A young couple near where we live both work at Lowe's. Their baby was born in August, but has had some serious health problems and been hospitalized for weeks. The family has posted a GoFundMe to raise money for the insurance deductable. I know that things are tight for lots of folks, and people in the mountains are hurting from the hurricane, but they're a young couple just starting out - not making a lot of money - and their baby is really, really ill.
Kris Kristofferson, 88.
So this guy has a hydraulic press and he runs both a 100 year old American sledge hammer and a new (Harbor Freight looking) Chinese one through it. The old one was unscathed; the new one gets squished.
A sledge hammer gets squished.
But then the guy returns the old one into like new condition. If you like old tools, this is 8 minutes worth your while.
Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind. Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.
So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:
Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.
...
While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.
Divemedic has some thoughts that are worth your time. The Silicon Graybeard does his preps. We're battened down for the fifth storm in the four years we've been here.
They say it's a security concern. They're right:
Now, the US Commerce Department is set to enact a de facto ban on most Chinese vehicles, by prohibiting Chinese connected car software and hardware from operating on US roads, according to Reuters.
The rationale? National security concerns. "When foreign adversaries build software to make a vehicle [connected], that means it can be used for surveillance, can be remotely controlled, which threatens the privacy and safety of Americans on the road," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
"In an extreme situation, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States all at the same time, causing crashes, blocking roads," said Secretary Raimondo, a scenario we saw depicted in Fate of the Furious (where it caused me a headache), as well as more recently (and to better effect) in Leave the World Behind.
Yup.
Now I expect there's a whole lot more behind this and the security risks are just nice window dressing, but it's pretty hard to argue with this.
As you'd
expect, there's terrific classical music for this occasion; as a matter
of fact, you've probably heard it.
Antonio Vivaldi was one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his Four Seasons
suite of four violin concertos is without doubt his most famous work.
Sadly for him, it didn't help him very much - the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles VI died before appointing him court composer, and Vivaldi (like
Mozart after him) died in poverty.
But there aren't many who leave behind a legacy such as this. Vivaldi's
life story in a way matches the mood of autumn, with a glorious youth
behind it and a cold, poor finish ahead of it.
But don't let me harsh your mellow! The music is sublime, and the temperature (in Florida at least) will barely drop below 70 ...
If this were such a big deal, would the Chinese be talking about it?
According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22.
...
The research details how the academics were able to recognize the rough location of a commercial drone by observing disturbances in electromagnetic signals from Starlink satellites caused by aircraft passing through them. The system could "provide significant advantages in detecting small and stealth targets," the team claimed.
The academics, led by professor Yi Jianxin from Wuhan University's School of Electronic Information, launched [paywall] a commercial DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone and sent it over the coast near the Chinese city of Guangdong. The researchers chose the drone as they estimated it has the same radar signature as a modern F-22 fighter.
They reported being able to detect up the drone – not by hammering it with easily identifiable radar pulses (which would invite a counterattack in a war situation) but by identifying where the drone reflected the signals from a Starlink satellite orbiting overhead. The test was overseen by the Chinese government's State Radio Monitoring Centre.
This looks to be pretty similar to a system of passive radar that the Germans used in World War II.
You would think that if this were effective (or if the Chinese thought it could be made to be effective), they wouldn't say anything about it.
How did the would-be assassin know where and when to find Donald Trump? Was he just lucky like Gavrilo Princip? Or was he "lucky" like Thomas Matthew Crooks?
Tomorrow is the feast day of Saint Ludmila of Bohemia, grandmother of Good King Wenceslaus of Christmas Carol fame. As queen, she was instrumental in converting the kingdom to christianity but was murdered by her daughter-in-law (mother of Wenceslaus).
By the 19th century St. Ludmila took on aspects of national hero, and the preeminent composer of 19th century national music wrote this oratorio in her honor.
I was going to post this yesterday, but ASM826 posted about the victims of that day. But this story is exceptionally well-told and deserves to be remembered.
No training. This was just what people did that day.
- One of the captains that evacuated Manhattan on 9/11
It's not quite fair to call this "America's Dunkirk", since the English Channel is a lot wider than the Hudson River. And the Luftwaffe had something to say in 1940, that they didn't have in 2001.
But this
is a great story, well told by Tom Hanks. About the time that the Coast
Guard sent out a radio message to all boats that can help evacuate
Manhattan. This is the story of the boats who responded, and evacuated a
Million people in a day.
