CNN.com – New Orleans aquarium platform falls, dumps 10 into shark tank – August 8, 2002
Not quite “Headless body in topless bar”, but sound, very sound.
I’ve always imagined that my retirement job would be writing the headlines for the Post or another tabloid…

Charles Johnson is hosting a discussion on the peaceful youth of islam.
It appears that a Muslim-hate-kidz site has been discovered: Clearguidance.com. It’s full of fun posts and video clips if you have a stronger stomach than I do.
Yeah, yeah, there are Christian Identity sites almost as bad – but, and it’s a big one – there are mainstream Christians actively denouncing and working against those folks.
As I’ve said before, where are the ‘moderate’ Muslims? Personally, I’ll bet that they have been oppressed into silence by the nutjob thugs who are currently running many of the Arab countries, and who are promulgating the messianic, destructive culture that we have to break somehow.
How becomes the question.

I’m working on the migration to www.armedliberal.com, and having a small problem…the archives don’t appear. I’ve both left them in the blog directory and put them in their own directory and made the code changes suggested on the help page on Blogger.
Can someone smarter than me make some suggestions??

Unqualified Offerings sets out arguments for waiting on Iraq:

Deterrence requires two components:
1) A sure penalty for noncompliance.
2) A clear benefit to compliance.
US policy toward Iraq has lacked factor 2 for a decade. Current, stated policy is
1) If Saddam uses, acquires or conceals weapons of mass destruction, he dies.
2) If Saddam foreswears use, acquisition and concealment of weapons of mass destruction, he dies.

Um, guys, while that’s a nice trope, this isn’t how 4th Generation warfare works. Saddam gets the maximum benefit from lying about his activities. It’s more like this:
“Wow!! Bummer about Tel Aviv!! Who would be crazy enough to smuggle a nuke in there? Wasn’t us, promise!! No, really!!”
While the tame game theory model suggests that he and others can be managed successfully through boundary and consequence-setting, the only thing that might work would be something Godfather-like:
If anything bad happens to me; if I catch a cold and go to the hospital; if I get hit by a car while rollerblading drunk; you will die. You are now the guarantor of my wellbeing.
And of course, if something bad did happen, there would be many people who would say: “With no apparent thought given to the thousands of casualties on both sides, de-stabilization of the entire Middle East, loss of just about every ally we have except maybe Britain – well, the whole thing is quite mad. Adventurism at it’s worst, cynically done, at least in part, as a desperate ploy to aid Bush & Co. in the midterm elections.” (from Bob Morris)
Personally, I lean toward doing something, and doing it now. It will destabilize the Middle East, but the reality is that the Middle East is going to get destabilized soon by demographics, resources, poverty, and most of all by a virulent and murderous culture that is growing there unchecked.
I have three reasons for wanting to get it over with; they are eighteen, fifteen, and five years old. I want to buy some time for them, and some space to try and come to any humanly sustainable resolution, and we simply can’t do it in the face of an increasingly belligerent (the proof is just inland from Battery Park) culture that will only be richer, better trained, and better armed tomorrow.
I’m still looking for an alternative path. But I don’t see one.

(From Joe Katzman).
A Fire Captain’s Eulogy

When a friend dies we miss them, we regret words unspoken, we remember the love. When a brother dies we grieve for the future without him. His endless possibilities. If your brother doesn’t die of old age you might never accept the parting. When a comrade dies we miss them, we regret words unspoken, we remember the love, we grieve the future without them. We are also proud. Proud to have known a good man, a better man than ourselves. We respect the need for him to leave, to rest.
Some people equate camaraderie with being jovial. It is anything but. Camaraderie is sharing hardship. It is shouts and commands, bruises and cuts. It’s a sore back and lungs that burn from exertion. It’s heat on your neck and a pit in your stomach. It’s a grimy handshake and a hug on wet shoulders when we’re safe. It’s not being asleep when it’s your turn on watch. It is trust, it is respect, it is acting honorably.

Nothing I can say compares. Why aren’t you reading the original?

It’s Eric and Dawn‘s birthday. Happy returns of the day, fellas. May you share a hundred more.

National ID isn’t popular in Japan…Japan in an Uproar as ‘Big Brother’ Computer File Kicks In.

(via Andrew Edwards, with whom I need to have a chat with re guns…)
Andrea Dworkin and suicide bombing.
I don’t want to copy the whole thing, and no single quote does it justice.

Catching up on my blogging, I read Ted Barlow, who comments on and takes me back to Diane E., who comments on Mickey Kaus. The subject??
George W’s 10% partnership interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team, and Kaus’ defense of it, which is hammered on by Ted and Diane.
Sadly, this is a case of Too Little Knowledge on their part. Here’s the deal; I’ve spent the last year trying (unsuccessfully so far, but I’m not done yet) to raise a bunch of $$ to start a business. Here’s how these deals work: there is a division of ownership between capital – the folks putting up the green – and labor – me and the rest of the management team (actually, to connect to an earlier discussion with Kevin R., there is a further division with ‘intellectual property’, with the folks (me, in this case) who came up with the idea getting an additional share).
What the management team and founders get is called various things, but a ‘promoted interest’ is typical. It is a percentage of ownership in the company that we get, not in the form of options, but typically in the form of outright grants. It is very typical for the promoted interest to be subordinate to the investor’s capital and a defined return … essentially they ‘loan’ the money, secured only by the ‘value’ of the company, so they get their cash out and some interest rate. Then they share the income and value, withthe ‘labor’ side getting their for the work they did in putting the deal together and in advancing the interests of the company.
This is absolutely a generic prototype for buying a business, and anyone who is in business could tell you so. Bush wasn’t ‘gifted’ with his 10%, he earned it just like Jeff Bezos did.
Now why they chose Bush as the promoter, what other financial relationships the investors may have had with him, his dad, or his later campaigns, I can’t speak to, because I don’t know. There may be oodles of sleaze buried in there waiting to be discovered. There probably is.
But if our team attacks him on this point, we’re going to look really damn silly. Let’s avoid that, OK?

In this month’s The Atlantic (not yet online) a brilliant article about 4G security in the form of an interview with Bruce Schneier.

The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry in one way or another. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.

In other words, they need to be flexible, adaptive, and decentralized. Sound familiar? He then goes on to criticize the current plans as exactly the opposite.

“Okay, somebody steals your thumbprint,” Schneier says. “Because we’ve centralized all the functions, the thief can tap your credit, open your medical records, start your car, any mumber of things. Now what do you do? With a credit card, the bank can issue you a new card with a new number. But this is your thumb – you can’t get a new one.”
The consequences of identity fraud might be offset if biometric licenses and visas helped prevent terrorism. Yet smart cards would not have stopped the terrorists who attached the World Trade center and the Pentagon. According to the FBI, all the hijackers seem to have been who they said they were; their intentions, not their identities, were the issue. Each entered the country with a valid visa, and each had a photo ID in his real name (some obtained their ID’s fraudulently, but the fakes correctly identified them). “What problem is being solved here?” Schneier asks. (my emphasis)

And so do I. He goes on:

“The trick to remember is that technology can’t save you,” Schneier says. “we know this in our own lives. We realize there’s no magic anti-burglary dust that we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don’t provide much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people.”

That’s 4th Generation security. It’s built around attentive, empowered people.