A News Literacy Guide from NewsTrust.net – Crap Detection 101.

I do all this naturally, and always have. If only more people would. Amazing how little bullshit detection most people do. Just inexplicable.

The Yorkshire accent has never been a particular favorite of mine, but Kate Rusby has about the most fun voice to listen to in the whole world.

I could listen to her read lists of IP addresses and military field manuals and be perfectly content all day long.

Another myth about women in combat is just that..a myth.

I’m not a woman, but I do have a small frame. I weighed about 155 pounds at the time in the army, and I once lifted and carried a guy who weighed 280 pounds and ran with him at a near dead run for 100 meters.

Trust me, if I can do that, nearly any well-trained woman can lift nearly any man.

It’s also harder to lift someone if they are incapacitated and not helping, but not that hard. Anyone can learn to do it in about five minutes.

The only place where upper body strength matters a great deal in combat is in a scenario that almost never happens any more (and even then, it matters less than you’d think*) – hand-to-hand combat.

Hand-to-hand combat in modern warfare is extremely, extremely rare. Probably one out of every 100,000 engagements have any hand-to-hand, and even then it is very brief.

As a drill sergeant once told me in the Army: “We will teach you to fight hand to hand. But if you do happen to find yourself fighting the enemy hand to hand, you have already fucking lost and probably better kiss your ass goodbye.”

*Unit organization and training matter far more

Why is Anne Hathaway hated?

Easy. She’s an extremely smart, very pretty, articulate woman who invariably speaks her mind and who doesn’t mince words, apologize for her success, or pretend that she’s not awesome.

In other words, misogyny. It’s no wonder she’s widely hated. Someone like that people from the Left and the Right will despise in about equal measure. And if you think there is substantially less misogyny on the left end of the political spectrum, hoo boy do I have news for you.

If she were a man, doing and saying exactly the same things, she’d be adored for it.

And while it’s always better on balance to be beautiful than not, being a beautiful woman who is not compliant and shrinking really leads to everyone bringing out the knives.

I’ve always really liked Anne Hathaway. She’s a great actress, has a low bullshit tolerance, and is always good in the parts she plays. That’s enough for me.

I got this from a vendor yesterday, in an email sent out to all their many thousands of customers:

Really, that’s how you want to represent yourself to all your customers?

The past few weeks, I’ve had minions all over the world doing my bidding. I am mad with the power!

Ok, not really, but it is weird running projects you’ve never actually seen.

The only way to play the market right now.

Ah, bullshit, though, about being a pro – you don’t need to be one to play this game. You just need to be smart.

It’s the game I’m playing, too – just waiting for another panicky crash, and I’ll be all over it.

What’s the most weird to me about so-called conservatives is that as long as they are the dominant ones, they don’t care if they are wearing a loincloth standing astride the slum where everyone else is naked – as long as the naked ones are poorer and more oppressed than they are.

Caring about relative status so very much just makes no sense to me. Apparently I just was not born to think that way.

I have pretty extensive weapons training, both informal and formal – I can hit targets accurately and consistently at 300 meters. I can disassemble and re-assemble a number of weapons very quickly. I can hit moving targets, and I can even fire fairly accurately dual-wielding pistols action movie style (which is very hard, I might add).

I also don’t panic and I don’t seem to have much of a normal fear reaction.

All that said, if I were to walk into a room where there were one or two bad guys with guns, a bunch of civilians maybe some of whom also had guns, and other confusing and confounding elements, if I had to shoot someone – though I am quite sure I could hit my target accurately, unlike most people – there’s maybe a 50% chance I’d shoot all the right people.

Look at all the advantages up above that I have, and then think about how much worse the average person toting a gun who only fires it at the range would do.

So why the hell would we ever even consider arming teachers and college professors? Really, could you think of any worse idea? Great, not only would half of them lose their guns within a few weeks, but if they ever needed to shoot anyone, most likely they’d shoot everyone.

In other music news, Wild Flag is fucking fantastic.

I was never a fan of Sleater-Kinney; despite their agreeable politics and Carrie Brownstein being an amazing woman, their music just never grabbed me. No matter how much you agree with someone, when it comes to liking music you just can’t fake the funk.

Wild Flag on the other hand – their music is both playful and cerebral, complex yet approachable, immersive yet never irksome.

And that guitar hook on “Boom.” Now, that’s something. Whoever plays that – damn, girl has some skills.

Apparently I am very late to to this, but anyone who thinks Beyoncé was lip-syncing the Star-Spangled Banner at the inauguration must be freakin’ deaf.

I mean, you can hear the audio from the monitors on the microphone, so it sounds like she’s double-tracked. There’s around a 20-30ms delay. Listen for it; I’m guessing most but not all people will be able to hear it as I’ve noticed anything below 50-60ms is difficult for you mortals to discern. 😉

And the performance, while great, is not studio great. Lip-synced renditions are usually perfect, but her actual performance* is not. Hell, as this article points out, she’s signing in an entirely different key at the beginning! That’s the second thing I noticed before I’d even read the article (the first being the monitors being too loud).

You can also hear the wind in the microphone quite loudly on two occasions, for which the sound engineer (probably frantically) adjusts for.

I’m wondering what sort of weird weed people have to be smoking to even suspect that’s lip-synced.

*It’s likely the very best any human could do under those weather and audio conditions

Every time I see something like this:

I go pirate something else expensive. Seriously, fuck the copyright industry.

Confirmed: It’s not just an urban myth (as I’ve seen some people claim) that burned CDs and DVDs deteriorate after less than a decade.

This weekend, I tried to read several hundred files from a DVD I burned seven years ago. Approximately 20% of them were corrupt to various levels. Some were totally unreadable, and some were readable but partially corrupt.

These DVDs were not stored in the sun or in the heat. They’ve never been wet and they have no scratches; the media just deteriorates after a while.

If you have any DVD or CD older than 2-3 years on which you have vital files, it’d probably be a good idea to get those files to other media ASAP.

Argh, trying to use Linux commands at the Windows command line today. Too many OSes.

To any browser that does not let me see the full URL: fuck you.