I've posted about this before. But this seems somehow apropos. And click through to that post to see the comment from Friend Of The Blog Paul, Dammit! who knows a bunch of the people interviewed in this. It's worth your time.
Christine Lee Hanson would be 25 now, graduated from college, and starting her adult life.
Christine was two years old. Her parents were taking her to Disneyland. They lived in Groton, Massachusetts and were on Flight 175 on a beautiful September morning twenty-three years ago today. She became the youngest person to die in the terror attack of September 11th, 2001.
At the end, her father was on the phone with his father. When the phone went silent, Christine's grandfather hung up. They had the TV on and watched the plane strike the tower at the same time. His wife says he was never the same.
Martin Luther King once said in a speech, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
I hope that this is true.
Remember.
Doubtless Dwight will cover this in full presently. But he was an actor that I enjoyed pretty much throughout his entire career (who can forget him in The Sandlot?) - but one role stands out in my mind: his guest appearance (as himself) on The Big Bang Theory.
And this scene was hilarious (from that same episode) but I had never heard the full story:
May flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.
For deer, anyway. Tacitus has been practicing.
He's also pondering ancient Roman ballistae, but I think that would be for something larger like an elk or maybe a moose ...
Seth Weeks is an interesting composer for a couple reasons: he composed for the mandolin, and he was black - back in the 19th and early 20th centuries when that was a definite limitation on how musical society would accept him. Despite that, he was the prime mover in bringing on what is called the mandolin's golden period. He became prominent enough that he toured in Europe and lived there before World War I and in the 1920s.
It was in Europe that he recorded his music, with Edison Records in London and Gerliner Gramophone in Berlin.
Born on this day in 1868, he lived to the ripe old age of 85. There are not a lot of performances of his music on Youtube, and this doesn't have a lot of views. That's a shame - he was an unusually interesting composer.
Navy finds hidden Starlink dish on ship:
Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship.
They called the resulting Wi-Fi network "STINKY"—and when officers on the ship heard rumors and began asking questions, the leader of the scheme brazenly lied about it. Then, when exposed, she went so far as to make up fake Starlink usage reports suggesting that the system had only been accessed while in port, where cybersecurity and espionage concerns were lower.
Well, it is a pain in the rear end to get hooked up to SIPRnet ...
Of course, there's been a general helping of Courts Martials to everyone involved.
And the funniest bit? Elon Musk had Starlink change the default WiFi SSID to "Stinky" to encourage customers to change the damn defaults.
SolarWinds issues security patch to eliminate hard coded password:
SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product that can be used by remote, unauthenticated attackers to log into vulnerable instances, access internal functionality, and modify sensitive data
The software maker has now issued an update to address that critical oversight; its users are encouraged to install the fix, which presumably removes the baked-in creds.
[blink] [blink]
What makes this even more double-plus ungood is that SolarWinds is a security company. They know that hard coded passwords are not just A Very Bad Thing Indeed, but considered harmful*.
I guess the only other possibility is that they don't know this, but I just don't believe that. Heads should roll over this.
* Old computing graybeards will remember the ACM paper "GoTo Considered Harmful" which created such a furor that "considered harmful" is now considered harmful when used descriptively.
Except here, where it is 100% justified.
Tuna sends in another one (thanks!):
Why can't accountants get library cards? Because they're bookkeepers.
It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer". It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular. Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.
It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club. Man is that different now. I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.
Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics. You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark. An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:
Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.
Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.
I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.
The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.
Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.
Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen? No? Better to kill 10 million of them? Oooooh kaaay.
Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.
And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.
During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.
Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists! Don't look at the wall decorations! I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!
Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.
So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys. What to do, what to do?
Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs. Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right? Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.
Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense. These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats. Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.
I wrote about that at length here.
And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland. And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago? How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century? Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?
Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:
This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.
To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.
Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.
Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?
Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants? Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty. Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.
This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime. I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street. Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg. Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).
It's all upside down. And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason. On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really. They sure must have had some powerful motivation.
I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.
So UK Prime Minister Keir "Two Tier" Starmer has decreed that people saying hateful things will be jailed because their speech is actually violence, and he's making room for them in His Magesty's prisons be releasing violent criminals because their violence is actually speech, you guys.
Some big shot police constable has even said he was going to go all 1775-Bunker Hill on Americans for their speech, which is totally violence. Ooooh kaaay,
All this totalitarianism reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union, back in the day. It was said about Leonid Brezhnev (and likely others). I've somewhat rewritten it for modern times. See if you can tell the difference.
