If this is a repeat of the Great Depression, we’re only in 1932.  Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Today, Confederate forces under the command of General Beauregard began the bombardment of Fort Sumter.  This action was the spark that lit the powderkeg of the American Civil War. 

The South spent the next four years learning the hard lesson that no matter how well led or how brave your soldiers are, if you can’t feed them, arm them, and replace losses in both privates and generals, you will lose in a long war against a foe that has a deep bench of generals, a huge pool of young men, and an industrial base that can crank out guns, wagons, shoes, uniforms, and food as fast as it is needed.

The family legend I heard growing up was that my Irish ancestor got off the boat, learned that there was money to be made signing up for the Army, and signed up with one of the local regiments for the bonus.  He then moved over a few blocks, signed up with another regiment, took the bounty, and moved on again.  The third time his timing was a bit off, and there wasn’t time for him to slip away to continue his entrepreneurship before he was marched south.  Thus began my tradition of military service and being sneaky.

The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history, and saw the transformation of warfare from a gentleman’s pursuit to an industrial endeavor.  By the end of the war, at least on the Union side, muzzle-loading rifles and muskets were being replaced with breech loading single-shot and repeating rifles.  Telegraphs and railroads were being used as weapons of war.  Military leaders were learning that destroying a field army was easier if you destroyed the supply chain that fed it first. 

Every so often, someone on the Internet spouts off about the necessity of another Civil War.  I’ve heard the family legends, read the histories, and walked the battlefields and cemeteries.  It is my earnest hope that it will never be necessary for Americans to kill Americans again.  We are better served with reform and elections in Washington than we would be with bullets and bombs in Los Angeles.

I just registered for the Lucky Gunner Memorial Day Blogshoot.   Apparently they got a heck of a lot more pre-registration than they expected, so there’s probably going to be a culling process of applicants.  I’m not strictly a gun blogger, and I’m certainly a small fish in a big pond of veteran gunbloggers.

But what the heck.  I put in my registration, and if I’m selected I’ll be heading to Knoxville for a weekend of shooty goodness, meeting people, and shooty goodness.  Wish me luck!  And don’t forget to register yourself!  I really want to start meeting more of the people I’ve met on-line.

A 4th grade teacher in Norfolk, Virginia, is going to have a good talking to over a recent history lesson.  Apparently the Norfolk Public Schools administration frowns on segregating 4th graders by race, then demonstrating a slave auction using the black students as chattel.  Go figure.  The principal of the school promises to have a discussion with the teacher about how inappropriate such a thing is.  From the reporting, you’d think she’d worn white before Memorial Day.  I mean, it’s not like she’d recreated a shameful, hurtful, and despicable part of our history or anything.

What’s next?  Is the German teacher going to have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed student sort the other students as they file past him after spending a couple hours locked in a closet together?   Maybe as another history lesson, the teacher could have the students with Native American ancestors give everything in their lockers to the other students and then spend the rest of the day being roughly moved from one classroom to another?

You know, I wonder why I’m shocked anymore..

“Honest honey!  I got it from a mosquito!”

A biologist who travelled to Africa and was infected with a mosquito-transmitted virus seems to have passed the disease on to his wife via intercourse.  Scientists report that, while rare, this kind of thing has been seen before.

Imagine if other diseases that are normally spread through intercourse were found to be transmittable via insect bite.  How many scumbags would look their wives in the eye and say “Hey, I got bit by a chigger while I was on that business trip.  Must have gotten it there.”?

Something tells me he’d still be a dead man walking.

According to a recent poll of Mississippi Republicans, 46% of them felt that interracial marriage should be illegal.  I’m assuming that what they mean by interracial is a black person marrying a white person.

Wow.

I’m almost speechless.

OK, Sparky, let’s talk.  See that calendar on the wall?  It says 2011, not 1911, or 1961.  We’ve sent black people to war, to college, to the voting booth, and to the White House.  I personally have had black physicians, black professors, black commanding officers, and one very good black lawyer in my lifetime.  In the event that one of my kids decides to become involved with an American of African descent, as long as they’re a good person and treat my kid like the beautiful prize they are, then they do it with my blessing.

