Category Archives: View

View 842 Monday, September 08, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

I finished a bunch of paperwork yesterday, and this morning after breakfast I walked down to the post office and then on to the bank, a round time of about two miles. I used to do that or more every day, and I think I should continue long walks. I make no doubt any of my physician friends who see this will have the same recommendation.

There is a good in depth analysis with some due attention to history in Scott McConnell’s

Washington Puzzled as Putin Doesn’t Back Down

Washington Puzzled as Putin Doesn’t Back Down

It is important to understand why Washington is puzzled about Russia’s actions regarding the historic path to the invasion of Russia. History is no longer a requirement for graduation from Harvard and a number of other prestige universities that serve as the Department of State’s recruiting ground; and the President has even less acquaintance with such arcana. Anyone interested in the current Ukrainian situation should read this.

Meanwhile, Putin has scored more points with his new ceasefire. He insists that he can’t actually grant that – he is not, he says, in control of the Ukrainian dissidents – but he will use his good influence to bring about an end to the hostilities. Of course the cease fire leaves the pro-Russian dissidents surviving and in control of some key cities in Eastern Ukraine. That was to be expected. Short of actual credible threat of war by the United States, Russia intends to possess the Cossack regions of the Eastern Ukraine – a land bridge to their newly seized Crimean peninsula – and to insure against the seizure of the rest of Ukraine by NATO. Any American foreign policy that does not realize this is deluded.

What we must be concerned about is the Baltic Republics, which are already NATO members and thus war trigger allies of the United States. Thanks to the Soviet policy of replacing ethnic Baltic families with Russians, sending the Balts to settle in eastern Russia, there are substantial numbers of Russians in the Baltic Republics. Russia needs Russians. Putin needs Russians. A number of recent articles have questioned how severe the Russian population crisis really is, but there’s not much question that Putin and his advisors take the problem seriously. His goal is not a new Empire with vast numbers of non-Russians under Russian rule; his goal is a stable Russian state, not a Republic in the western sense; more like the Roman Empire, which was officially the Senate and People of Rome through most of the Imperial days. The Emperor ruled by the consent of the leading people of the Empire, and sought to keep the rest of the Romans happy. Of course after Septimius Severus no actual Romans were ever Emperor.

As Rome retained – and Emperors had more or less respect for – the offices and trappings of the Old Republic, Russia will retain democratic institutions. Of course this can be said for the United States, which retains institutions in memory of a Nation of States, but has become more a Nation of Regulators. Places where there is actual self government remain, but most big cities have long been taken over by a small class of professional politicians, who generally choose the candidates before inviting the people to ‘choose’ among them. The result is that cities like Los Angeles have big governments, highly paid staffs of tenured civil servants with health care and assured retirement pay, and unpaved streets, water mains replaced on a three hundred year cycle, and a future resembling Detroit – which when I was young was the very symbol of a thriving industrial economy. Russia does not intend to import that sort of government; whether it can refuse to do so is another matter.

Russia has also seen what happened when tyranny ended suddenly in Libya and other parts of Africa – Iraq, for that matter.

There has long been concern about Russian population decline.

 http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/drunken-nation-russia%E2%80%99s-depopulation-bomb That concern continues .

Why Putin needs Russians, dying of a broken heart

The Dying Russians by Masha Gessen | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/02/dying-russians/

despite statistics showing the problem is not quite so severe. The Russians are concerned, and we must realize that. But of course Washington does not. Read McConnell’s piece… http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/09/washington-puzzled-putin-doesnt-back.html

For more background, see :

Solzhenitsyn & The Return of the False Dimitris

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/09/sholzenitzyn-return-false-dimitris-ukraine.html

It will present a view that I suspect you have not thought about.

I have accumulated a number of recommendations of places worth attention; far more than I have time to deal with.

I found these to be interesting, but I have no comments at the moment:

Identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’ allegedly made through DNA testing

 

JIBO: The World’s First Family Robot

Jibo The World’s First Family Robot

 

How to Deal With Hostage Takers: Soviet Lessons

 

The Trouble Is that Obama DOES Have a Strategy

 

 

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q2/view626.html

 

 

Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters

“Important findings” haven’t been replicated, and science may have to change its ways.

 

Claim: Global Warming will cause a deadly Jellyfish Invasion

 

A Neutral Guide to Net Neutrality

I don’t think Luanne’s grandparents are very far out of touch at all… http://www.gocomics.com/luann/2014/09/07

On malware and phishing:

You may well have run into this already, but I just saw it today and wanted to mention it: When I looked at a Web site I follow, I saw a new browser page open spontaneously, which advised me that the page I was looking at was associated with phishing attempts, and offered me a button to click to do something about it. Naturally, I closed the window and went away. That’s a nice twist in phishing: A phishing attempt that disguises itself as a warning against phishing.

