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Armed and Dangerous Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life's simple pleasures… Main menu Skip to primary content Skip to secondary content Home Search Post navigation ← Older posts Jan 24 30 Days in the Hole Posted on 2020-01-24 by esr Yes, it’s been a month since I posted here. To be more precise, 30 Days in the Hole – I’ve been heads-down on a project with a deadline which I just barely met. and then preoccupied with cleanup from that effort. The project was reposurgeon’s biggest conversion yet, the 280K-commit history of the Gnu Compiler Collection. As of Jan 11 it is officially lifted from Subversion to Git. The effort required to get that done was immense, and involved one hair-raising close call. Continue reading → Posted in Hacker Culture , Software | Tagged reposurgeon | 2 Replies Dec 23 The Great Inversion Posted on 2019-12-23 by esr There’s a political trend I have been privately thinking of as “the Great Inversion”. It has been visible since about the end of World War II in the U.S., Great Britain, and much of Western Europe, gradually gaining steam and going into high gear in the late 1970s. The Great Inversion reached a kind of culmination in the British elections of 2019. That makes this a good time, and the British elections a good frame, for explaining the Great Inversion to an American audience. It’s a thing that is easier to see without the distraction of transient American political issues. (And maybe I have an easier time seeing the pattern because I lived in Great Britain as a child. British politics is more intelligible to me than to most Americans because of that early experience.) To understand the Great Inversion, we have to start by remembering what the Marxism of the pre-WWII Old Left was like — not ideologically, but sociologically. It was an ideology of, by, and for the working class. Continue reading → Posted in Politics | 222 Replies Nov 20 Beware the finger trap! Posted on 2019-11-20 by esr I think it’s useful to coin pithy terms for phenomena that all software engineers experience but don’t have a name to put to. Our term of the day is “finger trap”. Continue reading → Posted in General | 189 Replies Nov 17 Some places I won’t go Posted on 2019-11-17 by esr A few minutes ago I received a request by email from a conference organizer who wants me to speak at an event in a foreign country. Unfortunately, the particular country has become a place I won’t go. Having decided that I want my policy and my reasoning to be publicly known, I reproduce here the request and my reply. I withhold the requester’s name for his protection. Continue reading → Posted in Politics | 133 Replies Nov 10 Grasping Bloomberg’s nettle Posted on 2019-11-10 by esr Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York perhaps best known for taking fizzy drinks, and now a Democratic presidential aspirant, has just caused a bit of a kerfuffle by suggesting that minorities be disarmed to keep them alive. I think the real problem with Bloomberg’s remark is not that it reads as shockingly racist, it’s that reading it that way leaves us unable to deal with the truth he is telling. Because he’s right; close to 95% of all gun murders are committed by minority males between 15 and 25, and most of the victims are minorities themselves. That is a fact. What should we do with it? Continue reading → Posted in Firearms , Politics | 270 Replies Sep 28 The dream is real Posted on 2019-09-28 by esr Elon Musk’s new Starship is not the tall skinny pressurized-aluminum cylinder we’re used to thinking of a real rocket, but a fat cigar-shaped thing made of stainless steel, with tail fins. I just listened to an elaborate economic and engineering rationale for this. And I don’t believe a word of it. It had to be that way because Elon Musk grew up on the same Golden Age science fiction magazine cover illustrations I did, and it looks exactly like those. Has tailfins . Freaking tailfins . And lands on a pillar of fire just like God and Robert Heinlein (PBUH) intended. The dream is real. Posted in Science , Science Fiction | 499 Replies Sep 14 Gratitude for Beto Posted on 2019-09-14 by esr Beto O’Rourke is a pretty risible character even among the clown show that is the 2020 cycle’s Democratic candidate-aspirants. A faux-populist with a history of burglary and DUI, he married the heiress of a billionaire and money-bombed his way to a seat in the House of Representatives, only to fail when he ran for the Senate six years later because Texas had had enough of his bullshit. Beneath the boyish good looks on which he trades so heavily, his track record reveals him to be a rather dimwitted and ineffectual manchild with a severe case of Dunning-Kruger effect. Beto’s Presidential aspirations are doomed, though he and the uncontacted aborigines of the Andaman Islands are possibly the only inhabitants of planet Earth who do not yet grasp this. Before flaming out of the 2020 race to a life of well-deserved obscurity, however, Beto has done the American polity one great service for which I must express my most sincere and enduring gratitude. Continue reading → Posted in Firearms , Politics | 916 Replies Sep 04 Be the America Hong Kong thinks you are Posted on 2019-09-04 by esr I think this is my favorite Internet meme ever. Yeah, Hong Kong, we actually have a problem with Communist oppression here, too. Notably in our universities, but metastasizing through pop culture and social media censorship too. They haven’t totally captured the machinery of state yet, but they’re working on that Long March all too effectively. And you are absolutely right when you say you need a Second-Amendment-equivalent civil rights guarantee. Our Communists hate that liberty as much as yours do – actually, noticing who is gung-ho for gun confiscation is one of the more reliable ways to unmask Communist tools. We need to be the America you think we are, too. Some of us are still trying. Posted in General , Politics | 295 Replies Aug 24 The Order of Defenders Posted on 2019-08-24 by esr Officiant: “One comes before us today who wishes to become a Sworn Brother. Let him approach.” Officiant: “Are there two Brothers present who will affirm that the candidate is of sound mind and good character, being aware that the penalty for error in this judgment is expulsion and disgrace?” Upon hearing affirmations, the officiant continues: “Very well. Aspirant. Take your firearm in your dominant hand. Raise it in the posture I now demonstrate, and repeat after me. After each line, the assembled Brothers will affirm with one voice.” My gun protects the weak. SO MOTE IT BE! My gun speaks for liberty. SO MOTE IT BE! My gun defends myself, my neighbors and my nation. SO MOTE IT BE! My gun guards civilization. SO MOTE IT BE! With this oath I become a Sworn Brother of the Order of Defenders. SO MOTE IT BE! I will defend, and teach others to defend themselves. SO MOTE IT BE! I will shoot neither in anger nor haste nor from any sort of intoxication, but in grave knowledge of the consequences. SO MOTE IT BE! When a Sworn Brother calls for aid in defending, I will answer. SO MOTE IT BE! These things I swear by all I hold sacred. SO MOTE IT BE! Following the initiation, all repair to a shooting range for convivial practice. I wrote the above after thinking about Rudyard Kipling’s Ritual of the Iron Ring for newly-graduated engineers. Rituals like this exist to express and formalize what is best in us. The Order of Defenders does not exist. Perhaps it should. Posted in Firearms | 205 Replies Aug 17 How the D candidates would introduce themselves at the next debate if they were honest Posted on 2019-08-17 by esr Hi, I’m Joe Biden. I’m the perfect apparatchik – no principles, no convictions, and no plan. I’m senile, and I have a problem with groping children. But vote for me anyway because orange man bad. Hi, I’m Kamala Harris. My white ancestors owned slaves, but I use the melanin I got from my Indian ancestors to pretend to be black. M...