...in which a person calling himself an Admiral in the Texas Navy sends a bizarre, ranting screed to Robert Farley at Lawyers Guns and Money, and the commenters at LGM proceed to investigate the guy's bona fides, finding out (among other things) that (a) he has no clue where the Air Force Academy is really located (it's in Colorado Springs, not Boulder), (b) the title "Admiral" is a self-appointment, and (c) He is a retired IT tech from Boeing.
I also learn from reading the comments that the acronym PLMB is apparently yet another slur created by unpleasant juvenile nitwits for the current POTUS (it apparently means "Purple Lipped Muslim Bastard").

1. Internet Butthurt
Upset by how your latest online interaction(s) turned out? You too can report it via this handy-dandy Butt-Hurt Reporting Form. Just don't ask me who you should report it to...your call.

2. The Washington Redskins naming debate
An interesting posting by Jeremiah Goulka over at Tomsdispatch which attempts to explain the two sides of the debate, but more specifically where the No Change side is coming from. Note that one of the fundamental challenges is that the Redskins owner is a person with an ego the size of a small star system, with a matching entitlement syndrome.

3. The Death of Expertise
A posting from Tom Nichols over at The Federalist that explains that, in an era where everybody can have access to information online, we have fallen into a syndrome where everybody can consider themselves to be an expert on any subject under the sun, no matter how little they actually know. Add the Dunning-Kruger Effect to that syndrome, and you have a pretty good explanation for the proliferation of so much weapons-grade Stupid on the Internets.

4. Wearing Google Glass? Think again...
Man goes to movie theater wearing (inactive) Google Glass because they have prescription lenses. He is pulled from the theater and questioned aggressively for hours by government and MPAA employees. It is not clear if he was formally detained; however, it was made clear that Bad Things Would Happen to him if he tried to leave. In other words, he was quite possibly illegally detained.
NOTE to the MPAA - If this is your idea of how to treat movie customers, you will not be seeing me at a cinema in future.

5. Texas Lawyer #1 - Patent Trolling, Texas Style
A Texas lawyer bought a collection of patents that he claims mean that he owns the rights to digital scanner technology. He has been trying to shake down small businesses with demands for $1000 or more if they use digital scanners. When the targets of some of the shakedown attempts contated the FTC, the holding company that owns the patents decided that (yes, read this carefully, it is not a mis-print) that they would sue the Federal Government. I admire the chutzpah of the patent owners, but I fear this will not end well for them. The State of Virginia is already suing them for deceptive trade practices.

6. Texas Lawyer #2 - the meltdown of Carl David Ceder
Courtesy of Ken White over at Popehat, the story of how Plano-based lawyer Carl David Ceder copied blog content to his own website, and when he was called on it, engaged in a public meltdown on the blog owner's Comments section, uttering all manner of utterly stupid and vapid nonsense mixed with threats.
Rule #1 of Holes surely applies here, as does The Streisand Effect. Carl David Ceder's search results in Google are going to look a lot worse in the next week or so.

As we move towards the end of another NFL season, I am going to surface my off-the-top-of-my-head list of aspects of the current rules that annoy me, with some quick suggestions for changes.

1. End of game kneel-down charades
The use of kneel-downs is an old convention (no more, no less) at the end of a game, where the team that is leading, usually with a full collection of downs, adopts what is known as "the victory formation", snaps the ball, and the quarterback kneels with the ball. The defense is expected to not attempt to push up to the quarterback.
The validity of this convention came under discussion in the 2013 season when Greg Schiano, the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, ordered his defense to push and attack the New York Giants offense at the end of a game, despite the Giants being in "kneel down" mode. The tactic upset the Giants, and left Schiano defending his orders to his team on the grounds that it is legitimate to attack the quarterback, even at the end of the game, since it could result in a fumble and recovery by the defending team.
Schiano's justification for the tactic, based on his claimed success with it at Rutgers, is BS; Rutgers never achieved any significant success with it during his tenure. They forced a grand total of 2 fumbles in 11 years. This is not exactly a high strike rate. I believe that he actually used the tactic as a motivational aid for his team, a reminder and challenge to them that they have to play for the whole 60 minutes.
Lost in the wider debate about Schiano's tactics is the reality that kneel-downs are the lowest risk approach for the offense at that stage of a game, with only a single ball exchange from the center to the quarterback, minimizing the risk of a fumble or other offensive SNAFU. However, they are a charade and a waste of game time. Players are paid to play for 60 minutes. I am not in favour of rules that can be bent to give the leading team carte blanche to run out the clock. At the end of the game, watching the leading team, if operating on offense, kneeling down and using up one or more downs, taking 40 seconds off the clock each time results in the last 2 minutes of many games being a charade.
The difficult issue is to specify a specific rule change that will eliminate kneel-downs by a team that is leading, but which will also differentiate a kneel-down from (say) spiking the ball, a play often used by a trailing team that is either out of timeouts or does not want to use a timeout and needs to stop the clock.
The most obvious modification would be to change timing within the last 2 minutes of the game so that the play clock stops at the end of a play and does not restart until the next snap if there has been no forward progress on the last play from the offense. That would eliminate all of the value of kneel-downs and force the offense to at least make an attempt to create a positive play. It would not eliminate spiking the ball, since that might still be needed to stop the clock if a team is out of timeouts. Spiking the ball would still be regarded as a lower-risk play than trying to run or pass.
A more radical revision would be to stop the clock after all plays in the last 2 minutes and not re-start the clock until the ball is snapped. I suspect however that the latter idea would not be popular with the TV networks, who are already upset at the increased length of games (mainly due to the proliferation of replay timeouts). I can forsee other impacts, with teams being more willing to spend timeouts earlier in games, since the value of timeouts at the end of a game will be greatly eroded.