I must say I’ve run into enough of this crap so that your quotation about "treated as wolves" sounds disturbingly attractive sometimes.

William

After I finished the Saturday View https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/a-day-eaten-by-worms-and-i-recommend-malwarebytes-org/ I kept fiddling with it until this morning, when I added some instructions on the safe way to close unwanted popup phishing attempts.

And we have this:

Dr. Pournelle –

The fine folks at Malwarebytes have a version of their program which has different names. They, and I, recommend keeping a fresh copy on a thumbdrive or some such.

https://www.malwarebytes.org/chameleon/

or browse to malwarebytes then for home and then other and finally chameleon

The program is named after other familiar programs – like Firefox. The idea is that if some malware has prevented you from getting to their web site, you can start running these until one starts.

I am not affiliated with their organization; but their software has saved a couple of systems for me.

I watched the first fifteen minutes of the new “Utopia” reality show, but I didn’t get far. I thought it the dumbest idea for a TV show I had ever seen. I don’t know how much they are paying the participants to go incommunicado without rules or mores for a year, but I don’t think there has ever been a period in my life when they could afford to pay me enough to do that. And when they showed the evangelist preacher saying goodbye to his wife and children and presumably his congregation to join a group of libertines willing to live with no electricity, few comforts, bad food, and unlimited booze and the prospect of uninhibited sex, I lost what interest I already had. We watched Chief Inspector Gently in a rather depressing but well written mystery/drama instead. I suppose the reviewers will try to convince me I made the wrong choice, but I do not think they can succeed.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 841 Saturday, September 06, 2014

Edits and additions through Monday, September 8, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Today was the day I was going to catch up, but at 2 PM I was still in my pajamas and hadn’t had lunch yet. I generally dress upstairs in my bathroom, so I have breakfast in my pajamas, so that wasn’t unusual; but about 10, when I was ready to go up to shower and dress, Roberta came to tell me of a tale of woe. Saturday she generally tries to Skype with one or another grandchild, and before she talked to one of them she had wanted to look up something about the education system, and she couldn’t do it. Her Internet browser exploded in advertisements, and she couldn’t even find Google. Clearly something had got into her system that ought not be there.

I went in to have a look. It was a mess all right. Something had changed the home page of both Internet Explorer and Firefox to Trovi, as well as the search engine. There were other problems. Control Panel showed me a number of programs I’d never heard of were installed. I removed several of them – Roberta couldn’t remember using them – but when it came to trovi and sizlysearch, the Microsoft operating system couldn’t remove them. Instead I was taken to a web browser page with one of those “are you human?” things to fill out which would take me to the Trove Uninstaller. God knows what that would do to her system, so I declined the offer. Task Manager showed me that several trovi and sizlesearch processes were running. I could close them, but seconds later they came back again.

Same with Internet Explorer and Firefox: I went in to remove all addins and extensions, but neither sizylsearch nor trovi could be disabled; the disable button was greyed out. There were a couple of other undisableable addins.

Since the search engines weren’t reliable as a means of finding out how to get rid of hijacked search engines, I asked my advisor team for advice, and also went up to my own systems to see what I could find. Online searches with uncontaminated systems told me that Trovi and Sizylsearch were notorious: not exactly malware, but certainly adware, and annoying. They also intentionally made it difficult to eliminate them, which moves them to malware status in my judgment.

Meanwhile, I had turned on Microsoft Security Essentials deep scan on Roberta’s machine. When I went back to her system the screen was dark. Nothing I could do with keyboard or mouse would get me a signal from it. Curiouser and curiouser. I pushed the hardware on/off button. A message about restoring windows appeared. That seemed a bit odd, but Windows came up all right, along with a Microsoft Security Essentials report that it had found WORM: Win32/GAMARUE and removed it. Looking that up advises me to scan any hard drive that her system has ever been connected with. That’s fairly easy since her machine isn’t part of the Chaos Manor networking system, and she doesn’t access other sites here. I also restarted Microsoft Security Essentials and told it to do a full deep scan. This took a while, but eventually it ran to completion having found no other malware.

Except there was: that is, if you count swizlesearch and trovi as malware. They were both still active, raining ads in new windows and generally being aggressive, enough so that her system was in essence unusable on the Internet. Also something about extreme weather was periodically giving us voice messages along with sponsoring commercials.

