Chutzpah defined

Hilliary Clinton now regrets not "going after" Jim Comey because she feels that his investigation broke precedent by revealing her illegal unsecured server at a time when she was standing for election.   Funny, my take on the whole deal is that Comey broke precedent by not prosecuting someone who had clearly mishandled classified information.

To draw a picture, I had the privilege of working at TRW-Space Park (now part of Northrup Grumman) in 1994 and 1995, not that long after the company had been embarrassed by the real-life espionage portrayed in The Falcon and the Snowman.  Suffice it to say that even 17 years after Christopher Boyce was convicted of espionage, the company was very sensitive to the possibility that it would happen again, and when I hired in, they made it very clear that if they saw any sign of mishandling of classified information--even being found in the locked areas where the classified work was done--it would be a race between HR and the FBI to see who could take action first.  When I would go out to lunch with coworkers, someone would always make a point of putting his badge where it could not be seen, because it was well known that KGB agents could and would try to work with TRW employees to get information.

So my response to Hilliary is "yes, Comey violated precedent by not getting a warrant for your server, and by not indicting you."   And it's a shame that we do have a pattern whereby prominent politicians who mishandle classified information get a "pass" from prosecutors that ordinary people who work with it do not.

A very interesting podcast....

.....about the death of reading, and its consequences for modern life, can be found here.  And yes, count me somewhat amused to be linking a podcast about the difficulties inherent with the lack of reading.  You should laugh at me, too.

But seriously, just as cultural commentators have been noting ever since the television was introduced, there are some very serious issues with "on demand entertainment", centered around the reality that the comprehension of complicated issues really requires more attention span than the classic "seven minutes between commercials", or today "two minutes per TikTok.".  Give it a listen, or a read when the transcript comes out.

An interesting bit about Ezekiel

In reading Ezekiel 1-4, I wondered what the actual Hebrew phrase for "Son of Man" is, and it's actually "ben-Adam", which could also reasonably interpreted as "Son of Adam"; in other words, bearing the name of a very specific man, and indicating a specificity and meaning that I'd argue the usual English translation does not have, along the lines of Peter and Edmund being addressed as "Sons of Adam" in Narnia.  It is not just genetics, but an affirmation of heritage and position before God. 

Thoughts on Shane Gillis' monologue

Well, first of all, in a tradition with SNL that's two decades old now or so, it wasn't funny, or particularly new.  As the Babylon Bee jokes, pastors from the 1990s are berating Gillis because he's recycling their old sermon material.

For my part, I'm not quite sure what a prostitute typically looks like, so I don't have the basis for comparison that Gillis apparently does.  ☺  I'd guess real prostitutes wear more outlandish outfits, heels, and in general look a lot less healthy than a typical spandex queen in the gym, though.

But seriously, while I can understand that showing more skin might be cooler--though full length tights and such would reduce that advantage, I'd think--I also am not a huge fan of feeling barbell knurling on bare shoulders (or letting the barbell slip because of my sweat not being absorbed by a cotton t-shirt), or feeling cold, clammy, sweaty vinyl on my skin.  

So overall, short shorts & jogbra is not for performance, but for show, and I suffer from the "disability" that the only person who really needs to see the precise contours of my body doesn't need to go to the gym to see that.  But for those who want to make a good impression in the gym, the main thought I have is that as a rule, beauty is the whole silhouette, not just the eye drawn to certain areas.  So in that light, the jogbra/booty shorts combo may work against a lady.

Well said

Greg Crosby notes how he tends to love the things of the past as he goes through his life, and I am tempted to agree.   Not that there aren't good things now--a computer like I'm using right now to type this note did not exist until I was in my thirties, for example--but as I shop for things I'd like to have, I am becoming more and more aware that many of the things I'd like are fading out of existence.  Things like manual transmissions, Katahdin Iron Works hoodies, leather shoes, CD level sound quality (sorry, MP3 loses something when you're listening to classical music), rye flour (except at the "hippie" food stores), and a bunch of other things.  

OK, yes, life changes.  You can't find buggy whips, corsets, or bloomers in most stores anymore, either, and some things are for the better.  But even so, I think something has been lost.

MAID and transition procedures

It strikes me that one thing that MAID/assisted suicide and transition medicine have in common is that too many practitioners do not seem to adequately understand that these things are permanent.  You can't revive someone you've killed, body parts you've removed do not grow back or reattach, and even puberty blockers and hormone therapies permanently change development.  It reminds me, really, of an adult version of the warnings in elementary school that certain behaviors would go on one's "permanent record."  

Wisdom, or foolishness, in the law?

 With regards to the furor over an incident at Cornell where a young coed had "relations" with seven young men while all were highly intoxicated, this Powerline blurb notes that under New York law, voluntary intoxication does not render someone unable to grant consent.

