Vital data used to protect against cyberattacks is missing from more than 2,000 of the latest entries in the world’s most widely used vulnerability database.
A significant number of new CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures) added to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) in recent weeks have lacked enrichment data — details necessary for researchers and security teams to understand the bugs.
The NVD was established in 2005 by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and last year alone, information on more than 29,000 discovered flaws was added to the database.
It is hard to overstate just how important the NVD is to the security industry and to organizations in general. The issue really comes from the explosion of reported vulnerabilities: from around 1,000/year in the 1990s to over 20,000/year today. That's a lot of analysis that is needed.
I hear rumors that NIST has had a budget cut, but quite frankly this doesn't get to the heart of the issue which is that the software industry is not covering the cost of the vulnerabilities that they release. This is an interesting potential solution:
John Pescatore, SANS Technology Institute director of emerging security trends, drew a comparison between cybersecurity and road safety.
“For automotive ‘vulnerabilities’ (recalls) that have to be fixed, vehicle manufacturers are required to notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who has maintained an easy to use database. Those manufacturers also have to pay for the vehicles to be fixed! The NHTSA had a 40-year head start over NIST/NVD, but it really is time for legislation to treat software more like we treat vehicles.”
Right now there is no cost to a company that releases bug-filled software - the cost is born by NIST. I'm not sure that a "Software recall" is the right way to approach this, but a (say) $10,000 charge for each vulnerability doesn't seem unreasonable. Non-commercial software could be for no charge, but the bulk of the CVEs are against software that is sold.
Likely there are other funding solutions, but like I said at the beginning it's hard to overstate just how important the NVD is to companies IT Security programs. Something needs to change.
ARLINGTON (CBS) – A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man.
It was the headline “1 down and 534 to go” that caught the attention. “One” refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.
Police are investigating the “suitability” of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license
Let's ignore for the moment how many people were investigated for making similar comments about George W. Bush. Let's look at the "logic" being exercised by the Arlington Po-Po, shall we?
They claim that Corcoran is so dangerous that, while he has done nothing more than put up a blog post, he must be restrained from possessing firearms. However, it appears that it's not worth it for the police to follow him, or stake out his place, or arrest him.
Huh?
Look, guys, if you think that his speech rises to the level of an actual threat of specific harm to specific persons, he should be in jail. If you're not sure, then do the leg work to establish whether it is or not.
Ah, I was so young and optimistic, 11 years ago. After all, we had ferocious conservative Republicans ferociously conserving things. But even then it was clear where this would go:
It would be one thing if the law were applied equally to all. It's not, and it will be applied disproportionately to us, because we hold views considered by some in power to be Double Plus Ungood.
Divemedic says the same, in fewer words. He also has some suggestions on a strategy you can use.
Thanks to the GOP, we're all TJIC now.
There's a reason that they're called the "Stupid Party". And there's a reason that the Democrats are called the "Evil Party".
Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern. This result survives several robustness checks.
Also, direct measures of improvements in well-being for the poor - the change in their share of national
income, the percentage decline in poverty, and the percentage change in the real minimum wage - are negatively correlated with inflation in pooled cross- country samples.
High inflation tends to lower the share of the bottom quintile and the real minimum wage - and tends to increase poverty.
So record inflation (remember that the Fed.Gov changed the way that inflation is measured so that food and energy prices are no longer counted - meaning that the "Highest inflation in 40 years" actually means "Highest inflation ever") is driving people into poverty at a record rate. Because the resident of the Oval Office has a "D" after his name I don't expect this to be reported in the Media, but keep this in mind when anyone tells you nonsense like "the Democrats are the only ones to do anything for the poor."
Yeah, they do something, all right. Good and hard.
I posted before about how my Son-In-Law the Chief has been deployed on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. Those of you who have been in the military or its orbit know what this means to his wife and kids. Military families are in a basic sense the core of our armed forces, and knowing that their families are doing okay is as important to our military as it was to Centurion Macrinus in the Roman Legions.
But it's hard for those left at home. It's juggling school and work and (yes) a lot of military stuff - military families look out for their own. My step-daughter is in nursing school with all of this and was turned down for base day care for her young kids.
But then the Chain Of Command kicked in. My S-I-L the Chief went to the U.S.S. TR's Command Master Chief and explained the problem. The Base Command Master Chief got a phone call from the TR, and then the Base Day Care organization got a call from the Base Command Master Chief. Suddenly, the problem was addressed. The military looks after their own and the Chain Of Command worked brilliantly.
This time.
Aesop talks about how the Chain Of Command has broken down. Go, read. That Chain of Command is broken, from the top. It's not always this way. I posted this video years ago, a graduation speech from the Air Force Academy; a lesson on the Chain of Command taking care of what needs taken care of. It's particularly important around 40:15.
(You should really watch the whole thing which is entirely excellent, but at least watch it to 41:30)
That's a chain of command that's worth a damn. But that was then, and this is now. My Son-In-Law saw what needed to be done, and his chain of command supported him. It's a damn good thing that he didn't need to route this request through this Congress of Clowns in the Pentagon E-Ring. What a pathetic bunch of losers. No doubt they will all end up with cushy positions on the Board of Directors of some Defense Contractor.