By now I had a consensus among both advisors and from my on line search: what I needed was malwarebytes.org and their scanner. I could not get Internet Explorer to go where I wanted it to. I couldn’t get internet Explorer even to open a new tab with a right click. Trovi really owned that program. I turned to Firefox. At least I could get a new tab, but I noted that Google was no longer available as a search engine.  I had to trick Firefox into going there by directly typing the full https://malwarebytes.org address into the address window – no search needed – and even then it popped up three more windows – not tabs, but new windows –  each offering technical expertise about malwarebytes.org but none of them having that address. They were pretenders hoping I’d go to them for help rather than malwarebytes.org.  I patiently closed each of those windows and the next ones that popped up,and some after that,  and by then the original window had got itself to the malwarebytes.org site. That site offers a free and a paid scan download. I chose free. That came down fast, and I ran the installation program. It updated itself, and began the scan; in seconds it had detected 19 threats. I looked at them (clicked details) and lo! sizlsearch had four entries, and Trovi had three. There were others including extreme weather reporting – it was that one which kept giving us sound messages along with sponsors – and some other stuff that I’d never seen before.I kept checking the scan progress, and it was finding a few every few minutes. Eventually it found 49, and announced the scan complete. I let the malwarebytes scanner quarantine them all, reset Roberta’s machine, said a few words of potent white magic, and when her system came up I opened Internet Explorer.

I was greeted by the Google home page, which is what Roberta uses. Trovi had hijacked that, but now Trovi was nowhere to be seen. Task manager showed that no trovi or sizyle processes were running, and now, several hours later, they are still gone. Of course we’re changing passwords just in case.

And I downloaded the malwarebytes.org scanner to this machine and ran it: it found one ancient file it wanted to quarantine, but nothing else. I’ll buy the professional edition and set it to scan all the other machines up here at intervals, since it catches stuff that Windows Security Essentials doesn’t believe is malware.. And it’s 4:30 in the afternoon.

A Republic if you can keep it.

So I still haven’t caught up. I have to pay bills, and there’s other stuff that didn’t get done while I was still in my pajamas at 2 PM. But I’ve dressed, showered, had my lunch, and I’ve put this in the day book, from where it will be easy enough to consult for writing into the column, and now it’s time to post this and pay the bills. I have some other stuff to write about, including the difference between a democracy, which the Framers of 1787 detested – “There never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide…” – and a republic, which is what Franklin said they had created. “A republic. If you can keep it.”

While I was dressing I thought about the concept of “fair play” and “fair game”.  In the old honor system, some people were outside it: they were not treated as honorable opponents, they were “treated as wolves are.” This was the sentence passed by the Roman Senate on the surviving members of the Catalinarian rebellion.  To be regarded and treated as wolves are.  I suppose we are too civilized for this, and we are bound to treat our barbarian enemies as if they were entitled to be treated as we do other men, but it makes you think.  Especially when they behead journalists and stone young girls for not marrying whom they are supposed to marry. Now of course I was thinking about the creators of trovi and sizylesearch and how we ought to think of them: they use Internet freedom to get as close to the malware line as they possibly can – there is some evidence that at least one of those started with the best of intentions – but end up costing thousands of people hours of time, adding up to more hours than there are in a long life; all wasted on countering their efforts.  That’s sort of the equivalent of murder. But I haven’t time to think all this through.  Another time.

But first I have to catch up. Beginning with paying the bills.

For those interested in travel and what we carried in the year 2000, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/adventure2000.html

Rick Hellewell, my security advisor, says

It looks like Sizlsearch is installed as part of a ‘you must install video software to view that movie’ kind of thing. Which should never be done. Prompts such as that are never to be trusted. If you think you need a video player, go to the source (Adobe Flash Player, I suppose) manually, never via a link or a message while browsing.

And, although Malwarebytes has a good reputation (as does Tom’s Hardware site), not sure that having two antivirus programs is a good idea.

But no anti-virus program will protect against a user installing an ‘add-on video player’, which is almost always a vector for installing malware.

I’d also recommend, after a power-off restart, a re-run of any malware scanner programs, just to make sure that things are safe.

…Rick…

Regarding two scanners, I can see they might interfere with each other, as each looks at the other’s data base.  An interesting experiment, and I do silly things so you don’t have to…

But note what Rick is saying. If you try to open a movie of the grandchildren, and up pops an offer to give you free software to view that movie with, don’t do it.  Leave the offer on screen and get someone who knows about this stuff to look at it. And be careful how you close that screen.  I generally close the whole browser rather than click anywhere in a potential malware screen, because just because it looks like a “close this window” place to click, you don’t know what it’s actually connected to.  Or at least I don’t. 

