And that just sucks. We need to retrench. Screw Iraq. And Afghanistan. Recent survey of Afghani people says 80% of them want the Taliban included in negotiations. People get the government they deserve. They could have had a democracy, but too many of them decided that wasnt for them. There are consequences for trying to force a form of government on a nation of people who are simply not ready for it. Iraq was probably ready. They were a well educated nation. Afghanistan, not so much. Look at the Philippines where America left her old colony as a 'democracy' and it has degenerated into a clique of powerful families, a dynastic form of what might be alluded to as governing. Or Cambodia where we spent $4 billion of mostly our tax dollars (filtered through the United Nations), and all they got in return was AIDS (courtesy of the African peacekeepers.) Hun Sen was the strongman in charge before the elections, and Hun Sen is the man in charge after the elections.

I would consider myself to be an environmentalist of a very extreme nature. But I don't seek to impose my beliefs on anyone. I don't expect government to impose it. I expect that I will have to elucidate my beliefs and if, in the marketplace of ideas, it is a successful idea and others agree, it will gain traction. Vectoring memes into society at large goes easy if the idea makes sense.

I think humanity, over the next several hundred years or so, ought to remove itself from the environment. To try to create a closed loop system so to speak. To reduce our footprint on the earth. Yes we still need large scale mining, yes we still need to extract enormous amounts of material from the planet for energy, construction etc. But this is abiotic. Meaning it does not involve or affect life of other species (or has very marginal and temporary impact). We already have DNA lines from cows, chickens, cattle and cereal crops. We needn't impact the natural ecosystem by overfishing (lets use fish farms), or by taking too much water which is not being replaced fast enough. We do need to seek a balance. But more on that another day.

Well, enough for now. The article I link to at the top of the page is really excellent. It is the cliff notes version of Global Warming plus the kitchen sink.

Too Funny!!

2010-11-05T22:41:00.001-07:00

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/10/beltway-adventure.html

Oh man this is hilarious. It gets funnier as you read it. Go ahead check it out.

Great Unwashed

2010-11-02T03:45:00.000-07:00

This just reaffirms what scientists have been trying to tell us. That progressives are statistically less informed than their opposites:

In the video numerous people just DO NOT know the difference between Kenyan and Keynesian. The ignorance is absolutely stunning. I think going from a 2 syllable word to a 3 syllable word is just tying their brain in knots. This is why they cannot understand what is so obvious to the rest of us, because it requires knowing things like, uh, 4, 5 and 6 syllable words. Like knowing that every action has an opposite reaction, that one must consider not just first order effects of one's actions, but also the secondary and tertiary effects of those actions.

Like raising taxes on the rich. They think they will get more money. The reality is the rich have lawyers that already rigged the system so that doesnt happen. Thats a second order effect.

It fits neatly with my theory that someone who self declares as a Libertarian is probably the most informed (except the ersatz-Libertarians who use the label cuz its cool, like Bill Maher.) To break with being born into a family that is staunchly democrat or republican and decide your values are closer to that of Libertarianism, well, that requires a whole lot of thinking about ones positions on a wide range of issues.

I think Tea Partiers would vote Libertarian if it had any chance of winning. But right now, it doesn't. However since the right, the conservatives and by extension (usually) the Republicans are the party with the most accurate view of reality, they have no choice but to support Republican candidates.

It has been quite some time since Republicans were the party of small government. The sad truth is they are a big government party and Democrats were the bigger government party. It has to do with power, with long term incumbency and the effect power has on people. Our political system is currently set up to utterly destroy a freshman incoming candidates ideals. They are co-opted by an army of lobbyists (which ought to be made illegal.) Everything is Washington is about power grabs. And in that regard there is little difference between the left and the right.

It is my sincere hope that as we go to vote today that we get as many new faces as humanly possible, people who are dedicated to fiscal conservancy. People who don't think deficit spending is a good idea. And that they will work to reduce the size of government..

That will however take another 2 years and the highly improbably event of getting the senate AND the presidency and not only that, but electing a president whose number one mission is financial responsibility. Who will shut down the BIA, BATF, Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development and an endless alphabet soup of destructive agencies.

Make SURE to vote today! Its the MOST important election... Until the next one :)

Google vs. Bing

2010-10-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

I'm getting real tired of writing about Google. But as I do more research, to make sure what I write is 100% accurate, more evilness just keeps showing up.

A few posts back I said that I had changed my default browser on my system to Bing after Google didn't post ANYTHING for Veteran's day. While Bing had a beautiful picture of the American Cemetery in Normandy.

From: http://www.jessicaswell.com/mt/archives/2010/06/why-i-use-bing-instead-of.php

So I guess Google thinks its more important to "honor" Pac-Man and Dr Seuss than the hundreds of thousands of lives that were given for the freedoms that we enjoy. And apparently freedoms which Google is trying to repress via selective search results.

When ClimateGate broke, there were some really serious games being played with the public as detailed here:

http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/google-gate/

Why would google show it at first, then eliminate it, then show part of it, then again later eliminate it. It shows some VERY high level manipulation. As detailed in the link above, Harold Ambler, a journalist, first dealt with a low level flunky at Google to try to get to the bottom of what was going on with the screwy search results.

After getting the run around he emailed directly to the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. HE GOT A REPLY FROM THE FLUNKY SAYING NO NEED TO CONTACT THE CEO. Which means that the CEO got the message and sent it back down. Talk about the highest levels of the company being aware of it!

Bottom line: Google manipulated search results during the height of the Climate Gate scandal, the scandal which I might add barely made it to the main stream press other than to say a "hacker" stole emails from CRU in England. Sorry, it wasnt a hacker, it was an insider with a conscience. If the truth ever comes out, I guarantee you that will be the facts. Why? Because what was released is exactly what was being asked for in very precise terms under the UK Freedom of Information Act. So the information was collected, and someone at the top banned it from being released. Then someone else on the inside decided to release it.

I used to have Google News as one of my daily stops for general news. As time went by I noticed a definite lefty slant to the news. Since they are able to put up whatever stories they choose, they were choosing ones that pushed a leftist agenda. Thats not the sort of place I want to get my news.

Besides, Bing has nice pictures, a new one every day, along with links to what that picture is about. Half the time I go to Bing I learn something new just from that alone.

Ok, lets hope this is my last post on Google, our "do no evil" friendly corporation that pays little to no US taxes and instead leaves that overseas in tax shelters like Bermuda.

* Bing is a lame name. I think Bong would have been easier to remember for most people.

Google USA Approved!

2010-10-28T04:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5dc89048-e1e3-11df-b18d-00144feabdc0.html

Wow now thats a huge relief. The FTC, Federal Trade Commission has cleared Google of wrongdoing. And here I thought Google was doing something illegal by hacking into everyones computers and stealing all sorts of data. Silly me.

The FTC cleared Google based on facts that surfaced in May of this year. The pass apparently also covers revelations that were just made known two to three DAYS ago! How convenient! In what would ordinarily be called "the normal world" the new and very explosive new charges of stealing passwords, IDs, emails, and the like would merit a brand new or re-opened investigation. But by putting this "get out of jail free" card into the public domain just days after the new charges, is an implicit guarantee that the new facts that have just surfaced will be conveniently ignored.

What an awfully practical way of disposing of this 'problem.'

So why did the FTC, the agency that is supposed to protect us from rapacious and, ahem, EVIL corporations like Google, do this?

1) Obama and Google are joined at the hip. Here, here and here.
2) The REAL story is that Google did it for a top secret NSA contract.
3) Because they can.

The level of corruption and coverup at the highest levels of government is astounding. Google-gate would have had a nice ring to it too.

Sigh.

Google Even MORE EVIL!

2010-10-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20101025/schmidt-dont-like-google-street-view-photographing-your-house-then-move/

You do know of course that the 'successful psychopath' leads directly to the CEO chair of major corporations. I would fathom a guess that a good percentage of CEOs are indeed successful psychopaths. Google's CEO Schmidt? Yeah, 100%.

and this...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323310/Google-used-Street-View-cars-emails-passwords-privacy-breach.html

Wow this just blows my mind, that Google thinks they can get away with their massive data collection and lie about it saying it was "inadvertent."