Like I said, go read Aesop. He says it differently, but he says it well.
Remember when Donald Trump asked why we couldn't get economic growth back to 4%? Remember how all the Right Sort of people mocked him? All the regulations he's cutting are aimed at getting growth back up to 4%. His administration is putting a lot of effort into this. Why?
It's because over time lower growth rates steal prosperity from the future. It's actually shocking how much lower per capita income is now than it would have been if we had been able to maintain 4% growth. Captain Capitalism examined this in depth ten years ago:
We were once growing at 4% per year on average, now we're down to 2.25%. It also brings a cold, harsh and brutal reality to previous generations who voted themselves in a whole bunch of entitlement goodies in making it quite black and white that the economy is simply not going to be able to produce the wealth necessary to make good on those promises
...
"What would our GDP or "income per capita" be if we had continued to grow at 4%?"
My brain, knowing the power of compoundingroughly estimated it to be around $100,000(click it, see if I was lying) per person per year vs. our $45,000 today. But I hadn't calculated it out...until now.
Had we continued our traditional, old school, EVIL and OPPRESSIVE 1950's economic growth, our GDP would NOT be the paltry $14 trillion it is today (in 2005 numbers), it would be closer to $26 trillion. [Remember, this is from 2010 - Borepatch]
We take the roughly 310 million Americans in the country today and that translates into a real GDP per capita of about $84,500. However, that figure is in 2005 dollars. I was surprised to find out based on the CPI how much inflation has occurred since then (despite what the government tells us) and apparently the US dollar has inflated by about 18%. You adjust for that and what do you get?
$99,832.
Did I say $100,000 as just a guess?
This is a big problem because that stolen prosperity would be able to fund a lot of programs that are already promised.
Well because starting with the baby boomers and passing this philosophy on to successive generations we started ridiculing, mocking, criminalizing and villainizing that things that gave us such a luxurious standard of living - Capitalism, freedom, liberty and all that is America.
You wanted social programs and "The Great Society"
You got it.
You wanted to help out the losers of society?
You got it.
You wanted to reward people for their idiotic mistakes?
You got it.
You wanted to lower standards so to save people's feelings?
You got it.
But hey, a lot of great, high paying government jobs were created to write and monitor compliance with all the regulations that are choking the economy. And 93% of the people filling those jobs vote Democrat* so it's all good, amirite?
* Hilary Clinton received 93% of the 2016 ballots cast in Washington, D.C.
Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - that it takes a long time to wreck a nation - but he didn't have Twitter. Sadly, we do. But history shows what it looks like as the wheels come off, and the Roman Republic was instructive to the Founding Fathers so it it well worth while to look at that slow motion car wreck. After all, our wreck might be in fast forward (depeche mode) with the help from Twitter.
The Founders intentionally fragmented power, with three branches of Government presumed to be antagonistic to each other and jealous of their powers. This structure was a result of looking at the structure of the Roman Republic where there was little effective power fragmentation - the Senate granted near supreme power to the Consuls, thinking that since they granted the powers, they were in the driver's seat. So how'd that turn out for them?
Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.
- Julius Caesar, the last of the Consuls and the first of the Emperors
But by Caesar's time, the Republic was dead in all but name. It died at a particular point, when what everyone agreed were sacred Roman political lines - never to be crossed - were crossed.
The Romans called these lines Mos Maiorum, which is fiendishly hard to translate but sort of means "the way things should be done." Once those lines were crossed it was Open Field running which would only be settled by someone who knew how to score a touchdown without spiking the ball.
Julius Caesar could not not spike the ball, and so was assassinated. His nephew and heir Octavian could score - repeatedly - without feeling the need to spike the ball and so became the first Emperor. In between them, there was a lot of bloodletting in Rome. Octavian learned from all of the violence of his early days growing up in the end of the Republic; he became Caesar Augustus because he figured out how to gather power to himself while keeping the appearance of not gathering power to himself. That only worked for him because everyone was really, really tired of the violence and murder that had come before.
That came from the collapse of Mos Maiorem. Once that was gone, it was anything goes. The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must. Marius (Julius Caesar's Father-In-Law) posted proscription lists - lists of his opponents who were declared Enemies Of The State and who could be killed on sight. The killers got to keep the proscribed's possessions. As you'd imagine, a lot of false accusations led to a lot of folks being added to the Proscription Lists.
Marius' mortal enemy Sulla took that rule and did one better on Marius' supporters. Even Caesar himself went into hiding as a reign of terror seized the Roman elite by the throat. Fortunately for Marius he was dead, but the streets of the Eternal City ran red with blood. Sulla wrote his own ferocious epitaph: No friend has ever served me, and no enemy has ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full. Sulla was the Reckoning for Marius' supporters.
It feels like that's coming here. It no longer feels like there is a common "us" that both sides recognize. That's new in American politics. It's like a line has been crossed; the Mos Maiorum of the early days are held now in contempt. It's Winner Takes All; The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must. If you get lumped in with The Weak then it sucks to be you.