As to the programs needed to view that video, chances are you already have programs that will open that movie, and you only need to know how to do that,  But do not let accept the offer of free movie viewing software from some friendly but unknown site, and do not give unknowns permission to install stuff on your computer. And do not trust it simply because a once reliable publication says you can.  I’ve told you that twice before.  What I tell you three times is true.

And I am reminded that I should tell you that malwarebytes is not a primary anti-virus and worm defense.  Microsoft Security Essentials remains essential.  But MSE does not remove some of the annoyingware that can make you crazy. Malwarebytes.org will do that. Use them both.

The California Sixth Grade Reader http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=chaosmanor-20&camp=14573&creative=327641 contains the stories and introductions from the original official California 6th Grade Reader in 1916. Similar readers, most of them containing the same stories as the California reader, were in use in well over half the other states. I had a Sixth Grade reader with most – nearly all – the same poems and stories in a country school, two grades to a room, in Capleville, Tennessee in 1943. These are the stories that Americans all had read, and formed part of the common American culture.  I have added a few introductions and a foreword directed to those who will be reading this book, and with a lot of help from readers and my advisors we have published it as an electronic Book. It is available on Amazon and readable in the free Kindle Apps for most tablets, PC’s, and smart phones like iPhone.  My six year old grand daughter likes some of the stories, particularly the one about Beethoven and the Moonlight Sonata.  

On closing malware popups:

Rick Hellewell, our security guy, says

A "normal" popup window will have the usual "x" in the upper right corner of the window, so you use that to close the errant window.

A popup window can be created without the ‘x’, or can disable the ‘x’ normal function. Or they can put a ‘fake’ ‘x’ button that actually does something else. So you may have to use another method.

If the popup window has the ‘focus’ (is the ‘active’ window), then you can try Alt+F4 to close it. Or you can look at the taskbar (usually the bottom of the screen) where you might find the indicator of multiple browser instances. You can then find the ‘bad’ instance, and right-click that instance to close it.

If that doesn’t work (sometimes new popups can be spawned), then you might need to go into the Task Manager (right-click the Task Bar, then select Start Task Manager; in Windows 8 I believe you can hit the Window button, then just type in Task Manager to start it). From there, you might see multiple instances of your browser program, and you can force stop it.

If still persistent, a last resort is a full shutdown/restart might be needed. And, after that, perhaps a malware scan might be in order.

This page has pictures and instructions on the process: http://www.wikihow.com/Close-an-Internet-Pop-Up .

…Rick..

Eric adds:

When in doubt I go to task manager and kill the browser entirely. "Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure."

When in doubt use task manager.

And thanks for the sales spike in the California Sixth Grade Reader http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LZ7PB7E/ref=as_li_tf_til?tag=chaosmanor-20&camp=14573&creative=327641

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 841 Friday, September 05, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

This is a day book. That means that I start out not knowing what will happen or where I am going. Today’s experiences certainly came out that way.

Another day eaten in large part by locusts, and I got little done. I am also convinced that Microsoft hates me.

I had to drive Roberta out to Kaiser this morning. I took Precious, the Surprise Pro 3, for a test. While out there waiting I tried it out as a laptop, both with OneNote and Word 365, using both the Stylus/Pen and the keyboard. I’ll have all that in the column I am preparing which I will have up soon now (not, I hope, Real Soon Now; but things do tend to eat my time in unexpected ways). One thing I did learn: if you intend to use a Surface Pro 3 as a laptop – and it is entirely possible that you can – you will need to get a number of usage problems solved when you are home; learning them on the job isn’t feasible.

Also, if you are just beginning Word 365, and you are not familiar with Windows 8 (sometimes known as Microsoft’s New Coke) do not try to learn the two together on a Surface Pro 3. There are too many unfamiliar things to learn all at once, and you can’t be sure whether your trouble is Windows 8, Word 365, or the Surface.

Having learned that I decided that the first move would be to get familiar with the Word 365/Windows 8 combination; and if that was too difficult, install Office 365 on a Windows 7 machine. That seems logical – but then I discovered that although I bought and paid for Office 365 Business Plan, which allows me to install Office 365 on several machines, I did that with the Surface 3 Pro – and I have not the foggiest notion of how to install it on anything else. I tried logging in to Microsoft Office 365, but I have no notion of what the user name and password are. I bought the subscription, so I must have used something, but if I logged any of that I sure can’t find it, and my memory of the event is that there was nothing to log. I send in the credit card number and downloaded the software. Fortunately it was American Express, which means that I have a way to make Microsoft listen to me if I can’t figure this out, but I’d rather not have to fire that cannon.