The article above explains that Google basically was "Wardriving" and hacked every single computer in the country of England. I suspect that England is not the only victim, that they probably did this EVERYWHERE.

What sort of information did they get from every single computer in England (and probably the rest of the places they mapped?)

1) Passwords and User ID's

2) Your personal emails!

3) Web pages you have visited

4) ? who knows - all your cookies, all your browsing history - its up to government inquests and hearings to get the rest of the story - hopefully.

But they claim, for now, that they only stole data from unprotected networks. Read on and I'll explain how that could mean 50% of all computers or 100% of all computers.

Their story keeps changing too.

1) First they admit they just scanned and mapped the WiFi locations, but had not collected or stored from the actual computers.

2) Then they admit they collected SSIDs, MAC addresses etc

3) Then comes the admission they accidentally collected 'fragments' of data.

4) Finally the truth emerges that they basically did the FULL HACK JOB on every wireless network they encountered.

So "Do no evil" means "hacking planet earth"? Wow.

Okay so now they come back and say it was 'inadvertent.'

I happen to know 'a little bit' about wireless hacking. Strictly book knowledge of course :).

Let me explain why this effort of their was NOT inadvertent.

1) The cars were equipped with 360 degree cameras. Those cameras did not ever need any wireless equipment to be associated with them. Simply by putting wireless equipment on the vehicles proves their intent.

2) Google actually collected data, passwords, logins, emails from users personal computers. If a government agency had done this people would be marching in the streets. Why is Google, the "do no evil company" getting a pass?

3) To collect the above said data, one needs a fairly sophisticated wireless hacking setup. Yes, thats right, hacking. You need hacking tools, and several of them, unless they wrote their own, in order to get this data. They would have had to use a combination of hardware and software like hi gain antennas, software hacking tools, the whole works.

So my guess is that they used a directional hi-gain antenna which would have been able to get through walls and other obstacles as they drove by each house. They would have had to be really fast about it too, which makes me think that they custom wrote the code, or did a code mash from off the shelf programs (like Kismet, NetStumbler, Aircrack-ng, Wireshark etc. Normally it would take a hacker some time to work through all the tools in their toolkit, parked in front of the targets house, in order to get passwords, emails etc.

So here is where I explain how ambiguous a claim it is on Googles behalf to say they only collected data on unprotected computers. It comes down to what the meaning of is, is. Or in other words, what do they mean when they say unprotected. Any wireless hacker knows that any computer can be broken into. Period, end of story. So how loose was their definition?

Once Google gets the basic data, they instantly know what type, brand and model of wireless router you have installed. Based on this information, each manufacturer of routers has a different 'default settings' for their product "out of the box." This means that any hacker already has ALL of the default passwords & login for every make and model ever produced!

Did Google use such a list to intrude? I very strongly suspect the answer is yes.

In Google's first attempt to defuse this explosive news, they initially claimed that they just had identified WiFi sites. This might be plausible, in that a lot of data is in fact flying around in the air that can be picked up with a passive scan. But it seems that with this additional disclosure Google in fact might have used a fairly common hack attack involving forced deauthentication.

In short what that would involve is Google transmitting, into your home, a trojan packet that looks like it came from the access point. It would have the effect of disconnecting them and forcing a reconnect (association request), and in the process, broadcast the networks name and SSID. This works because the management frames in 802.11 do not require authentication.

Did Google use this method to forcibly get the additional data? Who knows.

Think you were safe because you password protected your system? WRONG! Without getting into cryptographic esoterica, lets just say that at a certain point in the process of turning your password into bits and bytes, they go through hash tables, those hash tables have been totally compromised by hackers for quite some time. Aside from which any word that appears in a dictionary is very easily bypassed. If you want at least a modicum of protection go with alpha-numeric-symbolic combinations. Like 34!th*in).

Somehow I get the feeling this was a DOD contract or NSA. Google does extensive government contracting and would have been in an incredible position to collect additional information as they went on their innocent drive abouts with their cameras. Much of Google's contracting with the feds is classified. So the odds of us finding out the truth before we are too old to care about it are nil.

I have looked at various pictures showing Google rigs on top of cars. And the variety is quite surprising.

Whoa and looky what I just found while searching for links for contracts between the NSA and Google:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/24/spy-agency-amends-bid-contract-notice-google-favored/

Sounds fairly innocent, until you get to this quote:

"So we can map every single street with a (geographical) coordinate,” Brown said. “We can monitor it to see if there's any cell phones or wi-fis there. This allows the NGA to have aclassified version of what we've been using all along here in the United States, which is Google Street Maps."

Key part "to see if there are any cell phones or wi-fi's there."

Holy $][!+ Batman! I think this goes even deeper if they were out there scanning for cell phones too! Since the NSA considers the WHOLE WORLD its playground (read about Echelon here), it would have been a stroke of genius to straddle all sorts of snooping gear onto the Google "Map" vehicles.

Sounds like that do no evil plan ain't working too well. Or maybe that was just billshut from the get go. Yeah. It was.

Google IS Evil!

2010-10-24T00:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html

For a company whose motto is "Do No Evil" Google sure seems to be up to lots of no good.

For example doing wireless sniffing ON OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY! For what good reason was this needed? Contract with the feds would be my guess. Beyond that, Google would have no reason to know what your home wireless network is doing.

And if you look at my previous post, I complain about the real corporate culprits, not the fake ones, the ones victimized by the Mother Jones article. In the Mother Jones article, and as I have heard repeated from lefty sources over and over, they make it seem like S corps pay no taxes. They cleverly dress up the argument by saying they pay no Corporate Taxes, and then imply to those who don't know the difference that there is something wrong with that.

Besides, $60 BILLION goes a long ways, from just one company. Imagine if GE, Google and all the rest of the corporate crooks REALLY paid their fair share. And why isn't the government closing these loopholes? Its because GE and Google and Soros own the Establishment, mostly Democrats, but Republicans have a lot to answer for too.

So to put it straight, ALL (honest) corporations pay taxes. C Corps do it at the Corporate level and S Corps do it at the individual level. Case closed.

My complaint is with the huge companies like GE who paid zero in income tax in America. Now we know that Google is in on the act with something called "income shifting." Things like this are only possible with the largest of corporations. Your local small to mid sized company doesn't have the resources or the wherewithal to play these tax games. Large multinationals do.

Next time you think "Google Does No Evil" just remember that they only paid less than 3% in taxes. When the rest of us corporations S and C are paying 39%. They do it by keeping the money AWAY from America in something called income shifting.

It ought not be legal, but it is. Because these huge corporations pay to have laws written for them. Which brings me to my final point. We MUST have separation of powers. Separation of corporate interests from state interests.

And remember, Google IS Evil! Why do they celebrate the dumbest things with their logo and then conveniently 'forget' to celebrate national holidays (but only the patriotic ones) like Veterans Day. Bing celebrated it and on that day I permanently switched by default browser to Bing. Same results.

I think its fine, and fair, for anyone to engage in tax savings strategies. But to pay no taxes or such a small sliver of taxes as to be virtually nothing, that is a crime. Indeed, the IRS defines it as a violation of tax law if an entity takes an action which is solely designed to avoid paying taxes. Thats their catch-all rule.

If you or I were to start stuffing money in Bermuda I would imagine we would get a visit fairly quickly from the IRS. Why do corporate giants get a pass on this?

Ma Jones Propaganda

2010-10-20T04:28:00.001-07:00

If you ever hear someone saying that some US Corporations pay no taxes, they are probably lying to you*. Or at the very least not telling you the entire truth. This issue came up recently with Obama and Gang, through the person of Austan Goolsbee (one of Obama's economic advisors), said the following, trying to demonize the company Koch Industries:

"So in this country, we have partnerships, S corps, we have LLCs—we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms. You know, Koch Industries, I think, is one, is a multibillion dollar business, and so that creates a narrower base because we got literally something like 50 percent of the business income in the US is going to businesses that don’t pay any corporate income tax."