2. Rework the 1 point Try rules
When a little-known coach named Bill Belichick thinks that a play is a waste of time because of its high success rate, it is time for the NFL to listen. This play option either needs to be eliminated (leaving only the 2 point conversion option) or the rules need to be modified to make it less of an "automatic" for the offense. Moving the ball back another 10-15 yards would help, but there may also need to be other changes to reduce the almost 100 percent success rate. The article referenced above floats a bunch of other ideas.
Personally I like the idea of adopting the process used in Rugby Union, where the scoring team has to attempt to kick for extra points from a point back up the field in line with the spot at which the ball was grounded in the end zone (note that in Rugby, to score a try, you have to ground the ball in the end zone, not merely break the plane of the goal line). If this was adopted, and (for example) a quarterback threw a touchdown to a receiver in the corner of the end zone, the kicker would be forced to kick the extra point from close to the sideline, which makes the target area above the posts a LOT smaller. To make it fair, the rugby rule of requiring all players to stand behind the goal line until the kicker hits the ball would need to be adopted also.

3. Move kickoff back to the previous position
The moving of the kickoff point forward 5 yards has been a success if the objective was to reduce the incidence of kickoff injuries. Unfortunately, the result is that a very high percentage of kickoffs are null plays, a touchback resulting in the receiving team starting from its own 20 yard line. The referees could just have handed the receiving team the ball and avoided wasting everybody's time. At the very least, move the kickoff point back 10 yards.
But here is a radical thought - most of the injuries result from collisions of players moving at high speed in opposite directions. How about lining the kicking team up along the sidelines, 5 each side, in a zone either side of the center line, except for the kicker? That way, the collisions (whatever they might be) would be more lateral, reducing the impact forces.

1. It's Mary's Birthday!!
Happy Birthday to my lovely wife Mary Wilson Shevlin.

2. Things you might not want to try if you are a defendant - #1
It might be a bad idea to threaten to kill members of the jury and their families.

3. Overcriminalization, Texas-style
Many years ago, I asked a solicitor in the UK (that's a lawyer to you) how many laws he thought existed in England, and how many were really useful. His estimates were 5000 and no more than 1500.
Given the plethora of obsolete and outdated laws that appear to exist in the USA, this is a worldwide issue. Basically, if Something Bad Happens, politicians find it expedient to pass a new law, in order to head off cries of "Something Must Be Done!" or to head off accusations that they are doing nothing. The net result is that the law keeps getting more complicated, which further increases the workloads for lawyers and the court system. At the same time, as this article explains, the need to be seen to be Doing Something results in new laws being passed instead of statutory remedies being created. This further increases the size of the mess.

4. Syncing files without entrusting data to a cloud provider
The current syncing model implemented by Dropbox, BitCasa et al copies data to those provider's servers in the cloud. Given the current state of illegal government surveillance, there is a better emerging solution. The solution is not surveillance-proof (data can still be intercepted "in flight") but it eliminates the copy of data that currently resides on somebody else's cloud platform.

5. Butthurt by online reviews of your business? Thinking of suing? Think again
This article helps to explain (via a link to a more detailed analysis) that suing over online reviews in the USA is not likely to be a successful business approach. There is better than a 50% chance that you will fail, and given the presence of anti_SLAPP statutes in many states, you may find yourself paying somebody else's legal fees in addition to your own. Then there is the Streisand Effect. Short conclusion: Don't Do It.

