So … government shuts down tomorrow … my prediction is few will notice.

1. Seeing small things.
2. Leaks.
3. Unimpressed by the hostage/terror rhetoric coming from the left.
4. Fer your book inbox.
5. And cinema!
6. The standard model and a small crack. Perhaps.
7. I’m not getting it. Let’s see, abortion makes women “equal to men” in that that can walk away from pregnancy. A man walking away is horrible. How is making it the same for women a good idea by permitting her to kill her child a necessary right?
8. Fear and anger. That’s akin to the mythical “fear” that Obamacare might succeed scares the GOP. Uhm. Who? Who!? Every single person on the right I’ve ever talked to fears it will screw up the country. This other thing is just plain made up.
9. More terror in Africa.
10. Evil.
11. Two hunger strikes.
12. Uhm, duh.

Well, Hi there.

1. Bees and a man.
2. Rape and India.
3. Microclimate accuracy and the global data sets. (not unrelated).
4. Facebook … or at least faces.
5. Worser and worser.
6. So, Christians think some guy is God. How’d (when?) did that occur.
7. A speech. Better than the highly partisan post shooting speech our knucklehead-in-chief gave.
8. Who to save (after Galois, Ramanujan, and Mosely)?
9. Evagrius. One of those whose writings prompted me to cross the Bosporus.
10. Risk and vocation.
11. Because we don’t care to bequeath to our children.
12. Oh, pshaw. Consider possibilities of Klein bottle  noodles. Eat your solitons … how about fried eggs shaped as Siefert surfaces.
13. And for a wrap … just hush.

We had some malware infect our blogging system, and I had to do some cleanup. Google flagged us during this time as "dangerous", and if you use the Chrome web browser, you may have seen a big red warning sign if you tried to come here. I’ve got the infection removed and we’re back up and running. I have a little administrative work to do in the background, but for now, we’re back.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

G’day

1. Belorus hard man and age defeats youth.
2. The exceptionalism gambit turned.
3. And that same essay through other eyes.
4. Criminals and crime.
5. Speaking of which, … how about in verse?
6. Memory and charity. Our parish had a memorial liturgy to remember.
7. Acting ability noted.
8. That’s a request that should be ignored.
9. Another version of realpolitik.
10. Gas methods

Woo. Three days in a row … and three and a half weeks to go and busy busy busy season might be over (except for the clean up).

1. Guns and the racist race baiting left.
2. Here’s a likely suggestion (with material to back it up) … the biggest NSA problem has been journalists and the FISA court judiciary. Another question that came to me is if NSA has cracked https … banking is not secure … and how much money has been stolen?
3. On the other hand, there is likely good fallout from the NSA kerfuffle, to whit codes are always easier for the code users than the breaker from a computability standpoint. Piss off the crypto-crowd and the encoding standards will be computationally safe in the next round.
4. ’cause there’s no there there, allegedly … but if that’s the case, why hide?
5. The way of winning that was left to non-sprinters like me, but rarely ever got … ’cause I sort of sucked.
6. Three words and the pretty much empty set of people who know the meaning of all three (I was not one of those who knew those words, btw).
7. Philosophy.
8. Teuthidian tech.
9. Mr Obama’s speech summed up from the left.
10. A question raised by the same.
11. Explaining the non-existence of philosophers teaching ethics.

For 9/11

1. A tweet noted.
2. A photo.
3. Lyrical.

Links!

1. For the time traveling Obama (not?) fan. (Tip ‘o the hat)
2. Truth to power, 4th century style.
3. Racism and hate crimes.
4. Grist for the abortion debate.
5. A good idea noted in the sporting world.
6. How did it happen? Elysium suggests lax immigration policies … although factors leading to the fall of the two parent household and the rise in divorce figure greatly.
7. Syrian notes from the guy who predicted the Russian response several days before it happened.
8. A dog with a drinking problem. Glub glub.
9. Some damn fine sports reporting.
10. Of interest.
11. For the Biden home defense network.
12. Infrastructure spending.

A week in the middle … the last few weeks big push is over … and I’m in cleanup mode for traveling to Alabama next week and the next push.

1. Jesus’ maternal grandparents noted.
2. Badum, bing.
3. I’m missing where this is a problem.
4. This is not unrelated.
5. Zombies and brainz.
6. Hum drum home drone.
7. A book list.
8. A fistful of (not dollars) but something else mindful of dirt.
9. The last frame is the kicker.
10. A teaching method with results.
11. A question, the answer … ambition.
12. A question regarding  Syria.
13. A protestant (I think) sees an Eastern Paschal celebration.
14. Not just one “red line” in the Middle East.
15. Israel not the only frakking country in the Middle East either.
16. Three essays on Syrian intervention: here, here and here.
17. On scientific malpractice.

G’day

1. Some Olde English history.
2. How to ride heroically.
3. Angry parent doesn’t think about what they are doing.
4. Biological diversity and human ability.
5. Alas, the cost of moving, fiscal and psychic is so so very high … or not. Regardless, sounds good.
6. Frodo for President.
7. Amuzing.
8. STEM shortage.
9. Who is at fault?
10. Yikes.
11. Limited liability means what?
12. And why is this not completely obvious?
13. One reason why not to bomb Syria.

A while back, I gave my cautious approval to an NSA program that said it was just collecting phone call metadata; information about calls – like the phone numbers, and date & time – but not the calls themselves. We can get this same information about government phones, so keeping ours didn’t seem that big a deal. Still, it seemed a bit of overreach.

Well, we now have more information coming out of the NSA telling us that, well, they did make a few oopsies. They told Bloomberg News that, over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found. Clever use of the passive voice there; no actual names of agents were mentioned. Another spokesman said that the actions were the work of overzealous NSA employees or contractors. Yeah, and just a few “overzealous” IRS workers in Cincinnati were responsible for the entire scandal of targeting conservatives.

Like most government wrongdoing, this is going to come out in dribs and drabs. Had it stopped with the revelation of phone call metadata, I could have been OK with it. But now we’re hearing about a few slipups here and later a few there.

I know, I know. Give government power and they’ll first take more, and then abuse it. Wow, now who could have anticipated that?

Blogger Donald Sensing noted that someone writing at the very liberal Daily Kos website was rather irked that, due to ObamaCare, she’d wind up paying over $8000 a year for what she called “crappy, high-deductible insurance” in New York state. The writer notes, “This means we will all be required to pay steep premiums and deductibles but may not have the financial resources to actually access healthcare.”

You mean ObamaCare is not going to be the panacea its proponents claimed it would be? Color me meh.

She concludes , “I am reminded on days like today, that President Obama campaigned on the idea that people like me would see something like a $2500 reduction in health insurance costs. What was I thinking?” Don Sensing surmises that thinking didn’t enter into it. I’d say, wow, now who could have anticipated that?