He who has ears to hear, let him hear . . .

The title is Biblical, but the wisdom to which this blog post refers is worldly. Specifically, I'm talking about an article Karl Denninger wrote this morning. Here's an excerpt.

A deliberate and full-throated refusal to both consent to and promote deficit spending is the only peaceful means remaining, I am convinced, by which we the people can force the government to break the medical monopolies and balance the budget, which they must do right now, not five, ten or 15 years out.

Remember folks, Social Security Disability is due to go bankrupt in two years, and that's just the first of many of the "big sucks" to come.  That's not five, ten or 15 years in the future -- it's effectively right now and unless we cut the crap the start of the big suck is, at the outside, that close.

In reality it's even closer because of Obamacare and what is happening there ... The only way to delay what is now an impending crackup would be to suspend the individual mandate (and I expect them do exactly that, kicking and screaming all the way, despite all of those delays being flatly unlawful including the ones already granted.)

. . .

But even if the mandate is suspended for a year it won't matter, because SSDI is staring us straight in the face and getting the legislation passed and break the medical monopolies, which is the only act that can stop the implosion, will take the better part of a year if we start now.

That's the math folks.

There's much more at the link.

This is a must-read article, as far as I'm concerned. If you're at all concerned about the state of the US economy and where it's headed, you need to click over and read the whole thing.  I also recommend reading the comments beneath the article.  Some of them are also thought-provoking.

In short, I believe Mr. Denninger is right when he says that if we contribute to our highly-leveraged economy and society by joining in the current lemming-like credit-fueled 'race to the bottom', we're effectively dooming ourselves and our nation. His solution is to withdraw from the credit merry-go-round;  to live on one's earnings, not taking out loans, not keeping a balance on one's credit cards, but learning to live within one's means.  Pay cash.  (Obviously, there will be some situations such as medical emergencies where this isn't possible;  but for normal consumer items, the rule is, buy for cash or don't buy at all.)

Miss D. and I are working towards this as quickly as we can, and we hope to be there within the foreseeable future.  It'll be a big weight off our minds when we do.

Peter

Quote of the day

From Weer'd Beard, concerning the ATF's involvement in cigarette smuggling activities in order to entrap criminals - following which they can't account for millions of dollars and tens of millions of smuggled cigarettes:

Really I’m starting to think that the ATF is
simply a criminal organization with arrest powers.

I can only say that in my (not inconsiderable) experience, the opinions of the ATF expressed by agents of other Federal law enforcement agencies are frequently unprintable.  Draw your own conclusions.

Peter

How not to make it through the mud . . .

Here's a Russian off-roading video that's just mind-boggling.

Remind me not to go off-roading with either of them, would you?





Peter

What will happen when economic calamity strikes?

In his latest 'Things That Make You Go Hmmm...' newsletter, Grant Williams asks why no-one seemed to be worried over the latest showdown between the Obama administration and the House of Representatives. He concludes it's because those in authority have been relentlessly preaching that 'everything's going to be OK', no matter what.  Needless to say, he disagrees (as do I). He sums up as follows:

Somewhere, sometime, when it makes absolutely no sense to anybody, something is going to matter to everybody; and when it does, the instability which has been magnified by means of repeated assurances that nothing bad will be allowed to happen will bring the world to its knees, I'm afraid.

It's hard to deny that the world at large is a far more dangerous place now than it was 50 years ago. Yet, as a parent, I, like others in similar circumstances, go out of my way to make the world around my own children as safe and as sound as I possibly can.

Unfortunately, as they go about their days insulated from larger worries, my children's feeling of safety floats farther and farther from the reality of the dangers awaiting them in the "real world" every day.

The day that real world — the world in which mathematics and debts and credit ratings and unemployment levels and tax receipts and political stability and mathematics and free and fair markets and accountability and transparency and honesty and reality and — did I mention mathematics? — are alive and well — crashes through our gleaming soap-bubble world of reassuring illusions proffered by the likes of Obama, Merkel, Draghi, Bernanke et al, we are in for a world of hurt.

And when that something bad happens, it won't be greeted by the deafening silence of millions of trees falling in millions of deserted forests, but by the deafening noise of billions of people falling hard into reality, trying to understand why suddenly the safety their leaders had been promising them for years has vanished when they needed it most.

There's much more at the link. Go read the whole thing. It's long, but worth your time.

Think about it like this.  Approximately half of all the households in the United States are dependent to a greater or lesser extent on government assistance - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, unemployment payments, etc.  What do you think those households are going to do when the money runs out, and the government can't afford to pay them any more?

Uh-huh. It's going to be ugly . . . and it's coming. We saw symptoms of what will happen during the EBT shutdown last week.  That's one of the biggest predictors of the 'world of hurt' that Mr. Williams forecasts . . . except that last week, the system was up and running again within a day or so.  What happens when it doesn't come up again?  You got it - riots, looting, the works.

