Fish Fear Me

Monday This And That

Week 1 of fantasy football sees me up by 24 going into tonight's games. I'm done for the week, but my opponent still has Adrian Peterson left. Will 24 points be enough? I'm certain that AP is highly motivated to have an enormous game and I'm also certain that the Vikings management wants that as well. If he starts rolling they are going to go with it as long as they can. I want to see him have a good game, but let's keep it to 23 or under, okay?

Over the weekend I took a look at the latest allegations against the Patriots, that they deliberately screwed with the Steelers by piping the Patriots Radio Network into the headsets on the Pittsburgh sidelines. I had always figured that communication system was a fairly straightforward challenge, but it turns out that it is a lot more complicated than I thought. On game day there are more than just a couple of teams to worry about in the stadium:

Quarterbacks, defensive play-callers, coaches and game officials all depend on coordinators to ensure that their systems are interference-free. So do TV and radio broadcasters and reporters, medical and security personnel, staff who use the NFL’s instant replay and injury video review systems, concession operators, cleaners, halftime entertainers and many more.

That's from a very informative NFL web page about the NFL Gameday Frequency Coordinators.

Given the information from there and a few other stories I've read, it is doubtful if not impossible that the interference came from the wireless portion of the communication system. To be heard in those headsets it had to be mixed into the audio stream before it got to the wireless transmitters on the field. That would point to the wired "infrastructure" the NFL noted in its statement on Friday. It's likely that some sort of grounding or shielding problem in that wired infrastructure allowed the audio from the radio broadcast booth to interfere with the audio from the Steelers coaches booth, since they are probably in some general proximity to one another.

To throw a bone to the conspiracy theorists, it's not impossible for that interference to be introduced deliberately. However, given the complexity involved in game day communications, both wired and wireless, I think Occam's razor should apply. The problem can be explained reasonably without creating a conspiracy, of which there apparently is no evidence. Just because cheaters cheat doesn't mean they always cheat.

Great post by Robert Zubrin on the Malthusian underpinnings of the environmental movement in general and the climate change maniacs in particular. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here's the core argument:

The fundamental question boils down to this: Are humans destroyers or creators? If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide.

But if we choose instead to have faith in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources, then every new life if[sic] a gift, and every person, race, and nation becomes ultimately the potential friend of every other, and, rather than suppression, the fundamental purpose of government must be to protect human liberty at all costs.

As I've mentioned here before, the harnessing of fossil fuels has had enormous benefits for humanity and nature too, when it stops deforestation for example. The challenge is not to stop using them, it's to spread to the rest of the world the clean technology that has dramatically reduced real pollution in the US and Europe.

Hey, about that Northern border wall:

A convicted sex offender and international drug dealer from Ontario was caught with an equally soaking wet fellow Canadian after they swam from their homeland across a river and entered the U.S. illegally at the far northeast corner of Minnesota, a strategy the felon had used previously without detection, according to federal prosecutors.

As the story goes on to say, they got him because an anonymous informant rang up the Border Patrol and warned them. Allegedly the man had done that four or five times before.

I know that area and points west for 100 miles pretty well and it is not hard to imagine this being a successful strategy in a lot places. Scott Walker was misrepresented and took a lot of unfair heat for his comments about the US-Canadian border a few weeks ago, but those of us who know the area know how vulnerable it really is. After all, without that informant this guy would probably have gotten away with it again.

The Twins took 2 out of 3 at the White Sox this weekend and start a 10-game homestand tonight against Detroit. They are one game back of the Rangers for the second wildcard spot, who are only a 1.5 games behind division leader Houston. Those two start a 3-game series tonight. Kansas City looks to have the Central sewn up, but the rest of the postseason spots are still in play.

Are US Combat Troops Back In Iraq?

There's a report today that US combat troops have been redeployed to Iraq:

Nearly 160 US soldiers arrived from Kuwait aboard to the Habbaniyah air base, east of Ramadi western Iraq, yesterday to participate in the operation to recapture the city from Daesh.

An Iraqi military official told Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed news site: “The new forces’ mission does not appear to be training the Iraqi army or the tribes fighting with me. We expect that they will provide direct support in the upcoming battle to retake Ramadi.”

The US forces’ arrival in Habbaniyah comes after Shia popular crowd militias withdrew from the base under US pressure.

A member of the Anbar Provincial Council told the news site: “The Americans do not want the Islamic State militants or the popular crowd militias to stay in the area.”

To be clear, US combat units have been in Iraq, but they have been on a training mission and not assigned to Iraqi front line units.

