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your own self-driving car is never going to happen; but if it does, you’re in trouble

I’ve believed for years that the Internet of Things is ultimately going to be known as one of our culture’s greatest mistakes. We’re restructuring all the building blocks of our society on an Internet with security rules built on quicksand. If every business can lose your credit card number in eight seconds, what chance does every other company have at keeping things safe once they’re online?

And much of the Internet of Things is so unnecessary. What possible reason is there to hook up my fridge to the Internet? Oh, so the power company can better manage the grid at peak hours? I swear, if I hooked up my fridge and they turned it off, and I got home and my beer was warm? I’d burn down the power company.

And so to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet is structured, a bunch of dudes have figured out how to hack your car. Not the fancy new wired self-driving cars, but your normal everyday average current automobile. They discovered they can literally turn your steering wheel and send you to Valhalla via the express lane.

The BBC has a good brief summary, but the Washington Post gets into the all too predictable horrifying details.

Unless we’re prepared to restructure the base rules of the Internet, then the Internet of Things is a danger because everything is completely vulnerable. Yeah, I know, quite the stretch for some. But it’s all doom mongering from lunatic blog authors, until somebody dies in their car via a hack. Or somebody hijacks a drone and rams an airliner. I don’t have to go through this again do I?

Because of this, I contend your own self-driving car is never going to happen. Not because the technology can’t be done, but because there’s no way they can make it secure. And if your car ever does become self-driving it’ll be because somebody hacked your car and you’re in trouble. Break the window and dive out, while you can.

burning car

our future awaits

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Japan is debating the wrong issue

It’s been 70 years since Imperial Japan walked itself into a bar room brawl it couldn’t win. And everybody remains chasing ghosts. China and South Korea still won’t talk to Japan on a reasonable level, in large part because Shinzo Abe can’t choose to spend some of his off time playing Pachinko instead of crawling around Yasukuni.

And today’s Diet debate has brought to a head the obscure local concepts of collective-self-defense, constitutionalism, pacifism, and so on. It’s all part of Abe’s effort to make Japan a “normal nation” again. For the majority of the Japanese people who want no part of this, it’s about defending 70 years of prosperity and not pointlessly starting vicious bar room brawls.

It’s the push and pull of a culture struggling with the reality of an increasingly withdrawn America. Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Japan are all starting to realize they have to do more themselves. The difference is none of these other countries have the historical baggage Japan does. A significant portion of Japan’s population quite literally despise their own history. All you have to do is carefully watch two or three old Japanese golden-age movies to figure this out.

I could talk about this defense / historical discussion for four hours, but honestly, I can’t get past the idea that Japan is debating the wrong issue. The future of Japan is not going to be about collective-self-defense, constitutionalism, pacifism, and so on. The future of Japan is demographics.

By 2050 Japan’s population will have declined by 1/3. Nearly one out of every two Japanese will be over the age of 65. No country on Earth has ever gone through such a transition before. It’ll literally reshape Japan as we know it.

How will this change society? The culture? The people? And most importantly, how will Japan pay for all of this?

They should be talking about this in the Diet, in yakatori houses, Pachinko parlors, and on street corners. But the best they can seem to manage is the occasional dialogue on how many Philippine nurses are allowed in to work in nursing homes.

I don’t have an answer for this problem. At this point nobody does. But China is not Japan’s biggest threat. Nor is Japan’s history the biggest concern that should drive the future. Demographics is going to determine Japan’s path. Until Abe, the Diet, and the country tackle this, everything else is a sideshow.

diet debate

wrong topic

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newsroom baffled how leaders wrote Iran speeches via belligerent time travel

At the conclusion of fifteen straight hours of an overall “baffling ordeal” the entire newsroom of the Daily Planet struggled to write a single coherent article on the recent Iranian nuclear deal. Arguments among staff primarily centered on the similarity of speeches made by the planet’s leadership to words they already said six months ago. “We spent about seven hours investigating the possibility that the space time continuum had ruptured and we were both late for Christmas, and all humanity was doomed to a vicious black hold related death,” stated deputy editor Brace Winslow, “but after consulting the Pluto robot folks at Johns Hopkins we’ve ruled out that possibility. Which was fortunate, because I hadn’t had the chance to buy a damn thing for my future ex-wife.”

After a sleepless night, several pizza runs, and six discarded bottles of various alcoholic beverages the grizzled reporters settled upon the theory that the President, Republicans, Iranians, Israelis, and Euro-trash politicians all wrote their speeches six months ago and simply read them upon the agreement’s approval. “What we’ve yet to figure out is how they could write these speeches and then just read them,” remarked Winslow, “it’s almost like nobody has read the agreement before speaking.”