If any of you KNOW what I should do – a Microsoft web site I can ask for help, or something – please send me mail. I bought Office 365, and paid for it; downloaded it to the Surface 3 Pro, and have successfully used full OneNote and Word on the Surface Pro,. Searching my Inbox for messages to me from Microsoft disclosed that on August 26 I paid for it, and there’s a link that actually seems to log me in automatically to my Office 365 account; it give no User Name and asks for no password, but it is aware that I downloaded Office 365 to Precious, the Surface Pro 3, and Swan, a Windows 8 Desktop. That tells me more than I knew before, because I didn’t remember that I had already downloaded it to Swan. Clearly I have been told how to download this to another machine, and I suspect I only need that link to do it for yet another system. I can hope. But it all seems a rather odd way of doing business.

I’ll have more to say about all this when I learn more. I am also eager to try this terabyte of cloud storage I get, supposedly common to all the machines I have this Office 365 on. Much to learn. But since it’s now on Swan – what I was trying to accomplish before I began this – I’m ready to learn some more. So I started this asking for help, but apparently I am able to help myself. It’s still the enough for the column, because I don’t do those until I have a happy ending, but I am getting closer…

The Ebola news continues to be alarming. There may or may not be some advances in treatment, learned from the use of survivors. This is well summed up in a Forbes on line article :

WHO Ebola Drug Panel: Use Survivor Serum To Treat Ebola Victims

The World Health Organization has just concluded a two-day consultation in Geneva among 200 health officials, regulators, ethicists, scientists and drug company representatives.

The goal was to produce a consensus statement on assessing the safety and efficacy of experimental Ebola preventives and treatments.

The most immediate action will be taken with convalescent patient serum for treatment and already-planned safety trials for two preventive vaccines. Three primary recommendations were made.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2014/09/05/who-ebola-drug-panel-use-survivor-serum-to-treat-ebola-victims/

There are other recommendations, and it doesn’t take long to read. What everyone is being careful not to mention is the very real possibility that the Ebola virus may mutate producing a strain that can propagate itself through a vector, or directly through airborne cough particles. As I understand it, an odd mutation of influenza produced the Spanish Flu epidemic back in World War I times. I have no idea of what the probabilities are, but in these days of frequent air travel, I am sure many health safety officers are concerned that there will come a strain of Ebola that can infect before the symptoms are fully displayed. There are other unpleasant options. I hope the authorities are thinking about these matters.

My Tuesday newspaper tells me that President Obama is “enraged” at Israel:

Obama’s Curious Rage

Calm when it comes to Putin, ISIS and Hamas, but furious with Israel.

By

Bret Stephens

Sept. 1, 2014 6:32 p.m. ET

Barack Obama "has become ‘enraged’ at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. " So reports the Jerusalem Post, based on the testimony of Martin Indyk, until recently a special Middle East envoy for the president. The war in Gaza, Mr. Indyk adds, has had "a very negative impact" on Jerusalem’s relations with Washington.

Think about this. Enraged. Not "alarmed" or "concerned" or "irritated" or even "angered." Anger is a feeling. Rage is a frenzy. Anger passes. Rage feeds on itself. Anger is specific. Rage is obsessional, neurotic.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-obamas-curious-rage-1409610734?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204730204580127784230834408.html

I am probably the wrong one to comment on Israel and Gaza. Back when some influential people listened to me I took part in some policy discussions on what Israel might do, with particular attention to the actions of the settlers, and I was in favor of Israel drawing definite boundaries, removing the settlers from beyond the boundaries, and essentially unilaterally declaring a two-state solution. It’s more complicated than that, but the consensus was that if Israel got out of the occupied territories, sanity might return, particularly if there were good economic incentives. My advice was based in large part on familiarity with the plight of Christians in the occupied territories.

In any event, Israel decided to give something like that a trial, and at considerable cost brought the Israeli settlers out of Gaza and withdrew all Israeli troops from there. There followed some investments into Gaza. The hope was that Gaza might become something like Hong Kong. After all, at one time Beirut was known as the Paris of the Orient.

Clearly that didn’t work. Hamas took over and while there was considerable investment and construction, much of the investment went to rockets and much of the construction to tunnels for bringing in and concealing rockets; after which thousands of the rockets were fired in the general direction of Tel Aviv and other densely populated civilian areas of Israel. The Israelis have mostly been polite enough to avoid telling us they told us so.

