Government is the things we choose to do together

Elderly women sentenced to jail for feeding stray cats:

CLEVELAND (KDKA) — An elderly woman in Ohio has been sentenced to jail time for feeding stray cats.

Nancy Segula, 79, lives in Garfield Heights, Ohio, which is near Cleveland.

It’s illegal to feed stray cats in Garfield Heights.

“I would always feed them and take care of them because I was worried about them and I’m a cat lover. And then, once my neighbors around here started being unhappy about it, then they called the animal warden,” Segula told WJW.

Police say after several warnings, Segula continues to feed the animals.

A judge has now sentenced her to 10 days in the Cuyahoga County jail.

Maybe someone should ask Bernie and the other Dems about this.

What we're getting for Christmas

A new dryer.  Our six year old Maytag won't dry, and the Lonely Maytag Repairman tells me that it will be $200 for the part and $100 for installation.  I can get a brand new one for $500.

I remember Mom's old dryer that we had from as far back as I can remember (3 or 4 years old) until I was out of College.  They don't build 'em like that anymore.  Bah. The "feature" that I'm most interested in is "will work for 20 years".  Doesn't look like any of the new ones on offer have that.

We will not be buying a Maytag.  They can all get crotch fires for their planned obsolescence.  Maybe the others are as bad but I haven't been burned by them.  Yet.

Adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it

Mr. Anthony Ortolani of Westminster, CO found himself facing adversity.  An avid mountain climber, he was scaling Mount Bierstadt with his German Shepherd, Missy.  Weather rolled in, and they began to descend.

Then Missy hurt her paw, badly enough that she couldn't walk.

We all hope that we will never be tested with a life or death choice, that the cup will pass from each of us.  We hope this particularly when we face the choice because of our own recklessness, and our loved ones are facing the outcome.  Anthony Ortolani had to decide what to do.

He left Missy in the snowstorm on the mountaintop and made his way to safety.  With this decision, he revealed all that we need to know about his character.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

- Mark Twain

So much for Mr. Ortolani.  But have no fear, gentle reader, other climbers heard about the situation and revealed their character, too:

Monday morning, eight days after Missy was left, Washburn led a new search team of eight climbers. Chase Lindell and Alex Gelb volunteered to help.

“The thought of a dog slowly dying on the top of the mountain is tough to stomach,” Gelb wrote about his reasoning for joining the search.

The group powered through a snow squall near the summit of Mt. Bierstadt and found the dog right where Washburn had last seen it, on the treacherous sawtooth. They named the dog “Lucky” and took turns carrying the dog down the mountainside in a backpack.

Astonishingly, Mr. Ortolani wants Missy back.  The rescuers are suing to keep the dog that they saved.  Ortolani has been charged with animal cruelty, but is certain to escape the just sentence that would have been his in a younger and less degenerate age of the Republic - namely, being tarred and feathered.

Worst of all, Missy probably misses her master desperately.  Her pack is broken, even though she has had a significant upgrade in human companionship.  What captures our hearts about our canine friends is that they see us as we would be seen, not as we are.  Alas, this applies even to one such as Mr. Ortolani.

But while Missy will always see him as protector, the rest of us see him as he is: juvenile, reckless, and cowardly when the chips are down.  Missy may remain true to her breed and look at him with the eyes of loyalty, as she should.  I will look at him with the eyes of contempt, as I should.

No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.

- Dr. Sam Johnston

Mr. Ortolani is well advised to get used to it.

Anarcho-Tyranny 101

Anarcho-Tyranny is defined as "we refuse to control real criminals (that's the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that's the tyranny)."  Here it is in action.

The anarchy:

The 29-year-old man who was found beaten on the front porch of a home in Capitol Hill on Saturday has undergone two surgeries on his brain but his wife said he was able to squeeze her hand from his hospital bed Monday morning.

...

District police have released few details of the attack. They said on Saturday that Maslin was found about 8:30 Saturday morning unconscious on the front porch of a home in the 700 block of North Carolina Ave., around the corner from Eastern Market.

Where is the 700 block of North Carolina Ave, SE?  Eight blocks from the US Capitol Building:

Dunno.  Maybe Fosetti lives near there.  I hope not.  In any case, the police are unwilling or incompetent to keep the streets safe even a dozen blocks from our seat of government.

