Oakland police used methods prohibited in war zones

Before gas goes into a crowd shield bearers have to be making no progress moving a crowd or crowd must be assaulting the line. Not with sticks and stones but a no bullshit assault. 3 warnings must be given to the crowd in a manner they can hear that force is about to be used. Shield bearers take a knee and CS gas is released in grenade form first to fog out your lines because you have gas masks. You then kick the canisters along in front of your lines. Projectile gas is not used except for longer ranged engagement or trying to steer the crowd ( by steering a crowd I mean firing gas to block a street off ). You also have shotguns with beanbags and various less than lethal rounds for your launchers. These are the rules for a WARZONE!!

How did a cop who is supposed to have training on his weapon system accidentally SHOOT someone in the head with a 40mm gas canister? Simple. He was aiming at him.

I'll be the first to admit a 40mm round is tricky to aim if you are inexperienced but anyone can tell the difference between aiming at head level and going for range.

The person that pulled that trigger has no business being a cop. He sent that round out with the intention of doing some serious damage to the protestors. I don't care what the protestors were doing. I never broke my rules of engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan. So I can't imagine what a protester in the states did to deserve a headshot with a 40mm. He's damn lucky to be alive and that cop knows he was using lethal force against a protester he is supposed to be protecting.

"High Class Thugs for Big Business"

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Mayor General Smedley Darlington Butler (via)

Proving the Utility of Assertions in Software Development

Sven, this is for you:

The team observed a definite negative correlation: more assertions and code verifications means fewer bugs. Looking behind the straight statistical evidence, they also found a contextual variable: experience. Software engineers who were able to make productive use of assertions in their code base tended to be well-trained and experienced, a factor that contributed to the end results. These factors built an empirical body of knowledge that proved the utility of assertions. 

At one company I worked, assertions were discouraged by the head of software development, he considered them "bad style" – he now works for Adobe… And yeah, working for him sucked, big time. BTW, I was interviewing for Adobe when he went there (unbeknown to me) AND AM I A GLAD THEY DIDN'T HIRE ME.

Come think to think of it, assertions are the poor men's Test Driven Development, kind of inline tests.

"Wet streets cause rain"

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
― Michael Crichton

(via)

The Great European Debt Plan Hoax

To this end we invite Greece, private investors and all parties concerned to develop a voluntary bond exchange with a nominal discount of 50% on notional Greek debt held by private investors. (via)

Haha. For half of the "nominal" value (as in "issuing price"), I would "voluntary" give away my car. And most of the things I own. Can I interest you in some VHS cassettes? Only half the nominal value! It's a bargain!

The Space Shuttle was designed as a carrier for a First-Strike-Weapon

At the end of the 1960's and the beginning of the 1970's the United States began new research in the use of spacecraft for the destruction of military targets in and from space. In the late 1960's development began at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of a space-based nuclear weapon-pumped laser. This was originally envisioned as a fearsome weapon, consisting of several dozen independently aimed lasing rods arranged around the bomb. When the bomb exploded, a large percentage of its force would be conducted down the lasing rods toward the targets at which they pointed (in the microsecond before the rods themselves vaporised).

At the same time the Air Force and NASA were studying reusable space shuttles. A single shuttle payload bay of such weapons had the potential of destroying the entire Soviet ICBM force - not just in launch phase but in a first strike, frying them right through the silo covers. One of the most heavily classified projects of the time, it still came to the attention of Soviet intelligence.

During this same period NASA was struggling to justify a post-Apollo space program. The Nixon administration decided that the USAF shuttle project would be dropped, and their requirements incorporated into the NASA design. One of these requirements was a mission involving a launch into polar orbit from Vandenberg Air Force base, release of unspecified payloads into orbit, and return to Vandenberg after a single orbit of the Earth. This requirement forced NASA to drop their preferred straight-wing design for a heavier double-delta wing that had the necessary cross range.

Start from Vandenberg. Fly over the (north-)pole. Release a weapon (and detonate it over the Soviet Union). Return to Vandenberg. Rinse and repeat if necessary.

But in my view, this "First Strike" capability of the Space Shuttle was more a selling point than reality, just like the supposed ease and frequency of the Space Shuttle launches. But to the Soviet leadership, it seemed like a real threat.

The Soviet leadership saw their worst fears confirmed. This was a modern version of the first-strike multiple-warhead UR-500 and N1 super heavy rockets which they had developed but then abandoned in the early 1960's. 