Thus I am more likely to be enraged at those who used the opportunity to build rockets rather than infrastructure. I am not sure why one would become enraged at the Israelis for taking measures to prevent the rockets and destroy the tunnels. Of course that will involve asymmetrical casualties; what would one expect?

But I confess I am baffled that the President of the United States would be enraged at Israel. Perhaps this is misreporting, and I missed the refutation form the White House?

These were sent to me some time ago, and I marked them for posting with a comment.  I’m out of time for a comment but they are still worth your attention:

http://sultanknish.blogspot.ca/2014/07/know-your-military-colonists.html

http://warontherocks.com/2014/07/how-to-lose-the-robotics-revolution/

Pop culture metaphors applied to U. S. vs. Russia

The first that comes to mind is Blazing Saddles, Gene Wilder to Cleavon Little, on the subject of Mongo "Don’t shoot him, that’ll just make him mad.".

The second is the 09/05/2014 episode of Girl Genius www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php on dealing with attacking bears.

Obama in this case might be well advised to consider the candygram.

Tim Harness.

Never do your enemy a small injury, advises Machiavelli and just about anyone else who thought about it for a while…

Hi Jerry

I have enjoyed Larry & your books since high school, in regards to Australian temperature data sets our BOM (Bureau Of Meteorology) has reset all data obtained over 200 years.

It is a true scandal we actually have remote region records kept by families for 150 years (as official recorders) that is now not valid. I live in South Australia & from day one (1836) of settlement an official recorded meteorological data apparently most of this data is wrong. All data not compliant with global warming has been discarded, the reason is it doesn’t meet current standards.

If you use the recorded data hottest days in the 1930’s followed by 1890’s but due to adjustments every hot day since 1990 is a record (still lower than previous) The memory of those people that diligently recorded all things meteorological is being discarded, the disrespect of these persons is an insult to their legacy.

There are many regions where adjustment by BOM has turned cooling into warming, but worse than that they make media releases saying hottest day on record but don’t say record reset.

This is the easiest website to link to http://joannenova.com.au/2014/09/bom-homogenisation-in-deniliquin-creates-discontinuities-and-changes-trends/

Our our national newspaper The Australian has many examples, I am a practical person a humble tradesman but can see that I am being played here.

Chris

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 841 Wednesday, September 03, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Yesterday was mostly a discussion of the man sent to a mental ward for writing a science fiction novel. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/incarcerated-for-writing-a-science-fiction-novel/ my tentative conclusion was that this was more a case of bad reporting than anything else.

Dr. Pournelle,

Even though reassured by the better-sourced articles you’ve linked and commented upon, I’m still a little concerned that the McLaw situation could easily turn out to be Gulag-style thought crime persecution, and perhaps even more so than the recent seizure of a basketball team. We seem to only still have the authorities’ version of events.

-d

I hope you’re wrong, and I do believe that enough concern was aroused that competent reporters – there are still a few left in the journalism establishment – will discover the truth. As far as I can tell this was bad reporting, not malicious officials.  There do remain some good people in local government.  If we don’t believe that, we must conclude the the experiment begun in 1787 was a failure, and we could not keep the republic.  It degenerated into democracy and downhill from there, as the Framers feared it might.

But I just got tonight:   McLaw speaks!

Today’s LA Times Editorial Headline is “HOW TO PUT VLADIMIR PUTIN IN HIS PLACE.” The painless remedy, the TIMES tells us, is sanctions against Russian financiers and private companies. Another term for economic sanctions is economic warfare.

Today’s Daily Tech headline is Russian Hackers Hit Home Depot with "Massive" Credit Card Theft

Previously we had in the New York Times::

JPMorgan and Other Banks Struck by Hackers

A number of United States banks, including JPMorgan Chase and at least four others, were struck by hackers in a series of coordinated attacks this month, according to four people briefed on a continuing investigation into the crimes.

The hackers infiltrated the networks of the banks, siphoning off gigabytes of data, including checking and savings account information, in what security experts described as a sophisticated cyberattack.

The motivation and origin of the attacks are not yet clear, according to investigators. The F.B.I. is involved in the investigation, and in the past few weeks a number of security firms have been brought in to conduct forensic studies of the penetrated computer networks.

According to two other people briefed on the matter, hackers infiltrated the computer networks of some banks and stole checking and savings account information from clients. It was not clear whether the attacks were financially motivated, or if they were collecting intelligence as part of an espionage effort. Aside from JPMorgan, it was also not immediately clear which other banks were infiltrated.

JPMorgan has not seen any increased fraud levels, one person familiar with the situation said.