So this guy goes to Red Square Hyde Park Speaker's Corner and yells "Leonid Brezhnev Keir Starmer is a senile fascist old fool!" Of course, the police swarm him and drag him off to Ye Olde Gaol. He is sentenced to ten years and ten days in durance vile - ten days for slander and ten years for revealing State Secrets.
Maybe I gave away my edits right there ...
And so the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award for Totalitarianism goes to Brit PM Keir Starmer, for fascism above and beyond the call of duty. Well done you dirty commie bastard.
Microsoft has released a fix for a severe vulnerability in this month's Windows Update. The problem here is that a Bad Guy sending a specially crafted IPv6 packet can run code on your computer. Basically it's a spammer's/hacker's dream, and now there is demonstration code in the wild to do this.
If you run Windows 10 or 11, this is probably bad news for you. Here's what you need to do:
I must say that I was surprised about my IPv6 connectivity. But this is a really nasty bug, so get patching.
The FBI Inspector General has issued a scathing report about the Bureau's lackadaisical attitude towards protecting sensitive data:
The FBI has made serious slip-ups in how it processes and destroys electronic storage media seized as part of investigations, according to an audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.
Drives containing national security data, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act information and documents classified as Secret were routinely unlabeled, opening the potential for it to be either lost or stolen, the report [PDF] addressed to FBI Director Christopher Wray states.
...
The OIG report notes that it found boxes of hard drives and removable storage sitting open and unattended for "days or even weeks" because they were only sealed once the boxes were full. This potentially allows any of the 395 staff and contractors with access to the facility to have a rummage around.
There is a photo of the storage facility at the link, and it can only be described as horrifying.
I guess they are too busy spying on regime enemies to, you know, take security very seriously.
Cybersecurity Lab didn't use antivirus:
Dr. Emmanouil "Manos" Antonakakis runs a Georgia Tech cybersecurity lab and has attracted millions of dollars in the last few years from the US government for Department of Defense research projects like "Rhamnousia: Attributing Cyber Actors Through Tensor Decomposition and Novel Data Acquisition."
The government yesterday sued Georgia Tech in federal court, singling out Antonakakis and claiming that neither he nor Georgia Tech followed basic (and required) security protocols for years, knew they were not in compliance with such protocols, and then submitted invoices for their DoD projects anyway.
It seems that Dr. Antonakakis wasn't much impressed with antivirus products. Fair enough - it's a perpetual game of locking the barn door after the horse got out.
But the contract said that the lab would follow particular standards (in this case, NIST 800-171) which mandates antivirus, and the lab issued compliance statements with the invoices they submitted. This case seems pretty cut and dried.
And not at all impressive for Georgia Tech Cybersecurity Lab.
The Queen Of The World and I like watching the old TV shows ('50s, '60s, and '70s). One of these is The George Burns Show, the star of which really is Gracie Allen who would steal the show pretty much every time. Well, TQOTW discovered this gem from the last film appearance by Gracie, the 1944 film Two Girls And A Sailor. It had an all star cast but Gracie stole the show with this hilarious number.
Say goodnight, Gracie.
Disney said it is abandoning its motion to compel arbitration in a case filed by a man who alleges his wife died from anaphylaxis after a restaurant at a Disney complex failed to honor requests for allergen-free food.
Disney's motion to compel arbitration controversially cited the Disney+ streaming service's subscriber agreement, which includes a binding arbitration clause. The plaintiff's lawyer called the argument "absurd."
Disney confirmed this week that it will withdraw the motion, which it filed on May 31.
Good. It was a stupid argument anyway. Man, they generated a lot of ill will with that bone-headed move, though.
CMP is selling a limited number of M1917 Enfield rifles. Now, I love my Enfield, but I don't love having to stock both .303 Brit and .30-06 ammo. The nice thing about the M1917 is that it has the silky smooth Enfield action but is chambered in good old American .30-06 which you can find pretty much anywhere.
Both Field Grade and Service Grade are available, starting at $1000.
We voted at the primaries today. Had to show photo ID. I wonder if this is just a GOP Primary thing, or if it's the MOST RACIST THING EVER
Every year in the heat of the Las Vegas desert is the Black Hat Briefings, the premier computer security conference. There's always interesting news from the briefings (and from the much less buttoned down conference, DEFCON, which runs immediately afterwards).