The tyranny:

PRAGUE, Okla.– There’s a bit of diploma drama going on between a local high school and that school’s valedictorian.

David Nootbaar is furious his daughter’s school is keeping her diploma.

...

Nootbaar said, “Her quote was, ‘When she first started school she wanted to be a nurse, then a veterinarian and now that she was getting closer to graduation, people would ask her, what do you want to do and she said how the hell do I know? I’ve changed my mind so many times.’”
He said in the written script she gave to the school she wrote “heck,” but in the moment she said “hell” instead.
Nootbaar said the audience laughed, she finished her speech to warm applause and didn’t know there was a problem.

That was until she went to pick up the real certificate this week.

“We went to the office and asked for the diploma and the principal said, ‘Your diploma is right here but you’re not getting it. Close the door; we have a problem,’” Nootbaar said.
He said the principal told Kaitlin she would have to write an apology letter before he would release the diploma.

I have a simple solution for this problem.  The good burghers of Prague, OK could round the Principle, Mr. Rick Martin (School Superintendent), and the entire School Board and apply a generous coating of tar and feathers and then run out of town on a rail.

I leave it to my gentile readers to decide the expected lifespan of a private school that took tuition for four years and then refused to give the earned (valedictorian) diploma.  Personally, I wonder if one of Commodore Grace Hopper's nanoseconds is the right visual aid.

Isegoria points us to a good description of why this sort of petty tyranny is so common:

Minor officials prove their status with petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful show their strength through gestures of magnanimity. People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response.


How can high types be so understated in their signals without diminishing their perceived quality? Most signalling models assume that the only information available on types is the signal, implying that high types will be confused with lower types if they do not signal. But in many cases other information is also available. For instance, wealth is inferred not just from conspicuous consumption, but also from information about occupation and family background. This extra information is likely to be noisy in that the sender cannot be sure what the receiver has learned, implying that medium-quality types may still feel compelled to signal to separate themselves from low types. But even noisy information will often be sufficient to adequately separate high types from low types, leaving high types more concerned with separating themselves from medium types. Since medium types are signalling to differentiate themselves from low types, high types may choose to not signal, or “countersignal,” to differentiate themselves from medium types.

The Principal and Superintendent are moderately low status positions - petty functionaries responsible for a couple hundred workers - and not even their workers, since the school isn't their company that they started with their own capital.  The result is that we would expect the displays typical for low status officials - this sort of thing, in fact.

Compare and contrast to the "Superintendent" of a private school, who is very likely to be the owner of the school.  Not only would that person not be so entirely clueless as to the consequences of his actions to his future prospects of prosperity, as a business owner he would likely be considered a medium status official.  His signalling will be aimed at differentiating himself from low status officials.

This is a typically wordy and Borepatchian way of saying that it's all Monkey Brains, anyway.

Anarcho-Tyranny 101

Anarcho-Tyranny is defined as a situation where the Government harshly enforces excessive punishments on the law abiding while ignoring actual crimes committed by favored classes.  Here's how it's done in Practice, in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

Tyranny

Massachusetts' gun control laws are famously strict, although the murder rate in Dorchester doesn't suggest that they're effective at preventing gun deaths.  The gun laws aren't aimed at this, although it's the nominal justification.  Rather, they are aimed at disarming the law abiding population.

L'affair TJIC is a particularly egregious example of this, where a Massachusetts resident lost his gun permit because of his exercise of free speech.  Since Massachusetts gun permits are issued at the discretion of the local Police Chief, they can be revoked at any time, for any reason.

I myself nearly ran afoul of those same laws, when an empty .22 case got embedded in my boot tread during a trip to the range.  Since the law makes it a felony for an unlicensed individual to possess "ammunition or ammunition components", it was a good thing that I checked my boots before I left.  While it's unclear whether I would have been prosecuted for having a unreloadable case or not, this would have been at the discretion of the Organs of the State.

The arbitrary nature of the laws is what is proof of the tyrannical nature and presumed intent, to intimidate the law abiding population, or at least put so many ridiculous hurdles in their way that they forgo the exercise of their rights.

Anarchy

Criminals in Massachusetts routinely go unpunished, or receive sentences so light as to be essentially unpunished.  For example, child molestation:

A 45-year-old Ayer man was given 10 years probation and will spend no time in jail after a jury found him guilty of attempting to sexually assault a 19-month-old child.