And so record numbers of Americans find themselves as first time gun owners this year. Millions of new gun owners - although it must be said that those are rookie numbers. They'll be higher come the election. It's a Bad Moon Rising, and no matter who wins the election that's going to accelerate.
Because Mos Maiorum is dead. The losers in 2016 refused to accept the results of the voter's choice, and that looks fair to repeat when Donald Trump wins by an even bigger margin this coming November. What is to be done, when rioting in the streets is the New Normal?
What was done in Rome? Alas, we can read about this in the writings of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (in the Agricola):
Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
The Romans didn't screw around.
The Democrats aren't screwing around, either. If you look at Portland, or Seattle, or Baltimore, or St. Louis - all you can think of is they've made it a desert and the Media is calling it "peaceful protest". The American public looks on, and many realize this.
I've written before about Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that tells us much about human behavior. In particular, Tit-For-Tat is a strategy where you play the opponent's last play against you. If they cooperate with you, you cooperate with them. If they oppose you, you oppose them. Like I said, there are Mathematical proofs that show that this leads to a stable outcome.
That's not what we have today. What we have is the Democratic Party and the professional Civil Service, and the Media and the Universities doing everything they can think of to overthrow the last election. But respecting the election results is the Mos Maiorum of the American Republic. That's gone.
And so Tit-For-Tat (and Cornelius Sulla) says there's a different way. It's the Reckoning.
This is perhaps a better sense of how half the country is looking on the riots, from the same film:
A third of the country no longer wants Mos Maiorum - the way things have been done - rather, they want The Reckoning. Another third of the country has already abandoned Mos Maiorum, grasping at any straw - including "peaceful" riots - to get rid of OrangeManBad. The other third has yet to realize that come the Proscriptions, they will have to choose a side.
If you ever wondered how the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, just open the newspaper. It seems like the bloodletting has started; if so, it will not end until we have a later day Caesar Augustus who can end the bloodshed.
This Train Wreck would be known to the Founding Fathers, although they might have taken some satisfaction that they got two and a half centuries before the wreck of their plan. But Twitter has pushed everything into fast forward. The French call that depeche mode, which brings to mind the greatest cover of American Past ever recorded:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
So while CDC doubtless has many employees dedicated to controlling disease, the organization is run by people motivated by typical Washington politicking. That is a very plausible explanation of why CDC looks like it is trying to destroy the American health care system.
Consider:
The CDC was the source of the estimates of Wuhan Flu death count (6.6M) that were used to shut down the American economy, and
The CDC was the source of the rationale for the shutdown - slow the spread of the disease in order to reduce the maximum number of ICU patients to a level that would not cause the collapse of the health care system.
It looks like Mission Accomplished. Hospitals are empty, Hospital ships are leaving the ports they were to serve due to lack of patients, doctors and nurses are being laid off. The capacity of the health care system has clearly been preserved from the Wuhan virus.
But it has not been preserved from the CDC. Where are the recommendations from CDC to allow elective surgeries, reopening closed hospital wings and saving hospitals from bankruptcy? The World wonders. Hospitals from sea to sea are in precarious financial straits, due to the lockdown that was explicitly justified by CDC to prevent the same hospitals from collapsing.
But there's more, so much more. Consider:
Most people in the United States get health insurance as a benefit from their employer.
By the end of this week, probably 30M people will have been made unemployed due to CDC's recommended economic lockdown.
But those 50M people will need health care. They just won't be able to pay for it. Hospitals must (by law) provide services anyway, and so hospitals that are already in financial trouble due to CDC's recommended lockdown will face a flood of additional non-paying patients.
Oops.
Now none of this is controversial, although no doubt CDC would engage in a lot of ass covering to try to cover up all their past fear mongering. The implications are inescapable - the cure for American healthcare is worse than the disease. CDC is burning the village in order to save it.
Relax, we're doctors ...
We don't even need to go into motivations, because they're entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether CDC is doing this because they're Deep Staters who hate Donald Trump and want to take him down, or whether they see this as an opportunity to collapse the health care system and have the Government take it over, or whether they're just a bunch of incompetent nincompoops who rose to control the agency due to superior bureaucratic infighting skills - none of this matters. What matters is that CDC's recommendation is causing what is clearly a worse outcome for this country than just letting nature take its course.
In essence, the CDC-designed test kit included and extra segment that would have allowed users to include people who had SARS or similar coronaviruses. It’s not clear what the point of this third segment of the test was but the important point is that only the first two segments of the test kit were needed to identify COVID-19.
The addition of the third test segment might not have mattered except that it wound up creating a significant problem. The CDC decided to manufacture the test kids “in house” rather than rely on outside labs. And during that process, the reagents used in the third segment of the test became contaminated. We know this because when the CDC sent out the initial batch of test kits, nearly all of them gave false positives on the third segment.
The effort to create these kits was let by their top expert on respiratory viruses, so this is a first class screw up by the A-Team. Top. Men. And pay no attention to the name of the agency: the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Act The Second: What do you mean, Ebola has reached Dallas?