Yet the undaunted newsroom decided to determine the root cause of this discrepancy. “No responsible leader would just spout their own canned talking points without actually reading a critical document. So our conclusion is all the world’s leaders knew what the exact agreement would be when they wrote their speeches back in December. Because they could see through time. So we’re going back to Hopkins to figure out how this was done. The Iranian deal’s pretty huge; but think of it, our leaders can literally travel through time.  We could go back and shoot Hitler!  What a scoop.”

newsroom

Arcturus News Muster – 15 July 2015

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do not read or buy this book

Apparently an 89 year old stroke victim who can’t see or hear can consent to having their name attached to a book sold worldwide.  Who knew?  Money!  There’s been a lot of confusion on how this book came about, with widely varying stories on what’s happened.  So let me break it down in all its horror so you’ll believe me when I say do not read or buy this book.

– Harper Lee did not read or edit this book in draft or final form.  Whether she actually wrote any of this five decades ago is irrelevant.  The author reserves the right to approve their work prior to publication.  That’s why they’re the freaking author.

– Lee made herself clear on many, many occasions that she’d never publish again.  Seeing as how she’s not said one word about this book (probably because she can’t) it’s quite clear she didn’t consent and/or change her mind.  Thus, it’s not her book.

– Tonja Carter (Bob Ewell) says she miraculously found the manuscript, but only after Alice Lee died.  Like our good old friend Bob, it’s quite clear she’s lying.  And like our good old friend Bob, she’s getting away with it in open view of everybody on the planet.  Money!

So basically what’s happened is Carter and the goons at HarperCollins have decided to mortgage the good name of Harper Lee and her characters for all time in order to make money.  All without getting Lee’s permission.  Even though it’s her name on the front of the book.

The HarperCollins folks should be ashamed, truly disgusted with their actions.  But I suppose they won’t remember that when they step up to buy their third boat.

go set a watchman

Seriously, do not read or buy this book.

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Omar Sharif is The Most Interesting Man in The World

– Royal monarch visits his childhood home regularly

– Connoisseur of insanely beautiful women

– Able to converse in half-a-dozen languages

– Hooligan of mediocre EPL team

– Frequent French casino patron

– Mythically talented actor

– Drinking buddy of Peter O’Toole

– Accomplished bridge player

– Called a swanky hotel one of his homes

– Human in greatest movie entrance of all time

omar sharif

I don’t always applaud legends.  But when I do, I prefer Omar Sharif.

RIP my friends.

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on beer, breweries, airlines, airports, collusion, and selling out

So the airlines are supposedly colluding on price, eh? Who would have thought? I did. But I’m just some guy who flies regularly. I’m not a big shot at the Justice Department. But my Guests and I just did a brief half-hour of research to confirm what we’ve always suspected. It will undoubtedly take the Justice Department five months and $18M to do what I just did.

Kindly observe this tale of two airports: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport & Manchester–Boston Regional Airport.

So I went to Priceline Senόr Bancό de Rόbber Bill Shatner’s website to fly between these two locations. I chose 10-12 November to:

– Eliminate the possibility of last minute flight booking disparities

– Non-holiday week

– Not on a Friday or the weekend

– Random boring normal week

Manchester to Phoenix NOV

And, hmm, I get $347 with Delta and United, and American / US Air is within 7%. So why are Delta and United charging the exact same price? So I figure, okay, maybe Bill’s got an inside Star Trek deal in place with Delta and United. So I journey directly to the Delta and United websites to get it straight from the airline’s maul.

United 348

United gives a figure of $348 or $1 off Shatner.

Delta 355

Delta’s $355 or a whole $7 more than Shatner.

Just to further investigate I strolled over to Southwest and no points for guessing how much they charge for this flight.

Southwest 348

Yeah.

So of the four major airlines (all now under Justice Department investigation) three of them charge the exact same price. The other is a whole 7% more expensive. I see. Yeah.

So is all of this just a coincidence? That $348 is just how much it costs to fly from Manchester to Phoenix and none of the airlines can mess with that price?

Put another way, none of these airlines seem interested in providing a price different from the others, so they could, like, make money. You know, compete with the other airlines for your business to make a higher profit than the other airline. Capitalism, competition, etc?

So are the airlines colluding on price? I’ll let you decide. But the answer’s yes.

Speaking of reasons why collusion occurs, it seems presidential candidates have taken it upon themselves to conduct campaign events at breweries. Why?