Look, if you want to have a problem with people who aren’t as lilly white as the driven snow, fine.  It’s a free country.  You want to raise your children to keep their gene pool monochromatic, as long as they don’t hurt people, have at it.  It’s your life.

But do us all a favor and stop with the “There oughta be a law” crap.  Choices in marriage are none of the government’s business.  If two adults, regardless of their race or whatever, want to try to spend the rest of their life putting up with each other, it’s none of your, or my, business.  As a nation, we have better things to worry about than who’s hooking up with whom.  I’m sure that at the local level, Mississippi has more pressing issues.  Stop acting like a Democrat and let the rest of the world live the way they want to.

Israel claims that their new Iron Dome anti-missile defense shield has shot down a rocket fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.  This is pretty significant.  Israel has committed to better protecting its citizens from Palestinian rocket attacks, which have killed scores of Israelis in the past decade.  These attacks, primarily using locally made 17mm Qassam rockets supplemented with imported 122mm Grad rockets, are aimed at terrorizing the Israeli citizenry.  These weapons have no guidance other than the “If you point it up at x degrees of elevation at the launcher, it will probably hit x kilometers away” school of fire direction.

Basically, a few time-delayed single-shot rocket launchers are set up in a Palestinian settlement, and “aimed” at an Israeli city.  The terrorists leave, the rockets fire after a preset time, and the rockets fly in the general direction of Israel, with no real guidance system other than “over yonder”.  If Israel retaliates by hitting the location of the launchers, all they will normally hit is a Palestinian home, with the attendant CNN shot of wounded or dead Palestinian children that have been placed for the cameras.  Remember, when an American or Israeli rocket or bomb hits the wrong house and hurts someone, we’re evil imperialists.  When Hamas launches a couple dozen unguided rockets into an Israeli neighborhood, they’re freedom fighters.

The Iron Dome system appears to be roughly analogous to the American Patriot system, although the Tamir missile is designed to be used against artillery rockets instead of the Patriot’s anti-air and anti-ballistic missile roles.  There is a radar subsystem, a command and control subsystem, and a missile interceptor.   Its sophistication will probably allow it to discriminate between incoming rounds that are going to impact in a field and those that are going to actually hit a subdivision.  On launch, the Tamir interceptor closes with the target and destroys it.

One issue with the system appears to be cost.  Each interceptor costs as much as $50,000, and requires a modern factory to manufacture.  A Qassam rocket costs a few hundred dollars to make, and can be slapped together in any Gaza machine shop using scrap metal and a few pounds of smuggled explosives.  That’s quite a premium that Israel is willing to pay in order to knock cheap rockets out of the sky.

Another issue may be how the system handles an environment saturated with targets.  Obviously it can handle the normal attack with a few rockets, but how will it perform when Hamas changes tactics and starts launching a couple hundred small, inexpensive rockets at once?  Will the command and control system be able to pick out the targets that are most likely to impact in an Israeli neighborhood in order to conserve a finite number of interceptors?

Also, this is a purpose built system.  If Hamas learns that rockets are no longer effective, will they switch over to mortars or even just setting up a couple worn out heavy machine guns and spraying a few thousand rounds of plain old bullets into the sky in the general direction of Haifa?  I hope that Israel is well into development of their next set of technology and tactics to deal with Hamas’s indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians.

Congratulations to Israel in demonstrating that they can provide protection to their citizens against the cowardly rocket attacks from Hamas.  I hope that their system scales well enough that they can continue to provide that protection once Hamas changes tactics and tries to saturate Israeli defenses.

• ACORN pleads guilty to voter fraud in Nevada.  Maximum fine – $5000
• A close friend of President Obama got caught trying to pay an undercover officer to schlobben his knobben.  Want to bet this one gets swept under the rug?
• An air traffic controller in Knoxville apparently took a deliberate 5 hour nap while on-duty.   He’ll probably be fired, but hey, he’s most likely in a  union.  He’ll be back on the government payroll in some other capacity as fast as you can say “grievance”.
• CAIR got caught with their hands in the Libyan cookie jar.  

No, this isn’t a gun post.  But I feel almost as strongly on this subject as I do about my guns.

