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Rudy Giuliani was born in a different America

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This quote tells me one thing,

“We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,” – Rudy Giuliani, March 1994.

Rudy Giuliani was born in a different America, one radically different, from the one I was born in. This brings great dread to me because if this is what the current leadership of the U.S. believes, we are all in grave danger of a dictatorship placed in-charge of the the most powerful nation on the planet.

Crypto in the personal privacy world

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I was recently presented with The Code Book and while leafing through the pages during a moment of boredom I managed to create a simple crypto using the Julius Caesar character substitution method using Sybase T-SQL. And though I’m sure that the resulting encrypted text could be broken with brute force, it would not be easy, nor very worthwhile for most messaging.

In this world of spying and privacy invasion from all directions, a little personal crypto might be in order, particularly if one is inclined to be suspicious of commercial algorithms. and while this stored procedure is simple, it can be enhanced, feel free to use it for your own needs.

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.simple_crypto
(
@key_word varchar(25),
@message varchar(255),
@direction varchar(8)
)
as

set nocount on

declare
@key_input varchar(20),
@key varchar(27),
@key2 char(27),
@olumn int, @olumnk int,
@input varchar(255),
@olumnb int,
@output varchar(255),
@out char(1), @a_char char(1),
@undone varchar(255),
@count int

select @count = 97, @olumnk = 1
select @key_input = lower(@key_word) –‘branedy’
select @input = lower(@message)

create table #alpha (a_char char(1))

while @count <= 122 begin insert into #alpha values (char(@count)) select @count = @count + 1 end select @key = char(32) while @olumnk <= datalength(@key_input) begin select @out = substring(@key_input, @olumnk, 1) delete from #alpha where a_char = @out if @@rowcount = 1 begin select @key = @key + @out end select @olumnk = @olumnk+1 end select @key = @key + a_char from #alpha drop table #alpha select @olumn = 1, @olumnb = 1, @key2 = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{' -----------------encrypt if @direction = 'Cipher' begin while @olumnb <= datalength(@input) begin select @output = @output + char(charindex(substring(@input, @olumnb,1), @key) + 96) select @olumnb = @olumnb+1 end select @input + ' = ' + @output as 'Encrypted' end -------------------------------------------decrypt if @direction = 'Decipher' begin select @output =@message while @olumn <= datalength(@output) begin select @undone = @undone+ char(ascii(substring(@key, charindex(substring(@output, @olumn,1), @key2),1))) --, select @olumn = @olumn+1 end select @output + ' = ' + @undone as 'Decrypted' end -------------------------------- select 'From the key ' + @key return GO

Planting the seeds of an the attack on Iran

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This article Iran Is Found To Be a Lair of Al Qaeda reeks of the same odor as the ‘intelligence’ that led to the invasion of Iraq. But it’s just the first seed, a testing of the waters, if you will, for more elaborate fabrications. Watch this story unfold, as it will get better.

Mind you the leadership of Iran does not have any real love for the U.S., but the Bush administration has more personal links to this country than they are willing to admit. Just ask George’s father.

Politically incorrect Truths

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This article on Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature is very interesting, and I love some of the resulting answers that you can derive from them.

To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.

Fully explains why Bill Clinton had an affair while in the WhiteHouse. But the real question is even better. How is it that George Bush has NOT had an affair, or maybe he has and hasn’t been caught.

And this statement that terrorist are really just sexually repressed virgin males that think suicide bombing is a great way to get girls.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. … The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam.

And maybe this is what Bush is doing,

Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

He likes to start violent wars because he’s not getting sex in the Whitehouse 😉

So for this reason;

Men like blond bombshells

Id’s be looking for some blond under Bush’s bed, maybe named Ann Coulter?

Global Warming Scandal

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Having watched a program on E4 about the ‘The Global Warming Scandal’ I was gobsmacked, while I believe both sides of the argument tend to cherry pick the data, and that I believe that no-one has yet put all the environmental variables into a proper simulation of the environment (a simulation not a model) There was one point that I got out of this program. That the Africans are being suppressed from exploiting their own resources, coal and oil and that they are being denied their own industrial revolution and western prosperity. That they are forced to rely on unreliable Solar and wind-power for their electricity. And to this I want to rebuke.

First off the example of solar and wind power is presented from one of the worst and most incompetent installations of a solar panel I have ever seen. The presentation indicated that they had only the ability to run a refrigerator or a lightbulb. The first question you should ask is this, why do you need a light bulb in the day, the second is why only one solar panel, and then where is this an example of wind power. A very poor example altogether. But beyond this is another issue, and one that will completely underline the real purpose of this program. Economic viability!