– Everybody loves beer

– Get to pose with industrial looking equipment

– Meet hard working Americans not yet replaced by some dude in Shenzhen

– Everybody loves beer

bush brewery

Here we see Bush 3 at Four Peaks Brewery in Arizona.

clinton brewery

And here we see Clinton 2 at Smuttynose Brewery in New Hampshire.

I like these breweries. Smuttynose’s Robust Porter is first rate.

Robust Porter

I’ve only drank Four Peak’s Kilt Lifter when I’m layover at Phoenix Sky because you can’t get it out east yet. Good stuff too.

kilt lifter

You can get Kilt Lifter at Zinc Brasserie’s in Terminal 4. By the way, Zinc Brasserie’s is the only place you need to eat at Phoenix Sky. Don’t bother with anywhere else. I literally schedule layovers at Phoenix Sky to eat there. Place is freaking awesome. I’ve never been at Manchester long enough to eat there, so I don’t know what they’ve got.

Anyways, despite my affection for Four Peaks and Smuttynose I’m rather unnerved they’ve decided to sell out like this. Don’t you go ahead and think breweries host campaign events for free. They want payback, eventually. A phone call here, a campaign contribution there. A little access, a chance to remind somebody later when you need a favor. A concept otherwise known as collusion.

If the airlines are colluding against the law they’ve been doing it for at least a decade. And now the Justice Department wants to get involved? Honestly I’m surprised they’re actually doing something. Businesses have gotten so good at rigging the game or selling out that I’m always surprised when the consumer is handed a real victory, like when Comcast recently lost the chance to become the true giant octopus.

But I kind of expect the airlines to break the rules. They’ve been doing it since the dawn of flight. When Sarsaparilla Airways was shoving $2 bills into Woodrow Wilson’s pocket. But beer is supposed to be better than that. Beer is for us, more personal, intimate. You drink it at home, while relaxing with good television or a great book. Beyond crooked awfulness. It irks me to see them in the game this way.

Is beer the next total sell out? I guess we’ll know if Bush 3 or Clinton 2 wins, and then I stroll into my local shopette and see six packs of Robust Porter and Kilt Lifter. And they’re both the exact same price.

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outrage is now apparently the taste of victory

Great news! Your team just won. It’s a moment to celebrate glorious victory on the soccer / football field / pitch. You have many choices available on how you’ll enjoy this wonderful moment:

 

 a) Drink lots of beer with family and friends in an unbridled moment of enjoyable life

 b) Calmly read a book with your mate, pausing repeatedly to contemplate how lucky you were to get to see your team win

 c) Viciously parse random social media comments and shout loudly about how outraged you are that somebody wrote something that bothers you

 

Yeah, I know! I’d choose (a) or (b) too, and, oh, what, [unintelligible muttering] I’ve chosen (c)? When? [unintelligible muttering] But I did (a) and (b) last night. Doesn’t that count? [shakes head] [unintelligible muttering] Oh.

Once upon a time social justice warriors and the news media had pretty awesome causes to get behind. You could go to Alabama and do battle against goons who’d turn fire hoses onto people based upon the color of their skin. Or you could go to Nazi Germany and work against those guys who were too focused on mathematics and spreadsheets to realize what horrible fucking people they were.

You can do these things today too. For instance, you could go to Lebanon and deliberately cover the mass human misery and help millions in desperate need of support. Or you could go to Baltimore and cover the grinding day-to-day (not a single brief week) of how hard it is to live in America’s urban wastelands.

But why do any of this hard stuff when you can spend your time parsing somebody’s tweet and get mad at its content. After all, solving ISIS or urban America is awfully hard. Eh, whatever, let’s do nothing of actual value. Let’s sit behind a desk and trash free speech. It’s much easier that way.

I, of course, do this too. But the difference between me and somebody who works for the BBC or Washington Post is I don’t get paid for this. Plus, they’re on the nagging side. And I’m on the anti-nagging side. I want people to be free to say whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want. Their ilk literally wants to control human thought.

Two lunatic events to this end:

The Washington Post thinks this tweet is the most offensive thing England has done since the vicious firebombing of Dresden #BomberHarris #toosoon:

 

“Our #Lionesses go back to being mothers, partners and daughters today, but they have taken on another title – heroes: …”

 

Activist, journalist, and stormy-cloud-frowny-face-man Ishaan Tharoor, who used to be a senior editor at Time and a Yale man (must be a coincidence) called this a “sexist tweet”.

But what if I alter this tweet a little and make it say this:

 

“Our #Lions go back to being fathers, partners and sons today, but they have taken on another title – heroes: …”

 

To which my point is: What’s the fucking problem?