The revelations over the last year that the NSA is basically out of control and has been collecting both meta-data and data on US and non-US citizens, using a wide variety of quasi-legal and illegal mechanisms has, quite rightly, led to a storm of anger and fury at the consequent infringements of personal liberties and privacy.
As a result, another important issue has tended to not get the airtime that it deserves. The issue is covered in the latter part of this New York Times article. Basically, if multi-national corporations and governments do not trust the security and privacy of information transmitted via digital infrastructure supplied by US corporations, it is likely that over time, those corporations and governments will procure equipment from elsewhere in the world. This will have a significant negative impact on US business competitiveness worldwide.

1. Jerry Pournelle
Sci-Fi writer and former Byte contributor Jerry Pournelle continues with his wide-ranging blog Chaos Manor, despite recent health challenges. Thought-provoking as ever. Sci-Fi writers and futurists have a much more detailed and out of the box way of looking at the world because of what they write about, which requires equal degrees of understanding of the present, and the ability to imagine the future.

2. Satire, Onion-style
Apparently the Coors Light train has crashed...

3. A "WTF?" incident, multiple lawsuits and large settlements
In January 2013, David Eckert was detained in Deming NM in dubious circumstances and subjected to an escalating series of illegal humiliations and medical interventions after law enforcement became convinced (with insufficient probable cause) that he was concealing drugs inside his body.
The city of Deming and Hildago County has (rather rapidly, suggesting that they had no defense worth a damn) settled with Eckert and agreed to pay him $1.6 million in compensation. Eckert still has lawsuits open against other entities involved in the incident, including a hospital and doctors who were persuaded to operate on him illegally while he was being detained in that hospital in violation of just about every known principle of medical ethics.
This story truly has a horrific "WTF?" edge to it.

4. Large Corporations persistently rip off small artists and creative people
This story shows how a number of large corporations are quite happy to steal copyrighted works from small artists and creative people, sometimes by directly copying objects found on the internet. From reading the article, it is clear that the small artists in question have insufficient means of practical recourse. There is a blog devoted to itemizing some of the more blatant heists.

1. Is Snopes biased?
One of the common memes among GOP partisans and authoritarians is that Snopes.com is inaccurate or untrustworthy, and that it has been (or is being) funded by George Soros, who occupies the same role in the boogeyman universe for regressive partisans that the Koch Brothers occupy for progressive partisans.
I used to see lots of articles whining about Snopes in the 2009-2010 timeframe. However, when I looked at the wording, they almost always contained the same set of inline quotes, proving that one source article was being re-posted and quoted ad nauseam throughout the blogosphere. The allegations in that source article were non-specific, more like a cross between innuendo and propaganda.
Social psychologist Matt Moody took a detour a couple of years ago to examine one of the chain emails he was sent alleging that Snopes is untrustworthy, funded by George Soros etc. As you can see, by the time he had finished dismantling the email, there was not much left of it.

2. Out-of-wedlock births in the African-American community
There is a meme that out of wedlock births have increased in this community. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in this perceptive article, points out that simply plucking numbers out of a wider picture provides a distorted view about what has been happening in the last 30-40 years. The fixation with the out-of-wedlock issue is part of that peculiar tendency that humans have to invoke a "Golden Age" explanation for societal changes, comparing everything unfavorably to our imagined "Golden Age". You know, the one where the price of everything was reasonable, children respected their elders, there was next to no crime etc. etc.
One commenter makes a good point also; there are plenty of distant and absentee parents even in married supposedly functional households. Writing as somebody who grew up with emotionally distant parents, I have some understanding of the possible downside.

3. Award acceptance speeches
I think that any acceptance speech that mentions the recipient's schoolteacher should result in an instant Smite by that person's deity. Not that I have anything against teachers (quite the contrary), I just know that this will be followed by an attempt to thank hundreds of other people by name.
BTW, I noticed that Emma Thompson once again threw away heeled shoes at an award ceremony (she previously did that at the Oscars after she won in 1992, walking into the after-show press conference barefoot).

4. The War On Christmas
Christmas is over and the War is over until...well...somebody tries to re-start it later this year. This analysis from a blog explains some of the myriad reasons why the War On Christmas is a meaningless piece of censorious strawman twaddle.

5. Political corruption, Wisconsin style
This posting over at Lawyers Guns and Money summarizes what I can only describe as one of the best examples I have ever read of blatant political corruption. The sheer cheek of the scheme meets all of the definitions I have ever read for "Chutzpah". As the blog comments also point out, this utterly mendacious piece of money-grubbing fuckwittery was also moved into the legislative queue in WI the same week that another politician decided it would be a good idea to allow people to work 7 days a week. My bullshit and irony meters are now wrapped around their end-stops...