Lets assume that these poorer countries did exploit their resources. The first issue is who will mine their coal, since these countries will either have to borrow money to finance the effort, or that some private firm will exploit this effort. This done, they will have to finance the building of power plants to burn the coal, building them near the major population centers is common. Or they will have to have a private industry build them.

Now one, any loan for these countries will require payment for loans, repayment in what ever resource the country might have, this falls squarely on the one resource that they were intended to exploit for the benefit of the country in question. Building the power generation facilities fall under this same problem.

Two, mining and generation provided by private industries will seek profit. And while mining will provide a re-sellable resource, it’s mostly not going to be profitable selling to the countries that need it. So power plants will either be small, located near large population centers, or non existent. And even if electricity were abundant in the cities, there would never be a power-grid built to supply electrify to this poor medical facility which was used as an example of poor solar installation. Because it would not be profitable! SO this would not solve the energy crisis for this instance.

Beyond this, the likelihood of a single lump of coal ever reaching an African power-plant is nearly zero. As the economics of energy predicates that the most willing to pay, will drive the price. And the western world will always be the ones to pay. This will drive the price of coal beyond the ability of the Africans to buy their own resources back from the mining companies.

Therefore the purpose of this program is to exploit African resources for the western world. Nothing else could be so clear. It completely removes creditability from this program. Forget the scientist’s and experts presented in this program, the underlining meaning is not to preserve the jobs and careers of Global Warming researchers (a poor point as they did not present any wealthy researchers), but to prevent the loss of jobs in the oil, gas and coal energy industries. To prevent any disturbance to the status quo in the wealthiest industry on the planet.

UPDATE:

Royal Society vice-president Sir David Read said: “People should not be misled by those that exploit the complexity of the issue, seeking to distort the science and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of climate change.

UPDATE 2: ‘No Sun link’ to climate change is another nail in the coffin of this film.

Update 3: it just keeps coming Prominent Skeptics Organizations and their funding sources.

Update 4: The Truth About Global Warming

Republicans are making Democrats

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Prior to World War II, Americans were, much like they were before 9-11, mostly isolationist, self centered and generally ignorant of the world outside of the United States. The former, because they were turning away from Bloody World War I, and were trying to forget. The later was a forced ignorance of the world engineered by the Mass media owned and controlled by conservative big business, mostly sympathetic to GOP motivations. Years of manipulation with of the Idea that the media was ‘Liberal’ has convinced Americans that the isolation and selfishness was an American Ideal.

As an unexpected outcome of WWII, millions of Americans were introduced to the rest of the world, troops stationed all over the world, and even prisoners-of-war brought to the U.S. for internment influenced the population that there were people living in the rest of the world. People who did not share the american way of life. And Americans learned and gained an understanding, even a desire to know other cultures.

The current situation is a bit different, just as Pearl Harbor was different than 911, an unexpected difference is the decision to keep prisoners far away from the general population, partly to keep them from becoming ‘human’ and partly to keep them away from the U.S. Constitution, and the rights that it confers.

With control of the media the republicans have attempted to prevent interaction both with the truth, and any element that might make ‘foreigners’ less than the ‘evil’ monsters that the GOP needs to continue the war on the U.S. Constitution, for Iraqi oil, and to boost the Defense Industrial Complex. But keeping troops in enclaves (to prevent interaction with the Iraqi population) has lead to the uncontrolled situation that troubles Iraqi security, that prevents the Iraqi from learning about Americans, and from American troops from learning that Iraqi people are human also.

This isolation hasn’t worked, and soon American troops will be returning to the U.S. with a deeper understanding of the outside world, something the GOP did not want. And just as the U.S. became more democratic, more liberal, dare I say more international after WWII, so it will after Iraq. The Republicans are making Democrats out of Republicans, my father, a lifelong republican, is now thinking of voting Democrat. So will the pendulum swing from the GOP to the democratic party. Time will tell, the sooner the better.

In America, the news is no news.

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For Christmas, I spent the usual stressful week with the parents, and brothers. Aside from from the normal family conflict, I was struck by the lack of any real news. Sure there were car wrecks, plane crashes, murder and what not, repeated endlessly every hour in sound bites as if someone could miss them. But no politics, international news, opinion, or discussion of world affairs. If the event unfolded beyond 50, or 100 miles from where you are listening, nothing.

I felt like I had blinders and cotton in my ears. The closest thing to world news was in the form of the 24 hour weather channel on the television. Its no wonder everyone watches it. Ask anyone about what is happening in Japan, India, Ireland or any place beyond 100 miles away, nothing, but ask them what the weather is there and they can give you the five day forecast for anyplace in the world.

It’s no wonder Americans are ignorant of world events, isolationist in their thinking, they literally are unaware events happen anywhere else in the world.

The U.S. is now the isolationist bubble George Bush was seeking, ignorance in education, and news alike. Not what you would wish on the leaders of the free world.