Is it illegal for us to refer to these female humans for what they are? I’m pretty sure every female player on the England team is somebody’s daughter. Quite a few of them are mothers too. Maybe we need to sanitize this speech to the point it sounds like a faceless machine wrote it.

After all, isn’t the term “lionesses” sexist too? Doesn’t that imply that female athletes can’t be male lions? Isn’t the fact that we say a female human can’t be a male lion the most offensive English anti-feminist thing since King Arthur beat (alleged) his wife over an (alleged) adulterous act? The BBC doesn’t seem to think so (surprisingly). The term’s plastered all over their website.

Whatever, I got my Guests to write this very, very professional tweet:

 

“Our #humans go back to being humans, workers and oxygen consumers today, but they have taken on another title – winners of the game: …”

 

See how much safer and kinder this tweet is. If only all our speech sounded this way. Then nobody would ever say anything valuable or fun ever again. Think of how awesome that world would be.

Next up is the BBC who (not surprisingly) raises the issue of how many low-class-haters took to the airwaves to use the term Pearl Harbor in conjunction with the Japanese loss.

Apparently, poking fun at history is horribly offensive and juvenile. What kind of insensitive pig would do something like that? Well, me. This is what I posted prior to the game’s start on an unrelated social media platform:

 

“On July 5th, 1942 USS Growler torpedoed IJNS Arare and two other destroyers off Kiska or 2,527 miles from today’s stadium. Here’s hoping for an anniversary repeat. ‪#‎theystartedit ‪#‎toosoon”

 

But what if I alter this tweet a little and make it say this:

 

“On August 8th, 1942 Admiral Mikawa’s forces torpedoed and sank four Allied crusiers off Guadalcanal or 6,140 miles from today’s stadium. Here’s hoping for an anniversary repeat. #longlance #youstarteditoilembargo #toosoon”

 

To which my point is: What’s the fucking problem?

If we as a human race cannot laugh and tell jokes (even offensive jokes) about the most horrible war in human history, we’ll rapidly discover that humor no longer exists and we’re just a bunch of boring losers.

Somebody needs to get Tharoor and the BBC a bunch of beers and watch them drink until they calm down. Then they can just simply celebrate victory with the rest of us. They should try it now and again. They’d sleep better at night.

Normally I wouldn’t care, except that Tharoor and the BBC are powerful enough that people who actually matter are going to listen to them and further do what they can to control our speech.

It’s going to get to the point that anybody, anywhere is going to be afraid to tweet or say like, things, or anything at all, because they’ll be too afraid that what they say is offensive to somebody, somewhere, over something.

And what we can / cannot say will be dictated to us by an elite BBC woman and super-elite Yale man; upon pain of outrage and social ostracism. I fear this world. For when it arrives, it’s going to be a freaking miserable nightmare.

As an example, I almost, almost didn’t post my Kiska thing because I thought it’d offend people or folks would think it too juvenile. But I did it anyway. I’m glad I did.

stormy

The Arcturus Project’s Weekly (Not Weekly) Stormy Cloud Award goes to His Ivy League Eminence Ishaan Tharoor. Smart Yale man you might be, but wise you are not. Do you get it? I did a thing there.

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“He made the rafters shake with the loudness of his approval.”

239 years ago 56 guys signed a document that made them traitors.  This incredibly brave and reckless act changed humanity.  We take their ultimate success as a fact of history.  For them it was far less certain.  Not all of them lived.  All of them suffered.  All of them fought.  And victory was ultimately theirs.

If I can manage to remember, every year we’ll take a look at one of these men and reflect upon their lives.

Josiah Bartlett – New Hampshire

Born 1729 in Massachusetts, we find our young 21 year old Bartlett bound for Kingston, New Hampshire in 1750 to practice medicine, without a license, or having been to medical school, or even taken a single college course.  I guess back then you could get away with this.  He seems to have had some great doctors to teach him and a fierce propensity to read and then read some more.

In 1752 he fell ill with a fever normally inclined to end human life.  He’s credited with treating his own illness with cider (hydration) against the advice of other doctors and managed to pull through.  In this we see the emerging nature of a young man not inclined to do what other people say.

In 1754 he marries Mary Bartlett, who also happened to be his first cousin.  I guess back then you could get away with this.  It would prove a highly loving but also very practical marriage, mutually supporting through all the tough days that lay ahead.

He needed his prior personal brush with death when in 1754 an outbreak of diphtheria in Kingston killed scores.  He treated the sick using quinine, then a relatively new procedure in America, and undoubtedly saved hundreds including his own children.  As you can imagine, this made his name.