“Companies of our size unfortunately experience cyberattacks nearly every day,” said Patricia Wexler, a JPMorgan spokeswoman. “We have multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels.” Joshua Campbell, an F.B.I. spokesman, said the agency was working with the Secret Service to assess the full scope of attacks. “Combating cyberthreats and criminals remains a top priority for the United States government,” he said.

The intrusions were first reported by Bloomberg, which indicated that they were the work of Russian hackers. But security experts and government officials said they had not yet made that conclusion.

We have also had attacks on Target, Walmart, and other major consumer outlets.

I have seen no allegations from official Washington that Russian hackers are encouraged by their government, but I do notice a decided lack of vigor among Russian cybercops in pursuing these plausibly deniable computer experts.

So we are to put Putin in his place with economic warfare. I am reminded of the filk song “Bashing the Balrog.” Perhaps we need a new verse.

It would indicate that once you start bashing the balrog, the balrog gets to bash you. Economic warfare, like any war, is costly to all the participants. There is real damage. Most of it is to property, and the casualties are profits and bank accounts, but the damage and casualties are quite real even so; and most economic wars end with no real winners, and a great deal of residual resentment. There are no established rules of engagement or laws of economic war, and no clear paths to victory; and we have little experience in ending an economic war.  About forty years ago, RAND Corporation published several studies on the theme of “hostile trade”, mostly about Japanese foreign policy during the Shogunate. I presume there are later studies of economic war, but I’m not familiar with them. It does seem a hazardous venture.  Russia needs Russians, or Slavs who speak Russian, and needs them badly; Russian population decline is an existential threat to Putin’s nation, and his power to do something about it grows less with time.  The US possesses neither the means nor the will to prevent Russia from increasing its influence over, and probably eventually annexing, the Don area of the Ukraine.  Making what Russia sees as a vital interest cost a great deal more than it would without our economic war effort will not be ignored.

Bashing the balrog is an adventurous undertaking.

Perhaps this is what the President meant by a “reset” in relations with Russia? An economic Cold War?

An even stronger view:

‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine isn’t madness; it’s a rational, realist response to what it correctly perceives as a geopolitical threat right there in its own backyard.’

<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/how-the-west-drove-russia-into-ukraine/>

——-

Roland Dobbins

In fact, as we have consistently argued on spiked, the crisis in Ukraine owes far more to Western meddling than Russian. In fact, for the past 20 years, Western leaders have thoughtlessly, blunderingly provoked and frightened Russia over Ukraine. They have tried to pull Ukraine into the orbit of the EU, if not the EU itself. They have issued the half-baked offer of NATO membership to Ukraine, while simultaneously withdrawing it. And they have persistently, and self-aggrandisingly, talked of ‘promoting democracy’ in Ukraine and promulgating ‘Western values’. And what has made this so dangerous, what has led the region to the precipice, is that those selfsame Western actors pushing this policy-triad in the Ukraine don’t even recognise their intervention, their meddling, their clueless interference in Russia’s neighbour and one-time ally, for what it is: a provocation and a threat to Russia. 

It is in the American national interest to protect the Baltic Republics; but the Ukraine situation is very nearly an operational definition of a territorial dispute in Europe.  Some kind of federation within the Ukraine would make sense, but the West has shown no signs of understanding or encouraging that. It is not likely that a US economic war against Russia will benefit anyone at all.

I tried using Word 365 on my Surface Pro 3, and it was a disaster.  I am a sloppy typist, and one remedy to that is autocorrect: I change things like he3lp to help in autocorrect, and never have to worry about them.  The Surface Pro 3 keyboard is pretty good for a portable keyboard, but I still hit more than one key at a time, or get the wrong one, more often than I should.  Sometimes I just have to live with correcting the mistakes, but some of them are unambiguous, and thus good candidates for autocorrect. Over time I have built up a good set of autocorrections that go with the keyboard of that particular machine, and it works well.

But with Word 365 I can’t find autocorrect.  I can’t even find the ‘Word Options’ button that’s on the bottom of the drop down menu that comes when you click the big colorful button up in the upper left  of the Word screen – and for that matter I can’t find any big colorful button. for some imbecilic reason Microsoft has changed everything, and I intend to uninstall Office 365 from the Surface Pro and put in Office 2007 or something of the sort.  I don’t intend to learn a whole new word processing editor.

I’m asking for two opinions:  does anyone like Office 365, and whether you like it or not, how do you find Word Options, Proofing, and Autocorrect in Office 365?  When I try searching for them, I get page after page of add ins I can buy that will restore the old command structure of Word.  I don’t really want to do that.  I’d rather just uninstall 365.  But apparently the people who pay for search placement have so taken over the search business that it’s darned near useless: how can you trust a commercial offer to fix a problem when you don’t know what it’s replacing? 