Borepatch threw a hand grenade into the hen house in his recent post about how the Command Line Interface (CLI) on computers was going the way of the dodo in favor of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI).  For you people who work in the real world, Microsoft Windows is a GUI.  You see a menu or a set of buttons, you select what you want the computer to do with the mouse or some other pointy-clicky device, and the computer does what the program tells it to do.  When you open the C: prompt, now called the Command Prompt, on your Windows computer, that is a CLI.

 I can see his point from the end user perspective.  Although in my day job, we still use a lot of CLI type applications on *nix, mainframe, and even some Micro$oft systems, even if they’re encapsulated within a Windows interface.  But on the whole, most non-tech people who use computers will almost never open a command line unless they’re on the phone with tech support.  So, Borepatch’s assertion is correct for most consumers.

However, for those of us who work with computers, as opposed to those who use computers to do their jobs, the CLI is our bread and butter. Even the Windows guys I work with eventually migrate from GUI-only perspectives to using the command shells on their systems for at least some of their work.

GUI’s, even for some admin work, are great for beginners who are following a script to accomplish a set of discreet tasks or to do something that should be simple but isn’t if done the old fashioned way.  I’ve been known to use a GUI to set up printer queues and such on my systems from time to time simply because the CLI way of doing it is arcane and easily messed up.  But using a GUI exclusively can give someone a false sense of security when it comes to working on a system.  Yes, you can set up almost anything on a Windows system and a  lot of things on a *nix box with graphical interfaces, but you may not know what to do when the GUI doesn’t do what you tell it to do.  Troubleshooting through a GUI, if it’s even written into the application, can be ugly.  If you have access to C:, #, or $ (Cthulhu forbid SYS$SYSTEM) you can quickly look through logs, enter diagnostic commands, and try different solutions that may or may not have been included in a GUI.  Knowing what goes on behind the buttons comes from doing these tasks on the CLI, and being able to troubleshoot when things go wrong is crucial.

And for those of us who take care of more than a couple systems, using the CLI to remotely administer them makes life a heck of a lot easier and more efficient.  It takes a heck of a lot less bandwidth to send CLI commands to a system at the end of a 56k modem line (don’t laugh, I do it all the time) than it would be to get GUI commands and output from a remote graphical service down the same pipe.  Even Microsoft appears to be remembering that not everyone has fat pipes to all of their systems, and has built a remote, secure CLI into Windows Server 2008.

Maybe I’m just showing my age here, but it will be a cold day in Cuba before I stop using CLI on my systems, and something tells me that CLI in some form will be used on computers long after I hang up my SSH keys.

You’ve got about 18 months until the next presidential election, and I’m not impressed with your efforts so far.  Others say it better than I can, but let me put this into a familiar theme to help you understand my current opinion of the choices you seem to be putting forward:

Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  Well, well, Private RNC.  Show me your war face!
Private RNC:  Sir!
Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  Your war face!  Like this:  REAGAN!  Now show me your war face for 2012!
Private RNC:  Huckabee!
Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  Are you kidding me!?  Sound off like you got a pair!
Private RNC:  uhhhh… ROMNEY!
Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  Try again!
Private RNC:  PALIN!
Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  Better, but not good enough!
Private RNC:  TRUMP!
Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  Getting colder, braindead!
Private RNC:   GIIINNNNGGGRRRIIIICCCCHHHH!!
Drill Sergeant DaddyBear:  IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO YOU SPINELESS EXCUSE FOR A POLITICAL PARTY!??? THE BEST PART OF YOU IS SITTING AT THE BOTTOM OF GOLDWATER’S FOOT LOCKER!  YOU DON’T DESERVE TO ROLL AROUND IN RONALD REAGAN’S SPITTLE!  YOU DON’T IMPRESS ME, WORK ON IT!

Now that you know how I really feel, let me make a prediction:  You are probably going to nominate some milksop because “it’s his turn”, the TEA Party movement is going to turn on you (remember them?  They’re the reason Boehner holds the gavel and Mitch McConnell negotiates from a position of power with Dingy Harry), and Obama is going to get four more years to thoroughly roger our republic.

It’s been 20 years since you nominated someone I actually respect.Pull your head out of your 4th point of contact, nominate a charismatic conservative, and make me want to keep my affiliation with your party.  I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.