Notes From The Bunker

Notes From The Bunker

Monthly Archives: November 2016

The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote

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tumblr_ogc0noai251urmckio2_400Vote early, vote often.

‘Tis Election Day. This time the choices are…well…not great. Watching this election season has been like watching two people locked in a cargo container dueling with hand grenades.

To me, this is sorta like changing captains after the iceberg has already hit. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, now it’s just a matter of the route and driver that gets us there.

Here’s my most profound thought for the day: it’s too late to effect any real substantial change that will sway the course to Very Bad Things we are currently on. What you can do, though, is get your ducks in a row and prepare so that the damage is mitigated as best you can. In other words, it’s too late to keep the the ship from sinking, but you still have time to find the lifeboats.

I’m heading to the polls in a few minutes (because I will always vote), but I’ll leave you with this dandy: Didja hear the one about the Democrat in Illinois who said that when he died he wanted to be buried in Chicago so he could remain active in the party?

 

ETA: 20161108_103318When people ask who I vote for, I tell them “The person who won’t raise my taxes, screw with my guns, or hamstring small business”. If they say, “You voted for Trump?!” I reply with, “So you’re saying Hillary will raise my taxes, screw with my guns and hamstring small business?”

Article – Janet Reno, former U.S. attorney general, dies at 78

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Hmmm…Janet Reno dies the day before the election. Makes you wonder what she knew about Clinton.

Could not have happened to a nicer guy.

Janet Reno, the strong-minded Florida prosecutor tapped by Bill Clinton to become the country’s first female U.S. attorney general, and who shaped the U.S. government’s responses to the largest legal crises of the 1990s, died Nov. 7 at her home in Miami. She was 78.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, her goddaughter, Gabrielle D’Alemberte, told the Associated Press. Ms. Reno was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1995, while she was attorney general.

For you youngsters, she’s the guy who brought you such momentous moments as these:

elian-gonzalez waco_fire_wide-9203577b23bd582c55a3ac54d95e03ced5cd9573-s6-c30Say hi to Hitler and Ted Bundy while you’re down there, Janet.

Article – Election Chaos Fears Have Preppers Stockpiling Survival Food

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Meh..I don’t fear elections, I fear the results.

In case of an election night Doomsday, preppers are running up sales of emergency survival food.

While sales for “long term food” typically see an increase around natural disasters and elections, “this is more intense than what we saw in 2012,” said Keith Bansemer, VP of marketing for My Patriot Supply, a manufacturer and seller of survival food. During the previous election his company saw sales double. This time it’s triple.

“We have everyone we can on the phones,” he said. “We are overwhelmed.”

To be honest, I know far, far more people stockpiling guns, mags, and ammo in advance of this election than I do people stocking food against it.

Article – How funky tortoiseshell glasses can beat facial recognition

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I value privacy. I hate how more and more we find ourselves losing that privacy. This is why I am always gratified that when some technology comes along to challenge my privacy there also comes along some clever hacker with an idea to counter the problem. In their paper, Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition, presented at the 2016 Computer and Communications Security conference, the researchers present their system for what they describe as “physically realisable” and “inconspicuous” attacks on facial biometric systems, which are designed to exclusively identify a particular individual.

The attack works by taking advantage of differences in how humans and computers understand faces. By selectively changing pixels in an image, it’s possible to leave the human-comprehensible facial image largely unchanged, while flummoxing a facial recognition system trying to categorise the person in the picture.

Where the researchers struck gold was by realising that a large (but not overly large pair of glasses) could act to “change the pixels” even in a real photo. By picking a pair of “geek” frames, with relatively large rims, the researchers were able to obscure about 6.5% of the pixels in any given facial picture. Printing a pattern over those frames then had the effect of manipulating the image.


 

Article -Spooked by Russia, Tiny Estonia Trains a Nation of Insurgents

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Cubs win World Series.
Truly, we are in the End Times.

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I love this article.

Encouraging citizens to stash warm clothes, canned goods, boots and a rifle may seem a cartoonish defense strategy against a military colossus like Russia. Yet the Estonians say they need look no further than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the effectiveness today, as ever, of an insurgency to even the odds against a powerful army.

Estonia is hardly alone in striking upon the idea of dispersing guns among the populace to advertise the potential for widespread resistance, as a deterrent.

…..

The number of firearms, mostly Swedish-made AK-4 automatic rifles, that Estonia has dispersed among its populace is classified. But the league said it had stepped up the pace of the program since the Ukraine crisis began. Under the program, members must hide the weapons and ammunition, perhaps in a safe built into a wall or buried in the backyard.

My government gives me higher taxes and forces me to buy health insurance. Their .gov gives them G3 rifles and encourages them to be survivalists. *sigh*

I’m taking an Economics class at the university with a professor from Estonia. She’s a cute little bohunk who fits the stereotype of blonde former-Soviet polytech instructor. I wonder if she has relatives doing this sorta thing.

It’s interesting to note that the US (and, to a lesser degree, Soviet/Russian) experience in asymmetrical warfare is convincing some that tiny forces can, if nothing else, stalemate larger ones. Used to be that was ‘outside the box’ thinking…now it’s empiric data.