Prepare yourselves accordingly.

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  To confirm what I've said above, a month ago Bloomberg interviewed mega-investor Marc Faber. He predicted (accurately, IMHO) that the Fed will increase QE (i.e. print more and more money) rather than diminish or 'taper' it, if the government's need for money continues to increase.  In other words, the Fed will allow our national debt to grow, and grow, and grow ad nauseam rather than attempt to impose discipline on out-of-control government spending. I urge you to listen to this entire interview. It's 7½ minutes of your time that will be well spent (you should pardon the expression).

Yesterday Mr. Faber predicted (probably in jest) that QE-infinity might reach as much as a trillion dollars a month.  I'm sure he was joking, because by that point the US monetary system will undoubtedly have collapsed.  Nevertheless, it accurately describes the predicament in which the US government and the Federal Reserve find themselves.  They've made promises to the electorate (i.e. entitlement programs) that are impossible for them to keep without massive QE:  but if they continue massive QE, the country will go bankrupt, making it impossible to pay for those promises to the electorate.  Catch-22, indeed . . . and cue the riots when (not if) it happens.

Peter

Remembering a Cold War triumph

While searching for information about the Fulton Skyhook in connection with my current fiction project, I came across references to Project Coldfeet, a CIA operation during the early 1960's. I found enough information to put together a blog article about it.

The Skyhook had its genesis in World War II experiments to recover downed aviators from behind enemy lines. The early tests used a line stretched between two tall posts, which was snagged by a passing aircraft. The 'passenger', attached to that line, was jerked off the ground and into the air, to be 'reeled in' by an operator in the aircraft. It worked, although it generated strong enough g-forces to traumatize those picked up using it. Here's a video report on how Robert Fulton developed it into the system that was named after him.

A long, detailed CIA article about the early development of the system and Fulton's improved version of it may be read here. A short Popular Mechanics article on the testing of Fulton's system may be found here.

The system was dramatized in two successful movies of the 1960's. One was the James Bond thriller 'Thunderball', where in the final scene Bond and (inevitably) his love interest are rescued by a World War II-vintage B-17 bomber equipped with Skyhook - the same aircraft that was used during Operation Coldfeet, of which more later. You can see a series of stills from the movie depicting the use of Skyhook here, and a (rather poor-quality) video clip of it here.  The other movie was 'The Green Berets', in which a captured North Vietnamese commander is lifted out of hostile territory using a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft equipped with Skyhook. I've included the scene here because it's a good illustration of how Skyhook was operated.

So much for Skyhook - now on to Project Coldfeet.  A CIA article described it some years ago.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union battled for every advantage, including studying the Arctic for its strategic value. For seven days in May 1962, under Project COLDFEET, the US intelligence community pursued a rare opportunity to collect intelligence firsthand from an abandoned Soviet research station high in the Arctic.

The Soviet drift station – located on a floating ice island – had been hastily evacuated when shifting ice made the base runway unusable. Since the ice was breaking apart – and normal air transport to the island was now impossible – the Soviets felt the remote base and its equipment and research materials would be crushed and thoroughly destroyed in the Arctic Sea. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they were wrong.

Project COLDFEET was truly a joint venture bringing together the resources and expertise of the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. On May 28, using pilots and a B-17 from CIA proprietary Intermountain Aviation – accompanied by a polar navigator borrowed from Pan American Airlines – two intelligence collectors were successfully dropped by parachute onto the ice.

The B-17 – now rigged with Robert Fulton’s Skyhook – returned on June 2 to recover the team and their take. The Skyhook was a unique airborne pickup device that included a nose yolk and a special winch system.

The key measure of COLDFEET’s success was the unprecedented safe removal of the investigative team and many critical items.

The mission yielded valuable information to the US intelligence community on the Soviet Union’s drift station research activities. The team found evidence of advanced acoustical systems research to detect under-ice US submarines and efforts to develop Arctic anti-submarine warfare techniques.

This small team — incredibly courageous and resourceful — planned and executed a remarkable feat, capitalizing on a rare intelligence opportunity.

That must have been quite hair-raising for the two people dropped onto the ice. You can read more about it here, in the last two-thirds of the article, and at Wikipedia. Recommended reading.

Peter

World's worst movies?

In comments from her readers on Sarah Hoyt's latest blog article, a movie was mentioned as being among the worst ever made. I couldn't resist looking for more information about it, including its trailer.  I couldn't figure out whether to be appalled or amused!  On balance, though, I think it's so bad it's funny.  It's 'The Thing With Two Heads'.

Here's the trailer.

(Of course, Rosey Grier's highly varied career took him to even stranger places with the publication of this (in)famous book . . . )

Through a link at a review of the above movie, I was led to a second, equally awful offering.  This one's 'Shark In Venice'.  Wikipedia reports that 'According to several websites, the plot of the film puts it into contention for being the worst movie of all time.'