So what's the buzz from Black Hat this year? It seems that Palo Alto Networks had Booth Bunnies at their display booth:
[blink] [blink]
Now I did my share of manning the booths (yes, I was a Booth Bunny, thank you for asking) back in the '90s and the '00s. But even in the '90s we were considerably more buttoned down than this, and for good marketing reasons. Sure, some of the attendees might like the scenery, but some will not - and some of them will very much not like the scenery. This has been known to be bad conference marketing juju for literally decades.
Of course, the Palo Alto Networks' Chief Marketing Officer had to go full frontal groveling* in his apology:
PAN's chief marketing officer Unnikrishnan KP, or Unni as he's often called, issued his apology earlier this week calling it "tone deaf."
"Last week at Black Hat in Las Vegas, an unfortunate decision was made at a Palo Alto Networks event to have hostesses wear branded lampshades on their heads," he said. "It was tone-deaf, in poor taste, and not aligned with our company values or brand campaign.
"I take full responsibility for this misjudgment and have addressed it with my team and am taking steps to prevent such misguided actions in the future.
"Please accept my heartfelt apologies for this regrettable incident."
Nikesh Arora, PAN's chairman and CEO, doubled down on the apologies on Tuesday, echoing the points made by Unni, adding that what happened was "unacceptable."
I expect the headcount at Palo Alto Networks' marketing department has gotten a spin. We apologize again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
* See what I did there? I crack myself up.
More than $1 million worth of cocaine washed up on a beach in the Florida Keys after Hurricane Debby battered the Gulf Coast’s Big Bend Monday morning, officials said.
Debby, which made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane early in the morning, carried more than two dozen 70-pound packages of cocaine ashore as winds topped 80 miles per hour, the US Border Patrol said.
“Hurricane Debby blew 25 packages of cocaine (70 lbs.) onto a beach in the Florida Keys,” US Border Patrol acting chief patrol agent Samuel Briggs II said in a social media post.
Well all right then. I love Florida, but it has some goofy branding.
So some self-important English Plod said he was going to criminally charge and extradite US citizens for exercising their first amendment rights on US soil. Interesting.
Quite frankly, this seems like a golden opportunity for political candidates here to get a "gimmie" issue. Sticking up for the first amendment seems like a layup. And if as I suspect the Democrats are institutionally incapable of sticking up for free speech, then this is a gold plated opportunity to paint them as the party of censorship - not to mention being weak on foreign policy.
Like I said, this issue looks like it's 100% upside.
Password manager 1Password is warning that all Mac users running versions before 8.10.36 are vulnerable to a bug that allows attackers to steal vault items.
...
Think you might be vulnerable? No mitigations were provided by 1Password, so patching up to version 8.10.36 is your only shot at securing those credentials.
Password Managers are great security tools because they make it easy to have very strong passwords (basically, random gobledy gook) for your online accounts. They remember these passwords so that you don't have to.
But they're not magic, they're software. That means that even they can get security bugs. If you use 1Paddword on Mac, make sure you upgrade it to 8.10.36 which fixes this.
Yeah I know - hurricane season in Florida. Ian kind of blew past us a couple years ago and while it did have hurricane force winds here the rain went by pretty quickly. Debbie was the opposite - only 40 MPH gusts or so, but two solid days of soaking. They even had to do an emergency release of water from the Lake Manatee dam.
So yeah, it's pretty wet.
Spendy, but pretty sweet.
I mean, who ever said "Civilize them with an AR"? But expect to spend $1200+.
Wow:
CrowdStrike says it is "highly disappointed" and rejects the claims made by Delta and its lawyers that the vendor exhibited gross negligence in the events that led to the global IT outage a little over two weeks ago.
That's according to a letter, seen by The Reg and sent to David Boies, partner at the law firm Delta hired to investigate the airline's legal options after it struggled more than most to bring its systems back online, leading to a sprawling list of flight cancellations.
The Falcon vendor reiterated its apology to Delta and the wider customer base. It then went on to remind Boies, known for his work as special counsel during the 1990s US antitrust trial against Microsoft, that it had been proactive in reaching out to Delta, offering support to the airline "within hours" of the incident unfolding.
...
CrowdStrike's lawyer, Michael B. Carlinsky, then poked the bear further. He said that among other things, in this hypothetical trial Delta would also need to explain why it took so much longer than competitors to recover from the same issue, why it refused the free on-site help CrowdStrike offered – the support that led to faster recovery times than Delta's, and the operational resiliency of its IT infrastructure.
This is hands down the biggest screw up - ever - by any security vendor. I guess that a screw up this big is a potential extinction-level event for Crowdstrike but this sure doesn't sound like it will calm down their customer base. OK, so they offered some help when they took down Delta, and Delta didn't jump on this. That sounds like it's 1% on Delta and 99% on Crowdstrike.
