Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 46

Spotting the wild Fascist

“…how do we prevent the genocidal horrors of the Nazi regime from ever recurring? …we’ll start with the roots of Italian Fascism. It originated as a kind of live-action role-playing game for disgruntled Italian WWI vets led by a charismatic war hero, aviator, and poet named Gabriele D’Annunzio. Compared to what it evolved into, early Italian fascism had a rather charming opera-bouffe quality about it—theoretical ideas that were incoherent to the point of surrealism, lots of prancing around in invented uniforms, and dosing of opponents with castor oil.”

The Collusion National Network

All collusion, all the time?

Science by consensus is barbarism

The scientific method is pure, distilled civilization. It is completely unnatural.

Back Seat Baby: Have airbags become a Rube Goldberg machine?

The classic prescriptive mandate is the airbag. Bulky, expensive, undeniably useful, and we have no idea what far better ideas airbags crowd out of our vehicles.

Prescriptive vs. performance mandates

Do performance mandates matter? They’re arguably better than prescriptive mandates, but they still divert progress away from real progress and toward bureaucratic definitions.

The left’s vicious racial shaming

The left is waging a war against struggling mothers—all in service of creating racial discord and shoring up their identity politics.

2019 in Photos

For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2019.

Security is hard, and 2FA is not the answer

Is 2-factor authentication the magic bullet in security? Not unless we solve the real problem, which is that people always take the easy way out—and that includes service providers.

Apple swings privacy out of the park

This is the best Apple ad I’ve seen in a long time. It rivals their rip-mix-burn ad from the music encryption wars. (For extra credit, count the number of walls in this video.) This is possibly my favorite Apple ad since Rip. Mix. Burn. It forcefully states the obvious, yet it’s an obvious that too many people, especially people in power, are trying to make us believe is wrong. That truth is what they say, rather than what we see.

And they’re going to keep torturing us until we believe the lie rather than the obvious truth our eyes are showing us. Privacy, like owning music in 2001, is not dead yet, nor does it have to die.

This TRS-80

“There are many TRS-80’s in the world. But this one is mine.”