Three unrelated passings this weekend:
- Chicago's NHL Blackhawks ended their season last night, losing 5-4 in overtime to the L.A. Kings. It's always nice when a Chicago sports team makes it to the post-season, and also disappointing when they don't make the finals. The Kings will play the New York Rangers for the Stanley Cup.
- Chicago-based HomeMade Pizza Co., started in 1997, abruptly ceased operations Friday, closing all their stores and online presence without notice. When the chain first started, it quickly became my mom's favorite take-out pizza. The company prepared raw pizzas that you would then bake at home, the idea being the pie would be hot and crispy when you ate it, because there would be no delivery time. Apparently that concept didn't scale to 40 stores in four states.
- Spain's King Juan Carlos has announced his abdication after 44 years on the throne. He's 76 years old and believes his 45-year-old son, Prince Felipe, will have the "impulso de renovación, de superación, de corregir errores y abrir camino a un futuro decididamente mejor" (motivation of renewal, of action, of correcting errors and making way for a decidedly better future). No word yet on whether HM Queen Elizabeth II, now on the throne 52 years and whose own son is scarcely much younger than Juan Carlos, plans ever to retire.
None of these is connected, as far as I know.
Security expert Bruce Schneier is not an alarmist, but he is alarmed:
In addition to turning the Internet into a worldwide surveillance platform, the NSA has surreptitiously weakened the products, protocols, and standards we all use to protect ourselves. By doing so, it has destroyed the trust that underlies the Internet. We need that trust back.
By weakening security, we are weakening it against all attackers. By inserting vulnerabilities, we are making everyone vulnerable. The same vulnerabilities used by intelligence agencies to spy on each other are used by criminals to steal your passwords. It is surveillance versus security, and we all rise and fall together.
Security needs to win. The Internet is too important to the world -- and trust is too important to the Internet -- to squander it like this. We'll never get every power in the world to agree not to subvert the parts of the Internet they control, but we can stop subverting the parts we control. Most of the high-tech companies that make the Internet work are US companies, so our influence is disproportionate. And once we stop subverting, we can credibly devote our resources to detecting and preventing subversion by others.
It really is kind of stunning how much damage our intelligence services have done to the security they claim to be protecting. I don't think everyone gets it right now, but the NSA's crippling the Internet will probably be our generation's Mosaddegh.
Their super-hero mayor had a fun night in March, apparently:
Loaded behind the wheel of his Cadillac Escalade, high on his Jimmy Kimmel interview, Mayor Rob Ford is winding through the streets of his city.
It’s two days after Ford’s celebrated appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, two months before rehab.
In the course of this March 5 night, Ford will bring together two of his closest felon friends, beating one and accepting drugs from another; go on a racist tirade; and boast that he often has sex with “girls” in front of his wife, according to an account of the evening. He will suggest one man could have sex with her, a source has told the Star, recalling Ford’s words.
And yet, he remains in office, and Toronto has no recall laws. Fun times, fun times...
I may come back to these again:
Publishing the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ to NuGet is still coming up...just not this weekend.
I almost forgot, even though Illinois Climatologist Jim Angel blogged it earlier today. The new NCA is here. Highlights—with a distinctly Illinois-centered view—via Angel:
- In the next few decades, longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels will increase yields of some crops, though those benefits will be progressively offset by extreme weather events. Though adaptation options can reduce some of the detrimental effects, in the long term, the combined stresses associated with climate change are expected to decrease agricultural productivity.
- Increased heat wave intensity and frequency, increased humidity, degraded air quality, and reduced water quality will increase public health risks.
- Climate change will exacerbate a range of risks to the Great Lakes, including changes in the range and distribution of certain fish species, increased invasive species and harmful blooms of algae, and declining beach health. Ice cover declines will lengthen the commercial navigation season [this winter was the exception to the rule - Jim].
If you don't mind using 170 megabytes of bandwidth, you can download the whole thing (or just the parts you want).