After a four-day trial last month, a Lowell Superior Court jury found Joseph Sacramone guilty of one count of assault to rape a child...

At his sentencing hearing Monday, prosecutors requested a five-to seven-year state prison sentence, but Judge Janet Kenton-Walker sentenced Sacramone to 10 years probation with conditions.

Attempted child rape gets you zero jail time in the Commonwealth, because Governor Patrick appoints judges who believe - as a philosophical ideal - that the poor dears are oppressed, and so we mustn't judge too harshly.

And lest you think I'm cherry picking my examples, remember the former Marine Dad who caught subdood trying to molest his kid in the restroom, and punched his lights out?  Sumdood never saw the inside of a courthouse (and was in fact an illegal alien; the local Police Chief was astonished when he didn't show up for his Court date).  The Dad, of course, was arrested and charged with assault.

This was the incident when Massachusetts' dumb as a rock Attorney General Martha Coakley said that the State "didn't encourage self-help".

So there you have it, Anarcho-Tyranny 101, brought to you by those Intellectual Giants from Harvard Yard.  Remember, they're smarter than you and me.

Nicer, too.  They helpfully keep reminding us of that.

What could possibly go wrong?

Drugs?  Nope.  Gunpowder residue?  Probably.  Bacon?  Heck yeah.  Fourth Amendment?  We don' need no steenkin' Fourth Amendment:

Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body—agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you.

And without you knowing it.

But point a laser at a Policeman here in Georgia and you're a felon.  If you point it at a Legislator or Congressman, I wonder if it would detect traces of Douchebaggery.

Tar and feathers.

Three commas

That's what's in the number that will be what Penn State pays out in settlements to the kids that were molested by their football program - JoePa, specifically, and with the connivance of their University President and the Trustees of the University:

Freeh made the report of his eight-month investigation public earlier Thursday and said the board did not perform its necessary oversight duties in the case, which allowed senior university officials, including ex-president Graham Spanier and the late coach, Joe Paterno, to conceal Sandusky's activities.

Peetz and Frazier acknowledged board members did not ask the right questions of Spanier and allowed the former president to frame the case as something that was not as serious as it turned out to be. "We did not press the issue," Frazier said.

Because of that connivance.  The report on the matter leaves absolutely no doubt about whether the University knew and could have put a stop to it.  Holy cow, the ex-President and the individual Trustees are all fixin' to be personally ruined financially by the lawsuits.  The heirs of Joe Pa will likely have to give back everything they inherited from his estate.

And quite frankly, all this should happen.  Voltaire said it best: Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.

We find it useful to kill an Admiral every now and then, to encourage the others.


Jerry Sandusky, Frank Beck is keeping the coals glowing in Hell in anticipation of your arrival.

Die screaming in a fire, Mitsubishi DLP design engineers

Not just because you saved yourself 80¢ by using cheap, low temperature capacitors in your expensive big screen TV, but because then you made the circuit boards harder to pull out than Imperial Japanese soldiers on Okinawa.

It's not too much to say that the Mitsubishi DLP television series is the GM Cutlass diesel of big screen TVs.  And the '79 4.3L diesel, not the "good" 5.7L that would at least take you 60,000 miles before shattering into shards.

Engineering classes should teach fledgling designers that this is the express lane to customers who will never, ever buy anything with your logo on it again.  You can call the class "Die Screaming In A Fire, You SOB 101".  I expect there's enough material for a 102 class as well.

In which I admit to hating the poor

It's a fair cop.  This is a disgrace:

Lincoln Park, MI (WDIV) -- A Michigan woman who won one-million dollars in the lottery had enough money to buy a new house and car, but not enough to cover her grocery bill.

Lottery winner Amanda Clayton was spotted using a state issued food assistance card to buy food.

"Well, I thought that they would cut me off," said Clayton. "But since they didn't, I thought maybe it was ok."

...

A reporter for WDIV asked her if she thinks she has the right to the money when some taxpayers are really struggling and need the money.

"I mean, I have no income and I have bills to pay. I have two house," said Clayton.

Tar, feathers.

Oh. My. God.

My friend Marcus Ranum has a set of Security Laws, too.  His 6th Law is Sometimes it's easier not to do something dumb than it is to do something smart.

Marcus is too nice, sometimes.