1. Online Presence
My online presence is divided as follows:
1. Blogs
1.1 Tech http://grahamshevlin.com
This is where I write about work-related subjects such as general IT and Testing
1.2 Current http://grahamshevlin.com/current
This contains everything not on the other blogs
1.3 Music http://grahamshevlin.com/music
The music stuff is to be found here
1.4 Aviation http://grahamshevlin.com/aviation
Flying related stuff is here.
1.5 Corporate Realist http://corporaterealist.com
This is a nascent book project that I started work on 8 years ago. It will eventually be an e-book consisting of definition phrases and related stories culled from my 30-odd
years of experience in Corporate Europe and Corporate America. Comments are turned off in this site
Places where I hang out (and sometimes participate in discussions) are listed in the Blogrolls on the blogs. Some of those links may be broken, I do not validate my Blogroll links as often as I should. I apologize in advance.
NOTICE – I will be merging current, music and aviation down to a single blog in January 2014.

2. Twitter
This is where I post either short pithy comments or pointers to other news stories. I do not hold discussions on Twitter; the 140 character limit essentially renders that impossible. I occasionally use pointed language on Twitter, especially if I have noticed nitwittery, stupidity or idiocy out there in the wide world.

Grahamshevlin
This is my work-related Twitter account. I post work-related observations here. This account may be replaced by a new one in 2014 and beyond.

Gshevlin
This is my all-subjects Twitter account. Anything non-work related is to be found here.

Rainpebbleglass
This is the Twitter presence for Mary's glass business. No politics, religion or weird stuff here, just notices and discussions about the fused glass business.

Facebook - interaction rules
1. I am pretty inclusive. I have friends from across the political spectrum (or most of it). As long as they do not resort to unnecessary profanity or personal attacks, they can post what they like. I reserve the right to hide any postings that I deem to be cynical or toxic. Some people's recent postings have been hidden on my wall for that reason.
2. Sure, I post pictures of cats. Some people post pictures of dogs because they are dog people. Other people post pictures of guns because they are gun enthusiasts, or horses because they are horse enthusiasts. Some people post lots of family pictures because they are deeply family-oriented. I am a cat person. Get used to it.
3. I generally follow my general Internet interaction rules on Facebook. However, I generally do not write long comments on Facebook. Instead I will write a blog posting and then link it to Facebook.
4. I try to avoid comments of the “this is what I had for breakfast and this is what I am currently doing” variety. I am not conceited enough to assume that anybody is interested in such minutae.

Google Plus nostall160
I am starting to use Google + more in my online life. I may make more use of it, and less use of Facebook in the future, depending on how Facebook evolves as a social interaction platform.

Email
I have several current email addresses. I am not revealing them here, since I wish for email accounts to be a more private item for interactions with friends and trusted people. I actually use a couple of email accounts as spam sinks in order to limit my exposure to spam on primary email accounts.