In Word 2007, you hit the big colorful button; find Word Options; select Proofing; select autocorrect; and finally type in what is to be corrected (or paste it in) and what it is to be corrected to.  But with Word 365 I can’t even find the big colorful button, and when I use Google or Bing to ask where the hell autocorrect is, I get page after page of offers to buy something to fix the problem, but nothing about how to find the proofing or autocorrect feature.  Does anyone have any help?  I see mysterious hits on how to add features to the quick access too bar or something, but I can’t find the features in the first place.  Has Microsoft lost all semblance of sanity>

[Later.]

Thanks to all you readers who pointed out to me that in the old WORD the big Colorful Blob up in the upper left corner was in fact called FILE although it did not show that name, and that in Word 365 you can manage by fooling around to get a big blue thing to pop up that contains the word FILE.  In fact now that I have it I can’t make it go away, but I’ll figure that one out.  It has a long list of stuff including the word ‘options’, not WORD OPTION as it used to be, and that list contains proofing, and that will lead to autocorrect as before.  I still find it incomprehensible that Microsoft wants me to relearn use of a program I have been using since 1988, but perhaps I am merely being surly.  I seem to have developed some new pains today, and I’m back up here because I can’t sleep.  So I suppose that has solved the problem, and perhaps I just didn’t know what I was looking for.  I thought I was looking for the word FILE as a menu, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it.  Now it won’t go away, but better that than vanishing.

My great thanks to all those who took the trouble to tell me something that they must have thought obvious.  I really did look for FILE, and I didn’t see it.  I am also told by long time readers that Word 365 is actually better than Word 2007, and doesn’t take all that long to get used to; which is a comfort.  Thanks to all of you.

One more thing.  This tale will be in the column I am preparing.  At http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customization/AutoCorrect.htm there is a very readable exposition on using autocorrect, with good instructions.  It is very worth your while if you do a lot of typing and you use Word 2000 or later.

I have two more questions:  Does anyone know how to make autocorrect work in Windows Live Writer?  I suspect there is no way, but I would appreciate knowing for certain;  Second, where is the autocorrect dictionary stored? Is it transferable?  I understand there are ways to make up autocorrect options that will be used only in a particular document, but I doubt that the entire autocorrect list is incorporated in the saved document file. In any event I would appreciate knowing if the autocorrect list can be transmitted to copies of Word on other machines. Thanks!

And we have this on the global warming data:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/2014/08/heat-is-on-over-weather-bureau-homogenising-temperature-records/ which looks pretty dramatic. I have always been concerned with the particulars about average temperatures accurate to a tenth of a degree C. I don’t know how to get the average temperature of my house – some rooms air conditioned, some with fans, some just closed off, and do we include the two9 attics? – to a tenth of a degree C at any given time, much less a daily average, or a weekly, or a yearly average to a tenth of a degree C.  I am unsure how one would do that for the County of Los Angeles for the year 2015, and I am darned sure there is no reliable way to get the average temperatures of Los Angeles County accurate to a tenth of a degree C for the year 1915, much less for 1815.  I can understand that we have records of when ice formed and broke up on certain streams and rivers, but that doesn’t translate precisely into degrees C, much less tenths of a degree C.  As for the entire nation, I can’t understand why anyone would pretend to know the average temperature of the Continental United States in, say, 1840 to a tenth of a degree C – whether as an annual average or as a temperature at any arbitrarily chosen moment in time.  Estimates from tree rings and vegetation deposits are possible, but temperatures to a tenth of a degree?  Yet the rise in global warming is shown in tenths of a degree.

The above image is from Wikipedia.  Note that it shows a rise of about 0.8 degrees C from 1880 to the year 2000.  Now we know that the temperature is rising: in 1814 the Thames froze over hard enough that market sheds were constructed on the ice.  In 1776 Colonel Hamilton brought the cannon captured by Nathaniel Green at Ticonderoga to General Washington on Harlem Heights across the frozen Hudson.  We know those events happened, and they argue much colder winters in London and New York 150 to 200 years ago, so the temperature has certainly been rising.  How much is not so certain.  Growing seasons are longer now then they were then, so we can easily infer a warmer climate, but how much warmer is not so easy to determine.

Now Australia seems to be inquiring about data manipulation.  And I have yet to see a straightforward discussion of the data “smoothing” and “averaging” and other such measures that allow anything like tenth of a degree accuracy of annual global temperature.

McLaw speaks!

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.