But that's not what's going on here - it's explicitly telling a customer that they will drag them through the mud if the customer sues them for their monumental screw up.
Holy moley.
Wet. With continued wet throughout the day. It's Florida in hurricane season, right?
And to answer Graybeard's question, yes we are within the white cone:
So we're fine. My generator started up first pull a couple weeks back (you do run it every month, don't you?) so we weren't worried about all the TV ZOMGwe'reallgoingtodie!!!11!!
I mean, it's Florida in hurricane season, right?
Anyway, it looks like Graybeard is going to have a more interesting week than I will:
The other is that back in May, I got a reminder from "the system" that I'm due for a routine colonoscopy. The appointment, made well in advance, is for Tuesday. Those of you who have been through this know that the worst part of it is the night before, which is Monday night. With luck, the storm will stay on that track and be centered somewhere near the Georgia/South Carolina border. With bad luck, I'll be having to be working outside while the storm is clearing out - or stalled too close for comfort. Bad luck could mean not being able to put the tower back up for days.
The last time I went through this, I found that some car seat belts would prevent "liftoff" off the toilet seat and the troublesome, messy aspects of uncontrolled flight around the bathroom. The hardware is still bolted to the floor in the bathroom, I just need to remove a nut, put down the belt, and tighten the nut back down. One on each side of the toilet. It's a five minute job but can save hours of cleaning.
I wonder if this is something that NASA and Boeing can use to try to fix the Starliner thruster problem ...
UPDATE 4 AUGUST 2024 14:48: A day like this is perfect to just not go anywhere and watch old movies. For example, the 1944 Arsenic and Old Lace starring Cary Grant*. We hadn't seen this in forever, and both of us laughed out loud all the way through it. Makes you wonder why they can't make films like that anymore.
Arsenic wasn't nominated for any Oscars that year, which seems odd until you think about the other films that were nominated - Double Indemnity and Gaslight to name only two. Ingrid Bergman (deservedly) won Best Actress that year for Gaslight; interestingly, Cary Grant was nominated for Best Actor but for a different film that year, losing to Bing Crosby in Going My Way. Just a casual year of films all of which were better than anything produced in the last decade. [/rant]
Oh, and a quick note to all the Florida newbies: it's summer, we get storms here. Don't panic. This isn't a snowstorm up north where nobody can drive for a week until the roads get plowed. It doesn't do you any good to buy out the milk and frozen goods if the hurricane takes out everyone's power for a week. Don't go to the grocery store for your panic buying, get a darn generator.
To those of you considering moving here from up north, don't. It's too perilous.
And gas for it.**
* And also Edward Everitt Horton, best know (to old farts like us) as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales on Bullwinkle.
** Dual fuel is even better, with propane tanks.
I've said repeatedly that the temperature data is a mess. Long time readers will remember how the Surface Stations project documented poorly sited weather stations (like ones in the middle of baking parking lot asphalt), where 89% of the weather stations did not meet the Government's acceptable siting requirements. They all read too hot, sometimes by as much as 2 degrees.
Long term readers may remember how NOAA (the US Government's weather bureau) established a "Climate Reference Network" of only well-sited weather stations. The Reference Network shows that the poorly-sited stations overstate warming by at least half a degree. Remember, we are told that temperature increased by 0.6 degrees over the course of the entire 20th Century. Take away that half a degree and you have no warming at all over 100 years.
Yeah, that's quite a crisis.
But never let a crisis go to waste, even if you have to manufacture one. What have governments been doing to get more warming? Well, the UK.Gov is installing brand new weather stations, 80% of which not only are not acceptably sited, but are in Class 4 or 5 - the worst of the worst:
Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.
Remember, these aren't 80 year old stations that used to be in a pasture and are now in a parking lot. These are brand spanking new ones. Sitting in parking lots.
Tagged Climate Bullshit because, well, you know.
Libertarians have ditched their support for "free markets and free people":
I would prefer not to lose my Libertarian purity certificate. I want a political philosophy that is simple and has universal application. That way I don’t have to think too hard. For the last 30 years libertarianism has been that philosophy. Name an issue of the day and I can give you the answer. Sluggish growth? Privatise, lower taxes and de-regulate. Busy roads? Privatise. Inflation? Abolish the Bank of England or re-introduce the Gold Standard, or, er… privatise the Bank of England. OK, some issues are not quite that easy but usually they are. Until we get to immigration. Because if libertarianism means open borders then libertarianism is wrong because open borders are a disaster.