Two lies (or should I say words carefully crafted to be technically correct but mislead the reader to think something entirely different) jump out.

1) Goolesbee implies that S corps do not pay any taxes. (The tax IS paid, just not at the corporate level, it is the owners that pay as individuals, a very narrow distinction, almost without a difference that he fails to inform the reader about, thus leading the reader to the conclusion that S corps are 'cheating' somehow)

2) He also implies that 'this creates a narrower base' - a narrower base of what? He can only mean tax paying entities right? So another lie.

Notice the careful word crafting. This guy is good. Or his speech writer is.

First of all I find it reprehensible that they are trying to attack and demean the people and companies who contribute to their opponents. And if Republicans do it, I would condemn it as well. It is an attack on the freedom of speech. If, because of their donations, Koch Industries is now the target of an IRS audit or other malicious government treatment, it will scare them and others from contributing to candidates they support. This would have a chilling effect on our democracy. So if the right has Koch and the left has Soros I'd call that even (except one is evil, pure evil and an unrepentant Nazi collaborator, I'll let you guess which one :).

Here are the FACTS on corporate taxation:

There are two types of corporations. C and S. Subchapter C corporations are mostly used by very large companies who are public or plan on going public. The benefits of being a C corp are that you can have unlimited number of shareholders AND you can accumulate vast amounts of capital (such as Apple, Microsoft and many other companies have done).

C Corporations pay taxes at the corporate level. Additionally, stockholders, if they get dividends (how rare is that these days!) or sell stock that have gone up in value must pay taxes on both of those. This is what is known as the "Double Taxation" for C Corporations, that taxes are paid once by the corporation and a second time by the stockholders, of whom there may be millions. There are also no (well, few) restrictions on foreign ownership on C Corporations, such as say Citibank, whose second largest shareholder is a wealthy Saudi prince.

Subchapter S corporations are mostly used by smaller or mid sized companies (and some large ones), but ones that are not planning on going public and/or not planning on having more than 75 shareholders. The line about "paying no taxes" is technically true in that at the corporate level there are few if any taxes that must be paid. However it is a lie in that the taxes are paid by the individual owners. The owners of a S corp must be American citizens.

One could even make the argument, although I don't agree with it, that S corps are MORE American and benefit the American economy to a greater degree than C corps. C Corps send dividends and capital gains to overseas investors to the tune of (Im pulling a number outta my butt again) maybe hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Whereas S corps, with the requirement that all owners be Americans, keep that money in the United States, where the 'ripple effect' can work its magic in the form of additional jobs, deeper pools of capital available for new enterprises and so on. The reason I don't really subscribe to the above argument, even though it has some valid points, is that in a global economy, we really should not care what money goes where. We should be glad that the Saudi prince invested in our economy as that is a benefit to everyone involved. Foreigners who invest in America ought to be duly rewarded, just as Americans who invest in other countries. People who tell you to "buy American" simply do not realize that the supply chains are such that no product can be said to be made anywhere. And to get a sticker saying "made in America" is as easy as doing some final minor assembly in the US at a minimal cost.

Here is the link to the Mother Jones article which is full of misleading information:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/goolsbee-koch-industries-irs-scandal

And here are a list of the lies that Mother told us:

1) They claim the paragraph I quote from Goolesbee is a "slip-up by an aide." Uh, bullcrap, it was a carefully crafted message, wordsmithed by a pro from beginning to end, including the "uh, I think" in order to offer the shelter of ambiguity when the bullshit is uncovered.

2) The article states:

"That report noted businesses were increasingly eschewing corporate structures in favor of partnerships and other so-called "pass-through" entities to duck corporate income taxes."

This is just plain silly. If there is a trend for more businesses to file as LLC's its because LLC's are still fairly new and of course the trend is going to be going up. LLCs are also cheaper than either C or S corps. It also says that businesses are 'eschewing corporate structures in favor of partnerships and other so-called pass-through entities" - this is self contradictory. There are two types of corporations - S and C. One is a pass-through the other is not. But both are CORPORATIONS! Again a very crafty wording meant to mislead people. They make it seem like this is something new, that people are somehow cheating, trying to 'duck' taxes. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth.

Both types pay taxes just at different levels. Each type is meant for totally different businesses with totally different goals. They go on to say that it is done in order to duck corporate income taxes. Again, bullshit. If you own an S corp you might not be paying CORPORATE taxes but you sure are going to pay the same amount as an individual. There is NO escaping taxes! Additionally the IRS requires you to pay yourself a salary that is reasonable. Since you are the owner, reasonable means more than anyone else for the most part. So you are paying all of the payroll taxes. Then finally, the next type of tax that owners of S corps must pay are dividend taxes. That is the taxes on their profits. Unlike a C corp which can just keep profits year in and year out, an S corp must pay out all earnings and taxes must be paid in full on those earnings. In practice it means that the owners still leave all of their after tax money in the company, because otherwise the enterprise would fold for lack of capital.

Somehow they are trying to brainwash people into thinking that S corp business owners "pay no taxes" and that is patently false. But I keep hearing it said over and over by the left, so I am finally pissed off enough about it to write something.

3) On the issue of Obama's people looking at confidential tax records, could be right. Who knows. But Mother Jones contention that the guy got the data wrong and therefore could not have been snooping is unfounded. We DONT KNOW if he got it wrong because we DONT KNOW the if Koch is a C or S corp. That data, as far as we know, is not yet public. So maybe yes, maybe no, who really knows. The Koch's did say they pay Corporate Taxes, but that just might be a clever way of implying they are a C corp when in fact they aren't. There are so many corporate taxes that are paid, not just the Federal Corporate Income Tax On Revenue. There are even taxes the IRS illegally enforces that references Kyoto, for which the US was never a signatory! And thats a Federal Corporate Tax! So yes, S corps actually do pay many different taxes at the corporate level.

So one large load of crap from the left, and maybe one tiny poopie from the right.

* There are exceptions, where corporations in fact DO NOT pay any taxes. The corporations that are REALLY ducking taxes are the huge, mostly highly political, entities like GE, Obamas favorite, who paid zero income taxes in the United States, preferring to use something called "price transfer" to keep profits in offshore locations. To me that is cheating the government. The huge companies that relocate their corporate headquarters to Bermuda (Like George Soros, known and unrepentant Nazi collaborator) or places like that. Corporate welfare, subsidies, handouts and pork barrel spending to help congresspersons buddies. Thats the stuff they ought to be talking about. Not making it seem like good honest Americans who use the time honored S corporate structure are somehow 'not paying taxes.' Small companies, especially S corps, do not have the resources or opportunity to incorporate in Bermuda or create offshore entities for playing price transfer tricks.

For additional information I offer the following links:

http://www.quickmba.com/law/corporation/

http://www.themoneyalert.com/Corp-Entity-Table.html

http://www.maxfilings.com/incorporation-knowledge-center/differences-between-c-corporations-s-corporations.php

Compendium

2010-10-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

Summary of Silliness:

Osama Bin Laden Goes Green:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6901DG20101001

(now he is Al Gore's BFF. Also, complaining about the relief effort? How about stop killing aid workers and we might be able to get aid in there eh?)

After 65 Years We Are Still Supporting The Geezers:
http://dailycaller.com/2010/10/13/taxing-americans-to-protect-—-and-occupy-—-the-europeans/

(65 Years of America paying the bill for Europe's defense. Do they really need us there? Why are we there? Its time to bring all of our overseas troops HOME! I will, in a future post, explain my personal view of tomorrows US Military and how new technology will ultimately change our ability to project force. We do not need 150,000 soldiers in non-war zones, especially where we arent even wanted (thats YOU Korea and Japan!) With us paying for their defense, they have enjoyed a higher standard of living, were able to spend more on their (now failed) socialism and essentially deprive Americans the right to the benefits of our hard earned paid in tax dollars.)

The "Undocumented Law Un-Abiderers" No One Wants:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/28/mexican-lawmakers-say-worsening-mexico-violence-returning-criminals/

(Okay okay so I could have just said the Illegal Alien Felons, but that wouldn't have been politically correct enough. So Mexico is complaining about all the additional rapes and murders committed by felons that America has deported back to Mexico. I guess they would have preferred those rapes and murders happen north of the border. Sometimes I wonder if the Government of Mexico simply buses their overflowing prisons to the border and just sets them free to go north. I mean that would be pretty smart wouldn't it? Castro did it and it worked for him.

