TNR Beauchamp - NEI ?

I have been following the Beauchamp TNR storry for a while and while it disgusts me I haven't had much to say that many others are not already saying more effectively.

This morning I read this post at that I found via instapundit.

I was quite surprised to see the NEI as one of their advertisers.

I have cross linked with the NEI blog a number of times and am a regular reader of TNR online. Believe me when I say that it is unlikely that ardent readers of TNR are unlikely to support NEI's goals of increasing the acceptance of nuclear power. It seems their advertising budget would be better spent in less hostile venues.

Do I have a fundamental misunderstanding of either of the organizations? Or could this be a case of the Yankee picking algorithm planted adds and equating them with direct advertisement? An understandable mistake but still possibly a mistake. If so we might want to be judicious in approaching the advertisers or laying blame.

Was this in the paper publication or did it only appear on their site?

In any case I agree with the general need to press TNR to stop presenting lies targeting the military.

Gamer Super Computer

This is pretty cool

So here is the Crazy Idea

Cheap Game console

Three parts

Totally wireless (Including Power)

Controlled Main Console but VM's that are standard architecture so you can run Linux (or whatever other OS you want to buy from the "mother site"

Linkable so multiple consoles in the same vicinity or with IP access can share each others computing power.


More Later

Gasp For Breath - Political Success or at least progress

I am still alive. I am not even going to try to say that I will regularly post but I do not plan on abandoning the blog. So what has been happening.

I discovered that some of my previous posts were telegraphing my intentions so I quieted down. It worked. Long story short I followed the advice I recommended in several of my earlier posts with high emphasis on keeping to the truth and more importantly the provable truth. I did my best to keep pretty much everybody out of the muck.

Security By Self Delusion 1 and

Security By Self Delusion 2

Transforming Negligence to Non Compliance - Hat tip to Steve

and the beginning of 12 steps

Will give you an Idea of what was going on.

Mike at Episteme was being polite in his description but we are emerging from the dark.

Many of us have cooperated and the result is that one team's existence has been saved and even enhanced. A new team has been created and pushed up in the organizational hierarchy and I have been lucky (OK I worked pretty hard for it) enough to get a Director position and a heavy role in designing the new organization.

Of course the down side of the good news is that I have been completely buried and unable (and when I had time unwilling) to blog.

In any case I am back at least in part and will try to put up something close to weekly. Perhaps I can describe how we made progress in an intractable environment.


By the way for the Nukes out there there have been some interesting comments on the Brussard post and the Tokamak one. Thanks for the feedback it is encouraging.

Till sometime in the next month

Jim C

Some more Ammo on Layers

Sample Security Priorities - Industrial

1. Protect the Safety of People and Facilities
2. Protect Integrity of Key Financial Data
3. Protect Customer Privacy
4. Protect Restricted Data
5. Facilitate External Communications

Any thoughts?

Sample Security Priorities - Insurance

1. Protect Customer Data Privacy
2. Protect Integrity of Key Financial Data
3. Protect Restricted Data
4. Protect Partner Connections
5. Facilitate External Communications

Any thoughts or additions?

"Well We're not doing that any more."

I should say not.

Hello

Yes I am still alive.

Yes I intend to start blogging again soon.

No it will not be as much as when I started.

All that said this is cool.

Nuclear Safety in Japan

The headline "NUKE PLANT LEAKS AFTER EARTHQUAKE"

Oh my!!!

I might be calling this one a bit early because the news is just coming out but I suspect that this will be much ado about nothing.

From what I have read so far there was almost a gallon of water and it was contained in the containment building. No release of fission products.

So there is a 6.8 magnitude quake that left 3 foot fissures and the nuke plant only had a small leak that was contained.

I would call this a success in engineering. If this had been a gasoline or heaven forbid a LNG storage facility the result would almost certainly be worse.

Update:

Oh this is priceless

"Aileen Mioko Smith, of the environmentalist group Green Action, said the fire showed that some facilities at nuclear power plants such as electrical transformers were built to lower quake-resistance levels than other equipment such as reactor cores."

Duh - You think they might want to give higher priority to the safety of the reactor core maybe?? Sheesh presenting ggod engineering as a problem.

Juggling

I know most of you probably feel like this some (or most) of the time.

Twelve eggs in the air
Six hidden rotten and fake
Three Ostrich
Three Robin
Three Chicken
Two Fabergie
One viable Dodo Bird
Just wanna set the rotten ones down
Which ones are they?

No it is not a puzzle just a crappy poem.

Trip to Camden

Sorry for the light posting - no excuses.

If you want to check out what I have been up to in the last week or so check out my wife's blog.

http://foldedgingham.typepad.com/folded_gingham/2007/07/our-trip-to-cam.html

Update:
Yes that is me with the big stomach climbing the Boulder.

My name is Rather. And I’m a dick.

Iowahawk

Not much money, but they didn’t ask too many questions and they didn’t have any nosy “fact checkers.”