I mean, we've been sending out happy happy press releases for weeks now:
(CNN) -- A second health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for Ebola, health officials said Wednesday -- casting further doubt on the hospital's ability to handle Ebola and protect employees.
...
Meanwhile, CDC supergenius Frieden has decided that maybe sending an actual, y'know, CDC response team, to Dallas immediately might have maybe sort of possibly perhaps been helpful, unlike all that bloviating and reassuring from 1500 miles away with their heads firmly clenched somewhere upstream from their anal sphincter muscle.
Pity about the additional 100+ people now known to be exposed because you and your agency are run like the government equivalent of the Jamaican Bobsled Team, but thanks for the comedy relief.
Top. Men. And pay no attention to the name of the agency: the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Act The Third: Sorry about that "make patients go cold turkey on their pain meds" thing ...
People put through excruciating withdrawal symptoms because CDC told doctors to stop prescribing? My bad, Bro:
Last month saw a letter to the CDC, a letter that documented hundreds of patients suffering the adverse consequences of the CDC's guidance. The letter was signed by hundreds of doctors and nurses. And suddenly the CDC is stumbling all over itself to "clarify" their 2016 guidance:
Acknowledging the suffering caused by "misinterpretation" of the opioid prescribing guidelines it published in 2016, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday sought to clarify that it never recommended imposing involuntary dose reductions on chronic pain patients. In a letter to physicians who had objected to that widespread practice, CDC Director Robert Redfield emphasized that his agency "does not endorse mandated or abrupt dose reduction or discontinuation, as these actions can result in patient harm."
Except that's exactly what their guidance had told doctors. Click through for the gory details, but all I can say is that this is what you get when you have your national health care run by Top Men.
Postscript: How did we get here?
A Charlie Foxtrot this bad doesn't happen by chance, but rather is built brick by brick over the course of decades. As the old saying goes, enough layers of bureaucracy ensures that disaster is not left to chance.
And if you think I'm being hard on CDC here, check back tomorrow when I describe how CDC will single-handedly collapse the health care system in the United States. They have Top Men working on it.
To err is human; to really foul things up you need a computer.
- Unknown, from the 1960s
This is the problem with the virus models (as with all models). The math is the easiest part, and modeling software libraries are pretty thoroughly debugged. The crank and the gears that turn are doing what they're supposed to do.
But if the input data is wonky, then the output will never be accurate. Some of the inaccuracies are unescapable, for example delays in reporting deaths. Different countries have different reporting policies and cadences, and there's really not much that can be done about that. After all, the data are the data. But some really important data are poorly known, or not known at all:
True infection rate can only be known with mass testing of the population. You don't need to test everyone, but you do need to test a statistically significant sample. For the US, we're talking about hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Nobody is working on this, so we simply can't know what the infection rate really is. several small scale studies strongly suggest that it is much higher - perhaps ten times or more higher - than is being reported.
The recovery rate can only be known with mass testing of the population. We are seeing that many people who catch the virus are asymptomatic; since they don't feel (or act) sick, they don't get care and so are not included in the total number of infected. Again. small scale studies suggest pretty strongly that the recovery rate is much higher than is being reported.
The number of deaths includes a wide range of victims, some of which almost certainly were not killed by the virus - rather, they were killed by other ailments ("co-morbidities") but also had the virus along for the ride. Right now, all of these are included in the virus death rate, overstating its lethality by an unknown amount.
Since lockdowns vary by geography and by what is allowed or prohibited, tracking the result of the lockdowns is fiendishly hard, and I haven't seen anything that is even trying. We're told that "we're all in this together" and "we're making a difference" but there's no data about how much - if at all.
Put all of these together and it's simply impossible to provide good inputs into any model. This is basically a game of guessing, and the result has been a series of model re-works that dropped the projected death toll from 6+M to 500,000 to 120,000 to now (maybe) 60,000.
Which is about what the death toll from seasonal flu is. I'm not saying that this new virus is no more lethal than the flu; I'm saying that the people running the models are saying that maybe this is the case. Those models have been wildly inaccurate repeatedly in the past, so take the latest model results with a huge grain of salt.
But governments are sitting on top of increasingly restive populations. The populations have very good reason to be restive - the world economy has taken probably a $10T (that's Trillion) hit. That hit has been very unevenly distributed. In economic terms this is a very regressive tax targeting the poor and working classes. Ask Louis XVI or Czar Nicholas II how that turned out.
Last week we saw that we went from dying from, to dying with, to just plain dying. Even people who haven’t been tested are now classed as dying from coronavirus. This is juicing the numbers in the direction of the models. Whether this was intentional, to avoid confessing to the most colossal and costly blown forecast of all time, or this is more panicked over-reaction, I’ll let you decide. Either way, they did get a boost in the numbers from the re-definitions, which we’ll see below.
We saw yesterday that counting who dies of flu or any virus is not so straightforward, that it’s always the result of a statistical model. Every single flu death is not trumpeted from every media organ for months on end, but if they were, then we’d have counts similar to the way we have counts for coronavirus.