My suggestion: It seems to only ones who wants felons and illegal aliens to vote are the Democrats, so why not house them with registered Democrats? Is that ok with you guys?)

Thorium You Say?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with-a-nuclear-dash-for-thorium.html

(Thorium as a replacement for nuclear fuel? One ton of Thorium can replace 200 tons of Uranium. Thorium is cheap, clean and non-radioactive. It leaves NO hazardous waste that we need to warn people 20,000 years in the future about. The United States (and England & Australia) have Thorium up the wazoo (in technical terms it means we can power the world for 100,000's of years on known reserves. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed, does not require expensive and time consuming isotope separation, AND its IMPOSSIBLE to weaponize! In the 1940s, scientists were planning on using Thorium for commercial purposes but were stopped by the US Government because the government NEEDED plutonium for weapons. Maybe its time that we gave Thorium another chance. Besides, its named after THOR, the mighty Norse god, how cool is that. But that would be a good idea. Can't have that!)

Oops, Maybe The Sun DOES Matter:
From: The New Scientist:

The sun's activity has a place in climate science

FOR many years, any mention of the sun's influence on climate has been greeted with suspicion.

People who believe human activity has no effect on the climate staked a claim on the sun's role, declaring it responsible for the long-term warming trend in global temperatures. Climate scientists were often uneasy about discussing it, fearful that any concession would be misunderstood by the public and seen as an admission that climate sceptics are right.

No one has ever denied that the sun has an effect on climate. (Ed: Not true, if not included in computer models that governments base massive decisions on, what else is that BUT complete and total denial!) But the consensus view has always been that variations in the sun's activity, such as the 11-year sunspot cycle, have insignificant effects. While this remains true, the latest findings show that the sun might be significant on a more regional scale. It seems changes in solar activity can have consequences ranging from higher rainfall in the tropics to extreme weather events in the north ...

(Okay so that giant ball of fire we call the 'sun' - 99% of all the mass in the entire solar system - that gives us pink and salmon colored skin people sunburns (never seen a white person in my life, have you?), and that gets hot enough in some places to cook eggs on a sidewalk, can actually affect our weather? DOH! Can you imagine that the "computer models" (that are deeply flawed and will never work to begin with), ignored the sun as an input variable!

Only NOW, decades later after a 10 year long period of cooling (that coincides with a major lull in solar activity) do they finally appear to admit that it *might* affect the climate. Well considering that this is perhaps - hopefully - the only branch of science that takes conclusions first and then looks around for selected data to support those conclusions, I suppose this was inevitable.

LOL, next they are going to say that the Milankovitch cycles might have something to do with climate. But whoops, those were never part of climate models either!)

It just never ends. Sigh.

When Taleb Speaks...

2010-10-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

... Everybody listens.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-25/-black-swan-author-taleb-says-obama-s-stimulus-made-economic-crisis-worse.html

Nassim Taleb is my hero. His work on wall street as a quant, creating massive computer driven models for stock prediction prepared him well for his next role. That of debunking the entire field. He wrote a book a few years ago called "The Black Swan." Since then he has written many additional books. He is a real genuine original thinker. We have so precious few in this world.

To sum up his book, The Black Swan:

1) Computer models are pure bull shit. Nothing can predict the future.
2) They cannot ever account for the unpredictable
3) It is the unpredictable which truly changes paradigms
4) The only thing that is actually predictable is that things are unpredictable
5) The best plan of action is "Plan for the worst, hope for the best.", not a Taleb quote, but common sense wisdom.

The critical mistake that Obama and dems always make is the focus on jobs. To 'create jobs.' But you cannot create a job. A job is the end result of a process. That process starts with a healthy business environment, one which is favorable to the starting of new businesses and the expansion of current ones. From there flows the capital for growth which in turn creates jobs.

So an analogy might be something like this. Someone says 'we need to create trees.' 'Lets create trees!!', but you first need to prepare the soil. Lets say thats the level playing field for all businesses (unlike today where government connected companies have a huge advantage). Then you need to plant seeds. Lets say thats the equivalent of making capital available to those businesses. No need for Government agencies, banks can do a perfectly fine job of financing businesses. If a banker turns you down, go rethink your idea. If you still believe in it, there are angel investors and family & friends. Next step in our analogy is once its planted, it needs to grow. That requires watering, sunshine and a lot of bullshit. Well, who said business was easy, it ain't. That part of up to the entrepreneur, something America seems to have in spades. But they won't risk quitting their job for a speculative venture during a downturn, whereas they might during a time where they can either get their old job back or easily get another job.

Some things we did during our struggling early years:
- Went to Comdex and put our flyers on competitors tables and in the lunch areas (for free)
- Made tables out of (2) filing cabinets and melamine particle boards
- Got free boxes from Fed Ex, then shipped by UPS :)
- At auctions of bankrupt competitors, dumpster dived for invoices that were thrown out, and got tons of customer lists for free.
- Wrote a script that downloaded one of the "Big Yellow Page" sites entire database of computer dealers - again getting a free mailing list that we then were able to call, fax, email and mail to. (About 100,000 at that time). Tip: When trying to pull data out of online databases that require you to input a name, just go through all the vowels, one at a time. A, E, I, O, U. And the entire database is yours :)
- Worked for 10 years living on the cheap before finally being able to pull capital out of the company and use for ourselves. But the first 10 years were all about trying to survive the annual tax hit, which took away almost 50% of our capital. Its lower now, but in my opinion it can't be low enough. 10 to 15% I would say. Something like Hong Kong has. I would strongly support luxury and consumption taxes if by the same token they reduced taxes on productive activities (i.e. capital gains.)

You succeed by making your own rules. You succeed by zigging when everyone else zags. You succeed by being different and bold and having a vision of where you want to go. Bend the rules, but don't break them.

Following the herd is our instinct. Safety in numbers sort of thing. But like the Wall Street quants who also follow the herds, creating ever more complex 'computer models' of the real world, thinking this will lead them to ever more accurate predictions, are themselves falling subject to the herd mentality and the fallacy that there is safety there. There isn't.

How many times have you read headlines that read something like "Average Cost of New Jobs Created By Stimulus $200,000 each." I read something like that every single day. About the absolute waste that our stimulus dollars have gone to. In the effort to "create jobs." Obama has the cart before the donkey.

Nassim Taleb has said that we ought to have worked on paying down the debt instead of embarking on this insanely massive spending binge, which has done nothing to improve our lot except embarrass a lot of democrats who had promised a lot to get this load of crap passed into law and have delivered little.

So what would that have meant? It would have meant more short term instability at a period of great instability. It would have meant Goldman Sachs would have gone down, in addition to CitiGroup and AIG. But those are GOOD THINGS! The creative destruction of Capitalism at work.

Those banks sucked. To prove it, the market was about to subject them to the harshest punishment which they well deserved. That of bankruptcy.

Only because of their political weight did they survive (see my theories on separation of business interests and government, similar to separation of church and state). The incestuous relationship between government, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street would shock the average person who is unaware of this. Goldman Sachs, played the role of advisor to their own bailout! How can anyone get more corrupt than that? Yet Obama and Geithner both knowingly allowed it to happen.

Our tax money went from AIG to Goldman to Euro Banks (at 100 cents on the dollar I might add, extraordinarily unusual for distressed debt - actually, unheard of.) Now Europe is recovering, again thanks to the American taxpayer and we are suffering as a result.

Bankruptcy allows for bad businesses to either come under new management or to be parted out and sold off. In the short term there is pain as layoffs happen and as disruptions are felt. In the long run a much healthier economy emerges. One in which the winners, or the ones who have run their businesses the right way end up with more assets under their control, and those who have not done things the right way end up with less (or no) assets under their control. Thats Capitalism. It works. When government intervenes as it did with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, thats when it becomes dysfunctional. Some people blame capitalism for the ills of the world. But it is inaccurate. The blame must rest with the governments which interfere with markets creating false demand, distorting pricing methods and trying to create social engineering with market intervention. That is a sure recipe for disaster.