Read the whole thing, and the comments. And remember that this is Libertarian Central. If the Open Borders crowd has lost Samizdata, they've lost everybody.
15 years looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired. Congrats, buddy!
There seemed to be a lot less attention to my recent post about fighting between various Democratic coalitions than to the one about Preference Cascades. That's too bad because we are seeing that fighting right out in the open, and it explains a lot about why things are happening.
Exhibit A: the firing of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. Sure, it was the Right Thing to do, but when has anyone in Washington DC done the Right Thing? Instead, let's look at coalitions and their current dynamics.
Cheatle was firmly in Biden's coalition, seemingly close to "Doctor" Jill herself. But now Sleepy Joe is gone and doesn't have the stroke to protect his coalition members. It seems that Kamala was key in pressuring Cheatle to resign - Kamala is constructing her own coalition and needs to show the world that she's the one with stroke. Also, she needs the assassination story off the front pages, so this kills two birds with one stone. Plus, it opens up a position in the bureaucracy that she can dangle in front of people she wants to join her coalition. It's a threefer.
Exhibit B: The Far Left coalition is throwing its weight around, rioting in Washington's Union Station and the Capitol, and tearing down and burning American flags:
Sansour was direct. She warned the Democratic Party might lose the Muslim and Far Left votes in November. “Let us be clear. Our votes are still to be earned.”The dynamic here will be familiar to Europeans, looking at smallish but influential parties like the Greens. Sarsour is looking after her own coalition, trying to maintain the money and plum positions she can offer to supporters in return for their support.
I think I need to update my list of the coalitions in the Democratic Party's ongoing civil war:
All of these are jockeying for power right now. We will see a lot of seemingly random events transpiring between now and at least the Democratic Convention that are anything but random. They are about power and coalition building - and tearing down an opponent's coalition.
Quite frankly, that last is the Democrat's biggest problem - none of these factions really like each other very much. The best that you can say is that they see the other factions as useful to their goal to get and keep power. As more and more backstabbing occurs (as it must, there's only a month to the Convention and the time to strike is now or never), there will be less and less loyalty that they can count on from other factions after the convention. 90 days from then to the election doesn't give a lot of time to rig the results.
That will take a deep level of commitment, which will be really, really hard for them to achieve. So enjoy the infighting. It will be going on for a while yet.
UPDATE 25 JULY 2024 11:53: This would be inexplicable without thinking about rival factions jockeying for position inside the Democratic Party:
House Republicans and six Democrats voted on a resolution condemning President Joe Biden and his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, for failing to secure the border.
Which faction(s) do they support? Well, not Biden's or Harris'.
Tom emails a Dad Joke:
Golf balls are like eggs. They’re white, sold by the dozen, and a week later you have to buy some more.
The Democrats finally recognized that running an 81 year old man with dementia was a losing proposition. So they told us he had Covid, took him back to Washington, and announced he was not going to be the candidate in November.
So we have a President everyone on both sides agrees is unfit to run for office, still in office.
And who has the final launch authority on the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the next seven months?
Well, they can't in time for the election, anyway. There's an old saying in politics that "personnel is policy" which refers to a lot more than just having someone competent in the job. It's a reflection that politics is about coalitions - building them and maintaining them. The coalition members get their cut of the government largess, and pay for it with loyalty to the guy at the top. If they're not loyal, he gives them their pick slip and they lose the largess.
This was actually Trump's biggest mistake when he was president, not filling the Federal Government with his coalition. In his defense, he was in the middle of a Republican civil war, where there were multiple factions and multiple coalitions.
That's exactly what the Democrats face now, and why they can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together. Because there are multiple coalitions, whoever emerges on top won't know if he (she?) can trust these coalitions because they aren't his coalitions. They might be able to be integrated into his coalition, given time, but time is exactly what the Democrats do not have right now.
It takes time to forge a governing coalition - just look at any parliamentary system: when the government is stable it is because the governing coalition is solid. Ministers can issue policy with a reasonable expectation that it will be supported and carried out by the coalition members. When the governing coalition is unstable, chaos results. Orders get ignored or slow walked or subverted because the Minister no longer has the loyalty of the coalition members.
Eventually a leader emerges who can attract key talent from outside coalitions and integrate it into his. This will involve rewards like positions in the bureaucracy or some such - featherbedding is the name of this game. But until this all gets sorted out and the new coalition is filled with people who think they're better off with the new leader than without, nothing is going anywhere.