I didn't realize when I posted earlier today on SCADA security just how kind Marcus had been.  After all, I proposed my own 4th Law: Everything is on the Internet.  Some things are just harder to find.

So riddle me this, SecurityMan: how do you find one of these systems on the Internet?  What uber 31337 extra crazy h4X0R skillz do you need to find them?

Google:

LAS VEGAS--Not only are SCADA systems used to run power plants and other critical infrastructure lacking many security precautions to keep hackers out, operators sometimes practically advertise their wares on Google search, according to a demo today during a Black Hat conference workshop.

Acknowledging that he wouldn't click on any link results to avoid breaking the law by accessing a network without authorization, researcher Tom Parker typed in some search terms associated with a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), an embedded computer used for automating functions of electromechanical processes. Among the results was one referencing a "RTU pump status" for a Remote Terminal Unit, like those used in water treatment plants and pipelines, that appeared to be connected to the Internet. The result also included a password--"1234."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20087201-245/researchers-warn-of-scada-equipment-discoverable-via-google/#ixzz1UByPXkzn

*Facepalm*

I think that we're past the point of proposing fines for companies who do this.  As a modest proposal to improve the security of the nation's critical infrastructure, here's a security device that should be applied to the CEO of any company found with these systems Google accessable:

No need to thank me, it's all part of the service.

The Experiment

This Republic is perhaps unique (OK, maybe Canada - maybe) in its demonstrated ability to assimilate immigrants from all over the globe.  The "Melting Pot" has taken Irish, and Italian, and Polish, and Chinese, and all sorts of folks, and produced a hard but supple alloy called "American".

Some say that this process continues to this day.  I'm not sure, because some new immigrants don't seem to want to become American.

Certainly there's an incentive structure in place, where professional race-baiters like La Raza get power and influence from immigrants not assimilating.

This strikes me an a unique experiment in our history, one that explicitly turns its back on the success factors that we've seen over the centuries.  "Reckless" is one term for that.  Progressives are pleased to roll out the "Precautionary Principle" to justify their policy preferences regarding energy policy, saying that a sufficiently bad outcome - no matter how unlikely - is a powerful justification to stop something.

OK, I'll play that card here.  Maybe race-baiting multiculturalism is unlikely to cause widespread rioting and death.  Still, that would be such a horrific outcome that the Precautionary Principle says we have to STOP.  RIGHT.  NOW.

Right, Progressives?  I mean, your argument is entirely persuasive.

So what caused the bubbles?

We're told by a credulous media that it was Cowboy Capitalism that inclated the housing bubble and collapsed the financial markets.  The solution, we're told, is iron regulation.

So what did cause the housing bubble?  The media are an bunch of idiots - biased idiots, at that - and so you have to ignore them.  The Antiplanner has a different take, and you need to read the whole thing:

As the Antiplanner noted in recent posts, a lot of factors contributed to the recent housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. But only two factors were so crucial that, without them, the crisis would not have happened.


The two crucial factors were growth-management planning and inadequate ratings of financial risk. Growth-management planning–urban-growth boundaries, greenbelts, growth limits, and other policies aimed at controlling where or how fast regions grow–had three major effects on the economy.

It was Progressive SWPL policies wot dun it.  Like I said, RTWT, but how can artificially restricting the supply of Real Estate have any other effect than bidding up the price of land?  Supply/demand, anyone?  Only a Harvard Law Review president could be surprised that prices went up like a rocket.

For a while.

Most of the narratives of the financial crisis make it clear that, at many critical points in the growth of the housing bubble, the problems could have been avoided by more accurate ratings. Better ratings would have both reduced the size of the bubble (by forcing tighter credit and reducing speculation) and contained its effects on the rest of the economy (by keeping major banks and other financial institutions from being exposed to declining housing prices).

As the Antiplanner previously noted, the ratings agencies probably would have done a more responsible job if they were working for bond buyers rather than sellers. That was the case before the Securities and Exchange Commission effectively turned the agencies into a legal oligopoly. Introducing more competition into the ratings business is one way to avoid these problems in the future.

Why, in all the millions of column-inches of printer's ink spilled on this crisis, have we not read about incompetence at the SEC?  Oh, I remember - all Bad Things happen because of evil Rethuglicans, and you should never let a crisis go to waste - especially when a bunch of Columbia J-School types can get some swell high paying jobs working as press aides for various Democratic congressional types.  Or the SEC. 