Something else strange in the numbers. Remember how every week I’d cut and paste the CDC’s update flu hospitalization and death estimates? Can’t do it anymore, because why? Because the CDC stopped reporting on them. This could be because of over-burdened government workers, or because flu deaths aren’t as sexy as coronavirus deaths (even though the totals are similar), or because something else is going on.
And it's not just here in the New World:
It isn’t only in the US where the numbers are looking funny. France, too:
It’s already happening – France has stopped publishing the weekly mortality report in mid March – where (the lack of) excess mortality could readily be seen. Instead they created a new publication focused only on covid deaths.
Is this all political ass covering by the health services? Beats me. Certainly it looks like the motivation exists. Remember, the reason for all this government-imposed misery was to protect the health care services from becoming overwhelmed. Well, we're seeing hospital ships with no patients and Army field hospitals being demobilized because there are no patients and the Javits Center (which had been turned into a makeshift hospital) empty and there are doctors and nurses being laid off all over the country. And there are very odd things happening to the data.
But juicing the numbers can only go so far:
The temptation to juice coronavirus deaths must be overwhelming! The models promised unimaginably huge numbers. We haven’t come anywhere close to them. Millions and millions and millions of lives the world over have been ruined, with more ruin on the way, as the result of trusting expert models. They have to find a way to bring actual numbers in line with models.
They’re running out of options, though. Dying with from dying from was a good move, and we saw it immediately pop up in the death counts. Dying with suspicion from dying with was also clever enough, and we saw that, too.
What else is left, though? Only one thing.
If “dying from” is defined as dying with presence of COVID-19 antibodies, then once we reach herd immunity, which it seems is close in many places, then about 80% of all deaths can be classified as coronavirus deaths.
So where is the crisis? It's entirely fair to ask this question when literally everything we were told about this "pandemic" has turned out to be somewhere between overblown and flat out wrong. And quite frankly, not unusual in recent historical terms:
As with the Global Warming hysteria, if the science were as settled as we're being told there would be data falling off of trees confirming everything. Instead, everywhere we look we see data that calls the projections into question. If we want science-based public policy then its reasonable to ask for, well, science-based public policy.
Two days ago I posted that we need to re-open the economy. We're seeing a million people a day lose their jobs, so that's 2 Million more people without a paycheck, just since Sunday. It may be for nothing: there's actual data that suggests that the lockdown doesn't do much, if anything: Sweden hasn't implemented a lockdown at all and their death curve looks basically identical to the USA's:
The caveat about the problems with the data is a good one, and echoes what I wrote here. But the data are what we have, and if the lockdown - and the 25M newly unemployed - were actually effective you'd think you'd see something. You don't.
Enough, all ready. There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore. We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown). Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed
One of the most important economic principles comes from the nineteenth century French economist Frederick Bastiat. The "Broken Window Fallacy" derives from the fact that you are only looking at part of the picture - you see some things, but don't see others and so come to faulty conclusions. This is what is called "The Seen and the Unseen":
Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? ...
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another.
The national lockdown is basically breaking thirty million windows, and the governments are all patting themselves on their backs for all the lives they are saving. But are they really? Sure, we see some: the curve is starting to bend, and mortality rates are (thankfully) lower than predicted. This is What Is Seen. The Silicon Graybeard has a brilliant post about What Is Unseen:
The problem as I see it is we're not tracking any of the impacts of shutting down the country and just tracking how well we protected the health care system from collapse due to an increased workload. There are many reports going around about increases in calls to suicide hotlines and telephone counseling facilities as more and more people face depressing situations. There are anecdotal reports of increased calls to domestic violence agencies. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reported an 891% increase in calls over last year. Doctors are reporting fewer patients in Emergency Rooms for heart problems and other typical conditions they treat and doctors think patients are staying at home when they think they're having a heart attack instead of going to the Emergency Room. This isn't good.
In New York City, the number of people dying at home has surged in recent weeks to about 200 a day, compared with about 22 to 32 deaths during the same time frame last year, according to the New York City Fire Department’s data on cardiac arrest calls. ... Nearly 68% of cardiologists who responded to an informal Twitter poll posted this month by Angioplasty.org, an online community of cardiologists, said they have been seeing at least 40% fewer cases.
I know that when this topic comes up, the leftist wokescolds start to say, "you only care about money! You don't value life!" The answer is that the country is only looking at how many lives we're helping in one very specific place and totally ignoring the much, much larger group that's being impacted by these policies. We can't put a price on it because it's impossible to know how many lives we've saved.
Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway. Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.
But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences. Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:
And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.
Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.
Overall? I see little evidence that the various measures adopted by the western nations have had much effect. And with the exception of closing schools, I would not expect them to do so given the laxness of the lockdown and the vague nature of “essential business”. I’ve mentioned before, here in Sonoma Country California, the local cannabis retailer is considered an essential business … strange but absolutely true.
Finally, I want to talk about that most mundane of things, the humble cost/benefit analysis. Draw a vertical line down a sheet of paper, label one side “Costs” and the other “Benefits”. Write them down on the appropriate side, add them up. We’ve all done some variation of that, even if just mentally.