The offensive to retake Ramadi that was launched over a month ago has gained some ground, but has failed badly in it's prime objective. If this report is accurate about both the US troops arriving and the Shiite militias withdrawing, it probably means that US troops will finally be embedded within front line Iraqi Army units to coordinate air strikes and other support, such as logistics. 

Meanwhile, Iraq's defence minister Khalid Al-Obeidi and senior military commanders visited the ground force headquarters in the Anbar province.

During his visit Al-Obeidi called to “intensify logistical support for troops fighting in the province.”

I don't know the exact composition of the other US forces at the air base whose primary mission was/is training Iraqi forces, but my guess is they are also going to provide support for the Ramadi operation as well.

It will be interesting to see if this story goes away or if it marks the moment when Obama was forced to confront his disastrous legacy in Iraq. US troops on the ground can be a huge force multiplier and potential game-changer in the battle against ISIS.

Let The Games Begin

The fantasy football league I'm in completed its draft(yeah, we're a bunch of dinosaurs) tonight and here are the results:

• QB-Tom Brady
• QB-Cam Newton
• RB-Justin Forsett
• RB-Joique Bell
• RB-Joseph Randle
• RB-Alfred Blue
• WR-Antonio Brown
• WR-Odell Beckham
• WR-Marcus Colston
• WR-Jeremy Maclin
• TE-Martellus Bennett(Note: We play 3 WR/TE)
• DST-Denver
• K-Steven Hauschka
• K-Blair Walsh

I drafted 6/15 and so on for each set of rounds. To me this is almost perfect as I was drafting every 9/11 picks. I had the number 1 pick last year, and besides the major blow from AP sitting out most of the season, I hate sitting for 19 picks between getting two. So far here's how I think I did.

I was quite uncharacteristic this year. With the #6 pick overall I took a WR, Antonio Brown. By the time it came back to me at #15, Odell Beckham was still sitting there and I decided to grab him up as well. That left me with no RBs going into the third round, and it has been a long time, if ever, that I've done that. 

Round #3 saw me draft down a little according to the cheat sheets, but I like Justin Forsett even if he is a bit of a gamble. Just like Joique Bell, who I picked up in the following round. 

Round #5 saw Tom Brady still sitting there, so that's my prime QB this year. On the return side I grabbed Steven Hauschka to round out the core of my lineup(long term, hopefully). 

I don't remember the sequence after that, but I was essentially filling out #3's and backups.  I'm pleased to have Maclin, Colston, and Bennett rounding out my WR/TE options.  Randle and Blue will either turn out to be brilliant or busts. Both have a chance to win starting spots behind pretty good offensive lines, but both didn't exactly overperform in the preseason. Cam Newton is being talked down due to his injured receiving corps, but I think he was a reasonable choice as a backup to Brady in round #10.

Blair Walsh has had a dismal preseason, but he shown the ability for booming field goals in the past. If the regular season starts poorly for him I can always cut him and later find another fill-in for Hauschka in week 9. 

So there you go. I gambled at RB and I'm nervous about that, but we'll just have to see how it plays out. Of course, that's true with the rest of my roster as well no matter how good I feel about it. One year ago I was pleased to be sitting pretty with Adrian Peterson and a soon to be off suspension Ray Rice, and we all know how well that worked out.

More: ESPN, which we use to manage our league, seems to have made a number of annoying changes since the end of the last season. I'm also hearing a fair amount of grumbling that they've decided to become political, and to the left. On the first count, I realize that my right to complain about a free service is somewhat limited. However, there is fierce competition for the eyeballs and clicks that free FFL service brings in, so it's not just a one-way street. Other than the overreaction to the Curt Schilling tweet, I haven't seen enough to make a judgement on the political side, but I am watching now. For the moment it's enough to see this gobsmacking disinformation tonight:

Since I had just drafted him as my #1 RB you can imagine my dismay at seeing a report of an MCL sprain when I got home. Except, it's apparently a load of crap. Hey, ESPN, how bad have you guys become? Seriously, if you want to do major damage to your credibility then keep letting garbage like this get posted on your website.

Please Don't Make Me Your Enemy

Stories like this, along with some others this year, have gotten to the point where they are making me rethink a few things:

In the middle of last school year, Lila Perry came out as transgender. Before that, she had been living as a gay male.

But that’s not who she really was. No longer was she going to pretend, Lila said.

So this year, she told teachers and administrators at Hillsboro High School, where she is a senior, that she would no longer be content to use a unisex faculty bathroom. She wanted to be treated like other female students, including access to bathrooms and locker rooms for girls.

Her decision spread quickly through the small Jefferson County school district and, on Monday morning, students at Hillsboro High School walked out in protest. During the walkout, Lila was locked in the principal’s office. She said she and administrators worried about her safety.