Even worse, there will always be serious back stabbing between different coalitions. Trust is not a virtue most politicians hew to, and quite frankly until they are in a position to remove perks as well as give them, they would be a fool to trust just about anybody.
Some day a leader will emerge to stitch together the various coalitions that make up the Democratic party. It won't happen in the next 100 days, sure as God made little green apples.
The biggest implication of this is that it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to "fortify" the upcoming election via 2020-style shenanigans. Sure, the party bosses will want to, but how much do they trust the other coalitions to support them? Would other coalitions even go so far as to rat them out (with plausible deniability, of course) - leading to various party elders behind bars. That certainly would make it easier for other party elders to construct a winning coalition once they've taken out some of the competition.
Like I said, these people would have to be fools to trust very many people, and an election cheating scheme requires a lot of people to pull off. When everyone is on-side you get the 2020 election. When lots of people are very much not on-side you get, well, the Italian government which has had something like 60 Prime Ministers in 80 years.
The best analogy I can think of is the scene from The Godfather where all the families get together to divide things up. Nobody trusts anybody. That's where the Democrats are right now.
I repeat: you can't put a coalition together overnight - heck, it's taken almost a decade for Donald Trump to put together a serious coalition and a lot of his party still hates him. I think that the Democrats will come more apart before they start to come together as the various factions start putting out mob hit style rumor whispers about their Democratic competitors. We will hear a lot about this in the next few weeks.
And this is why the only choice at all for them to to fall in behind Kamala and hope for the best in the down ticket races. But remember, while Kamala might have inherited Slow Joe's campaign cash, she was never really part of this coalition. It's not loyal to her at all. It may be that she's been so ineffective in office because Joe's coalition kept sabotaging her. She has to build a coalition, and right quick. The cash will help her there but coalition building takes time.
She doesn't have that. What she does have is a whole boatload of enemies in the Democratic party. Some of these think that their best bet to get to the top of the greasy pole is for her not to get there. They'd rather have Trump in the Oval Office because they will have 4 years to build a coalition. If Kamala is there, things are a lot trickier for them.
I almost feel sorry for the Democrats in general and Kamala in particular. Almost. It's ironic that all their short term tactical maneuvering has led them to this very spot. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of Mob Bosses.
Leaked video from Rehoboth about Biden's advisors convincing him to drop out of the race.
This is really funny, and really well done. I love how he gets names and dates repeatedly wrong. And was Corn Pop really a Soviet General? Who knew?
The National Portrait Gallery has acquired the oldest photo of a First Lady, an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolly Madison. This is a very cool picture, as it captures some of her personality - people chose very formal poses back then. No smiling. Except for a hint of a smile from Dolly.
A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.
It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.
At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.
I think we're at that stage now - well, not the up against the wall shooting stage - but a cascading loss of confidence and loyalty in the Democratic Party itself for Joe Biden. This will shrink the Margin of Cheat except in the most blue of blue states, and given that it looks like New York and New Jersey may be in play, there may not really be a lot of blue left.
In other words, everyone is starting to realize that the propaganda was just that - propaganda.
Add in the drop in contributions to the Democratic Party (the preference cascade is hitting the donor class, who are realizing that this "investment" may not have a return, and hedge their bets by contributing to Trump).
Now add in the media, who start to see that they are better off trying to help the Democratic Party, rather than mean old Joe Biden.
The question is not whether Trump will win, but whether the Preference Cascade will give him coattails, and how long they will be.
My guess is that the Preference Cascade is in full swing in the Secret Service, as competent and dedicated agents there start to wonder when (not if) to throw their corrupt bosses under the bus. There's a lot coming out about this Charlie Foxtrot in the SS, so that suggests that the lack of loyalty to Joe Biden is advancing nicely there.
Once the Preference Cascade begins, TPTB have precious few tools to counter it. For example, cracking down on leaking from within the Secret Service will do nothing but convince the undecided there that TPTB are untrustworthy and have to go.
Which will make Donald Trump only the second President to serve non-consecutive terms.
BREAKING: Donald Trump calls for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to receive Secret Service pic.twitter.com/vRvxTzghvX
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) July 15, 2024
Well, duh. Kind of makes you wonder why they haven't so far.
So they tried to assassinate Donald Trump. The question is whether they will try again. The next question will be what will be the reaction if they succeed.