Here's the trailer.

How about it, readers?  Let's hear your nominations for World's Worst Movie(s) in Comments.  If you can include a link to the trailer, or an article about it, that would be even better.

Peter

Why raising the debt ceiling was bad for America

I found an article in Fox Business that states simply and concisely why raising the debt ceiling was a bad thing for the USA.

... every time we are forced to print money, which occurs as we raise our debt ceiling, it devalues the U.S. dollar. This in turn makes the items that you spend your after-tax money on more expensive.

. . .

When you print more money it reduces the value of the money you already have. This, in turns, makes your lives tougher and more expensive.

So, remember each time you go to pay for something and it costs more than you expected, each time you are feeling as though your money isn't going as far as it used to, and each time you feel the strain of day to day living is more financially stressful -- you are not being delusional. It is because each time the debt ceiling is raised and we print more money and issue more debt your life and money are being devalued.

There's more at the link.

The inimitable Karl Denninger put it very succinctly.

Just remember this -- all this debt does not create value.  It may create a price, but it does not change value.  Unpayable debt is unstable just as is a jar of nitroglycerine and the more you pile it on the more nitro you put in the jar, the heavier it becomes, and the more likely it is that you'll drop it.

If you continue this path rather than reverse it dropping of the jar becomes inevitable, as is the outcome.

Again, more at the link.

Several times readers have asked me for background material that will help them see the 'big picture' of our economy, where it's at, and how it got there. Here's a reading list of books that I highly recommend.  If you read all five, you'll be well equipped to understand what's about to happen to our economy, and prepare yourself as best you can to survive it. Click each book's title to be taken to its page on Amazon.com. They're listed in alphabetical order by author surname.

Karl Denninger (2011)

Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World

Michael Lewis (2011)

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

John Mauldin & Jonathan Tepper (2012)

Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How It Changes Everything

Peter Schiff (2011)

The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy -

How to Save Yourself and Your Country

Thomas E. Woods Jr. (2009 - a very libertarian perspective)

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed,

the Economy Tanked, and the Government Bailout

I share the beliefs and perspectives of the above authors, many of whom predicted the 2007/08 crash and have been demonstrably accurate in their comments and forecasts since then.  I see no reason to believe the "it'll-all-be-all-right-on-the-night" milk-and-honey forecasts of 'authorities' such as Paul Krugman and his ilk. The economic fundamentals are too far out of balance.  Sooner or later, they have to come back into balance;  and if our policymakers won't allow them to do so, they'll exert the inexorable certainty of mathematics to do so themselves.

Mathematics is a science.  Science studies reality.  Reality happens, whether we like it or not.

Peter

Welcome to my visitors from Reddit

When I checked Sitemeter earlier today, I was astonished to find that this blog had received over 1,000 visits in a single hour.  (I normally get an average of 2,500-3,000 each day, either direct to the blog or via its RSS feed.)  At the time of writing I've had 9,227 visitors so far today, and the total should be well over 10,000 by midnight.

The cause of all the traffic is this article I wrote in November 2011 about a very low pass by a South African Air Force Harvard training aircraft (a.k.a. the T-6 Texan to US readers) over troops on a beach. A Reddit user posted one of the pictures to this thread on that site's HistoryPorn sub-forum, and an avalance of visitors resulted.

If any of my Reddit visitors read this, it's nice to have you here.  Please come back often!

Peter

Just shut up and click 'Accept', dammit!

I'm amused - but not surprised - to learn that customer agreements can be more complex and difficult to read than some of the most abstruse works in the English language. The Daily Mail reports:

For even the most avid reader, Beowulf is a notoriously unwieldy classic.

With more than 3,000 alliterative lines written in Old English, many competent literary fans would consider it a struggle.

However, the Anglo-Saxon poem is not as epic as Google's latest terms and conditions, according to a new study.

Scientists have found that the internet giant's user agreement is more difficult to understand than the saga, which features the lines 'Now Beowulf bode in the burg of the Scyldings/Leader beloved, and long he ruled'.

Google's new terms and conditions, featuring AdSense service rules, are coming into effect on November 11.

Users are currently being asked to agree to the changes, which include the requirement to 'opt out' if you don't want your image to be used in advertising.

The new agreement, which has been the subject of much debate, has also been found to be a more complicated read than Leo Tolstoy's Russian novel War and Peace.

'You have to be a graduate to understand these terms and conditions,' Ewa Lugar, a researcher at the University of Nottingham, told The Times.

'Fifty per cent of the population cannot interpret them.'

There's more at the link.

Well, of course they can't understand them. The companies concerned don't want us to understand them. They're hoping we'll get so frustrated by all the legalese that we won't even try to understand them. Once we've given up and clicked the 'Accept' button, they can do what they like with our personal information, and make as much money as possible using it, whether or not we actually understand their intentions. If it turns out their terms of service don't allow them to make money in some way they hadn't thought of before, they'll simply change the terms of service (as Facebook has done several times in the past, and as Google is currently doing).

