Tomorrow is the feast day of Saint Ludmila of Bohemia, grandmother of Good King Wenceslaus of Christmas Carol fame. As queen, she was instrumental in converting the kingdom to christianity but was murdered by her daughter-in-law (mother of Wenceslaus).
By the 19th century St. Ludmila took on aspects of national hero, and the preeminent composer of 19th century national music wrote this oratorio in her honor.
I was going to post this yesterday, but ASM826 posted about the victims of that day. But this story is exceptionally well-told and deserves to be remembered.
No training. This was just what people did that day.
- One of the captains that evacuated Manhattan on 9/11
It's not quite fair to call this "America's Dunkirk", since the English Channel is a lot wider than the Hudson River. And the Luftwaffe had something to say in 1940, that they didn't have in 2001.
But this
is a great story, well told by Tom Hanks. About the time that the Coast
Guard sent out a radio message to all boats that can help evacuate
Manhattan. This is the story of the boats who responded, and evacuated a
Million people in a day.
I've posted about this before. But this seems somehow apropos. And click through to that post to see the comment from Friend Of The Blog Paul, Dammit! who knows a bunch of the people interviewed in this. It's worth your time.
Christine Lee Hanson would be 25 now, graduated from college, and starting her adult life.
Christine was two years old. Her parents were taking her to Disneyland. They lived in Groton, Massachusetts and were on Flight 175 on a beautiful September morning twenty-three years ago today. She became the youngest person to die in the terror attack of September 11th, 2001.
At the end, her father was on the phone with his father. When the phone went silent, Christine's grandfather hung up. They had the TV on and watched the plane strike the tower at the same time. His wife says he was never the same.
Martin Luther King once said in a speech, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
I hope that this is true.
Remember.
Doubtless Dwight will cover this in full presently. But he was an actor that I enjoyed pretty much throughout his entire career (who can forget him in The Sandlot?) - but one role stands out in my mind: his guest appearance (as himself) on The Big Bang Theory.
And this scene was hilarious (from that same episode) but I had never heard the full story:
May flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.
For deer, anyway. Tacitus has been practicing.
He's also pondering ancient Roman ballistae, but I think that would be for something larger like an elk or maybe a moose ...
Seth Weeks is an interesting composer for a couple reasons: he composed for the mandolin, and he was black - back in the 19th and early 20th centuries when that was a definite limitation on how musical society would accept him. Despite that, he was the prime mover in bringing on what is called the mandolin's golden period. He became prominent enough that he toured in Europe and lived there before World War I and in the 1920s.
It was in Europe that he recorded his music, with Edison Records in London and Gerliner Gramophone in Berlin.
Born on this day in 1868, he lived to the ripe old age of 85. There are not a lot of performances of his music on Youtube, and this doesn't have a lot of views. That's a shame - he was an unusually interesting composer.
Navy finds hidden Starlink dish on ship:
Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship.
They called the resulting Wi-Fi network "STINKY"—and when officers on the ship heard rumors and began asking questions, the leader of the scheme brazenly lied about it. Then, when exposed, she went so far as to make up fake Starlink usage reports suggesting that the system had only been accessed while in port, where cybersecurity and espionage concerns were lower.
Well, it is a pain in the rear end to get hooked up to SIPRnet ...
Of course, there's been a general helping of Courts Martials to everyone involved.
And the funniest bit? Elon Musk had Starlink change the default WiFi SSID to "Stinky" to encourage customers to change the damn defaults.
SolarWinds issues security patch to eliminate hard coded password:
SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product that can be used by remote, unauthenticated attackers to log into vulnerable instances, access internal functionality, and modify sensitive data
The software maker has now issued an update to address that critical oversight; its users are encouraged to install the fix, which presumably removes the baked-in creds.
[blink] [blink]
What makes this even more double-plus ungood is that SolarWinds is a security company. They know that hard coded passwords are not just A Very Bad Thing Indeed, but considered harmful*.
I guess the only other possibility is that they don't know this, but I just don't believe that. Heads should roll over this.
* Old computing graybeards will remember the ACM paper "GoTo Considered Harmful" which created such a furor that "considered harmful" is now considered harmful when used descriptively.
Except here, where it is 100% justified.
Tuna sends in another one (thanks!):
Why can't accountants get library cards? Because they're bookkeepers.
It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer". It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular. Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.
It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club. Man is that different now. I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.
Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics. You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark. An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:
Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.
Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.
I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.
The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.
Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.
Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen? No? Better to kill 10 million of them? Oooooh kaaay.
Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.
And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.
During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.
Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists! Don't look at the wall decorations! I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!
Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.
So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys. What to do, what to do?
Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs. Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right? Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.
Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense. These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats. Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.
I wrote about that at length here.
And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland. And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago? How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century? Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?
Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:
This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.
To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.
Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.
Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?
Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants? Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty. Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.
This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime. I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street. Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg. Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).
It's all upside down. And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason. On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really. They sure must have had some powerful motivation.
I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.