It's that second question that made me think of Strauss and his ferocious opera Elektra. That girl had family issues: Her father was Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks against Troy. He sacrificed her sister to the Gods to gain favorable winds for the invasion fleet. Her mother Klytemnestra murdered her father in revenge. Her brother Orest kills their mother in revenge. Mad with fury, Elektra dances in the blood of the guilty.
Quite a story. The Nazis quite admired it, the necessity of bloodletting to purify the family. Yesterday's events made me think on what might befall should they succeed in their manic desires to stop Trump by any means necessary.
If so, you need to replace it right away. There is a critical vulnerability which allows a Bad Guy to dump user accounts and passwords - basically, this lets him take over the box. Because the routers are End Of Life (EOL) there will never be a software update to fix this.
Fortunately, home WiFi routers are pretty cheap these days.
I used to run D-Link in the past (I'm pretty sure I had one at FOB Borepatch, back in the day) but those are long gone now. If you have one then run, don't walk to get a replacement.
Details here for those who are interested.
So Youtube hates guns and is trying to demonitize shooting channels. So one of the channels decided to follow the rules, with hilarious results.
Oops:
Keen meatheads better hope they haven't angered any cybersecurity folk before allowing their Traeger grills to update because a new high-severity vulnerability could be used for all kinds of high jinks.
With summer in full swing in the northern hemisphere, it means BBQ season is upon us, and with Traeger being one of the most trusted brands in grilling and smoking, there's a good chance that many backyard cookouts could be ruined if crafty crims have their way.
Nick Cerne, security consultant at Bishop Fox, discovered a few weaknesses in certain Traeger grills, ones that have the Traeger Grill D2 Wi-Fi Controller installed – an embedded device allowing a grill to be controlled using a mobile app.
Successful exploits could allow a remote attacker to execute day-ruining commands such as temperature change controls or shutting down the grill altogether.
I think that we can all agree that the definition of a Black Hat hacker is someone who changes the temperature on your smoking briskit to 400 degrees ...
But put a computer in it, expect security bugs.
In keeping with The Queen Of The World's birthday, here's a composer from a part of the world I had never heard of. I grew up on classical music, and for guitar that meant Andres Segovia (with a tip of the old chapeau to Julian Bream). I had never heard of Eduardo Falu, Argentina's great guitarist. He's been dead these ten years or more but many of his songs are on Youtube. This is an entire concert he gave in Seville in 1978. He would be 101 years old today.
The Queen of the World and I were talking today, remembering the bicentennial celebration in 1976. She pointed out that two years from now will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wow.
It's still worth celebrating.
And then blames the medical student who had to take out the trash:
A data protection gaffe affecting the UK's NHS is being pinned on a medical student who placed too much trust in their bin bags.
An investigation was launched following the discovery of confidential medical data sprawled across a back alley in Jesmond, a pricier suburb of Newcastle in the North East of England.
The medical student is thought to have thrown the documents into their domestic waste, which was placed outside for collection, but through one means or another, the documents escaped to the freedom of an alleyway off Lonsdale Terrace only to be found by a passerby.
So what can we say about the NHS from this? Well, they have a terrible process for sensitive waste disposal. They may actually not have any process at all. Certainly the evidence does not suggest rigorous training and enforcement.
Also, we see Yet Another circling of the wagons, with a hopelessly weak excuse that blames the lowest guy on the totem pole. That does not suggest that their process will be improved next week, or next month, or next year. Remember, the Organs of the State do not self-correct.
But socialized medicine is awesome, amirite?
It looks like just about all of their corporate execs (other than CEO Eugene Kaspersky) have been sanctioned by the US Fed.Gov. Oh, yeah, the software is banned in the USA after July 20:
The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) cited national security threats in designating the 12 individuals as under sanction. In making the announcement, it also noted: "OFAC has not designated Kaspersky Lab, its parent or subsidiary companies, or its CEO."
The Treasury did, however, designate just about every other exec who reports directly to the Moscow-based firm's chief exec "for operating in the technology sector of the Russian Federation economy," which under EO 14024 is a no-no.
It follows Thursday's actions by the Commerce Department that prohibit Kaspersky Lab Inc from providing its software and other security services in America from July 20 — plus years of directives and mandates to kick Kaspersky products out of US government networks.
This seems weird - maybe it's just more escalation of Great Power Politics between the US and Russia by the neocons in our government. Kaspersky has made good products, and a scan of the Borepatch archives shows only references to what has been a quality security company.
If you use their antivirus, it looks like you need to go shopping.