This is a must-read post, and I don't say that very often.

The speech that Arizona Governor Jan Brewster should - but won't - give

In a more vigorous, and less degraded age of this Republic, we might have expected something like this:

My fellow Arizonans,

I address you tonight to explain why I am vetoing the legislature's latest bill, banning public gatherings within 300 feet of funerals.  I understand that emotions are running very high after the senseless shootings in Tucson.  I understand that the group that has announced its despicable plans to protest outside the funeral of a 9 year old victim has further inflamed the situation.

But our system of government is clear.  The First Amendment of the Constitution recognizes the right of all people publicly to assemble.  It recognizes the right of all people freely to practice their religion.  It constrains the government from restricting these rights, even when we see them as bizarre, or even offensive.

It restricts the government especially when we see these as offensive.

We can look on the Constitution as merely a piece of paper, or we can look on it as something real, that binds us with well thought out restrictions devised by wise men long ago.  Men who saw that evil seduces us to act, by appealing to our better natures.  These men had seen the results of that evil - evil done with the best of intentions - and bound our government with chains as mighty as they could craft, to prevent that evil from establishing itself on our shores.

While I agree with the sentiments that moved the Legislature - agree with all my heart - I will not bring that evil to these shores.  This government will not violate the Founder's sacred intent, and prevent the people from assembling.  Nor will it prevent what I personally believe to be a contemptible church from spreading its message of hate, in the course of exercising its understanding of its religion.

I therefore veto the Legislature's well-intended statute, because it does violence to the Constitution.

I encourage all Arizonans to exercise their rights of assembly and speech as well, especially in Tucson, and especially at this little girl's funeral.  Those rights are equally precious, and protected by that same Constitution.  As it has often been said, "The First Amendment protects you from the Government, not from me."

I've spoken with the head of the State Police, and with the Tucson Chief of Police, and by a strange coincidence both the State Police and the Tucson police are busy that day, and will not be in attendance at the funeral.  I do ask all Arizonans to exercise their good judgment, and consider whether it would be wise to bring firearms.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless this great state.

The situation would almost certainly be addressed peacefully, since the Westboro Baptist Church members, while contemptible, are likely rational.  It's almost certain that they lack the courage of their convictions.

But it's possible that the Good Citizens of Tucson might have the opportunity to mete out justice.  It's happened before here, and still occurs:

The older man - measured, polite - had decided it was time the world was told why a man should be abducted, tied to a lamppost and have boiling tar poured over his head and body before being 'decorated' with feathers.

...

"This man had been warned," he says. "This man was known to have been dealing drugs in our community. If you have kids rolling through the doors with their eyes all over their heads, you know that something is not right.

"It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to work it out. Selling drugs to children is not on. The community wants drug dealers off the street, but they have no confidence in the police. If police catch these people dealing, they don't do anything.

The Constitution binds our government with mighty cords, restraining its acts.  The Government should be bound with these cords, to protect the People.

But the Government needs to be wise enough to know when to step aside to let the People do what it should not.

Via The Other McCain.

We have carefully considered your application ...

... and concluded that you are one crazy ass bitch:

When the owner of a Seattle beauty salon had her application for a loan from the Rainier Valley Community Development Fund denied last year, that was bad enough. When she later received what appeared to be a second rejection letter for the same loan application, she discovered that the reason for her inability to get the loan was that she is a "crazy ass bitch."

This in a letter from her government. You see, they had torn up the street for some sort of boondoggle "improvement" (likely an improvement to some Government Official's cousin's construction business), but had provided grants to businesses impacted by the disruption. Our heroine had a beauty parlor, and most of her clients couldn't get to the shop anymore. And so she applied to her Benevolent Masters Government.

Be sure to click through and RTWT - they have a copy of the letter.

At this point, it's fair to ask what would happen if this were a business that had turned her down this way. The employee responsible would have been dismissed for cause, probably the same day. Instead, what happened at the Government agency?

The letter was the product of the fund's Executive Director, who was subsequently suspended for one week without pay. She also penned a follow-up letter to the applicant in which she apologized for her actions, but stopped short of calling herself a crazy ass bitch ...

An Executive Director is, of course, politically connected. She's still there (you saw the part about "politically connected", right?).