Unfortunately, it seems Dr. Fauci doesn’t do cost/benefit analyses. It seems he only looks at or cares about the benefits. He called millions of people being thrown out of work “unfortunate” … unfortunate? It is a huge cost that he doesn’t want to think about. He’s not going to lose his job. His friends won’t lose their jobs. Meanwhile, at the same time that he’s saying “unfortunate”, the mental health hotlines and the suicide hotlines are ringing off the wall. People are going off the rails. Domestic violence calls are through the roof, and understandably. Forcibly take the jobs away from a wife and a husband, tell them that they are under house arrest, that’s stress enough … and meanwhile there’s no money coming in, rent and electricity bills are piling up, can’t put gas in the car, kids bouncing off the walls from being cooped up … of course domestic violence and suicides and mental health problems are off the charts.
And this doesn't count important intangibles. Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again. Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future? To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people? Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months? Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months? That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.
It's the Unseen. And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor. That it is Unseen is not by accident.
And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation. Of course the resulting public policy is hideous. Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference). You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine. No doubt this is all a coincidence.
Also interesting, the only person who has been talking for over a week about getting this fixed is Donald Trump. No doubt this is also a coincidence.
But hey, we are governed by really Smart® people, are we not? Relax, citizen - all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The bread is free and the circus is entertaining. And even better, the chocolate ration has been increased from 3 ounces to 2.5 ounces ...
Probably because too little, too late, and kabuki theater screening at airports, when we should have shunted everyone into mandatory quarantine for 30 days before entry was allowed, starting in early- or mid-January.
If only the CDC hadn’t pooch-screwed the test kits so hard that the dog will never walk right again.
You're going to need a bigger blog post to list everything that the Fed.Gov, State(s).Gov, and Local.Gov are doing wrong, not to mention the Solons who run the Hospitals (and who are threatening to fire nurses who wear masks).
I would add to his list:
Failure to designate a single hospital in a city/region as the Kung Flu Medical Center, and isolating all patients (and a significant portion of the PPE) there. At the very least this will slow the spread of the virus among medical workers and protect capacity for non-virus emergency care.
No centralized procurement of cloth masks (of course these are not as effective in preventing infection as disposable ones, but given the massive mask shortage a million cloth masks that can be washed in bleach daily isn't nothing. Probably more important for general population and first responders, but not nothing.
No non-crappy models of Kung Flu disease spread. Granted, all computer models are always wrong to a greater or lesser extent, but what we have right now makes the climate models look like Nostradamus. Add in the terrible data being fed into the models and you are better off simply ignoring all model output.
The entire western world is being driven into a depression. Millions are out of work, with more on the way.
The pain is falling disproportionately on the working poor. Since a lot of these live in proximity to the Gimmedat community, their suffering will inflame anger in the group most likely to loot and riot. I think we're two weeks away from the first big one, probably less than that.
The Fed.Gov is ramming through a $2T, 2000 page "bailout" law that is guaranteed to be larded with goodies for everyone other than the people who are most hurt by the shutdowns. If 50% of this money does anything other than line the pockets of well-connected special interests it will be a miracle. This by itself will do further damage to the economy, putting more people out of work or raising inflation (hurting the working poor). Or both at the same time.
Quite frankly, I can't imagine how things could be worse. Aesop's worst case scenario of a melt down in the medical community seems to be happening, and every government response I see looks like another toe gets shot off the Body Politick.
Pessimal.
It may be that there just is no solution. I wish I could be more optimistic, but I don't see anyone doing anything remotely sensible.
House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Panderville) just announced she has dropped procedural blockage and will allow a vote on the Senate’s version of the COVID bill instead of holding the nation hostage by demanding what some commentators called “racial and gender pay equity provisions, diversity on corporate boards, increased use of minority-owned banks by federal offices, and a grab-bag of other diversity-themed requirements.”
So Congress was was working on a deal which presumably contained pork out the wazoo, and Nancy came in at the last minute saying "you have to eliminate the letter 'Q' from the alphabet or we won't pass EMERGENCY ZOMGVIRUSOMYGODWE'REGOINGTODIE!!!!!11!!!eleventy!!!!"
It looks like the GOP cunningly agreed to her plan. Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.
so now that the Senate has passed it, can we see what's in it? Asking for a friend.
Senate (n) A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.
The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Future historians will mark this date as the day that the American Republic began its inexorable slide into Civil War and secession. While this process has been under way for quite some time, this is a tidy date so loved by lazy historians. Before this, the Republic; after this, whatever comes next.
This impeachment is so nakedly partisan and so devoid of anything but the lust for power that nobody can pretend that the Old Ways of Decorum can still be in effect. In essence, Nancy Pelosi has done what they accuse Trump of doing: upending the traditions of democracy. What's most striking about this is that they've done it all for nothing.
The Democrats don't look happy at all. Indeed, many of them dressed in black for the occasion. The spin was that they're somber for this solemn occasion, but you know that many have looked at the polls and heard from furious constituents and think that they're guests at their own political funerals. It all looks like a huge miscalculation - rather than the impeachment process driving Trump's poll numbers down it's done the reverse. Voters everywhere are annoyed at the whole charade and Trump's supporters are infuriated. The Democrats didn't see that coming at all, because a biased media makes them stupid.