And guess what. We are headed for the same, identical disaster as before. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still open for business! They should have been shut down and the private sector taken over. There is no need for a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Zero. The world would have been far better off if Barney Frank and friends had not created these monstrosities. Which were, and are, part and parcel, wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, as is the United States (for now).

Ruling by Fiat

2010-10-12T13:23:00.001-07:00

No that doesn't mean running the country from the inside a crappy European car. It means running the country like you are a dicktator. Obama is the only president in memory who has done more by fiat, just saying make it so, than any other president.

Granted, I didn't pay much attention to things under Reagan, I was pretty young. Under Clinton, I'd say my dad capped it up best "At least he is making love, not war." And Bush, well, Im no fan of war, not by a long shot, but maybe some ass kicking was due in Afghanistan. I didn't have the intelligence data that the president gets. Ditto with Iraq. I do think Bush had a priapic predilection for Iraq since day one. To try to paraphrase his thought process, it might be something like "That guy tried to kill mah daddy." (with a Texas twang to it). Well it *could* have happened that way? :)

I think that means i really didn't like any president, ever. But thats besides the point.

This is the point:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2010-10-07-healthlaw07_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

"Obama's Department of Health & Human Services has exempted 29 companies from certain mandates under the new ObamaCare" is what the linked article says in a nutshell,

There are indeed good reasons for doing this. Any company with a lot of minimum wage workers will be in the same bind. But what about the other 38,343 (I just made up a number) companies who find themselves in the same bind as McDonalds and Burger King and don't have the political firepower to be heard?

So surely this is what Pelosi meant when she said "We need to pass it to find out whats in it." I would have thought that like to be a joke from a lame comedian, but its actually what she said. When our leaders pass laws with NO CLUE about how its going to impact the country, its time to get rid of those leaders WHOLESALE. They have forfeited their right to rule.

All of these insane laws, from ObamaCare to the new financial regulations put incredible burdens on American businesses. We do not know what the future holds for us. The present is bad enough and just to survive we have had to do some very serious and painful belt tightening. Thats to survive today. But what about when these new rules come into effect?

What about the law that requires we (I mean all of Americas small businesses collectively, not just my own), file a 1099 for every single transaction over $600 dollars. This is such an outrage! It will create the mother of all paperwork blizzards ever known. Sure its a 1 or 2 page document, but most of my transactions ARE above $600! It means tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand or more separate 1099's that we will need to file. It means chasing down customers to get the paperwork, it means self auditing to ensure we have fully complied. It means responding to a similar number of requests from our vendors.

What do I do when someone didn't comply and went out of business. How many workers will I need in order to comply? How much will it cost to make this requirement a part of my business flow process. And this is just one of many, many new rules and regulations that are being issued out of DC like buckshot on automatic. This, from a Marxian president who simply does NOT understand business and most certainly does not understand small business, where the small business person literally has everything on the line. Banks do not loan money without a greater amount of assets behind it, so trust me when I tell you that when a small business owner goes down, typically their home and all of their assets go down with it.

The insurance part gets real scary. Its one of our larger expenses. We already get screwed by insurance companies enough as it is (both as employer and as employee.) But adding expenses to the insurance company (by for example requiring kids to be on policies until age 26), will guarantee that they pass through those costs. So far I have read that costs might increase by up to 30%! In one single year! I can assure you that structurally, no business and no community of small business (and even large ones), can absorb such a large hit, especially during a recession. So yes, everyone is just sitting on the sidelines freaking out about what to do. This stops innovation, it stops new projects or ideas from being launched which are the wellspring from which capitalism grows, ergo, benefitting everyone.

ObamaCare needs to be repealed, 100%. And then we need our new set of leaders to go back to the drawing board and find ways that our nation can collectively reduce the net cost of health care.

There seems to be a super secret, yet so very obvious reason why our healthcare is so costly. But why is no one stating the obvious? Is it just easier to demonize insurance companies (whom i hate too), or the drug companies or medical instrument companies? But they really aren't at fault. They exist in a market. If they are too expensive the customer will switch. We switch health insurers almost yearly to try to keep our costs under some degree of control.

No, the real problem is that we are living longer. That the drugs, the medical system has become so advanced that people who would have died at a much earlier age and now living much longer. And in many (not all), cases they are living better and productive lives for sometimes additional decades. The value of that shows up in the cost of our healthcare. Its unavoidable. You add in the baby boom generation going through the medically most costly years of their lives and yes, we have a problem on our hands.

Comparison to European countries is impossible for two reasons. One their birthrates are on a steady decline and two they have no massive influx of illegals like we do. Our medical systems carry an estimated 10 million illegal aliens, who often show up at the emergency room where all human decency obliges us to treat them. Aside from that, there is obvious epic failure in the entire Euro zone as they go through their so called 'austerity' which means going to systems like America USED TO HAVE. Its insane that we are both swapping operating systems at a time when proof is everywhere that socialism never worked. Its like going from XP to Vista, but worse, its going from XP SP2 back to Windows Me or Windows 98. So we have a recession, it happens. Doesn't mean you downgrade the entire economy to a failed system of Marxist inspired Keynesian experiments.

Most certainly the answer is not some insanely complicated democrat inspired legislation that no one can make sense of. The answer is not Obama giving exemptions (many, not just in this case of the 29 companies like McDonalds) to smooth over rough spots and all of the unintended consequences of poorly considered legislation.

The answer is in collecting all ideas, scouring the world for best practices and then putting together a common sense package that will collectively reduce costs for ALL parties involved.

Additionally I would suggest not passing a single bill that is massive, but separating it out into many hundreds of bills. Simpler ones that actuaries can understand and explain to the voting public. Ideas that Republicans have already suggested (and got shot down because they currently have NO VOICE in American politics). Such as breaking down the state barriers to competition. There are a lot of little ideas that can be passed into law fairly quickly that will chip away that the problem. Year in and year out as long as we have a pragmatic approach to this the problem can be solved. This is America. We are a country of problem solvers. yYt today those problem solvers are shackled because America is currently a 100% wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. This needs to change and FAST!!!

I really hate that name, they don't deserve the right to have democracy alluded to in their party name. They need to rebrand as either socialist party or progressive and stop lying to us. If there were any democracy, ObamaCare would never have passed. This abortion of a law passed because of procedural games and huge kickbacks to certain states (again there is that ruling by fiat - uh, not ruling from a Fiat.)

Also, just stating the obvious, but its animal cruelty to have their symbol be a jackass. Where is PETA when you need them? Their symbol, if symbology were used properly would be an inert rock. With sharp edges.

Republicans with an elephant, thats cool. They are powerful, workhorses when trained by humans and never forget. They have huge brains too :).

Except that Republicans DID FORGET! They forgot that overspending was bad. They forgot (under Bush) that bailing out bad companies removes moral hazard and allows bad managers to continue to be rewarded and the companies that competed and were better are now under a double burden of not having government support during a recession.

I really hope this new crop of elected officials are truly NEW. Toss out the trash on both sides. America must stop being an Empire. And we are an empire by virtue of our actions, involving ourselves in every single country and trying to control the world. If we continue this pattern, our empire will collapse in financial ruin. Screw Pakistan. Why do we give them money? Screw Egypt. Why do they deserve anything? We prop up a despot who is set to turn the country over to his son. We need to pull out of world affairs, bring our soldiers home, and let them do the greatest service possible that one can render their country. Rebuild it. Make it more efficient. Update the electrical grid, update the roads and other infrastructure projects. Do the massive engineering that we are (or were) so well known for.

Do we really need hundreds of thousands of soldiers in over 100 countries around the world, 90% of which are no where near a front line? Screw Korea. They hate us anyways and don't want us there. So lets do them the favor of pulling out and let them settle their own problems. They have gotten a 50 year free ride from the America taxpayer, underfunding their own defense costs so they could pour that into industry. Ditto with Japan. They are rich enough to shoulder their own burdens. We can project power anywhere in the world from our bases on little outposts (like Diego Garcia) and our mainland, should it be called for.