The reaction to the Space Shuttle was the Buran shuttle, which was supposedly very expensive.

It seems that two things broke the back of the Soviet Union: The Afghan War and the Buran project. Both were a reaction to the US – how ironic.

Quotes from a bygone era

You must remember that our Soviet land is impoverished after many years of trial and suffering and has no Socialist France or Socialist England as neighbours to keep us with their highly developed technology and highly developed industry. Bear that in mind! We must remember that at present all their highly developed technology and industry belong to the capitalists who are fighting us.
Lenin, 1921

The lesson of that victory [over fascism in WWII] was that Soviet citizens must still heed Lenin's warning of 1921.
Andrei Grechko after World War II

Oh, the times are long gone. Capitalism has crushed the Soviet Union. As Andrei Grechko wisely said (probably after the Prague 1968): "Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution."

The real moon hoax

Studying declassified Corona spy satellite photographs, Vick is able to show that there was substantial unexplained activity at the Baikonur cosmodrome during December 1968. Although no photographs exist during the 8-12 December launch window, images made during a pass on 15 December show a Soyuz spacecraft - booster combination mounted on its pad and the Proton pad gantry in position, although no booster is mounted. A week later, the Soyuz booster is being removed from its pad, but now a Proton - L1 combination is on the Proton pad. This seems to clearly indicate that attempts were being made, right up to and beyond the day Apollo 8 was launched, to beat the Americans to the moon. The authors theorise that an attempt at a manned launch to the moon using the two-launch podsadka scenario was attempted, but that some serious spacecraft problem must have resulted in the Proton launch being scrubbed.

So all these years the Ruskies said "No, no, comrade, we never planed to go to the moon, I swear on Lenin's tomb!", and they were almost there to go to the moon BEFORE the Yankees.

Interestingly, they had not one manned moon flight program, no, they had TWO manned moon flight programs. One was run by Korolev (and then after his death by Mishin) using Soyuz-spacecraft and N1 rockets, the other was run by Chelomei using a Soyuz variant and Proton rockets. Both ran into problems with, both with their spacecraft, both with their rockets. The Soyuz capsules were too heavy for a N1 single-shot-mission (and anyway delayed), the N1-rocket was not reliable, Soyuz-1 failed killing its Kosmonaut, the Proton looked promising (and is one of the backbones of Russia's space industry today) but ran into reliability problems. So Korolev's team aimed for a "bastard" version, using Proton and Soyuz/R7s for a two-launch mission with prior docking in LEO. Well, it didn't work – the rest, you know.

Don't believe in models

Models are a fine tool – just don't mistake them for the reality. Whether economy, climate or medical science, some (many?) scientist have models of the world, which might be helpful to understand a an smaller or larger aspect of the real world. Yet in an act of what seems to me to be confirmation bias, the mistake "their" model of the world for realty itself – and then it becomes religious. Catastrophic positive feedback in climate! The homo economicus with his self-interest will lead the invisible hand of the markets. My model of your illness proves leaves only one conclusion.

No. Your model is not the reality, and chances are it is actually far away from it – just some spurious correlation.

"The poster child of excessive lawsuits"

The case was noted by some as an example of frivolous litigation; ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits,"

Yeah, right.

I had never before seen the injuries suffered by the woman who sued McDonald’s for its hot coffee. Now I have.


Excerpt from 2011 documentary "Hot Coffee" von anonymouscoward382

On John McCarthy

But McCarthy's legacy also has a little-noted dark side which also influenced my career, but in a much less positive way. McCarthy was not only one of the pioneers of the study of AI, but also an avid proponent of a particular school of thought about how human intelligence works. McCarthy believed that human intelligence could be modeled as a formal logic. That hypothesis turns out to be (almost certainly) wrong, and the evidence that it is wrong was overwhelming even in McCarthy's heyday. And yet McCarthy steadfastly refused to abandon this hypothesis. Well into his nominal retirement, and quite possibly to his dying day, he was still working on trying to formulate formal logics to model human thought processes.

The way human mental processes actually work, it turns out, is (again, almost certainly) according to statistical processes, not formal logics. The reason I keep hedging with "almost certainly" is that the jury is still out. We have not yet cracked the AI puzzle, but vastly more progress has been made in recent years using statistical approaches that has ever been made using logic. Very few (if indeed any) logic-based systems have ever been successfully deployed on non-toy problems. Statistics-based applications are being deployed on a regular basis nowadays, with Siri being the most recent example.

