three years is just the beginning

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Alan Parsons - Return To Tunguska

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Self portrait

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Tis the season

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What's for dessert.

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What's for dinner?

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John Lee Hooker and Bonnie Raitt play "I'm In The Mood"

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Nothing says holidays like birch stumps

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The reason I have no respect for your authority is that your authority doesn't act respectfully.

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Bonnie Raitt - Angel from Montgomery (live)

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Bruce Cockburn - Lovers in a Dangerous Time (Live in the Bing Lounge)

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Bruce Cockburn performs "Strange Waters" on Q

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David Gilmour Wish you were here live unplugged

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Townes Van Zandt - Dead Flowers

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Dry manhattan made with High West Silver Rye. Perfect.

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Jalapeño bangers and mashed.

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Home

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This is going to hurt.

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Home

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Robin Trower Live - Bridge of Sighs

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Stalker( Сталкер)-Russian Movie with English Subtitle.

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Insect Swarms

This is why everyone in NYC and DC are in a bad mood:

Stop calling me a dictator on Twitter, Turkish dictator cries

The news organization founded by Mike Bloomberg, who rules like a dictator, gives Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is the dictator of Turkey, a platform to deny that he is a dictator, and that Twitter is ruining the world.

Mike Bloomberg's opinion of Twitter is unknown, but he probably isn't happy that anyone can tweet more than 16 times a day.

Supreme Court says States can take DNA samples from arrestees

The Court ruled today [Maryland vs. King] that taking a DNA swap from someone who has been arrested is not an unreasonable search, even though it basically allows the government to go fishing for unrelated offenses. When the Court splits 5-4, and Scalia writes a disent joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, you can be assured that the ruling is bad for civil liberties, and that the disent will be scathing (and quite humorous at times.):

Make no mistake about it: because of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

Volokh has some discussion here.

The Last Ice Merchant

Baltazar Ushca climbs Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo with a pack of donkeys laden with straw to cut glacial ice, which he sells at the market. He's the last one. This is his story. Give him 15 miuntes of your time.

http://vimeo.com/66507747

Solaris

Until 2011, the only English edition of Stanislaw Lem's book Solaris was a translation of the French translation that Lem considered awful. A new translation was published in 2011, and is available from Amazon for $3.99. It's worth re-reading, and if your only exposure to Solaris was the George Clooney movie, this is the version you should get.

Possible Opening Lines From the Science Fiction Novel I Will Likely Never Write, #1

The aliens, thought Corporal Schlitz, resemble nothing so much as piles of dog vomit.

Reflections on the passing of Brennan Manning

 The news that Brennan Manning had died filled me with a mix of sadness and joy - sadness, because such a wonderful light has gone out of this world, joy because if Brennan Manning is right, then there is reason to hope that I will meet him again.

I met Brennan once years ago, briefly, when he came to speak at a church that I attended. He was gracious, kind, and very patient with me as I fumbled for words, trying not to gush like a giddy teenager meeting a rock star. There was a photo taken of us, but it's lost in the confusion of the years in between.

I came across this quote, which sums up the core of Brennan's teaching quite well:

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.
"But how?" we ask.
Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’
There they are. There we are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.
My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.

Brennan told a story once of being invited to dinner at a rabbi's house. After the meal, the rabbi's young son climbed into his father's lap while he and Brennan were talking. The young boy proceeded to tug playfully on his father's beard while the discussion went on; the father tolerated the boy, and never said a word against him, while continuing his conversation.

If faith is worth anything, if belief means anything, then Brennan Manning is sitting in God's lap, tugging God's beard at this moment. I hope that one day I can join him there, and see if the two of us can distract our Father for a moment. I bet we can't.

On the "terrorist watch list" and gun background checks

The United Stated Department of Disinformation, otherwise known as NPR (link) has posted a hand-wringing report condemning the NRA for lobbying to refuse to allow the fact that a person is on an FBI or DHS terrorist "watch list" from resulting in a failed firearms purchase background check.

Let us, as NPR does, set aside the inconvenient fact that the guns used by the alleged marathon bombers were not legally obtained; even if being on the watch list was indicated by a background check, no such check is performed when an illegal firearms transfer occurs.

The truth is, the constitutionality of using these lists in any way to limit a person's rights is entirely suspect. Since there is no clear defined legal process by which one gets on or off the "watch list", legally there shouldn't be any restrictions on the constitutional freedoms of those on it. You or I could be on the watch list simply because someone in Washington picked our names out of the phone book, literally. It's that arbitrary. For those with relatives in the Middle East, it's even scarier. Consider: my children have uncles and cousins who are fighting (and dying, for what it's worth) for the Syrian resistance. If the state department decides to label those rebels as "Al-Qaeda backed groups," any one of my children could find themselves on a watch list for the mere act of posting something on Facebook or Twitter.

(The same is true for the "no-fly" list, which not only is contrary to basic freedom of movement, but also is unlawful under existing Supreme court precedent.)