Much has changed in the name of tolerance in my lifetime and I think most of it has been for the better. It seems now though, that tolerance is being turned into a cudgel to be used against all sorts of other social sensibilities and send us down the path of madness. And it's really starting to piss me off that the people who warned us not to give them an inch or they'll take a mile, the people I and others scoffed at, are more and more appearing to have been right.

I'm not going to question Perry's assertion of being transgendered. I have no basis for making such a judgment and it's kind of dumb to get dragged into that argument anyway. I think it was reasonable for the school to try to accommodate Perry with a unisex bathroom in the teacher's lounge. In fact, I agree that more, if not all, individual restrooms should be made unisex. But I draw the line at forcing people to accommodate transgender people in communal settings. If private gyms choose to open their locker rooms to whomever identifies as what then their membership is free to accept that or go elsewhere. But coercing anyone in the case of a communal setting is unacceptable to me.

The same goes for attacks on religious freedom by coercing people into doing things related to gay weddings that they don't want to do. It's not the 1950s and only "Whites Only" hotels for 200 miles in any direction. We're talking about wedding cakes and crap and for 99.999999% of gay couples there are probably dozens of bakers willing to take their business for every one who won't. If they sue somebody for turning away that sort of business they're not a civil rights victim, they're assholes. Enough with that bullshit.

And the same goes with the assault on normal gender pronouns. It offends my fondness for the truth, but I'm willing to a call a man with a penis "she"(and the opposite) anyway if that's what they want. However, if it is going to lead to bullshit thinking such as "Well she's a she so she should be able to use the women's locker room even if she has a penis," or this latest bullshit about "ze" and "zis" and whatever then the time has come to step back and demand that people use the right words. You have a penis? You are a "he" and you will use the men's facilities. You have a vagina? You are a "she" and you will use the women's facilities.

End of story, end of bullshit. 

I have no desire to persecute Lila Perry or cause her harm, but the other boys and girls at that school have their own rights and sensibilities that need to be respected. When she, I'll still grant her that for now, says “There’s a lot of ignorance. They are claiming that they’re uncomfortable. I don’t believe for a second that they are. I think this is pure and simple bigotry,” she's being disrespectful and ignorant in her own right. When I read that quote the first thing that came to mind is "The hell with this entitled little asshole, maybe it's time to go back to treating transgenderism as a mental disorder." I've cooled off since, but I'm definitely not alone in my anger. I don't want this fight, but let me be very clear that the transgendered community shouldn't want it either. 

Nor do I desire to restart the gay marriage fight, but if the gay community is going to turn that victory into a way to get the government to commit their hate crimes against religion then maybe that battle needs to be re-fought too, knowing what we know today.

People are pissed these days and situations like Hillsboro High School are kindling waiting to go off. If the feds come down on that district and force the issue that might be the spark lights an unpredictable firestorm of backlash. Tolerance is often a two way street, and if the LGBT doesn't start giving some back soon they are going to start losing mine. Like I said, I'm not alone.

"Pigs In A Blanket"

The St. Paul chapter of Black Lives Matter held a protest march this past Saturday morning. They gathered at a local park and then walked about 2 miles to one of the larger gates to the Minnesota State Fair. When that was closed off they went to the main gate, as originally planned.

News of the march had prompted angry comments when it was first announced, since the organizers made it a stated goal to disrupt the first weekend of the fair. Support for BLM is lukewarm to non-existent outside of the Twin Cities anarchist/leftist crowd anyway, but disrupting the fair wasn't going to do them any favors on that score. In the end the protest was peaceful, there really wasn't any serious disruption, and there was only minor heckling in opposition. Police patiently waited out the die-ins and delays and no arrests were made.

I watched the march live via some guy who kept talking about "revolution" while he was livestreaming it. It was all fairly boring except for this chant: “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon!” The Strib says it only happened once, but I'm pretty sure that rang out on at least two occasions during the march. That chant bugged me in a vague way until it finally clicked. "I’m putting pigs in a blanket." was one of the last things that Ismaaiyl Brinsley wrote before he gunned down NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

Now, I think most of those protesters were not consciously demanding the death of cops, but I'll bet at least some of them were fully aware of Brinsley and the context in which he had used the term. BLM members have gone on TV downplaying the chant and even calling it "playful." For most maybe it was, in an ignorant sort of way. The "white revolutionaries" along for the ride probably got the joke though, given their total hatred of the police as standing in their way. The really funny thing is if push came to shove those cops would be the only thing standing in the way of them getting their revolutionary asses handed to them. 

Intended as a threat or not, if BLM truly wants to be seen as non-violent then they need to lose the "pigs in a blanket" stuff, period. I don't think we can expect that from a movement founded on the lie "Hands up, Don't shoot," but we can ask.