And no president should ever rule by fiat. Its unconstitutional to make laws that people are exempted from. Its bad lawmaking. Bad Obama, bad, bad, bad...

(I'm having visions of scotch tape and rubber bands holding the ObamaCare laws together. Not comforting at all. And all we are gonna get as time goes on is more white out (exemptions) and scotch tape & rubber bands, short term fixes for a fatally flawed law that no one understood.)

First Sightings?

2010-10-03T21:55:00.001-07:00

Its amazing how often 'conventional wisdom' is just plain wrong, especially when it comes to the history of firsts. Seeing Bing's search engine title page the other day got me thinking...

Here is a screenshot of the title page for the Bing search engine on 9-20-2010.

Crop circles. Most people think they started fairly recently. But in fact the first recorded sighting comes from the 1600's in the form of a wood carving:

In the Wikipedia Entry attached to this photo is the following quote:

"The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire is the title of an English woodcutpamphlet published in 1678.

The pamphlet tells of a farmer who, refusing to pay the price demanded by a labourer to mow his field, swore that he would rather that the Devil mowed it instead.

According to the pamphlet, that night his field appeared to be in flame. The next morning, the field was found to be perfectly mowed - unnaturally perfect, in fact.

This pamphlet, and the accompanying illustration, is often cited as among the first recorded cases ofcrop circles by cereologists."

I for one think that most crop circles today are hoaxes. However 400 years ago? I dunno about you, but I would think that during that period of time, most people were more concerned about surviving than creating hoaxes. So that lends it somewhat greater credence. Along with that weird bit about the fields being aflame.

For simple crop circles I can imagine that some sort of combination of odd atmospheric phenomenon might be responsible. For the highly complex ones, I can only imagine that some clever people are behind them. Aliens? No chance. Messages so cryptic that we cant solve them are not 'communication.' So while there may be a, uh, grain of truth to crop circles, Im still in the category of doubter for probably 99% of them.

The other famous 'first' is the first sighting of a UFO. Was it the WW2 pilots who were reporting 'Foo Fighters'... Interesting Video:

Or was it the very famous sighting in 1947 by Kenneth Arnold, the first person to use the term Flying Saucer. Note in this link, there are other reports going back to 1870 showing UFOs !!

But in fact no, UFO sightings have gone back further than you can possibly imagine.

Try these pictures out, appearing in Renaissance artwork! Note the level of detail and how well they compare to photographs of much more recent vintage:

The artwork from hundreds of years ago bears a striking resemblance to a UFO sighted over Florida fairly recently.

But we are just getting started. Take a look at these:

Starting to see the similarities? Round object in the clouds, with some sort of light emitting from it. And its not just ordinary light, its collimated or laser light. Normal light spreads out with distance. This light does not. For artists, especially the Renaissance artists whose realistic depictions defined the era, either made up something they never observed or they observed something that ought not to have been possible. They are describing, in their artwork, a property of light that mankind only discovered in the mid 20th century, laser light, or light that travels a long distance without diffusing.

But wait, there's more... and yeah, you're gonna have to wait :) - I need to photoshop the pictures to sizes that wont give me errors.

*All of these photographs are taken with permission from a book by Matthew Hurley, entitled: The Alien Chronicles. This BLOG post is a very short version of a much longer one I have half written. His book is just packed with so much overwhelming information its hard to whittle some of it down into a summary.

A scan of the cover of the book is here. I count Matt Hurley as a good friend whom I have known for nearly a decade. Seeing his book finally make it to print about 6 or 7 years ago was a real reward.

Weird Science

2010-10-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

Just how weird are these 'greens'? Take a look at the 10:10 Movement's propaganda video below. This is a REAL advertisement that ran in the UK until average people started seeing it and reacted with outrage. What you see in the clip is the greens forcing propaganda on children and killing the ones that do not agree. To them, this is their normal. To think that 'greens' would have given the, um, green light, and um, let this see the light of day, is proof enough that these people are 7 cans short of a 6 pack.

and...

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/196642

Well the report on the review of the IPCC (the lead UN Climate Change body) is out and the news is bad, for them. Good for anyone who would like less politics and more science to get done.

The honest truth is that we do not know if the earth is warming or cooling. We do not know if these are micro or macro trends. We do not know what impact the sun has, although solar cycle number 23 (the one that is just getting started right now - and yes they number them like that) promises to be a memorable one, which I will discuss in a moment. We do know that warmer climate is always associated with a proliferation of life and colder climate with the exact opposite. We do know that higher CO2 concentrations in the air fill the earth with bountiful plant life.

We do not know if humans are causing global weather to change.

We DO know that humans are causing a lot of local damage to aquifers, local fisheries and other resources and these issues just do not get attention because of the overwhelming funding for an issue which is probably not an issue at all. Even if it were true that we were changing the climate, its part of the natural cycle of things for the earths inhabitants to change its environment. During the Carboniferous period of the Paleozoic era, plants exhaled so much oxygen that the atmosphere became highly oxygenated, thus allowing for animal life that could not have existed before. Oxygen is a very powerful molecule and was a great engine to power myriad new forms of animal life. The balance between oxygen, nitrogen and trace elements, like CO2, has always evolved over time. There is not a normal atmosphere. There never was. Climate change is the norm. I think even a snail could survive sea level rises of .01 cm per 100 years. They do just fine with the tides caused by the moon, which are many orders greater than any predicted sea level rise. I think we will all be just fine, no matter what the environment has in store for us. However, you can always count on massive loss of life due to the "Black Swan" effect, which is the sudden and catastrophic event which is unexpected. Such as the earthquake off Indonesia which killed an astounding 250 million people.

Had normal science been allowed to follow its normal course. Had skeptics not been drummed out of the business, had Stephen Schnieder and his wife not double dipped and were both 'climate scientists' and sellers of doom and gloom books (like many other 'climate scientists'.) Had these things happened differently we might now know some answers. Instead data was lost (deliberately?), destroyed, massaged and co-opted to present a unified narrative.

That narrative being:

"We are doomed unless we stop CO2 and give the 3rd world lots of our money."

The agenda of the far far far left, so far left they are communists. When the so called 'Useful Idiots' of communism in the west lost their religion, they turned, en masse to the environment. What better way to advance their agenda (redistribution of wealth) than by stealth. How did policy on changes in weather come to include massive transfers of wealth to the third world? Not a single western democracy on this planet has had a popular vote for this concept. None, anywhere. The closest anyone came was in Australia which was roundly rejected by a very large percentage of voters.

If its green, its wrong. If its 'progressive', its not. If its supported by a union, its anti-American. If Soros or any of his cohorts are involved, its anti-human. If the left supports it, it probably means its a bad idea.

Trillions In Debt

2010-10-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.nationalreview.com/battle10/244695/bennet-bombshell-trillions-debt-nothing-show-it-michael-sandoval

"Trillions In Debt and NOTHING To Show For It"

That is a direct quote from Senator Michael Bennett (D: Colorado)

The article above says it better than I could.

Sad. Just sad, how our hard earned tax dollars just go up in government smoke. Its like their are rolling their congressional joints with "Humboldt's best" (a crop that ought to be taxed) and the rolling papers are trillion dollar bills. Same result.

Is this what happens when the generation that thought the Beatles were the great philosopher kings of their generation get into power? Yeah I thought so.

One Nation Rally?

2010-10-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

What if someone held a rally, and only the organizers showed up?

I think you would get something like this:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2010/10/washington-rally-liberal-groups-/1?csp=hf

"One Nation Working Together" is a coalition of 400+ groups. Wow! That sounds HUGE. Considering that each coalition member sent some form of delegate, and some even sent large contingents, like AFL-CIO, SEIU and other "screw the union members and spend their pension funds subverting our democratic system" type groups, and the turnout was only in the "several thousands"?!?!?! Wow.

So yeah, it sounds to me like just the organizers showed up. What else would you have expected? When they use day laborers (non unionized) to run picket lines, you know their cause is hopeless.