The intent of the Founders with respect to the 2nd Amendment

If one actually reads the founders - Madison, Jefferson, Munroe, Hamilton, etc. - it's pretty easy to see that their intentions were to have the general population fully armed and prepared to resist tyranny, whether it came in the form of an external invasion or a hijacking of the internal political process. There is ample evidence for this in the writings and papers of those involved in drafting the Constitution. These documents are readily available to anyone via a simple trip to any reasonably stocked public library; many of them are available on the Internet. Anyone who claims the founders meant otherwise cannot produce a document that proves their claim, because such a document does not exist, unless perhaps they are citing examples out of consequence, or referring to writing where there was clearly an attempt to withhold the right of gun ownership from a particular class (namely, those of African descent.)

 One may argue that the situation is different, but the process for modifying the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights is to introduce and pass an Amendment, not to rewrite history to support one's arguments.

Rutgers and the myth of the student athlete

Here is everything you need to know about college athletic programs: In the 1990s, Milton Friedman, an alumni of Rutgers, tried to buy an ad in several publications serving the Rutgers community. In part, the text of that ad read: "The proper role of athletic activity at a university is to foster healthy minds and healthy bodies, not to produce spectacles. Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students, and to add to the body of intellectual knowledge, not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes." The Rutgers Daily Targum, an independent student newspaper, ran the ad. The alumni magazine for Rutgers refused to run it. Friedman filed a lawsuit to force Rutgers to run the ad. The university spent nearly half a million dollars fighting the lawsuit.

Thursday Writers Challenge

Write 500 words about: bees. Post a comment with a link to what you wrote, or with what you wrote.

#1

Everything about this setup sucks, lord,
Especially the part where you just sit in silence, 
Not responding to my hopeless whining
Give me something I can hold onto
Or please get out of the way
And let me embrace the despair that you 
Steadfastly fail to displace.

The cry of a child

On the list of things I should never have to do, and yet have to do far too often, somewhere very near the top is the entry that describes holding a child while they cry over their other parent's inexplicable behavior.

I love my kids, but this gets old, and frustrating. I cannot fix their broken relationship, any more than I could fix my own.

All I can do is hold them while they cry and, despite my growing cynicism and diminishing faith, find myself praying along with St. John at the end of the Apocalypse: "Even so, come, Jesus."

Don't send me email at work.

I'll admit to having a bias against using email ever since the company I work for was bought out by a large corporation, and our perfectly useful, secure imap server was replaced by an Exchange server that we have to run Windows inside a sandboxed VM in order to access it. (Unintended consequences strike again. Thanks, Sarbanes–Oxley.)

I'm not kidding.

Before the merger, to read my email, I fired up my client and read my email.

After the merger, to read my email, I:

• establish a VPN connection to the local office, using my "local" credentials (local ldap id/password)
• run remote desktop software to access a virtual machine running Windows 7 inside the office network
• establish a VPN connection to the corporate office, using my corporate credentials (secure token + pin)
• launch Outlook (as a contractor, I must use the full client, not Outlook Web Access) and sign in with my corporate ldap id/password, which are not synced with the local account.

On top of that, I probably have violated some policy just by posting this.

Any relationship between this byzantine process and batteries catching fire on airplanes is purely coincidental.

Last night, I dreamed of trains. Specifically, I dreamed that I was walking next to trains and train tracks.  Then I ducked to get under some branches, and someone tried to take my wallet, so I stabbed them with my pliers.

It's clear that my dreams are telling me to move to Portland. Or something else.

Sports reporters and Clearing logs

I met my wife on the Internet. I have had several significant friendships with people that I've only known or primarily known online. Two of my best friends are people I met via the Internet. Over the past years, I've had several friends that I've known only online pass away.

I have encountered people who obscure their identities in their online relationships. Some did so openly, acknowledging that their online persona was something that they intended to keep distinct from their "real life." Others did so in a fashion that could be considered subterfuge and misrepresentation.

At times, I have struggled with how to discuss my online friends with friends and family members. In particular, when talking to a person who has stated negative opinions about "online dating", Second Life (where I met my wife, for what it's worth,) or online friendships, I have on occasion allowed a misconception about the nature of my relationship to stand, or been less than forthcoming about it. For example, at least once in the past I've said that my wife and I were introduced by mutual friends; this is true, from my perspective, but it leaves out some facts: that our "meeting" was online, and that those "friends" were (with one exception) people I only knew online at the time.

A while back, sports reporters started telling us a story. They told the story that they wanted to hear, because it was a good story: the rising football star who lost both his grandmother and his leukemia-stricken girlfriend on the same day. It was a great story. It drove up ratings on TV and rankings on the web. It wasn't true, exactly. The girlfriend part, at least.

The staff at Notre Dame, to their credit, view Te'o as a victim. It's troubling that so many sports journalists are willing to pile on accusations that he was somehow a party to the deception. It's especially disingenuous because so many of them were in a position to investigate the alleged girlfriend as the various stories played out over the season, and none of them did. Nobody checked Stanford's student lists. Nobody looked for a death certificate. Nobody checked hospital records. Nobody did anything. Why not? Isn't that what journalism school is supposed to teach you? What does it say about the state of journalism when nobody bothers to verify a major news story about a Heisman candidate?

Considering the way online relationships have impacted my life, I am extremely sympathetic with Manti Te'o's situation. From what I have been able to read about it so far, he was naive, and he was victimized. Only he knows for sure, but absent any conclusive evidence, we should give him the benefit of the doubt.