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t little Katie Couric,”

She stood there, perky and defiant, atop a pair of muscular cheerleader’s calves that looked powerful enough to snap a co-anchor in two.

“Oh Danny, Danny, Danny!” she sobbed. “I’m in an awful fix! The auditors found over three million missing from the Nielsen account, and they’re blaming it on me!

Paralyzer

I'm not paralyzed but I seem to be struck by you

I want to make you move because your standing still

If your body matches what your eyes can do

You'd probably move right through me on my way to you

Finger 11

Buy it here

Iraq

"This war cannot yet be dissected because it still lives– wounded, angry, thrashing on the table, but alive. We can only hack into it, diagnose it, treat it, knowing each attempt at a cure affects the pulse. Doing nothing causes tachycardia. Much of what afflicts Iraq was here before America was born. But when we elected to perform surgery on this sick land, we used hacksaws and sledgehammers, and took an already sick patient and hacked off some parts while pulverizing others."

"Meanwhile, there are stadiums full of people shouting at the doctors, threatening to fire them or revoke their licenses, or at the very least to cut off the lights mid-surgery."

"For far too long our media and government have failed to fully inform us–even to the point of lying–about Iraq. I came to this ill-begotten war searching for people who knew the truth and would tell it."


Read the whole thing it is worth it regardless of which side you fall on.

Email Privacy

and the Fourth Amendment via Volokh

Gods of Fusion

Funny but geekily twisted

"I would not want to be taken prisoner by people who entertain themselves by burning puppies to death."

That's a quote from this post at Classical Values.

I have to agree with it and will go quite a bit further. I have been following Balko's tracking of these incidents and the tragedies related to SWAT raids for quite some time but they had become numbing to me.

Like a lot of blog topics you see it over and over again until interest wains. Of course in this case that reaction is horrible. These are human beings (and in the dogs case humans property [and friends]) that are being killed or harmed in these false or stupidly incorrect raids. Unfortunately I was pretty numb to them. I would check Balko out periodically but what can you really do?

This weekend I saw something that woke me up to it again (at least for a little while) I was watching a COPS type show on the Dallas SWAT team and what I saw appalled me. The show was glorifying it and clearly playing up the "hero" factor but I saw a bunch of nearly juvenile thugs. There were three raids in the show for all three put together they must have gotten almost a pound of marijuana and a dozen or so crack rocks. To clear the obviously massive amount of illicit material from the streets they literally pulled the side of two houses off and destroyed the doors and windows of the third. The tear gassed and held children (3 to 7 year olds) at gun point and clubbed clearly disoriented (but not resisting) people of many ages.

I'll admit they found some drugs in each house but the amount in each case makes me believe it is far more likely that it was the family's teen that had it than any trafficking.

So these people's houses were destroyed, the children traumatized, the parents beaten, machine guns shoved into their heads, professional lives probably ruined (can you imagine explaining why you need time off for something like this) because their teenager had a few cigarettes worth of illegal drugs.

The culmination of the show was them using a .50 cal rifle to take out the engine block of a hijacked semi. This one was a little bit closer to acceptable to me because of the fact that there was definitely an armed and dangerous person on board but I couldn't help but thinking this was a needless action. Where was the semi going to go to? It couldn't possibly outrun the police and it was being driven by a sane person (even though she was at gun point). Which is more likely to make the hijacker freak out and kill the driver? Running out of gas after a 4 hour cooling down time or being shot at with a .50 cal sniper rifle from the back of an armored personnel carrier? Well? At least they didn't shoot her dog when it jumped out of the cab.

Don't get me wrong I am all for police being able to defend themselves and even aggressively pursuing potential culprits. I am not a drug legalization freak either. They are increadably harmful (even weed) and need to stay illegal. I think that police need to be given a great amount of leeway in how they deal with threats. I also think they need to do everything in their power to deescalate and there has to be some accountability. This is triply true in the case of mistaken identity.

In my job I can get fired and in the case of SoX possibly sent to jail for unknowingly making a mistake. Are you telling me a demonstrably innocent person can get killed and the police involved don't get any scrutiny at all? Or only a few days suspension. I am sorry that is just unacceptable.

I am also of the opinion that it isn't always directly the officer's fault. Someone running the department created the environment where these things can happen. In the case of accidental deaths in forced entry of the wrong address the police chief should be at least as culpable as the CEO of a mismanaged company.

This is just wrong.

Bigotry of Condescension

Very interesting interview with Spiegel

Money Quote

"So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs."

Via Instapundit

Same as it ever was

Tesla did this a long time ago.

I kind of wonder what kind of ionizing effect this has on cells (Specifically the DNA in the cells) exposed to the energy. I hope they study that some first.

Disturbing Babies from Wired

I am not sure which is more disturbing the Cthulhu baby

or

The Giant Robot Baby

Has Wired be acquired by the Enquirer while I was reading some Lovecraft?