Musings of the Desert Rat

 Today is another year passed since I started on this earth.

Hard to believe that I am now 55, I feel as horny as 25 (or 15 for that matter), and goes to show age can really be just a number.

By coincidence, an old acquaintance from my high school days came up to visit for a couple of days, and last night I took her down to Fremont Street, and had a chance to finally go into the Circa Hotel-Casino which I meant to go visit since they opened about 2 years ago.  Wasn't too bad, plenty of eye-candy to behold both inside and outside.  After extricating from there, I took her down on a cruise of the Strip, and it was typical assholes-and-elbows traffic even at 00-dark-30 on a Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Gave me a chance for one more look at the Mirage before they close up on the 17th of this month.  Sad to see an icon go, but change is the name of the game here in town.

Tonight, back to the grind.  At least I'll have my regular partner back with me on shift this week.

 From BCE:

 Just keeping busy with work and some personal matters.  Changes are coming, some good, some so-so.

Will keep y'all in the loop best I can.

 Link to story

Abuse is abuse, no matter what.

 Some more tidbits from the blogs I try to follow:

1. BCE is reminiscing on 20 years since he went to Iraq as a civilian contractor and how times changed.  I will say this, he's now almost half the man he used to be.  Thanks for stepping up to the plate and still sending good vibes to you and Gretchen and hope her battle with cancer ends in a resounding victory.

2.  Not much from Electrospaces (formerly known as Top Level Communications) lately, there's an article (in Dutch) regarding how the Dutch government is proposing regulations on how their intelligence community is able to respond to cyber threats.

3. Over at Wirecutter's blog, I came across this interesting tidbit about how PornHub is going to block users in Texas in order to be compliant with a recently-passed state law that penalizes sites for not properly verifying the age of their visitors to prevent underaged folks from viewing the content.  Depending on how they got their gateways configured, this can be easily circumvented with a VPN client just like how lots of folks are able to view IPTV content from other areas which may be blocked.  Time will tell if this is gonna work out...

And on a personal note, my dad is once again back in the hospital for internal bleeding (his hemoglobin was at 4.5 :-o ) so hopefully they can find out where it's coming from and get it fixed.

Another personal and professional note, the live show that I regularly work as a backstage medic announced that they are closing and that the last day is May 11.  I'll post more later about that along with pics when I get a chance.

 In my usual tromps around the blogosphere, Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man posted this article from a interesting source on some suggestive advice to the Russian soldier on how to deal with the combat in the Ukraine.

I find it an interesting study on the mindset of the Russian soldier's mindset in particular and the Slavic culture and worldview in general.

Considering that Russia is trying to bring itself back to greatness on the world stage, it does bear some study.  Knowing your potential adversary is a basic tenet on preparing for conflict. 

 This article about a professor at Harvard that had received a severe backlash when his study to determine if racial bias exists in regards to police shootings showed no such bias even exists.

Even after he redid the study with new assistants to formulate and tabulate the data, he still achieved the same end result. 

I would like to see the actual study and review the methodology used for manipulating the data, and see if it holds to generally accepted practices used for similar studies.  The fact that his peers warned him not to publish does make me wonder.  At least he was forthcoming in publishing the results and not trying to bury it somewhere.

Yet another example of the mob not liking reality, it seems...