A business that treated its customers would lose clients to other businesses that treated them better. This? If you don't like the service provided by your Government, you can take your business to another Government.

Oh, wait - you can't. No wonder government services stink.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty Leftie-Statists, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Via The Antiplanner.

More "Common Sense" gun control laws

This one is about the "felons should lose their right to possess firearms" bit. Eugene Volokh finds teh crazy in the Michigan state law code:

The statute, Michigan Penal Code § 750.532, provides,

Any man who shall seduce and debauch any unmarried woman shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by imprisonment in the state prison not more than 5 years or by fine of not more than 2,500 dollars ....

On a snarky note, I thought it was southern rednecks who were supposed to be the bluenoses, but I digress. Volokh points out how this law is currently used (roughly 20 convictions in the last 10 years), and the problem with this:

One story on the subject, John Schneider, It’s a Crime, Lansing State Journal, Feb. 15, 2000, at 1B, reports that,

[A]ssistant Ingham County Prosecutor Sam Smith ... explained that in the case that appeared in the newspaper, simple seduction wasn’t the original charge. The man was charged with a more serious offense. The seduction plea became, as Smith put it, the “resolution” to the case. That’s most often how it’s employed, Smith said — as a “reasonable resolution.”
Smith stopped short of saying that consensual sex between consenting unmarried adults would never be prosecuted as a crime, but admitted it would be rare. Of course if one of the parties is married, the crime becomes adultery, but that’s rarely prosecuted, either, Smith said.

But this still strikes me as wrong. Say someone refuses to accept such a “reasonable resolution” and pleads not guilty, perhaps because he claims the sex was consensual and that he shouldn’t have to go to jail for it. Nothing in the law keeps the prosecutor from charging the person both with the more serious offense (presumably rape) and with seduction, so that even if the jurors accept the man’s story, they’ll still convict him of seduction.
I don’t think we should put our trust in the noblesse oblige of prosecutors when it comes to sex crimes any more than when it comes to speech crimes. Seduction shouldn’t be criminal just so that prosecutors find it easier to reach plea bargains in rape cases.

Make enough behaviors into felonies, and you can take away people's rights. A convenient transfer of power to the government here: not only does this make their job easier, but it makes everyone defer to government officials; after all, who wants to call attention to yourself that could result in a felony prosecution for a trivial act, based on the prosecutor's discretion?

It seems that in a less degraded age of the Republic, the response would have been tar and feathers.

Medical malpractice reform

Yes, we need it. No, the Democrats won't put it in Obamacare. That's not the point of this post.

The Brits need it more than we do. Suppose your child has a major problem. Suppose you take him to the National Health Service (NHS) hospital. Supposed you begged them to take your son's case seriously. What do you think would happen?

Cheryl Cressey, 48, told how she pleaded to have her son admitted to hospital. She said: “I kept going back and asking for somebody to look at him, but nobody would come. They rolled their eyes at me, they tutted at me, they turned their backs on me.”

A ten year old boy, dead from Meningitis. Sent home from the hospital with pain killers. What does avictim of socialized medicine look like? This:

Here at least, we'd sue them to destitution. The only word for this is evil. State-sponsored evil.

From the place that used to be Great Britain comes this warning, if we're wise enough to listen. This sort of thing happens all the time, so I've started a new tag, killed by socialized medicine.

Hat tip: The Drawn Cutlass.

From: God To: Fed.Gov Subject: Shape Up

About the first thing a larval hacker learned, back in the day, was how to forge email. It's trivially easy, and frankly I'm not letting the cat out of the bag by showing you here. There's a point to all of this, but first I want to show how trivially easy it is to do this.

Disclaimer: You know this, but don't try this at home. Srlsy.

Telnet is the program Unix machines use to log in across the network. It's horribly insecure, but sadly ubiquitous. Basically, it takes a character (or line) that you type on your computer, wraps it up in network packets, and sends it across the network to the other computer, which handles it like it was typed directly on the keyboard there.

A cool thing about telnet is that you don't have to use the normal telnet port (TCP/23); you can use any old port that you want. If there isn't some program listening on the other computer, this won't do you any good. But if there is something - like email - listening on the other side, you can send data directly to the program. In this case, you can forge email.