1. I am not online to make money. I have no advertising revenue income from any of my blogs or other social media locations. I am not writing to gain, keep or impress an audience. Essentially I am writing for my own fun and to improve my writing for other reasons (I am writing books that I hope to self-publish). If other people like my writing, this is good. If other people hate it, this is also good. The last thing I would like to be is non-memorable. I can achieve that latter goal by not writing at all.
2. My approach to identity is to post as myself. As far as revealing information about myself other than my given first and last names, I adhere to what a former work colleague defined to me as The Concept Of Minimum Effective Fact. I reveal only the minimum amount of information about myself. For example, I never reveal my home address to others in casual conversation. Why would they need to know that piece of information?
3. I seek out different views, and I am interested if those views are articulately and usefully expressed.
4. Not everybody is going to like me or my views after reading what I have to say. I call this the law of averages. One cannot be liked by everybody. I accept that.
5. I use humor and irony a LOT. Humor and comedy, apart from making people laugh (which is a hell of a lot better than almost anything else, except possibly sex), also allow for the subversive exposure and ridicule of all of the weird, illogical and stupid things that tend to take root in modern societies and inside the heads of people.
6. I extend the Principle of Charity in discourse. I will adopt the most benevolent interpretation of somebody's statement, not the most negative one.
7. If you want to engage in discourse with me, provide some evidence that you are thinking as you write, and that you can construct arguments. Hitchens’ Razor is my general response to assertions without any supporting evidence.
8. If you write postings or comments that mostly recycle talk radio or partisan media outlet cliches, I am unlikely to respond. See (7)
9. If you want your ideas to be respected, have good ideas. I have a tendency to engage in ridicule if people espouse ridiculous ideas and either cannot support them or try to engage in sleight of hand, fallacious reasoning or other forms of sophistry. Ridicule is a logical response to the promulgation of ridiculous ideas. Please note that in line with extending the Principle of Charity (see above), I will be endeavoring to critique the ideas, not the person.
10. There is no Constitutional right to not be offended. If you find something that I wrote is offensive, you need to ask yourself if it is because I have expressed it offensively, or whether you simply do not like the viewpoint. If it is the former, feel free to call me on it. If it is the latter, let’s debate it, but starting with "I am offended" is likely to result in a response along the lines of "and your point is…?". You, not me, control how you react to viewpoints and ideas that conflict with your worldview.
11. If your posting is clearly a toxic rant on a subject that you cannot stay away from, I am unlikely to respond. For example, right now a lot of people appear to have a deep animus against the POTUS and rant about his perceived shortcomings and those of his administration. They cannot conceive of any positive thought about him. I learned some time ago that engaging this level of toxicity is a waste of everybody’s time. In my experience, the people writing these sorts of rants most of the time are seeking affirmation, not debate or discussion.
12. If your posting or comment contains juvenile sneers like "Obummer" or "Boner" and/or engages in broad-brush negative stereotyping of individuals or societal groups using tired cliches like "liberals", "atheists", "republicons" or similar, or comprises suggestions like "leave the country if you don't like X", or contains statements that prove that you consider groups of individuals as some lower form of life, you just lost me. Processing elementary school insults and dealing with exclusionary and mean-spirited worldviews is a waste of my time.
13. I love to understand the world, via information and facts. That leads to me using fact checking extensively. I can and will fact check claims and allegations off the internet, and from time to time I am going to declare some stuff to be bullcrap, nonsense, or poorly formulated or argued.
14. I have a reasonable working knowledge of the modern world political landscape. This does mean that I am likely to call out bizarre or distorted worldviews. For example, there is a tendency right now to call out any political view that is perceived to be more progressive than the mean in the modern USA as "socialism " or "marxism". This is likely to cause me to eventually engage in ridicule. See (9) above. The reasons for this are varied and several. One of them is that I grew up under socialism, so I know more than a little about its operation as a political system.
15. I have a reasonable understanding of the types and usage of various logical fallacies, and I will remark on their usage if I encounter them in postings or arguments. Logical fallacies undermine the validity of arguments.
16. YouTube videos do not magically confer credibility and gravitas on ridiculous, dysfunctional or illogically dystopian opinions and worldviews. Anybody with $100 of camera gear, some time, editing software and a resonant well-modulated voice can create a YouTube video. Many people on the political and societal fringes of the modern USA such as Sovereign Citizens, Birthers, adherents to all kinds of conspiracy theories and religious crackpots, turn out YouTube videos at almost the same rate that I breathe. My analysis and questions will revolve around the content. I try to distinguish between quantity and quality when the time comes to analyze outputs on that channel.
17. Capitalizing whole words or sentences LIKE THIS in your enthusiasm or zeal to make a point is counter-productive. It is shouting, which works about as well in the internet world as it does in the real world. It also makes me wonder if you have a problem with the underlying argument or point, if you feel that shouting is the only effective way to communicate it.
18. If I walk away from a discussion, you have no right to assume that you have “beaten” me, or somehow impressed me into agreeing with you. Just because you have silenced somebody, it does not entitle you to conclude that they now agree with you. Most probably I walked away because I determined that further discussion was a waste of my time, which is my prerogative. However, you could check this by asking. Conversely, I am not into declaring rhetorical “victory” in discussions. That sort of approach belongs in elementary school.

1. Wackadoodleness #1
I introduce you to this highly wacky and doozy article about pleomorphism...

2. Sovereign Citizen Batshittery #1
From That Country That Keeps Sneaking Their Weather Across The Border Illegally, here is a tale from a judge who comes across a defendant asserting the usual SovCit exclusions from Life, The Universe and the modern legal system.

3. Sovereign Citizen Batshittery #2
From the Good Ole US of A, a home-grown SovCit who thinks that smarting off to a judge is a valid and useful defense strategy.

4. Sovereign Citizen Batshittery #3
The strange case of a SovCit whose attempts to lecture the court on law are tartly brushed off by a judge. Kenneth Wayne Leaming was later sentenced to 8 years in jail for filing false liens.

5. Sovereign Citizen Batshittery #4
In which a former orthodontist who abandoned his practice and became a full-time Sovereign Citizen identifies himself as a 1922 silver dollar coin when arrested, and gets tossed from court for yammering at the judge. As you can no doubt guess, this is not going to end well...