It's a bit like the run up to the First World War. Nobody really wanted that Armageddon, but once the wheels were turning that way it was impossible for anyone to back out. That's Nancy Pelosi's problem - her cunning plan was going to put the hammer to Donald Trump, but when she realized that it was probably going to cost her the House majority (and thus her Speakership) it was too late to put the brakes on things. It would destroy her reputation and infuriate the Democratic base just as the primaries came around to vote on.
And so it will end not with a bang but with a whimper. This will demoralize the Democratic base, but Donald Trump's base will still be infuriated. They will want payback. Not revenge, but a reckoning:
The Democrats have been shameless in their use of raw political power. Well, two can play that game, and Republicans are finding that they don't have to curl up into the fetal position when talking to the media - indeed, you can gain voters by sneering at the clearly biased media. The appetite for raw power grows with the tasting, and while this has pretty much been a Democrat game for a while there's no reason to think that both parties can't wet their beaks from that pond.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Almost all great men have been bad men.
- Lord Acton
And so the bonds that once knit this Republic will likely get unraveled a bit further, as the reckoning happens. This will infuriate the Democratic base for the next election, and they will demand tit for tat. And so on, and so on. Each iteration will further whittle away at the sense of what is unthinkable in American politics. Fast forward ten years and we're in uncharted territory. It won't be the American Republic by then. Or more specifically, it will be a new American Republic - number five by my count.
But as the bonds stretch and snap, people will rationally question whether the whole can be saved (it can't). 18 December 2019 will go down as the beginning of the end of the American Republic. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The FBI Inspector General's report is out, and while it is being portrayed by the media as "exonerating" the Agency, it lays out in explicit detail things like the 17 errors and omissions in the FISA warrant application used to spy on the Trump 2016 campaign. Remember: the FBI lied on the FISA application used to spy on you and that's no crime; but it is a crime for you to lie to the FBI about the spying they did on you based on the FISA warrant they lied to get.
And so the question is: what to do about the FBI (please, no peaking at the post title). Don Surbur lays out the cold hard truth of the situation:
The perps of this crime do not have to explain a thing. They are retired and can flip Congress the bird. Their pensions are safe and a few of them have book deals, a reward for keeping their mouths shut about Obama's corruption.
I have told readers for months, no excitement without an indictment. Without prosecution, no one is held accountable, and it will happen again because no penalty is attached to abuse of office.
And this will trickle down the FBI. It rolls downhill in government. The top men in the FBI lied to a judge to get the warrants to spy on a future president. They will go unpunished. The message is clear to the FBI: Lie. Fib. Do whatever it takes get a warrant or a conviction. The inspector general has your back.
Does anyone really expect indictments? Heck, General Clapper perjured himself before Congress and was not indicted. The FBI perps here didn't (quite) rise to that level. And so, the question remains: what to do with the FBI?
The Organs Of The State do not self-correct.
The Agency needs to be shut down. There is no possibility of reform, not when its leadership is staffed with Obama/Democrat partisans. They don't want to reform, and even if the people named in the IG report do end up serving hard time, the remaining FBI leadership still won't want to reform. Donald Trump will someday no longer be President, and someday a Democrat will put his loafers on the Resolute Desk. The Agency has to go, QED.
Quite frankly, this can be useful for Donald Trump. The messaging is "the Deep State is corrupt and politicized and not reformable, and the Republic is better off with no Agency than a corrupt one". The story is so big that the media will amplify his message despite themselves, and despite their desperate attempts to spin it. After all, who wants a corrupted national police force? And it will have much more impact at other Agencies (hello, IRS) where the leadership might just think that they're next in Trump's cross hairs. Maybe they won't want to reform either, but maybe they might. After all, the Democratic Party is better off if they're left with an Agency that is reduced in power, rather than with no Agency at all.
One thing that Donald Trump is good at is (politically) slitting someone's throat and watching them twitch. Sadly, this needs to happen now at the FBI, on a much larger scale than anyone is talking about.
What a depressing place that our Republic has ended up.
UPDATE 12/10/19 12:12: "They don't want to reform" - man, that came quickly:
I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me. With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!
Yeah, Insty and Uncle both linked to his post on the NRA's troubles, but it's a really good one. His invoking of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is spot on, and you should read the whole thing.
What I would add is that it's rare that you see the Iron Law expressed in, well, graft as blatantly as Wayne LaPierre and Company have done. Millions and millions of our dollars have gone to enrich the inner circle, not to advance the Second Amendment.
It was 2014 when I let my membership lapse, because the only thing I heard from the NRA was Wayne asking for money. Where were they on rolling back restrictive gun control laws? A lot of the time they were out front on new restrictions - remember Wayne LaPierre muttering about "Mental Health restrictions" a long time before the new hotness that is "Red Flag" laws started getting passed? I do, and believe that the post I just linked was the first time I invited him to die screaming in a crotch fire.