Guess whose priorities - and right of privacy - come first with such companies? Here's a hint . . . not ours.

Peter

Sweet corruption

I've written twice before about the scale of international fraud involving adulterated honey from the Far East.  Now it looks like at least some of those involved are being brought to justice.  Here's an excerpt from a recent BusinessWeek report.

ALW relied on a network of brokers from China and Taiwan, who shipped honey from China to India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The 50-gallon drums would be relabeled in these countries and sent on to the U.S. Often the honey was filtered to remove the pollen, which could help identify its origin. Some of the honey was adulterated with rice sugar, molasses, or fructose syrup.

In a few cases the honey was contaminated with the residue of antibiotics banned in the U.S. In late 2006 an ALW customer rejected part of Order 995, three container loads of “Polish Light Amber,” valued at $85,000. Testing revealed one container was contaminated with chloramphenicol, an antibiotic the U.S. bans from food. Chinese beekeepers use chloramphenicol to prevent Foulbrood disease, which is widespread and destructive. A deal was made to sell the contaminated honey at a big discount to another customer in Texas, a processor that sold honey to food companies. According to court documents, ALW executives called Honey Holding the “garbage can” for the company’s willingness to buy what others would not.

There's much more at the link.

There's so much corruption and fraud in the international food trade that it's truly scary.  The potential consequences for consumers' health are very dangerous.  I urge you to read that whole report, and those I've cited before about Far Eastern seafood, and educate yourself about the risks involved.  I've become very picky indeed about checking the source on every package of food I buy.  Unless I'm reasonably confident it came from a trustworthy supplier and/or region of the world, I won't purchase it.

Peter

Armies, combat - and lawyers

It seems that political correctness has now invaded the battlefield by way of civilian lawyers and unelected bureaucrats. The Telegraph reports:

'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,’’ cries Shakespeare’s King Henry V before Harfleur, ''Or close the wall up with our English dead.’’ We are brought up to believe that these were fine words.

But was the king human-rights compliant? Did he have due regard to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007? As he called on the ''good yeomen,/ Whose limbs were made in England’’, did he not understand that the MoD’s ''duty of care’’ extends to procurement and that he was therefore liable for litigation over any body armour inadequate to protect those English limbs?

Did he not recognise that, once the bodies of the English dead had been removed from Harfleur’s wall and repatriated, his actions would be judged by the ''narrative verdicts’’ of a coroner from Brize Norton? In ordering his men to ''Follow your spirit, and upon this charge/ Cry 'God for Harry, England and St George!”’, was he inciting them to disregard the Right to Life as laid down in Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), written by Tony Blair’s government into British law and amplified in a series of judgments by our Supreme Court and the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg? Nowadays poor Harry would be a war criminal, not a national hero.

If you look at a well-named pamphlet, The Fog of Law, published by Policy Exchange, you will see what has happened. Its authors, Tom Tugendhat and Laura Croft Klein, take the reader painstakingly through what they call ''the legal erosion of British fighting power’’.

. . .

The arrival of risk-averse military leaders is now not a future danger, which is what one usually hears, but a present reality. The people in charge are no less personally brave than their predecessors. But the encroachment of law forces them to turn their faces from scanning the horizon of potential conflict and look over their shoulders instead.

The problem is not the existence of law in military affairs as such ... The threat lies in the takeover of the military sphere by law designed by and for civilians. Worse, this takeover is carried out not merely by our judges acting under the ultimate authority of our elected Parliament, but by a melange of judges, domestic and continental, answerable, thanks to the ECHR, to no entity but themselves.

There's more at the link.

If things have got this bad in formerly great Britain's armed forces, it's a certainty that they're getting that way throughout the rest of Europe too;  and if they're that way on that side of the Atlantic, how bad are they getting on this side?  I'm willing to bet that Canada's armed forces are more affected by them than ours are at present, but given reported decisions by some of our senior commanders, I'm fairly sure the US armed forces are headed in that general direction as well.

My combat service was in a simpler time and culture.  You shot fastest and straightest, or the other guy did.  Sometimes I came out ahead on that equation.  Other times, as attested by the scars I bear, I didn't.

Peter

Dietary supplements - too much of a good thing?

I've long believed that the fad of stuffing oneself with all sorts of vitamins, minerals and other odds and sods might be doing more harm than good. I'm glad to see that others are speaking out about it with greater frequency.  For example, the BBC reports:

This piece is about what we have learned about vitamin supplements in the last few years - if you are healthy, and you live in a country like the UK, taking multi-vitamins and high-dose antioxidants may shorten your life.

For most of us, for most of the time, they're unhealthy.

. . .

Looking at any one individual study won't be very revealing to answer the question of whether vitamin supplementation is good for you. They're densely scientific and the conflicts of interest can be very hard to spot.