Now this sounds appalling, well...at least to those of us who have never gotten intoxicated to "get up the nerve" to sleep with someone, and...maybe it is indeed the case that a certain portion of sexual assault allegations are indeed....simply people getting intoxicated to get the nerve to do something they otherwise would not have done.  The apparent discrepancy between rape rates in anonymous surveys and as reported to police might flow in part from this, and this would also explain the fact that about two thirds of sexual assaults noted on those anonymous surveys involve intoxicated people.

Now what is the proper approach in the law?  I'm not sure. Do I want justice for people who are truly victimized while they are intoxicated?  Absolutely.  Do I know that if a person was drunk at the time, he's going to have suspect memory, and isn't going to be a very good witness?  Absolutely.  

So I wonder if New York's approach is the right one because it tells all participants that things can really go wrong.  Want to have sex with a stranger while drunk?  Not only are you risking STDs and unwanted attachments, but if the other person persuades the police that your apparent assent was not real, you get to watch your money disappear by the billable hour.

It's not a perfect system--no system where you're depending on the memories of people who were intoxicated can be anywhere close--but perhaps it has something to say for it.

In related news, the newspaper of record has come up with a foolproof way to avoid being arrested for rape at a ketamine-fueled orgy: don't go to ketamine-fueled orgies.  Sounds like someone needs a Nobel Prize for that one.

Interesting news out of Denver

Apparently three former Denver Broncos quarterbacks are thriving at other professional football teams.  Now of course, the days when pro football players almost always stayed with one team, or maybe two, through their whole careers are long gone, but what strikes me is that this happened with a very interesting VP of football operations there; John Elway.  

Elway is of course retired, and to be fair, one of those QBs is now in the CFL, but it strikes me that people in the Broncos office might do well to understand the dynamics between Elway and these men, and see what they can learn for the future.  There are other former football greats--Mike Singletary comes to mind--who also failed as coaches, and as long as football teams hire former players as coaches, they might do well to understand what kind of things make them fail.

Watch out for that "peer reviewed research"

Congress has found that a Biden-era study that found no safe level for alcohol consumption was actually performed in contradiction to the law, was led by unanimous activists against the use of alcohol,  and....in some indications of cardiac health, their own graphs actually showed a slight protective effect.  Keep in mind, however, that the graphs provided in the link I provided are, with a couple of exceptions, smoothed to the point that....the statistician in me does not trust the data.  Real data do not, in general, look like that.

Now since alcohol does suppress the immune system to a degree, it is probable that you'll get a somewhat higher rate of infectious disease and cancer, even with low concentrations, but that said, there is yet the likelihood of hormesis in this regard.  We cannot assume that just because something is toxic in high concentrations, that it will be harmful in small concentrations.

Examples of this principle include all of the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, which become toxic in high concentrations to the liver, as well as water, which can throw off electrolyte balances in high concentrations.

The camera doesn't lie?

Well, not in the age of AI.  Apparently, Stanford University has been caught using AI to change a Hispanic male student into a black female student.  Shades of Google Gemini, where their AI engine "accidentally" made a host of people black, including President Washington, who became a gorgeous black woman where the emphasis was...shall we say...not on her wooden (or ivory) teeth.

Because apparently, it's not like Stanford has any eminent black scholars on campus like Thomas Sowell.  And certainly "no harm is done" when a Hispanic student is erased from the picture.....

On another, far more lighthearted note, here's an article on how to work the gluteal muscles better on the leg press.  Apparently they're not aware that there are devices called "barbells" and "squat racks" that will allow better development not only of quads and glutes, but also hamstrings and the various muscles of the trunk and shoulders.  How sad.

For endurance athletes

Apparently in the realm of "extreme sports", a young woman has gained a medal, and some notoriety, as she soiled herself, and a few things around her (like the track), with explosive diarrhea as she won a competition.  No, there will be no pictures.

And it struck me that having done endurance sports throughout my life, and having had the opportunity to be very worried about whether my bowels would stay put through the entire race, and having run quickly to the bathroom or the woods at times, I've got some experience with handling this sort of thing.

The first thing to remember, in my view, is that the porta-potty is there for a reason, and is a medal so important that it justifies exposing everyone to one's personal bowel microbiome?

The other thing that comes to mind comes from an experience I had as a young man.  When I got my first apartment and started cooking for myself, it occurred quickly to me that the maple syrup I'd treated myself to really overpowered the white flour pancakes I was making.  Hence, I started using whole wheat flour for my breakfast pancakes, and then I noticed fairly soon that I wasn't needing to take nearly as many potty breaks as I did before.  It was a bonus both for flavor and my own health.

Moreover, as I consider athletic performance foods--protein bars, gel packs, protein powders, and the like--what I see very often (not always) is that there's a lot of sugar in most of them, and very little fiber in many of them.  Now look up how excess sugar, and a lack of fiber, can lead to diarrhea.  Yes, sugar goes quickly to glycogen and muscle energy, but it also has other effects.