So the only thing that I'd add to Lawrence's excellent post is that we really won't miss the NRA when its gone. Yes, it's sad that Wayne drove it into the ground, yes, it's a crying shame what they did to a once great organization. But here we are. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
I've been writing about the risk to the power grid for a long, long time. Here's one example from 2010:
1. The Grid is a high-value target to foreign Intelligence Agencies. It's been said - correctly, IMHO - that while there are friendly foreign governments, there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies.
2. The computer systems that run the Grid (called SCADA systems) are based on old technology, and are difficult to patch. This means that it's quite likely that the computers running the grid are riddled with security holes.
3. While these systems are not supposed to be connected to the Internet, the incentive to do so is very, very high. For example, it's a lot easier to reset something by remotely connecting to it from home than getting up, getting dressed, and driving 20 miles in a storm at 3:00 AM.
4. Nobody has accurate maps of precisely what their network looks like. Network aren't so much designed as grow, almost organically. The Power Company networks are no exception.
Taken together, this paints the picture of high-value, low-risk for an adversary.
In a new troubling escalation, hackers behind at least two potentially fatal intrusions on industrial facilities have expanded their activities to probing dozens of power grids in the US and elsewhere, researchers with security firm Dragos reported Friday.
The group, now dubbed Xenotime by Dragos, quickly gained international attention in 2017 when researchers from Dragos and the Mandiant division of security firm FireEye independently reported Xenotime had recently triggered a dangerous operational outage at a critical-infrastructure site in the Middle East. Researchers from Dragos have labeled the group the world's most dangerous cyber threat ever since.
The most alarming thing about this attack was its use of never-before-seen malware that targeted the facility’s safety processes. Such safety instrumented systems are a combination of hardware and software that many critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising. When gas fuel pressures or reactor temperatures rise to potentially unsafe thresholds, for instance, an SIS will automatically close valves or initiate cooling processes to prevent health- or life-threatening accidents.
It looks like the only plausible explanation is that someone doesn't want to be able to shut down the US power grid, they want to be able to wreck it.
It's certain that the Powers That Be are not treating this with the urgency it demands. While the Department of Energy has been at least awake for the last 4 or 5 years about this, this country needs a crash course on making the grid more robust. Not hardening it - that's likely a fool's errand in these days. Rather, the grid needs to become more survivable in the face of attack:
Safety systems need to be isolated from network compromise. This means direct servo connection rather than commands sent via the network (what happens when the network router gets disabled by a Bad Guy?).
The grid needs to better handle portions of it going off-line, and then coming back online. This seems to be where the first experimental hacking was concentrated, and it's key that surviving parts of the grid do not get damaged by high voltage surges during these events.
There needs to be a lot more stocking of spare components than there is. A large scale grid shutdown will mean there is no chance of "just in time" component resupply.
Manufacturing of things like high voltage transformers needs to come back to the United States from China. If the grid is down there's no time to wait the 6 weeks to get the darn things shipped from Shanghai.
All of this costs money, and so nobody wants to do it. But we pay people at DoE (and Homeland Security) to think about this, and to convince the policy makers that this is an existential threat. If the grid is damaged, a lot of people will die as gas stations run out of gasoline, hospital generators fail, etc.
Sadly, confidence is not high in the Powers That Be. I recommend a generator, with two weeks' fuel. A diesel generator will be more expensive, but it will last longer. More importantly, the fuel won't go bad.
When the researchers asked 66 people to watch 24 videos – 12 are real, and 12 deepfakes – people could only label them as real or fake correctly about 52 per cent of the time. “This model has shown promising results in generating lifelike videos, which produce facial expressions that reflect the speakers tone. The inability of users to distinguish the synthesized videos from the real ones in the Turing test verifies that the videos produced look natural,” the researchers concluded.
They are getting better. Whether they will get better enough to be able to fool experts - Joe Off The Street is notoriously bad at detecting stuff like this - remains to be seen.
Else we wouldn't have Rangerettes who can't climb a short wall, Navy officers who can't conn a ship without hitting everything afloat, as they dredge up parts from museum pieces to keep their current aircraft flying, Air Force generals pimping for a white elephant plane that cannot fly, missile officers cheating on their proficiency tests, Marine recruits in combat arms who can't throw a grenade without killing themselves, or "combat leaders" who couldn't pass a ruck march, West Point "leaders" who condone open communism from faculty and students, and promote a pack of Affirmative Action cadets who couldn't pass a PRT or meet basic weight and appearance standards, while flashing Black Power signs in uniform. We wouldn't be doing gender reassignment surgeries instead of physical therapy for combat wounded, we wouldn't be spending more money on gender sensitivity counseling than on marksmanship training, and we wouldn't be wavering the insane and drug-addicted into the military in record numbers, just to appease a pack of blue- and pink-haired SJWs.
There's plenty of blame to go around - Obama's vow to "fundamentally change the country" following hard on Bush's deployment of too small a force into too big a mission for far, far too long. But we have planes that can't fly, ships that keep hitting other ships, and a brass that seems more devoted to their next promotion than the welfare of the troops that serve under them.