It took decades to make this switch, arguably due in no small measure to McCarthy's influence. One of the many consequences of this delay was the infamous AI-winter, which lead more or less directly to the commercial demise of Lisp. That the same person was responsible both for the invention of such a powerful idea and for its demise has to be one of the greatest ironies in human intellectual history.

Unbelievably Cute

Penguins in sweaters. I kid you not.

"The tree ring data is not temperature (say that out loud). This is why it is called a proxy."

The data in a time series analysis is the data. This tautology is there to make you think. The data is the data! The data is not some model of it. The real, actual data is the real, actual data. There is no secret, hidden “underlying process” that you can tease out with some statistical method, and which will show you the “genuine data”. We already know the data and there it is. We do not smooth it to tell us what it “really is” because we already know what it “really is.”
…
The tree ring data is not temperature (say that out loud). This is why it is called a proxy. It is a perfect proxy? Was that last question a rhetorical one? Was that one, too? Because it is a proxy, the uncertainty of its ability to predict temperature must be taken into account in the final results. Did Mann do this? And just what is a rhetorical question?
…
What you can not, or should not, do is to first model/smooth the proxy data to produce fictional data and then try to model the fictional data and temperature. This trick will always—simply always—make you too certain of yourself and will lead you astray. Notice how the read fictional data looks a hell of a lot more structured than the real data and you’ll get the idea.

Read it all!

Things I didn't knew about american history: Yippies

The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies in 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings: Rubin came to one session dressed as an American Revolutionary War soldier, and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance. Then Rubin "blew giant gum bubbles while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with Nazi salutes." Rubin also attended HUAC dressed as Santa Claus and a Viet Cong soldier. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing an American flag. Hoffman quipped for the press, "I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country," paraphrasing the last words of revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale; meanwhile Rubin, who was wearing a matching Viet Cong flag, shouted that the police were Communists for not arresting him also.

Hilarious. :-)

The Media…

The country of Greece has been more or less shut down by a general strike as the country's economy teeters on a precipice that could plunge the Eurozone, and potentially the whole world, into a major economic depression. But you'd never know if from reading American news sources. The NYT front page, which includes a story about how Mitt Romney cared for his lawn (and no, I'm not kidding), makes no mention of it. I can find no mention of it on any other American news outlet. (CNN doesn't even mention it under World News!) The only coverage I can find at all is on Reuters and Al Jazeera. Reuters reports that there are 400 dock workers demonstrating outside the port, but I can neither see nor hear any sign of them.

Intensely Insane

A major naval exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints it is endangering the lives of fishermen and is disrupting mobile phones.

The Nato exercise, dubbed ‘Joint Warrior’, involves the military forces from 14 countries and is taking place off the west coast of Scotland. As part of the operation, Global Positioning System (GPS) services were jammed in a radius of 20 miles around the various warships.
(via)

Let me get this straight: The NATO does jam THEIR OWN navigation system? What good is a military navigation system one can only use in times of peace? Just how intensely insane is that? Unless of course it is all about the profit the MIC can make from all that shiny hardware…

"It would all be hilariously funny if these people weren’t destroying the world."

Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.  The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.  “This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

"Civil disobedience will not be tolerated"

"Civil disobedience will not be tolerated," Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston, told a local news station on Tuesday.

So you want non-civil disobedience? Bankers walk away with Trillions(!) of Dollars ransom, while peaceful protestors on sidewalks get pepper sprayed. People who peacefully cross a bridge get arrested. No justice, no peace.

Simpletons who run the world

"We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough. Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years."

Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal about the Afghan War. (via)

The Afghan War isn't about Bin Laden. It isn't about terrorism. It isn't about Al Qaeda. It isn't about the Taliban. It isn't about women's rights. It isn't about human rights. It isn't about "freedom". It isn't about "them" hating "us". It isn't about the "free world". It isn't about democracy.

It is about the MIC making enough profit for the capital. But while the buck keeps rolling, it is all honky dory to let simpletons handle all the Gear&GIs, and bomb the world, I guess.

Boys and girls, remember the next time you hear some people who think they know everything explain why some country supposedly needs a good bombing: It's a "simplistic view" – everything you hear is bullshit.

Oh, the irony

Michael Moore speaks at Occupy Wall Street. The video is on YouTube, the adverts are from Google – and the advert is paided by an Bank…