Its time to make Unions illegal and free the workers! Let the bad workers get fired, let the good workers make more money! Freedom must and WILL eventually prevail in the job market. And stop letting members dues AND their pensions get spent on politics.

As my dad was dying he had to sue his own union to get years of unpaid pension payments. By the time he got it, between the lawyers and people who were supposed to 'help him', he ended up with zero out of an $80,000 settlement. Thats unions for you. They screw you when you work for them and when you depend on them to pay out claims for medical, retirement etc, they are WORSE than the WORST insurance company.

If I hadn't seen it happen to my own dad I would not have believed it could be so bad. Don't trust a union - EVER! They make all the workers 'equal', suppressing talent and promoting losers. They are thugs, mafia and criminals at best.

MAKE UNIONS ILLEGAL!!! It will help save America. Our internet and high tech sure didn't need unions for workers to be well compensated and earn insane amounts of money. And they still don't. Unions 100% guarantee jobs get exported to China. It reduces American competitiveness by inserting a layer of expenses which are too much for any company to withstand. Ergo, jobs go to where they will be able to make a profit, which in todays world means China.

Hello, Obama, and your US Customs Commissioner, a trade war with China is a very BAD idea. Its going on right now, started about a year ago and the public barely knows its happening. A few snippets get out here and there, but rest assured its happening, and its creating massive extinction events across the American economy among importers and distributors. In trade wars no one wins. China and America have such radically different economies that we don't even compete in the same markets (except for very rare circumstances.)

Oh, and the reason we no longer get counts on people at rallies like this is because the 'Million Man March" sued the US Parks service because they were peeved that they didnt exactly get counted as a million, not even close. So their answer, LAWSUIT! Thanks a lot MMM for now denying the public honest information about rally attendance. Now we have to rely on the unreliable sources, namely the groups themselves. So did Beck and Palin draw 500,000 people or 2 million? Who knows. I would have trusted the parks service estimate. They had been doing it for a long time until the MMM lawsuit. But for One Nation to self admit to several thousand is pretty hilarious. I wonder if they inflated those numbers too? Hmm.

Must See Video!

2010-09-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

This video sums up the current mood of our country better than anything I have read or seen lately.

Enjoy:

Deception 'Settled'?

2010-09-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/meltdown_of_the_climate_consensus_G0kWdclUvwhVr6DYH6A4uJ

Echoing Al Gore famous last words 'the science is settled', IPCC's investigation of itself turns out to be surprisingly honest! Wow, we actually had some scientists with backbone enough to be honest. My heartfelt congratulations and undying appreciation going out the the entire team that investigated the IPCC.

What they found, proves, that there was deception, junk science, enormous political influence and all manner of malfeasance. So we can with great confidence say, "There was deception, that part is settled." The IPCC and all of its previous work must be thrown out and we need to go back to the drawing board.

Political influence, most of it coming from the communist inspired left, wishing to use this cause to 'redistribute wealth' from rich nations to poor ones in the form of carbon credit offsets, has set real science, on what could still prove to be a very serious subject, back decades.

IPCC Chairman Pachauri, (the dude who also does side work as the caveman on Geico commercials), personally benefitted from the claim of the Himalayan Glaciers Melting by 2035. Seems that his own company, 'Energy and Resources Institute' was awarded 300,000 Pounds by the idiotic Carnegie Corp. Not only that but he suckered 2.5 million pounds out of the EU (paid for by the European taxpayers).

Rajendra Pachauri Relaxing At Home (below):

And Rajendra Pachauri on the set to film another Geico Commercial (Below):

His training as a railroad engineer certainly qualifies him to be cast as a Neanderthal in a TV spot. Chairman of IPCC, not so much.

Uh Oh - US Debt?!

2010-09-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.news.com.au/business/breaking-news/us-government-hiding-true-amount-of-debt/story-e6frfkur-1225926567256#ixzz106MjZzOz

You mean our debt is even WORSE than the mind boggling $12 trillion that Obama has racked up?

Quote:

"Mr Kotlikoff and Mr Moylan agree US national debt is much more than the official $US13.4 trillion number, but they disagree over how to add up the exact number.

Mr Kotlikoff says the debt is actually $US200 trillion.

Mr Moylan says the number is likely about $US60 trillion."

and

"But whichever figure is accurate, all three agree that the problem has worsened in the last few years.

They say it is because Congress and the Administration, whether Republican or Democrat, consistently overspend."

See, I keep saying that both Dems and Republicans are BOTH the party of BIG GOVERNMENT. Thats why the Tea Party movement is so super critical at the moment. Its helping to swing the pendulum back to fiscal conservatism.

No matter who you vote for or whatever party it is, just make SURE they are fiscal conservatives. There is NOTHING of greater importance to our country at the moment. The Obama spending took a problem that had been solvable and turned it into a problem that is unlikely to be solvable. Instead our 'solution' was to implement a combination of failed Japanese style policies combined with policies reminiscent of what triggered the great depression.

Of course none of this addresses our OTHER debt problems which make it much worse!

1) State and municipal debt
2) $5 Trillion in Fannie Mae/Mac liabilities (and growing)
3) Government Union Pension Debt which is underfunded
4) Private Union Pension Debt which is underfunded
5) ? - and $ - with lots of zeros. Its there, we just haven't been told yet.

Im sure there is a lot of other scary stuff out there. So Im 100% on board with Paul Rands proposal to audit the Federal Reserve. If we are going to find out what sort of dirty tricks they have been up to, a real honest audit by an independent auditing firm might do us a lot of good. Probably catastrophic in the short term once people learn the truth, but its the bitter medicine we need to swallow to get to the bottom of things (uh, no pun intended.)

The link I refer to at the bottom of this post has a great analogy. If you were alive at the time of Jesus (2000 years ago), and you spent $1 million dollars EVERY SINGLE DAY, by about today, year 2000 or so you would have finally spent $1 trillion. To cover just the Fannie Mae/Mac black hole, well, keep at it for another 8000 years.

We really can't take much more of this. The number of stressors to our financial system are at an all time high. And the news just keeps getting worse, even as the Government Propaganda Machine spins at a furious rate (i.e The Summer of Recovery - doh!). Spin doesn't work too well when facts betray you.

Blaming Obama or Bush for the recession is foolish. Its a business cycle which we have yet to figure out why it happens much less attempt to tame it. For that, the science is not settled.

I blame both Bush and Obama for their RESPONSE to the recession. Capitalism works best when left alone. Intervention in the markets tend to be costly and more negatives than positives. Under Bush the whole idea of rescuing these irresponsible financial institutions came about. Obama took the idea and went for broke.... Literally.

Had no one done anything, today we would be out of the recession, instead of facing a double dip. We would have swallowed some hard medicine, but prosperity would have returned - of course absent ObamaCare, the escalation in Afpak and the deplorable financial laws that were written in the wake of this mess which don't even address the original problem! It was just a power grab by the executive branch for more control over the banking system. And today we are sowing the seeds for the next Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac crash, um, er, bailout.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/5-trillion-more-dollars-to-fix-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac

1st Gen Hackers

2010-09-21T05:09:00.000-07:00

There is an entire history of an underground subculture that started in the late 1970's, blossomed in the 1980s and has grown exponentially in the decades since.

My personal involvement was from around 1978 to around 1986. I was between 11 and 18 during my most active years and left the scene when I had to grow up and get serious about life.

My brother and I started on a TRS-80 with 4K of memory and a tape recorder for storage. This was a gift to us from someone my dad had done handyman work for.

Once we saved up enough money (through a variety of actual work and scams), we bought our own Apple 2 Computer. No floppy drives as they were too expensive. It took us another year or so to come up with the $500 bucks for a 180K floppy drive. But we had access to our schools computer lab which was packed with Apple 2 computers. My first job in the computer world was working for Staff Development For The Ocean View High School District in Huntington Beach. My boss was Patricia Gerde (Hi Pat, if you are out there please contact me :). While I made less than minimum wage I was very happy just to have any sort of job. My job was in fact teaching my teachers how to use computers, along with setting up databases using PFS: File and various computing tasks.