Your fellow runners will thank you.  Take it a little easy on the sugar, get some good fiber (oatmeal is apparently key for many Olympians at breakfast), and have a great, filth-free race.

A terrifying thought with AI

As much as I am on the side of Ukraine in their war against Muscovy (Russia), there is one thing that terrifies me; that the drones which are doing most of the killing will become more fully autonomous, and the end result will be armies that can simply commit mass murder by launching the drones in the general direction of the victims, something of a "Skynet" kind of situation, but without the dry one-liners for which Ahnuld is rightly famous.

I would say that we could simply trust that world leaders are sane enough not to do so, but with Vodka attacking mostly schools and apartment buildings, Pooh putting millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, and Sparkles Khamenei murdering and executing tens of thousands for the "crime" of not liking the current government, I don't think that I can take that assumption to the bank.

So what do we do?  Well, the Kyivan Rus has shown us a way to start with massive investments in jamming and anti-aircraft defense, and until Skynet really gets going and becomes more fully autonomous, that will be an effective, if very expensive way of preventing things from going too far.  Finding and destroying launch sites will further limit things.  

But that noted, I think we have some very real things to deal with with AI, as the Poohs, Vodkas, and Sparkle-Mullahs of the world love the idea of projecting power without needing to persuade people.

Say what?

Back in the day, in the 1960s through the 1980s, it was said that one could fail an FBI background check for classified clearances if one had lived with someone outside of marriage--the logic was, rightly or wrongly, that the embarrassment of having that revealed could induce someone to wrongly share classified data.  That is certainly the logic behind the "honey traps" engaged in by the KGB.

So I was shocked yesterday to see that today, bestiality is not an automatic disqualification for FBI employment.  Now is this horrific?

Well, not really, and Kash Patel needs to work on his messaging.  What Patel is actually referring to was that the FBI will not automatically disqualify those who have been sexually abused by being forced into things like bestiality, and (within the reality that sexual abuse leads to mental illness and such) I can go along with this--and Patel should have said "what the policy actually says is that a history of being sexually abused does not automatically disqualify a candidate."

A bit more about big buildings

A few years ago, I noticed something very interesting; that modern masonry buildings tend to have an expansion joint filled with a rubber-like material every 20-40 feet, while older ones can go on for blocks with no such expansion joint. I also noticed that modern cinderblock buildings tend to crack a lot, and providentially, I visited the home of a friend who is a mason, and asked him what was up.

He explained to me that the mortar is different; older buildings use lime mortar, which apparently is a little bit more flexible and tolerant of thermal cycles, while for the past 80 years or so, most builders have used Portland cement, which is more rigid and thus brittle.  Hence newer masonry buildings need expansion joints, and will crack if they are insufficient.  You'll see the same thing in finished garages if they don't have adequate climate control (like mine), or even large rooms finished with sheetrock.  Brittle materials don't do well with thermal cycling.

Lesson for those who would build gigantic monuments to themselves is that engineering-wise, it gets difficult with modern materials, and hence building on a smaller scale, and using materials that will flex better with thermal cycles, will be wise.  We might say that physics tells us to create our homes and businesses on a more human scale.

Urban planning; let's make more targets

This is something of a follow-up to something I posted over a decade ago; that in many ways, gigantic buildings like the Sears ("Willis") Tower and World Trade Center really don't make sense except as a statement of ego.  The cost then was about 5-10x the cost of construction on a normal scale, and there are developments with the war in Ukraine that make this even more so.

Specifically, we're seeing how "Shahed" drones can, when they crash into an apartment building (war crime, yes), put several families out of a home and make significant portions of the building uninhabitable.  We are seeing how warfare, at least by the Russian and Iranian model, is to attack hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings with swarms of drones.

Now in the best of situations, this is bad, and it's even worse when one realizes that to get to shelters, residents need to go down stairs or the elevators--exposing them to more danger from those same drones.  And in that light, I think we need to remember the example of the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, which famously tricked the Yamato into firing on her as if she were a cruiser--using armor piercing shells that simply went through Roberts, as well as other ships like the escort carrier Gambier Bay.

In other words, architecture can try to withstand this kind of assault (like a cruiser or battleship), or it can simply serve as a target for very expensive munitions, and while jet Shaheds are relatively cheap, their price is still....about the price of a home, $100-200k.

And so we might wonder whether, as we consider this new (and horrific) way of war, we might combine de-Sovietization (removal of gigantic apartment complexes) with smaller scale (and nicer) buildings that....let's just admit it....would be far more inviting to not only residents, but also prospective businesses that might want to set up shop, and--as the mess of war recedes--even tourists.

Really, for the past 150 years or so, urban planning has been working on a model built around the steam engine--where factories and buildings were made ever more massive more or less to keep the steam engine working and justify its cost.  Now that the production of energy can be done on a much smaller scale, it's time to reconsider that model.