For the answer you have to turn to what are called "systematic review papers". This is where independent scientists gather up all the available data and re-analyse it to answer big questions.

Here's what a couple of them say:

"We found no evidence to support antioxidant supplements for primary or secondary prevention [of diseases of any kind]. Beta-carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A. Antioxidant supplements need to be considered as medicinal products and should undergo sufficient evaluation before marketing".

Just to be clear - "increase mortality" - that means they're killing you. These are powerfully bioactive compounds but they're not regulated in the same way as drugs. Whatever you think about the regulation there should surely be a warning on the pack if there's data saying they're bad for us.

The next question is - why are they bad for us?

. . .

Antioxidants provide a nice example. They soak up the very toxic, chemically-reactive by-products of metabolism called free radicals. These free radicals, left unchecked, can cause damage to DNA and may be linked to cancer.

Your cells are full of antioxidants but surely taking more would be better? Right? Keep those cancer causing radicals under control? Well, unfortunately, your body's immune system fights infections by using free radicals to kill bugs. Exactly what effect huge quantities of extra antioxidants could have on this is not clear but it's easy to imagine that it might not be good and you could get more infections.

Vitamin A is linked to increasing lung cancer in smokers. Excess zinc is linked to reduced immune function. Long-term excessive intake of manganese is linked to muscle and nerve disorders in older people. Niacin in excess has been linked to cell damage. And so on.

And it gets more complicated still when you start mixing everything up in one tablet. For example, different minerals compete for absorption. If you take large quantities of calcium you won't be able to absorb your iron. If you take large quantities of iron you won't be able to absorb zinc. If you take vitamin C you'll reduce your copper level.

So it's not just that taking lots of one thing is not good for you, it's that it may cause a dangerous reduction in something else even if you are also supplementing that.

There's more at the link, including a useful list of what's actually worth taking. Recommended reading.

Peter

Deep Purple covers by Blackmore's Night

I've mentioned Blackmore's Night in these pages before. It's the Renaissance/folk rock group founded by Ritchie Blackmore, formerly of Deep Purple and Rainbow, and the lady who subsequently became his wife, Candice Night.

Blackmore's Night has covered some of Deep Purple's heavy rock classics in acoustic, neo-folk style, and I greatly enjoy them.  Here are two to whet your appetite.  First, the classic 'Child In Time', in a shorter version preceded and followed by the Renaissance tune 'Mond Tanz', complete with Candice Night playing the Rauschpfeife.

Next, here's the group's rendition of 'Soldier of Fortune', written by David Coverdale and Ritchie Blackmore back in the 1970's.

There's much more of Blackmore's Night's music on YouTube, if you're interested.  They released their eighth studio album, 'Dancer And The Moon', earlier this year.  They're part of my permanent listening rotation as I write my books.

Peter

Ever heard of a 'Mondegreen'?

I hadn't, until I came across the word this week while surfing the Web. Wikipedia defines it thus:

A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song. American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in her essay "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954.

. . .

In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the 17th-century ballad "The Bonny Earl O' Moray". She wrote:

When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

        Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
        Oh, where hae ye been?
        They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
        And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." Wright explained the need for a new term:

The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.

There's more at the link.

I found it particularly interesting because I know the ballad in question very well. I'm accustomed to hearing it as a song rather than a poem, with my favorite rendition being by Old Blind Dogs on their 1999 album 'Live' - one of their very best, IMHO.  I'm afraid I haven't been able to find that on YouTube, so here's a version of the ballad by The Corries.

'Lady Mondegreen', indeed!





Peter

May she rest in the peace she so richly deserves

Readers of my book 'Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls' will know that I served as a prison chaplain until a severe injury forced my medical retirement.  Prison ministry is still something near and dear to my heart.

It's therefore with sorrow, but also with great happiness for all she accomplished, that I learned of the death of Sister Antonia Brenner, the 'Mama' of La Mesa penitentiary in Tijuana, Mexico. Her life was profiled in the book 'The Prison Angel', and in a documentary movie, 'La Mama: An American Nun's Life in a Mexican Prison'.  It's a remarkable story of how a twice-divorced mother of seven children became a human angel of mercy to thousands.

Here's an excerpt from her obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

Small of stature, with blue eyes peeking out from under her traditional black–and-white habit, Brenner cut a strikingly serene presence in the overcrowded prison of 8,000. She lived as any other inmate, sleeping in a 10-by-10-foot cell, eating the same food and lining up for morning roll call.

She would walk freely among thieves and drug traffickers and murderers, smiling, touching cheeks and offering prayers. Many were violent men with desperate needs. She kept extra toilet paper in her cell, arranged for medical treatment, attended funerals.

Guards and inmates alike started referring to her as the prison angel. In the cellblocks she was known simply as "Mama." "There isn't anyone who hasn't heard my lecture on victims," she said in a 2002 Times story. "They have to accept that they're wrong. They have to see the consequences. They have to feel the agony. ... But I do love them dearly."

