Ball Diamond Ball

It’s good to feel happy and Heaven knows we’ve seen trouble, but let’s don’t fool ourselves — this is an opportunity, not a solution.

The Trump victory in 2024 is an amazing feat, and there will be much written about it.  The campaign ran one Hell of an operation, and this is going to be a fascinating story when it comes out.  Grassroots and big-name support along with great personnel picks and magnificent showings by the boss made this a campaign for the ages.

Part of what made this “mere competence” seem spectacular was the backdrop of doom and corruption.  This 2024 victory is more than the defeat of a vapid woman and her ever more vapid running mate.  The Marxist Alinskyite Obama project is still running a … Continue reading →

Widely reviled former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley worries that he will be court-martialed under a Trump administration.  His fears are probably larger than life, but hardly without merit.  He does have a serious vulnerability.

I understand that he feels there is some justification for what he did — I have read it.  He puts it in the context of soothing the excitable Chinese — he feels that he was doing real ‘Missiles of October’ stuff, mil-to-mil contacts avoiding war by mistake.  That’s noble.  But there is still a right way to do things. I  would have one question for him: “Did you tell your boss what you said about him to the enemy?”   The rest follows from there, and may be … Continue reading →

I am inclined to consolidate our Republican coalition. Our winning team should be solidified and replicated.

I also do not want revenge upon our fellow countrymen merely for voting differently. Their rights are our rights.  But there are a great many who did more than just vote or politic a different way — some of them joined in the hysteria to destroy our families and livelihoods over COVID mandates, and have colluded to mutilate and pervert our own children, with a malicious disregard for our rights or the children’s well-being.  This cannot go unpunished, or it *will* continue.

Finally, there are a great many officials who have committed actual crimes in office, putting their partisan or other interests above their oaths to the Constitution. From Garland to Vindman, … Continue reading →

Jeff Bezos’ WaPo, like the LA Times before it and USA Today shortly after, has refused to endorse Kamala Harris for President.  He wrote an op-ed about it here:  The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media

If you haven’t read that yet, it’s worth the time, but take your blood pressure meds first.  As is typical with leftist framing, he says that the problem is perception of bias, rather than bias itself.

We [newspapers — bdb] must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. … Continue reading →

It’s time to take the MSM up on their claims to objectivity.  Accept for argument’s sake that they are all as pure as the driven snow, without a common ideological axe to grind.  You know, just to make the rest of this argument go.  Then look at the questions they ask and the “clarifications” they issue.  Why would a “debate” “moderator” say such a thing?  What is the worldview which would cause an honest journalist to ask such a question, or to emit such a brain-dead reply?

This analysis will show that the honest and hard-working talking heads of the Democratic People’s Republic of TheNews are all thoroughly mal-educated Marxists.  Regardless of whether they are committed or merely caught up in the rush, every single one of them … Continue reading →

WordStar 7, the last version of the first word processor, has finally been posted as a complete application, with manuals and much more than ever came in the box by science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. 

To describe the impact or the rationale would simply be to recap one of Sawyers’ bests posts on WS, which go back to the early days of the internet.  I will simply link to some relevant pages and provide a few notes.

Meanwhile, here’s the first three paragraphs from his post:

As you all know, I continue to use … Continue reading →

We’ll see how this comes out on the other siiiideee

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Major maintenance complete.

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I try not to spam YouTube links — YouTube is evil and linking isn’t exactly providing content.  But I’m not in a position to check this guy’s math and likewise for the expected results of a baryon-baryon collision.  Sigh.  Still, this short and engaging video is as tractable and as interesting as another one about pilot waves made perhaps ten years ago.  Shush now, we’re talking about the pendulum video here:

If you’re having a hard time putting together just how these pendula are actually put together, the word he should have mentioned is “torque”.  You’re welcome.

Also, here’s the one on pilot waves, er I mean driven bouncing droplets of oil:

Finally, I had to use an alternate browser to make this second video pop … Continue reading →

I don’t want us playing world cop.  I personally have gone, and while I ate up the mission at first, it soured around the time some of my friends were killed (I identified them and signed for their uh receipt at the big military hospital there), and my second tour was an exercise in finding a job I could do with all my heart.  All I did was take care of our people, which I can do all day long.  No “host-nation” partnering, no nation-building, no joint security tomfoolery; just take care of our people over there.  Happy to do so, because the whole thing was a piece of refuse, and I wanted to take care of people who thought the way I had on my previous deployment, … Continue reading →

Here’s a reasonable-sounding guy talking about how Agile (the software development “discipline”) has been co-opted by management and that’s why it never works.  He’s not entirely wrong, but his larger point is the same-old same-old.  “But real Agile has never been tried!” they cry, while it just keeps on failing.  Sound familiar?

Agile in my limited experience looks like this: the coding nerds with no higher responsiblity shot the managers, declared an autonomous anarchic coding collective and colluded with end-user customers who also bear no higher responsibility to produce, approve, and certify requirements and results.  Nobody lived happily ever after, Amen.

What happened instead has been a profusion of cobbled-together software which does not meet the actual requirements of the larger customer organization, forcing agglomerations of non-process … Continue reading →