From The Department Of "Shhhh, It's A Secret"

There's actually some pretty good information in this story if you can get past the stupidity of the title and first paragraph:

U.S. launches secret drone campaign to hunt Islamic State leaders in Syria

The CIA and U.S. Special Operations forces have launched a secret campaign to hunt terrorism suspects in Syria as part of a targeted killing program that is run separately from the broader U.S. military offensive against the Islamic State, U.S. officials said.

Is it just me or more and more does it feel like we live in a Monty Python sketch? I read that first paragraph and half expected to see John Cleese walk into the room and say "Well, it's not much of a bloody secret if it's been published in the Washington Post, is it now?"

Windows 10

I've upgraded one PC to Windows 10 now and will go ahead with my and Dad's laptops when Microsoft is ready. My second PC is down for the count with a bad hard drive at the moment and I may end up just converting it to a Linux box when I fix it, but that's another story. The upgrade has gone fine so far(Dell Stage stopped working, but I didn't use it anyway), but there are two issues that you may have already heard about: RAM usage and privacy concerns.

Windows 10 uses a fair amount more of RAM than the Windows 7 version I upgraded from. That's not necessarily a bad thing as long as it doesn't hog up everything and freeze out the apps you want to run. I have 4 GB of RAM on this PC and I haven't seen that happen in the week since the upgrade. Others apparently have had problems, and there's all sorts of stuff out there about drivers and downloading the Windows Driver Kit, but before you do any of that I recommend reading this: Why Is Windows 10's "System" Process Using So Much RAM? It's a good explanation and the first steps there are good ones to follow if you are having a problem. 

While the RAM concerns have not turned out to be a problem, I do take issue with Microsoft's privacy defaults that are a naked grab to hoover up everything you do with your computer or device and send it back to them. Some people note that most of them were present in Windows 8, as if that is some sort of excuse. It isn't. For the purpose of this post I will only be talking about the PC version, but beware of any device you install Windows onto these days.

Lifehacker has another article that does a good job of explaining the settings you can change to maintain your privacy, or not. Note that you do not need a Microsoft account to install Windows 10, though you will need one to take advantage of some features. The bottom line is the more that Windows 10 makes things easier for you, the more information they are gathering about what you do on your PC and the internet. What they can do with that information and what can happen to it down the line is what you need to think about.

Here's a fairly quick read about Microsoft and privacy policy that is worthwhile. It should be fairly obvious to everyone that Microsoft wants to gather as much info as they can about people, within the various terms of their privacy policies, so they can make more money by selling ads that are highly tailored to the user. Some people don't find that creepy at all, in fact they consider it helpful. And it's not like Microsoft is the only company out there doing it. Facebook is one giant privacy suck for just that purpose. 

To be fair to Microsoft, they also gather up this info to provide services that users may find helpful. Cortana, Microsoft's version of Siri, can't fully function like a personal assistant unless it "knows" an awful lot about you. It's a trade-off that each person has to decide for themselves.

I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn, so I'm not a total privacy fanatic, but I'm uneasy about what Microsoft is doing here. The privacy cost does not seem worth the benefits to me at this time. My choice was to turn everything off and sign in as a local user, not with a Microsoft account. Perhaps I'll change my mind on some of that in the future.

Whatever you decide, just remember that everything Microsoft amasses on you can be turned over to the government, some of it even without a judicial warrant. It can potentially be compromised in a security breach. Those are just the facts of life. I hope you find the links above useful, and check out any of the many other resources that are out there if you are facing this decision.

Now Finish It Off

This is a little hyperbolic, but still more good news in the war against Flash:

The day that Steve Jobs prophesied back in 2010 in one of his most famous screeds is finally upon us -- the death of Adobe's (ADBE) Flash web format.

Beloved by advertisers, hated by users, security experts and pretty much everyone else, Flash is still all too common, especially on media sites. One survey found 90% of all so-called rich media ads -- the ones with videos or other moving elements -- relied on Flash in the first quarter.

But starting today, Google's (GOOGL) Chrome, the browser of choice for a majority of desktop users, will be effectively cutting off Flash advertising at the knees, ignoring those intrusive, battery-sucking, fan-spinning, auto-play videos and banners. (Now people will have to click on the ads to see them in Flash.)

This is not the death of ads on websites, but it is another major step in pushing advertisers out of Flash and into HTML5, a much more secure platform. I mostly use Chrome for browsing and, tired of the eternal security problems, disabled Flash from auto-starting a long time ago. I have to manually allow Flash to run some videos, but I got used to that quickly. The complaints of those who don't will hopefully drive more and more websites out of Flash and into HTML5.