He transitioned into politics in 1757 as a town elector and by 1765 is in the Provincial Assembly.  He never looked back to his days as a small town doctor.  Within two years we find him serving as a key player in relations with the Royal Governor and commander of a Militia Regiment.  Over time he found himself more and more at odds with the Royal administration.

By 1774 he’s clearly in the colonial camp.  He gets it in his head (at grave risk to himself and his family) to join illegal underground committees and corresponds with average calm men like Samuel Adams.  He’s warned by Royalists to end this “pernicious activity”.

But again, here is a man not inclined to do what other people say.  The Royalists respond by burning down his home.  This mild hint kept him from representing New Hampshire at the First Continental Congress.  But he rebuilt.  And he didn’t take the hint.  And so in 1775 the Royal Governor kicks him out of office.

After the gunfire started, Bartlett is again elected to the Continental Congress and is in Philadelphia for all the key moments.  Towards July 1776, he writes to Mary:

“May God grant us wisdom to form a happy Constitution, as the happiness of America to all future Generations Depend on it.”

When the delegates voted for independence it’s said of his legendary vote:

“He made the rafters shake with the loudness of his approval.” 

Josiah_Bartlett_signature

He signed the document right after John Hancock.  And then he went to war.  He raised New Hampshire militia units and fought at Bennington as a battlefield physician.  He was back in Philly for a while with the Congress but ultimately returned home to New Hampshire for good.

Just as he was an uncertified doctor, he now managed to make himself an uncertified lawyer and judge.  For you see, all the signers of the Declaration were freaking supermen.  If Bartlett had wanted to be a cage fighter or a quantum physicist, I’m sure he could have gotten away with it.

He serves as a normal judge, then joins the Supreme Court, then becomes Chief Justice.  Because why not?  Later on he helps ensure New Hampshire’s ratification of the Constitution in a very close vote of 47 to 37 at the State Convention.  We tend to brush over what a near run thing the Constitution really was.

Bartlett serves as New Hampshire’s Governor for four years.  In 1790, he’s finally made legal when Dartmouth gives him a doctorate in medicine.  Ten of his immediate descendants become doctors as well.

In 1794 he retires from public service due to his age and what one would guess as the fatigue of decades in the fray.  But like a lot of brawlers, once he takes off the spurs there’s not much left in the tank.  He dies only a year later at the age of 66 and is buried alongside Mary in Kingston.

His farewell message to New Hampshire:

“I now find myself so far advanced in life that it will be expedient for me, at the close of the session, to retire from the cares and fatigues of public business to the repose of a private life, with the grateful sense of the repeated marks of trust and confidence that my fellow-citizens have reposed in me, and with my best wishes for the future peace and prosperity of the State.”

josiah bartlett

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schizophrenic behavior is never okay

I don’t care what anybody says, both those women were concussed. Alexandra Popp had her skull split wide open. Morgan Brian’s eyes looked like she was strolling through the Land of Chocolate with Homer Simpson. Neither of these players should have gone back into the game.

If this was the NFL, it’d be front page news today. The outrage. The mass hysteria. But because it’s women’s soccer, it’s somehow okay.

To their credit, many media outlets (SI, NY Times, Post) who hammer the NFL with glee do have articles this morning questioning the wisdom of allowing two very clearly injured players back onto the field. But other imperial bomb throwers (ESPN) don’t have a word about it at least a dozen articles deep.

You’ll see this line on this shitty blog again and again, I originally stole it from South Park:

“Either it’s all okay, or none of it is.”

If the sports media is going to demolish the NFL over concussions they need to demolish women’s soccer over concussions. Anything less is schizophrenic behavior from a media that chases an issue based on click value, not actual value.

And thus: NFL is popular = concussions issue sells, but women’s soccer is not popular = concussions issue does not sell.

I’m of the mind that everything in life has risks, even driving yourself to work. Sports have risks that need to be managed. Concussions happen. Life happens. And the sports leagues, NFL, FIFA, etc, can work the issue to make it better.  Without sacrificing the core of the games.

Clearly last night needs to get handled better by FIFA. It was not okay. I guess the point of this post is there’s progress to be made to lessen the risks, but the media treats the issue differently depending on what sport’s being played. This schizophrenic behavior serves nobody, nor the issue at hand.

Morgan-Brian-Alexandra-Popp

I kept waiting for the ambulance to come out; and ten minutes later they’re back on the field; these two players are real warriors, admirable; but they should have been made to sit down