Chaos Manor View, Tuesday, November 24, 2015
We are now on the brink of war with Russia.
<http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/russian-rescue-helicopter-shot-down-6891003
Roland Dobbins
Turkey has called for an emergency meeting of NATO.
The Russian warplane was over an area of Syria inhabited largely by Turkmen, ethnic Turk Syrian citizens who are in rebellion against Bashar Assad. Turkey has supported this rebellion. There are political factions in Turkey who support the annexation by Turkey of Syrian Turkmen areas of Syria, although I know of no formal claim by Turkey.
Firing on the Russian warplane by a Turkish Air Force F-16 is reported as authorized by the highest levels of the Turkish government. It was claimed that the Russian warplane was in Turkish airspace, but apparently that is not the case – unless Turkey is laying claim to the northern area of Syria inhabited by Turkmen.
Two Russian pilots ejected from the Russian plane. They were reportedly killed by Turkmen rebels, and a Russian rescue helicopter was grounded by ground fire and then destroyed by heavy weapons. There is no news of the crew.
1130: It is time for a walk. More when there is something to know. I cannot guess what President Obama will do, except to note that he took weeks to months to authorize the strike against Bin Laden; he is not likely to act in haste. This morning he said that ISIS must not be tolerated, it must be destroyed; but he said much the same thing before, and there is little indication of how he expects to accomplish this.
1310: Turkey is adamantly claiming that the Russian airplane was in Turkish airspace, and they were justified in shooting the Russians down.
Russia continues to deny that their aircraft ever crossed into Turkish airspace.
The President of the US has said there are no plans to send US divisions to fight ISIS, but emphasized that the Caliphate cannot be tolerated and must go, but if he knows how to do this he is keeping it confidential: so far as we can tell, he is staying with his strategy he formed last summer. Oil is up a dollar a barrel.
No one seems eager to go to war, but President Putin has yet to announce his plans. It is futile to speculate. He has announced that he will attend the climate conference in Paris, and that this is a major rebuke to the terrorists. He did not say why.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Some good news from my son Richard:
A perfect landing
Your grandson watches this over and over. I told him the landing might make his Grandpa in California cry for joy just a little bit.
Apparently a reusable first stage. The rocket has no reentry vehicle, but a reusable first stage is one key to cheaper access to orbit.
Blue Origin sticks rocket landing, a major step toward reusable spaceflight | Ars Technica
This is too cool for words.
John Harlow
Bezos did it.
Dan
The Case of the Disappearing Quasars.
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-of-the-disappearing-quasars/>
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Roland Dobbins
I wish I had known this when – but maybe not. it sure happens fast!
“No one needs to learn cursive.”
So say today’s K-12 “educators”. Accordingly it is being eliminated from many schools’ curriculum.
I was doing some genealogical research and realized that much original source historical data, such as census reports, was created in cursive. Some may have been scanned and converted or keyed as computer searchable data but much has not.
Will the American people, in a generation or so, have to rely on government gatekeepers to interpret these source documents? Will the nation be as functionally illiterate in cursive English as it is in historical Latin or Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic (or any number of other languages both historical and current)?
Why do some in positions of authority consider this a “good thing”?
Charles Brumbelow=
Is this the end of cursive writing? We can hope that we always have electric power.
FROM DELL
Response to Concerns Regarding eDellroot Certificate
Today we became aware that a certificate (eDellRoot), installed by our Dell Foundation Services application on our PCs, unintentionally introduced a security vulnerability. The certificate was implemented as part of a support tool and intended to make it faster and easier for our customers to service their system. Customer security and privacy is a top concern and priority for Dell; we deeply regret that this has happened and are taking steps to address it.
The certificate is not malware or adware. Rather, it was intended to provide the system service tag to Dell online support allowing us to quickly identify the computer model, making it easier and faster to service our customers. This certificate is not being used to collect personal customer information. It’s also important to note that the certificate will not reinstall itself once it is properly removed using the recommended Dell process.
We have posted instructions to permanently remove the certificate from your system here. We will also push a software update starting on November 24 that will check for the certificate, and if detected remove it. Commercial customers who reimaged their systems without Dell Foundation Services are not affected by this issue. Additionally, the certificate will be removed from all Dell systems moving forward.
A little arithmetic
It seems we have let in some 785000 Muslim refugees from the Middle East etc.
But, we are told we are safe because the overwhelming majority do not support ISIS or terrorism. In context it turns out that “overwhelming” part is a “huge”
87% or so. But, if you think about it that amounts to about 13% who DO support ISIS or terrorism (or both, of course.) That’s about 100,000 enemy personnel (of all ages, of course) who are our enemies.
To put that in perspective Wikipiddle claims a typical US Army division is 17000 to 21000 people, not all out there pounding mud, of course. That means we have a count of 5 divisions of enemy personnel in our country, perhaps half as many front line troops as our Army maintains. Does having 5 divisions of worth of enemies in our country make YOU feel safe?
I don’t feel safe at all. Dig into the facts and pry out the numbers that are being obscured by “vast majority” type words. We are in deep doo-doo with the enemy count behind our lines in our homeland. Europe is likely toast. Their numbers are MUCH worse than ours. Obama is doing everything he can to “correct”
that error.
This is the article that led me to pry out some real numbers of significance.
O’Reilly failed us by not going the next numerical step.
{^_^}
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
