It is clear that with the start of 2014, the Obama Administration — as many (including myself) predicted — wants to declare victory with Obamacare and go home. It is also clear to many of us — but apparently not to the mainstream media — that the Obamacare trainwrecks just keep on coming and are […]
[rewritten, with some additional links] As many writers have been noting, particularly over the past week. the Obama Administration is getting more and more desperate in trying to make Obamacare work, or at least to avoid complete disaster. They are tossing aside enacted laws, published regulations, and their own computer systems to find some way […]
Decades ago, as a computer science undergrad at BYU, I took a graduate math class in catastrophe theory, taught by Prof. Helaman Rolfe Pratt Ferguson. This wasn’t because of particular skill on my part, but because I was working with one of my professors (Robert P. Burton) to develop 3-D graphics imaging technology to aid […]
Decades ago, while home for the holidays from college, I attended a church-sponsored all-night New Year’s Eve party for college students. The organizers, whom I knew, had cozened me into providing (for a few hours) one of the on-going entertainments. They had crudely decorated a refrigerator box to look like a mainframe computer and […]
I have a new post up over at Ace of Spades about why Obamacare is different from the usual anti-GOP tropes put forward by the Democrats, and why they should be very, very afraid: 1) How many of you know someone who died in Hurricane Katrina? (Just thought I’d get that out of the way.) […]
The most valuable IT consultant is someone who stands athwart a failing software project, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. (with apologies to William F. Buckley) After a flurry of posts over several weeks on the unfolding Healthcare.gov […]
A very common pattern in a IT project such as the Healthcare.gov website is that those in the trenches know how bad things are, but those at the top don’t — or don’t want to know, leading to a phenomenon I noticed many years ago and named “the thermocline of truth“. What usually happens is […]
…I can’t do any better than point you at Mark Steyn explaining how thoroughly Putin has punked Obama: Charles Crawford, Britain’s former ambassador in Serbia and Poland, called last Monday “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began.” Obama set it in motion at a press conference last year by drawing […]
I am a member of a special-interest national security e-mail discussion group (long story); one of the other members today posted a link to an article in Foreign Affairs by David Kaye entitled “The Legal Consequences of Illegal Wars”: So what is the law? The black-letter law on the use of force is quite simple: […]
[Thanks to the links from Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds), Chaos Manor (Jerry Pournelle), and John C. Wright’s Journal (John C. Wright — what, you were expecting Karl Rove?). In fact, if you follow the link below to my 2008 post, you’ll see that I first read the poem over at Jerry Pournelle’s blog, Chaos Manor.] I posted this poem […]