Here's what it looks like:

First, I open command prompt & go to telnet client by typing telnet.. Below is the session:

Microsoft Telnet>o www.mailserver.com 25
220 mailserver.com ESMTP Sendmail Version 8.x.x; Mon, 28 Sept. 2008;
We do not allow to send fake or bulk emails...
helo microsoft.com
250 mailserver.com Hello Nice to meet you..
mail from:billgates@microsoft.com
250 billgates@microsoft.com Sender Ok
rcpt to:victim@victim.com
250 victim@victim.com Recipient Ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself..
SUBJECT:Hello!
Hello,
I am Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft. I would like to offer you a job for Microsoft

Corporation. If you are interested to work with Microsoft, then reply me at my mail address.
Regards~
Bill Gates
.
250 2.0.0 iF3NDLS240106 Message Accepted For Delivery.

My first one was a little different - I sent it from "god@heaven.org"* but it's exactly the same. Fake.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, it seems that the UK.Gov is spinning up criminal investigations based solely on an email they received:

Exclusive The government faces accusations of technical incompetence and waste after it went to the High Court to shut down the Fathers 4 Justice website, wrongly claiming campaigners had threatened to publish the home addresses of 237 judges.

Lawyers for Matt O'Connor, the controversial group's founder, are now preparing action against the Ministry of Justice to recover costs and damages from taxpayers. He alleges civil servants failed to perform basic checks on the origins of the threat before launching a legal attack.

The battle began in late June, when the Ministry of Justice received an email falsely purporting to come from O'Connor. It said Fathers 4 Justice would expose judges on its website as revenge for perceived unfairness in family court decisions.

The UK.Gov got an injunction forcing Fathers 4 Justice to take their web site down. Fathers 4 Justice complied, and appealed, asking for the email. Guess what they found:

"I'm not a techie but any fool could have looked at the Message-ID and seen it was a fake - a 10-year-old could have done it," O'Connor told The Register, adding that no attempt was made to verify the email by contacting him directly.

"Someone there is either extremely gullible or vindictive."

Let's leave aside the question about whether the UK.Gov would have targeted say, a mother's group, or a minority rights group, as opposed to white males. What's clear is that there are a bunch of mouth breathers in the UK Ministry of Justice. Mouth breathers that can get court orders.

I know that the *.Gov exempts itself from Criminal Negligence statutes, but this seems to rise to that occasion.

Oh, and one last word to the wise: Don't do this at home. Srlsy.

* Heaven is a non-profit organization, so it has a .org domain.

Crowd boos congressman on Cap and Trade vore

Mike Castle is a Stupid Party Republican congressman from Delaware. In a town hall meeting, he was loudly booed by the crowd (around 7:15 into the video) when he backed the Carbon Dioxide as global warming side.

More interestingly, one of his constituents said that he should be voted out because of his vote in favor of Cap and Trade. The cheers are quite astonishing (4:12 into the video). It's unknown if the crowd had a cauldron of tar and a bag of feathers.

This next election looks like it will be the most interesting one in my memory.

Hat tip: Watts Up With That.

Can I just say that I have a little crush on Jenny Sanford?

No, not like that. Like this:

When I found out about my husband's infidelity I worked immediately to first seek reconciliation through forgiveness, and then to work diligently to repair our marriage. We reached a point where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect, and my basic sense of right and wrong. I therefore asked my husband to leave two weeks ago.

And this:

I believe enduring love is primarily a commitment and an act of will, and for a marriage to be successful, that commitment must be reciprocal. I believe Mark has earned a chance to resurrect our marriage.

And this:

Psalm 127 states that sons are a gift from the Lord and children a reward from Him. I will continue to pour my energy into raising our sons to be honorable young men. I remain willing to forgive Mark completely for his indiscretions and to welcome him back, in time, if he continues to work toward reconciliation with a true spirit of humility and repentance.

Translation: shape up and walk the line, mister.

Quite some time ago, I mused on the differences between Princesses and Cowgirls:

However, speaking as someone who several decades ago had to choose between princesses and cowgirls, I'd tell the boys to go with the cowgirls every day. As Postrel says:

I expected the museum to be stupid. It wasn't. In stark contrast to the ridiculous Women's Museum in Dallas, which (the one time I visited it) featured a strange combination of populist kitsch and social-constructionist feminist dogma, the Cowgirl Museum showcased women of no-nonsense character, pioneer (and pioneering) achievement, physical daring, and unapologetic femininity.