There's more at the link.

Here's a brief excerpt from a two-part interview with Sr. Brenner.

The full interview may be viewed in two parts, here and here.

We are poorer for her loss, but richer that she lived among us.  May she rest in peace, and may those to whom she ministered join her in the fulness of God's time.  We're all going to need the mercy of God, just as much as they do.

Peter

The Epic of Gilgamesh and class discrimination

I was very interested (but also saddened) to read how the discoverer of the Epic of Gilgamesh was denied at least some of the respect and recognition that was his due - almost certainly because he was from the lower class, in a society that was class-conscious to a fault.  The Telegraph reports:

[George] Smith, an unlikely scholar, was the man for the task. Born of modest parents in Chelsea (his father was a carpenter), he left school at 14. He married young, moved to Crogsland Road in Camden, and had six children. Unsatisfied, he spent what spare time and money he had pursuing his interests of Assyriology and biblical archaeology. He was so often seen at the British Museum that Sir Henry Rawlinson (the discoverer of the Behistun monument, a “Rosetta Stone of cuneiform languages”) eventually employed him as a classifier. But even for such highly skilled and specialist work, he was paid little more than the cleaning staff.

On the evening he came across Layard’s fragment, Smith is said to have become so animated that, mute with excitement, he began to tear his clothes off. (Though much repeated, there is only a single source for this story, E A  W Budge’s Rise and Progress of Assyriology – published 50 years after Smith’s death.) Smith quickly prepared a paper to present to the Society of Biblical Archaeology.

. . .

... it was not until January 1873 that the Telegraph stepped in to offer the British Museum £1,000 for Smith to conduct further excavations. Taking travel advice from Arnold, Smith departed for Ottoman Iraq later that month.

His journey was not an easy one. Smith had never travelled before, and his letters home (illustrated for his children) demonstrate that he suffered chronic seasickness. On his arrival, Smith found himself beset by officialdom. His permissions were not valid, the papers had not been signed by the right people. He was delayed for months.

Digging began on May 7, and within three days he believed he had discovered more broken fragments of the “Deluge”. In fact, he had discovered another long-lost poem: The Epic of Atrahasis. In Smith’s own words, “The proprietors of The Daily Telegraph, however, considered that the discovery of the missing fragment of the deluge text accomplished the object they had in view, and they declined to prosecute the excavations further… desiring to see it carried on by the nation.” The brief excavation was over. The question of future funding would depend on Gladstone.

Permission was granted and on a second dig (in 1874) Smith discovered Babylonian accounts of the creation, the fall of man, the pestilence, the Tower of Babel, and fragments of many other legends. But it was on the third excavation in 1876 that Smith ran into difficulties.

He left England in 1875, and was so delayed by Ottoman officials that he did not arrive at Nineveh until July 1876. By then, with temperatures already in the mid-40s, it was too late to dig. He fell ill.

Smith’s notebooks in the British Library recount his descent into delirium, and the final pages make for heartbreaking reading. He set off for England, but died before he got as far as Aleppo. He was 36, only four years into his career as an Assyriologist. The newspapers mourned Smith’s early passing. They explained that he had died exercising a heroic commitment to the science. The dedications and obituaries, though, masked a slightly darker story; one where Smith may have been subject to coercion in his decision to delay.

Smith had previously written to request curtailment of the dig because “plague” was sweeping the lowlands of Syria and Iraq. Permission was refused. He was told by the museum secretary that the trustees would consider it to be “very objectionable” if he were to terminate the excavation early. It is impossible to imagine the same being said to Rawlinson or Layard.

There's more at the link.

How sad that a mind of such quality could be judged, not by its intellectual capabilities or accomplishments, but by the social class into which its owner had been born.  As the article notes, if Smith had been a member of the upper classes, he'd never have been pushed around as he was - and he'd probably have been allowed to leave the area of his excavations sooner, thereby avoiding contracting the disease that killed him.

If you're interested, you can download an e-book version of Smith's translation of 'The Chaldean Account of Genesis' in several formats, or read it online in HTML format (click each chapter title to read it).  Recommended.

Peter

Facebook users, be warned . . .

The Telegraph has published an interesting (and worrying) article about what hackers can learn about you from Facebook, and how they can use it.  Here's an excerpt.

Anyone can download all the data Facebook holds on them. Thanks to Europe-wide data protection rules companies are obliged to reveal what information they store on you. Normally this involves a written request, small fee and 40-day wait.

Luckily Facebook makes this easy. By clicking on account settings (the small cog icon at the top right), picking "general" and going to "download a copy of your Facebook data" you can get hold of everything.

Browsing the folders at first is fairly amusing. Old messages track forgotten relationships as they spark up and peter out. Gossip from university days resurfaces. AmDram productions you promised friends you would attend remain in a list of past events.