Via Sullivan, a great example of someone committing journalism on a politician:
Sullivan comments:
Over the weekend, Washington’s journalistic class was hobnobbing with the people they cover. Bob Woodward has helped pioneer access-journalism in which favored courtiers in The Village act as stenographers for the powerful – their skills deployed merely to figuring out which of their exclusive sources is telling the truth (a wrinkle unknown, it seems, to the access-journo of the day, Jo Becker). The idea that they would wreck their access by asking a politician questions that he really doesn’t want to answer – “Isn’t your wife German?” (see above), “Can you give us evidence for your crazy pregnancy stories?” – is preposterous.
So I give you the above video, by the intrepid BBC political reporter, Nick Robinson. Watch him go for the jugular, and watch him not release his grip until the prey is whimpering, near-lifeless on the ground. A joy to watch, and Hitch, I suspect, would approve.
Brilliant. "Was your wife taking someone else's job?"
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD reported this week that atmospheric carbon dioxide averaged more than 400 ppm in April, a new milestone:
Every single daily carbon dioxide measurement in April 2014 was above 400 parts per million. That hasn’t happened in nearly a million years, and perhaps much longer. Climate scientists have proven that the rise in human-produced greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are “extremely likely” to be the dominant cause of global climate change. The likelihood of dangerous impacts—like sea level rise, hotter heat waves, and certain types of extreme weather—increases with each incremental annual rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide levels have increased by more than 40 percent since humans first started burning fossil fuels in large quantities about 250 years ago. Once released, the carbon dioxide from coal, oil, and natural gas burning can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Thus, the crux of the problem: There just hasn’t been enough time yet since those first coal-powered factories in Europe for the atmosphere to return to equilibrium. What’s more, the pace of fossil fuel burning has since dramatically quickened—there’ve been more greenhouse gas emissions in the last 40 years than over the previous 200—so carbon dioxide buildup keeps accelerating.
So what about the hockey stick? If you look at the last 800,000 years, the chart of CO2 concentration looks more like a brick wall:
Scary.
As predicted last week in private Kremlin memoranda, today's referendum in Crimea has determined that more people on the peninsula support union with Russia than actually live on the peninsula. As someone once said more eloquently than I:
But here's the BBC:
Some 95.5% of voters in Crimea have supported joining Russia, officials say. after half the votes have been counted in a disputed referendum.
Crimea's leader says he will apply to join Russia on Monday. Russia's Vladimir Putin has said he will respect the Crimean people's wishes.
Some review, I think, is in order.
First, Crimea doesn't have a leader that can apply for union with Russia any more than Long Island has a leader that can apply for union with Bermuda.
Second, Putin's respect for the Crimean people's wishes notwithstanding, I can't decide if we're back in 1980, 1939, 1914, or 1836; regardless, it's nice to have the USSR back in town as we're all sick of terrorists.
Third, is there anyone who thinks about these things seriously and believes that this action shows anything other than Russian weakness? Authoritarian leaders always make this mistake, and they wind up destroying their countries. You can't conquer your way to security. Just ask, well, us.
The news recently and Krugman this morning have brought Tennyson to mind:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Heroism has its place, but not when it takes everyone else through hell.
The sun rises in the Crimean Peninsula in just over an hour, at 6:16 local time. A rumor circulating earlier today was that Russian commanders occupying the region had threatened to attack unless the Ukrainian military surrendered by 0300 UTC this evening—20 minutes ago. The Russian navy has denied this. We'll see.
Russia, of course, has the power to take and hold the peninsula, and it seems to have support from a sizable portion of Crimean residents. But at what cost? Again, we'll see.
One thing is certain: Ukrainians are terrified. Ukrainians are in shock. But also, Ukrainians are Ukrainians, from Donetsk to Lviv.
Ask anyone we've invaded. Nothing brings a country together like an occupying army.