No-nonsense character. Pioneering achievement. Daring. Feminine. Yeah, baby.

That's what built this country, and it's alive and well in the South Carolina Governor's Mansion. Without the Governor.

Hacking retail, hacking wholesale

Both my regular readers know that I'm a bit of a Cassandra about the security of the power grid. This goes way, way back to the Pleistocene Age of the Borepatch blog, back around September 2008:

It's pretty surprising how vulnerable the power grid is to someone who wanted to start taking it apart, bit by bit. The grid was designed to be robust against storms and natural disasters, and is very robust indeed. Against single impact events. An attacker who exploited this SCADA vulnerability to take out an important point in the grid would stress the entire grid, as it tried to route around the failure. If the attacker took out another key point, and possibly another, the grid might collapse.

And:

From a security point of view, the real question is not "Is the power grid vulnerable?" Of course it is. The real question is what parts of the grid do the bad guys already own?

A couple of months ago, I revisited this topic in relation to espionage:

4. The Power Grid is now no longer dependable in any meaningful sense. Instapundit makes a throwaway comment that isn't actually a throwaway: Maybe I should rethink buying that generator . . . . Actually, yes, this is precisely what you should do. Nobody can demonstrate that the grid is reliable to stated service levels. The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security should lose sleep over this.

Well, it turns out that I'm not nearly pessimistic enough. This is hacking at a retail level: taking over power control systems one by one. Pretty much only governments have the resources to do this, since it's terrifically expensive in terms of man-hours required.

Wholesale is where it's at for those on a budget. And the Obama administration - no doubt at the behest of the Greens - is paving the way. Billions of dollars in the "stimulus" plan is for purchase and deployment of "smart" power meters, centrally controlled network devices that can let power be remotely turned on or off. The power companies like them because it makes it easy to implement "rolling blackouts" - think California in 1999. The Obama administration and the Greens like them because they now can make you use less power.

The bad guys like them because they can now use automated malware technology to take over the entire power grid at once:

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid, according to a security researcher who plans to demonstrate several attacks at a security conference next month.

[snip]

There's just one problem: The newfangled meters needed to make the smart grid work are built on buggy software that's easily hacked, said Mike Davis, a senior security consultant for IOActive.

He has proof, and is going to demonstrate it at the upcoming Black Hat security conference. So just how lame is the security of the system?

The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid.

You know when you go to a secure web site - say Amazon? You know how you have the padlock icon? This thing:

That means that even your silly old browser will encrypt the traffic. The power meter? Sorry.

Authentication is a fancy-pants term for "show me who you are". Anyone who's ever used a password or a PIN had done authentication. The power meter? Sorry.

And basic malware techniques make this a mass-production hacking opportunity:

To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer's smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.

So .... Any Tom, Dick, or Harry who can get on the power network can send a command to any power meter to shut it down. The power meter will helpfully comply, no questions asked. The only thing that would stop this is to make sure that nobody ever gets onto the power network. Except we can't even keep malware out of classified networks that are disconnected from the Internet.

So, how are the Feb.Gov planners helping? They're not. On the contrary:

He said the rush to upgrade has only increased in the months following passage of Barack Obama's stimulus package, which reserved $4.5bn for smart-grid spending. To qualify, however, utilities must meet aggressive deadlines that have only accelerated companies' upgrade plans.

As a result, concerns about security have taken a back seat, said IOActive's Davis. Before the incentives were announced, several utilities approached him and asked if he would perform penetration tests on meters they planned to roll out.

"As soon as the stimulus bill came out, everybody just clammed up," he said. "It's almost impossible for us to get new devices to look at now."

So, some of the companies were actually interested in improving their device's security, until the Fed.Gov-sponsored gold rush lit off. Can't really blame them to not wanting to lose the entire market to competitors. Nice bit of unanticipated consequences, there. I'm sure that they're smarter than we are, though, particularly those of us in Internet security.

Buy a generator, and lay up food, water, and ammo. Yes, it's really that bad, and it's fixin' to get worse.

UPDATE 12 June 2009 23:45: Interesting. NERC is the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Not sure what this means, other than someone picked up on this little post pretty quickly.

UPDATE 14 June 2009 16:45: Welcome visitor's from Tam's Place! Take a look around. More on the psychology of how this sort of thing happens here.