You realise biographers of the future won't be combing through dusty collections of letters but double-clicking on folders containing Facebook profiles. But what if the data fell into the wrong hands?

To see what useful info could be gleaned I downloaded my own personal Facebook data, which has been building up for the last seven years. Through simple word searches a host of sensitive information could be uncovered within minutes.

Searching for the word "bank" in the file containing past messages returned my bank account details. Sort code; account number; card number; bank name; the lot. Turns out I had sent them to a friend who needed to transfer money in 2010.

Typing "my address" bought up my home address, including postcode, as well as a flat I had rented in London. Searches for "my number" and "my email" found the correct details instantly.

Date of birth could be worked out via "happy birthday" posts. Relatives could be found by searching the friends list for my surname. Recent sessions logged the IP address of the computer used.

A criminal could even work out the exact times I would be out of the house for dinner or on holiday by looking at which events I was attending.

"There are all sorts of things you could do with that," says Tony Neate, an ex-policeman who spent 30 years in the force and now heads up the government-backed Get Safe Online campaign.

"I know from talking to people within the police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency that you are well on your way as a criminal to having everything you need to steal your identity."

He adds: "They can mirror who you are and then start looking at where they can actually make money from the information they have got ... The amount of information you have given me is 90 per cent there for someone to be able to [commit identity fraud]."

By intercepting post at my home address a fraudster could create a credit card or take out a bank loan in my name, according to Neate. The Facebook data alone may be enough to open a new bank account with my details to be used to transfer dirty money.

Neil Munroe, external affairs director at credit information group Equifax, says the information "ticks a lot of the boxes" needed to take out a credit card and fears people fail to adequately protect their profiles.

"A lot of passwords are still set as derivatives of family names, pet names, holidays, that type of thing," he says, warning that Facebook profiles can help criminals guess logins. The fact that so many people use one password for all their accounts is also a danger.

Munroe continues: "Intuitively everybody knows that that information should not be there. You would not write that information on a sandwich board and walk down your local street with it on. That is exactly what you are doing with Facebook."

There's more at the link.

This merely confirms my earlier opinion that Facebook is simply too much of a security risk to use safely.  The same applies to most other social media, IMHO.  I'll be staying off them, thank you very much - or, if I find myself forced to use them, I'll do so from a dedicated computer that does nothing else, and doesn't have links to my e-mail, address book, or other personal information.

Peter

Useful tips for Android, Google Search and Google Maps

The Telegraph has published three articles that I've found useful.

Android: 10 hidden features

Google search: 15 hidden features

Google Maps revamp: new features enabled

If you use any of those services, you may find the articles interesting.

Peter

Business names that are also puns

A tip o' the hat to reader A. M. for sending me the link to this article.  It lists 30 businesses with names that are also puns - some of them excruciatingly funny.  Here are a few examples.

There are many more at the link.  Great fun!



Peter

No-one's asking the important question anymore

Earthbound Misfit wrote:

How McDonalds, Burger King (and Wal-Mart) Pick Your Pocket, Even If You Never Spend a Dime There

The short answer is that they pay their employees so poorly that the majority of fast-food workers are also on public assistance. So what happens is that the Federal treasury (that's *us*, folks) subsidizes those companies' labor costs.

. . .

Why are we subsidizing these greedy ******s' labor costs? When you hear the GOP and the Tea-baggers screaming about "welfare queens", why aren't they yelling at Wal-Mart and McDonalds?

The answer is easy: Those corporate welfare kings have the money for lobbyists and lawyers. A single mother working at McDonald's or Wal-mart isn't making campaign contributions to The Canadian Usurper or the Tea Party Caucus.

There's more at the link.

She starts from the left side of the political spectrum, unlike me, but in this case she's absolutely correct.  These corporations are, indeed, taking advantage of government programs to reduce their own expenditure on employee benefits. However, I respectfully submit that she may be missing the most important point - namely:

WHY SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT

PROVIDE THESE PROGRAMS AT ALL?

The fact that these programs exist, and are heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, allows - even encourages - companies to make use of them to reduce their own costs.  That's precisely what's happening with Obamacare right now.  Because it exempts part-time employees working less than 30 hours per week from its onerous (and very expensive) requirements, a lot of companies have converted as many as possible of their employees to part-time status.  They now earn less money, and aren't eligible for the same benefits that they formerly enjoyed as full-time staff . . . precisely because the government has set up financial conditions (incentives and/or penalties) that encourage companies to treat employees like this.

Let's be quite clear about this.  Companies - and individuals - operate in a marketplace with laws of supply and demand.  There are incentives for companies to attract and retain good-quality, loyal staff.  However, if expenses - increased taxation and/or fees, administrative overhead, complexity of complying with government regulation, and so on - are more costly to a company than those incentives, the same laws of supply and demand dictate that the company will choose the least costly option.  That's precisely what the companies Earthbound Misfit castigates have done.  They've obeyed the laws of economics, instead of the 'laws' (more accurately, customs or values) of compassion and/or corporate responsibility (which don't have the weight of economic necessity behind them).

