Everything you always wanted to know about government IT . . .

. . . but were afraid to ask:

Airmen urged to reenlist, extend current enlistment, retire, separate before Feb. 15

by Tech. Sgt. Steve Grever

Air Force Personnel Center Public Affairs

1/15/2013 - JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-RANDOLPH, Texas (AFNS) -- Air Force officials are encouraging active-duty Airmen who are eligible to reenlist, extend their current enlistment, retire or separate in March to complete these personnel actions through the myPers website and their base military personnel sections by Feb. 15 to avoid processing delays and military pay issues.

Airmen need to accomplish these actions because the Air Force is upgrading and transferring the Military Personnel Data System to the Defense Information Systems Agency's Defense Enterprise Computing Center in March. The upgrade project is scheduled to take about 23 days to complete, during which time, MilPDS will not be available.

So, hurry up, guys, and make those life-altering decisions right now because the goverment’s computer system will be going down for three weeks, and seeing as how we’re the military, we don’t have any backup or redundant system.

The Malian Barrel o’ Monkeys

Gave me a giggle . . . sardonically speaking.

Behind the WSJ paywall now, but the headline says it all:

U.S. Delays Support [to Mali], Cites Legal Concerns

Right.  Because we all know how scrupulous the Obama administration is about following the War Powers Act, or any other laws for that matter.

Here is an NYT story that details how the Islamist insurgence were aided by U.S.-trained government military units that defected at the first opportunity.

The same American-trained units that had been seen as the best hope of repelling such an advance proved, in the end, to be a linchpin in the country’s military defeat. The leaders of these elite units were Tuaregs — the very ethnic nomads who were overrunning northern Mali.

So, drinking its own anti-racism Cool-Aid, the U. S. happily trained the very ethnic group whose loyalties lie with the Islamic world.  Good going, guys.

Medved’s Foolishness

Michael Medved:

With the president participating in successful last-minute efforts to prevent crushing, automatic, across-the-board tax hikes that would have done disastrous damage to the U.S. economy, it’s time for Barack Obama’s angriest critics to finally give up the paranoid fantasy that he’s some sort of alien agent with a secret agenda to wreck capitalism and weaken the United States.

Everything about this paragraph is wrong.  The tax increases to which Michael refers would take taxes up to the level that they were during the Clinton administration, which happens to be the last truly prosperous era we had.  Odd, though, that he doesn’t mention the spending cuts.

The real “fiscal cliff” is when we exhaust our ability to borrow money.  At that point, whether we cut spending or embrace hyperinflation, we’re all in for a pretty unpleasant drop in living standards.  The string of budget deals preventing us from getting our deficit under control only hasten that day.

No, Obama’s plan for the destruction of America is the same as the Republican plan:  keep importing foreigners through immigration.

Bidirectional History

A social historian, observing trends in the public treatment of sex from 1960 to 1980 and projecting those trends into the future, could be forgiven for thinking that society would soon shed its remaining behavioral restrictions and reservations on our way to base animal behavior, for good or ill.

As Elusive Wapiti comments in my last post, however, what actually happened is a little more complicated. While it is true that many measures of sexual morality have continued their decline, they have also broken down along class lines. After a fling with divorce and teen sex in the '70s, the upper middle class has largely abandoned it.

Consider as well the treatment of sex in movies. There is little today's viewer of even "R" rated movies will miss out on, sexually speaking, but our imaginary historian, considering the early careers of Eva Ionesco and Brooke Shields, would have supposed that these media depictions would have involved ever younger teens, and even children.

And yet, by the rollout of Beverly Hills 90210, a show with no shortage of sexual themes, Hollywood had turned to using adults even in their mid to late twenties to play high school students. I understand this trend has continued, although I don't really know. (I've never seen an episode of Degrassi, for instance.)

The limited reversal of sexual trends after 1980 can be chalked up to our society's recurring moral panics about children, but I can't help but wonder if the social affects are double-edged. Television and movie audiences encouraged to regard "teen" sex as normal and healthy by watching physically mature 20-somethings are being sold a lie; if rather they were shown actual, still-developing teens, the audiences would likely be more conflicted about the message, if not entirely put off. And in fact, whatever their viewing habits, the upper middle class knows better anyway; it is the working class that has fell victim to the lie.

Is the tide turning once more? This Guardian article provides some useful history and quotes experts on all sides, but can't quite make up its mind whether adult-child sex is abuse or just another orientation.

Parenthetically, it is noteworthy that Brooke Shields, while still very attractive at 47, has not had the movie career I would have predicted from her Calvin Klein and Blue Lagoon popularity in the early 80s. She still acts, apparently, but not in anything I can remember seeing.

The Slope Keeps Slipping

The  good little liberals indulging themselves in a spot of moral outrage over Cord Jefferson’s Gawker piece on pedophilia (H.T.:  Trumwill, although Ace reported on it earlier) may reveal a residual moral sense not quite purged by their embrace of gay marriage.  But all their invective, justifiable as it may be, only reveal an unprincipled exception.  Having discarded the idea that sex has a moral purpose beyond what people decide to make of it, they have drawn an arbitrary line in the sand with regard to children.  Perhaps even Ta-Nehisi knows that in the long run it will never hold, and he is very afraid.

Flyover Birtherism

My readers who followed this story more closely can correct me on the details, but I remember how the MSM mocked those challenging Obama’s eligibility to serve as president when, after he presented his “birth certificate registration”, insisted that this wasn’t an actual birth certificate.

Well . . .

It happened that my wife went to the DMV the other day to get a driver’s license, pursuant to which she presented her still-valid out-of-state license, her marriage license, and what she thought was her birth certificate.  This turned out to be, not the birth certificate, but the birth certificate registration.  It had a seal, it contained all the same information, and was all that New York State provided at the time she was born.  It had been good enough to get a passport, marriage license, and driver’s licenses in at least four states, but now . . . wasn’t.  Evidently, the documentation standards have gone up, and nothing less than a birth certificate would do.

I will reserve judgment as to whether the more rigorous standards will accomplish their intended purpose, which I take to be keeping illegal aliens from getting official IDs.  But it is ironic that what Obama presents as evidence of presidential eligibility is not actually good enough to get a driver’s license anymore.

Why no cell fax?

Notwithstanding that scan+email has largely replaced the fax machine technologically, there are still occasions when someone insists that it’s the only way they can send and/or receive a document from me.  So, why can’t cell phones send and receive faxes?

There is apparently a hard-and-fast technological impediment I’m not aware of.  There are cell phone apps that let you upload a document to a paid service, which will then call the receiving fax machine on your behalf.  But that’s a sorry substitute for an app that has your phone itself dial the fax number and send it directly.

I have read that a fax machine needs a special chip that cell phones don’t have, modems don’t have any trouble, and can’t that functionality be implemented in software now?

The only possibility I can think of is something more fundamental:  land lines communicate at seven bits per sample, whereas maybe cell phones use fewer bits?  And there isn’t a fax protocol for anything less than seven bits?

Does anybody know the answer?