The subculture I speak of as the first generation of hackers were perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 early to mid/late teenagers, using personal computers, mostly Apples, who used and abused the telephone system, making free phone calls, courtest of MCI, Metromedia, ITT and Sprint (who were the dominant alternative carriers to AT & T). We were able to use hacking tools and run our computers overnight and in the morning we would have a handful of working codes. Some would last less than 30 days, others would last month after month. But the key thing was the free phone calls. It connected this subculture of kids the likes of which had never been seen before. We met at BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) which was the real precursor to the internet. Imagine the internet where just 1 person could connect to a website at a time. That was the world of the BBS. My brother and I ran two BBSes. The first was The Silmarillion and the second was Dune BBS.

We traded cracked files (cracked meant that the copy protection had been removed and the files / program could be freely copied.) And everyone had vast collections of software including the latest games.

In another post I would like to go into detail about a gentleman by the name of Mort Goodman who ran a BBS named The Pig Sty. He has since passed away, but his story needs telling. I'll be doing the research for it in the coming months so that by the time Im ready to post something it will be a bit more comprehensive than just my own memories. But to put it succinctly, Mort was the center of much of the illegal and underground hacking / cracking / phreaking / video & movie copying activity in Orange Country in the 1980s through the 1990s. [More In Another Post]

For now let me introduce you to Martin Friedman. Martin wrote the 1980s equivalent of Napster. His program was called Disk-Fer. And it was revolutionary in that it allowed for the automated copy of entire disks. So instead of file by file, you could just set up Disk-Fer, walk away for, oh, an hour maybe, come back and your copy would be there. It had awesome error correction and rarely failed to do its job.

Here is a screenshot of Disk-Fer:

here is a photo of Martin Friedman, aka "The RedHeaded Freak"

Martin, like most Computer Geeks, was a bit loopy and a social reject, like the rest of us. He came to visit me during a summer and stayed a month. I led him through my process for cracking computer copy protection code and he showed me the inner workings of Disk-Fer. And we just messed around having a great time.

Another noteworthy invention was an Israeli gas mask which he had converted into a bong. He was a man (kid) of many talents.

Sadly he committed suicide, while in his 20's. Here is a link to his obituary that appeared in Wired Magazine. He was known for other accomplishments by that time and I am a bit surprised that his obit never mentioned that he wrote Disk-Fer. But that was Martin. Quiet, unassuming and never let things go to his head.

A newer and better version of Disk-Fer later came out, written by The Gonif and The Wombat. Both I would consider good friends, especially the Gonif whom I knew quite well. Jeff and Mike (will hold their last names unless they approve) worked together on many cracks and wrote a very popular program, really the successor to Disk-Fer called "Catsend."

Here is a screenshot of their program:

The next screenshot is a program that we all used to hack out long distance codes. Back in the 1980s, for cheaper phone rates, companies would sign up with long distance providers like Sprint, Metromedia, ITT and MCI. They would have to dial a special access number for say Sprint, then enter an 8 digit code, and then the actual phone number they wanted to call. A lot of effort to save on ones phone bill - but back then phone calls were incredibly expensive!

Here is the screenshot of Cat Hacker:

Okay now I remember more, looking at this screen. It wasn't 1-800 numbers. Each area of the country had a local (i.e. free) phone number they could call. A local access line. At the bottom of the screen you can see that Sprint has been selected as the service, dialing is set to fast (if you have never heard an autodialer running on fast you would be very surprised how fast a computer can dial a phone number. Literally a whole number in a split second. Hacking is set for Random. This was very important because in the later days, once Telco security figured out what us kids were doing, they built traps for anyone trying to call in and hack numbers in actual numerical sequence. So the alternative to avoid that trap was to hack random numbers. So it would generate random 8 digit numbers and try it. Perhaps something like 99% did not work. But because it was so fast in trying and retrying we could always rely on getting at least a few valid codes after a whole nights run (on automatic).

I think without these tools, without the ability to call for free, this entire underground would never have been established. The social networks were just as important as the electronic networks. We became friends with people we had never met. What you could do was far more important than what you looked like, the color of your skin, your belief system or whatever.

Jeff and Mike, along with Wayne and David, were all arrested by the FBI, who seized their computers, and if memory serves me correctly, arrested them at their high school. Needless to say it freaked them out and all the rest of us. We were all too close and all doing the same thing. Maybe Jeff can tell us someday why they specifically were targeted. But of all the kids arrested through the 1980s, we were all on a first name basis with each other! The Cracker, Bill Landreth, arrested for hacking Telnet and many others.

In the wake of all of this, Steve Wozniak put the word out that he wanted to talk to me. My hacker name was "The Freeze" and I had made a name for myself my cranking out a pretty high volume of copy protection code cracks. Well eventually we got an illegal teleconference set up and he did interview me. Two weeks later he gave a speech at Softcon in Atlanta (I think it was Softcon 1982?).

The general gist of his speech, during which he specifically named me :), was that the FBI should not be arresting these kids, industry should be hiring them! And he was right. There was nothing particularly malicious about the hacking and cracking and phone phreaking (today its all called hacking, back then each subset of activity had its own name). We did it for the intellectual challenge, for bragging rights and not much else. The Redheaded Freak, The Gonif and The Wombat never made a dime off the code they wrote. It just never entered our minds that there was money to be made from this. It was just a part of the community ethos.

Today I think hacking is much different. Some of that original ethos still survives in open source projects, in MAME and other user community driven projects. But too much hacking is now all about money. It hurts individuals, and thats just wrong.

A special thanks to Patrick Asato in Las Vegas who has been instrumental in pulling ancient files off old floppy disks. Without him and his help I would never have been in the BBS: The Documentary, I never would have reconnected with dozens of old hacker friends and I would have simply forgotten what I had done in my younger years. Until he had contacted me out of the blue, I truly had not even thought of those years of my life for decades. And its not something which is easily explainable even to family and friends, most of whom are still unaware of these exploits.

Well more on this fun stuff later. Some day someone needs to write a book, probably centered on Mort Goodman of The Pig Sty, as he was such a central character in the networks. I hope I don't have to do it, but I will if no one else does.

It would be a real tragedy if this history were not preserved for posterity.

DRM Hacks :)

2010-09-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/high-bandwidth-digital-content-protection-hdcp-could-be-fatally-busted/9697

DRM (or Digital Rights Management) is the scheme that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray makers use to copy protect their movies. An encryption system that gives only the content creators rights, zero rights for the purchasers of such content.

Intel owns and sells the scheme under the name of HDCP.

So when it hit Twitter that someone had leaked (or much more unlikely reverse engineered) the encryption tables, well, thats big news.

This will allow Geeks and Techies the ability to crack the copy protection and make full quality copies. Unfortunately its a slightly OLDER version, 1.0. However 1.0 is what exists inside of most of the devices out in the market, so it is still a big deal.

A word of warning, check to see if your device (Blu-Ray player) has a PROM, EPROM or EEPROM. If it has an EEPROM (Electrically Erasable), and is internet connected, it might try to phone home and get itself reprogrammed. All of the above chips are typically Quad Flat Packs with J leads. The chip number might start with 27 or contain that. Jeez Im old. Anyhow just type the number into google and it will tell you what it is. Most of the recent ones I've seen are perfectly square and typically surface mounted (as opposed to being socketed).

The above article contains all of the tables. I've taken it one step further however and have it downloadable in all the formats you can think of, ready for any programmer to tackle and have some fun :)

Lets see if this works:

https://public.me.com/fsegler

Then click on DRM data files and you will see 4 files. They are all of the DRM hex tables in various formats, including Excel, Word, ASCII Delimited and Space Delimited. So pick your poison :)

Information wants to be free. Thats the beauty of the internet. Its how Climate Gate got exposed and its how many of us get news that the Mainstream Media REFUSES to cover! They are trying to control us by controlling (as in limiting and slanting - in other words propaganda) the news that reaches us. The internet is our counter weapon. Hackers will always win because there are too many ways in, too many ways to crack copy protection, to get past network security and in general find all the secrets they want to keep either for profit or power.

Good luck and have fun :)