If government did not provide and/or subsidize programs such as Obamacare, food stamps, etc., these companies would face greater demand from their employees to pay a living wage - one that would cover all basic needs.  Companies that did so would be able to take their pick of potential workers, while those who did not would struggle to attract and retain good staff.  However, when the law of the land removes that incentive, why should companies bother?  After all, they're in business to make a profit, and their shareholders want that profit to be as high as possible.  Why should they pay higher salaries, or provide more expensive and comprehensive benefits, when they know the government will step in to level the playing field at taxpayer expense?

There are those who maintain that government should provide these programs, because it's 'our' responsibility to provide for the needy among us.  Says who?  I can understand a religious motivation to do so, on the basis of one's beliefs - but that's a moral obligation, not one that can be made binding on those who don't share one's beliefs.  ("Separation of church and state", remember?)  I can understand a philosophical obligation, too;  one's conviction that ethical considerations demand that one care for one's fellow human beings.  However, why should your ethical considerations require me to pay for their implementation?  What objective, non-subjective imperative - moral, philosophical or any other - requires taxpayers to automatically and unquestioningly subsidize programs such as Obamacare, food stamps, welfare or whatever?  Frankly, I can't think of a single one.

(Marx could: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".  Socialism has enthusiastically adopted his diktat.  A very large part of today's 'welfare society' in Europe and North America is based firmly upon it.)

Such programs may be desirable from any number of perspectives, but I find no justification whatsoever for making them a mandatory burden on the public purse.  In days gone by most of them were provided by religious and/or charitable institutions.  Those who felt the need could contribute to them, while those who did not could refrain.  (I think that's a pretty good model for the arts, too.  Why force taxpayers to subsidize artistic expression that they find boring, or unattractive, or even morally reprehensible?  Why not let those who enjoy a given art form subsidize it with their donations, while those who don't are free to ignore it?)  Unfortunately, those who seek power over us all too often impose their own preferences and choices on us by legislative fiat.  We end up being obliged to pay for things with which we may or may not agree.

The do-gooders and social reformers who have dominated our politics since World War II have basically ensured, through the programs they set up, that companies don't have to pay a living wage, and that many people have to work two, or three, or even more jobs in order to make ends meet.  Furthermore, those programs have given rise to the 'entitlement culture' that cripples many of our citizens and communities.  See, for example, the following articles:

'What Would The Founders Think?' on 'The Entitlement Culture'

'Dr. Sanity' on 'The Entitlement Culture'

Steve Tobak on 'The Truth Behind Our Entitlement Culture'

I agree with most of those perspectives.  The 'do-good' urge has given rise to the 'entitlement culture', which in turn has allowed corporations and 'Big Business' to fob off onto the US taxpayer many of the costs they formerly paid to or for their employees.  Who's to blame?  We are, for allowing such programs to mushroom and multiply until they consume two-thirds of the federal budget.  Heck, when such programs benefit us directly - funding for local initiatives, or artistic expression of which we approve, or sports in which we participate - most of us actively encourage and support them!

Here's yet another example of that mindset.  By following some of the links Earthbound Misfit provided, I came across an article titled 'New Data Show How Big Chains Free Ride on Taxpayers at the Expense of Responsible Small Businesses'.  Here's an excerpt.

The public cost of ensuring that employees of these companies have health insurance and enough to live on represents, in effect, a hidden corporate subsidy.

Even Whole Foods, a high-end chain run by a self-proclaimed “Conscious Capitalist,” makes the list, with about 17 percent of its employees enrolled.

“By the end of the summer, I’ll have six Whole Foods stores within 15 minutes of me,” said Michael Kantor, who co-owns Cambridge Naturals, an independent health store that pays 100 percent of the health premiums for full-time employees and half for part-time.  Kantor has spoken out in favor of raising the minimum wage, which could lift many retail employees out of working poverty and enable them to afford insurance.

Again, more at the link.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Notice Mr. Kantor's proposed solution - more legislation.  He wants to force companies to pay more by legislative fiat, so that employees will earn enough to buy insurance.  In other words, he wants one government program to compensate for the damage he believes he's suffering from a different program!  If he feels so strongly about the matter, why doesn't he, as a matter of conscience, pay his employees more on his own initiative?  Can it be that - gasp! - he can't afford to, for reasons of economics?  Can it be that he wants the government to make that decision for him, so that everyone suffers under the same burden, and thus he won't be disadvantaged?

Why not get rid of all the programs, and start with a level playing field?  Think about it, folks.  It's a hard and unpalatable concept . . . but it's the only way I see out of this mess.  If you have a better idea, please tell us about it in Comments.

Peter